On the morning of May 12, 1797, Ludovico Manin entered the Great Council chamber inside the Doge's Palace in Venice.
Behind him hung Tintoretto's enormous Paradise. Outside, people crowded into St. Mark's Square. Across northern Italy, word had spread. Napoleon's armies were advancing toward the republic.
Manin had spent the previous eight years as doge of Venice. He was about to become its last.
For more than a thousand years, Venice had governed itself. It had elected 119 doges before Manin, built a maritime empire across the Mediterranean, minted its own money, fought wars, signed treaties, and become one of the richest trading powers in Europe.
The republic was older than any person in the room. And now Napoleon was determined to bring it to an end.
Venice had tried to remain neutral as French armies swept across the peninsula. By the spring of 1797, that neutrality had failed. Napoleon was threatening the city directly, and Manin believed resistance could end with Venice destroyed.
So the Great Council gathered.
Only 537 of its roughly 1,200 members showed up — not even enough for the usual legal quorum. Rumors of invasion and revolution were spreading through the city. Then, during the meeting, gunshots erupted outside.
The men inside feared the uprising had begun.
It hadn't. Soldiers in the square were firing a salute to the flag of St. Mark before departing. But inside the palace, nobody knew that.
The vote was called: 512 in favor, 20 against, 5 abstentions.
And with that, one of the oldest republics in the world voted itself out of existence.
Manin removed the insignia of his office. When the decision reached the crowd outside, people began shouting for the republic they had just lost.
Viva San Marco.
Viva la Repubblica.
They raised the flag of St. Mark over the square and tried to restore the old order. But it was too late. Within days, French troops entered Venice, and Ludovico Manin left the Doge's Palace for the last time.
For generations, these people had been born Venetian. Their parents and grandparents were Venetian. The republic had survived for so long that no one alive had ever known a world without it.
Then suddenly there was a last doge.
Today, we look at Venice and see a beautiful city in Italy. But at the time there was no Italy to belong to. Pull up a map of Europe from 500 years ago and the coastlines look roughly the same, but almost nothing drawn inside them survived. Nine years after Venice, Napoleon finished off the Holy Roman Empire too. Poland was carved up by its neighbors and spent the next 123 years not existing at all.
Then there is the Soviet Union, which might feel different because it happened so recently.
For most of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union wasn't some fragile little state waiting to be swept away. It was one of the two most powerful countries on Earth. It had nuclear weapons, an enormous military, and territory stretching across eleven time zones. If you had looked at the world in 1985, the Soviet Union would have seemed like one of its most permanent fixtures.
Six years later, it was gone.
Not conquered.
Gone.
In its place were fifteen independent states — Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and a dozen more we now treat as perfectly ordinary countries.
Because once a political order has been around long enough, we forget that it replaced another one. I know I do this with America.
I have no trouble accepting that the Roman Empire ended or that Yugoslavia is gone. But when I imagine the same thing happening to the United States, it's unsettling.
Picture a world a thousand years from now with no country called the United States of America.
It sounds outrageous.
Maybe California belongs to one political union while Texas joined another. Maybe some larger federation has replaced the country entirely. Or the territory is divided among states with names no one has even thought of yet.
These possibilities sound like science fiction. To some, they sound like treason.
Even writing the title of this essay made me squirm a little. I don't want to believe it. I was raised to believe in America.
Yet nothing about these futures is stranger than telling someone in Moscow in 1985 that within a few years the Soviet Union would cease to exist.
Part of the problem is that when we imagine a country disappearing, we usually imagine conquest: an invading army, a defeated government, another flag raised over the capital. But that's only one way a country can end.
The Soviet Union wasn't conquered. Neither was Czechoslovakia, which split in two so calmly that people called it the Velvet Divorce. Countries don't always disappear because something goes terribly wrong. Sometimes they split apart. Other times they simply become part of something larger.
That's what eventually happened to Venice. The political world around it changed, and the old republic was ultimately absorbed into a unified Italy. Germany emerged through a similar process. The future doesn't have to be created by collapse.
And if the United States is temporary, that means the presidency is too. One day, someone will hold that office for the last time.
Maybe that person will know it, as Manin did. Or maybe the country will change slowly, and historians will argue over which president counted as the last.
The thing that makes America feel different is that Americans have never treated it as only a country. From the beginning, it attached itself to concepts bigger than its borders: equality, individual liberty, and government by consent.
If America goes away, it can feel as though those ideas go with it.
But democracy survived Athens. Roman law survived Rome. A country can disappear while its best ideas travel elsewhere. It can also keep its name while leaving those ideas behind.
America is a home for those ideas. It doesn't have to be their last.
A thousand years from now, someone may study the United States the way we study ancient Rome. They may recognize the name and know that hundreds of millions of people once lived inside its borders. They may even know that many of those people found it almost impossible to imagine a world without it.
To them, America may simply be history.
The last president of the United States may sound no stranger than the last doge of Venice does to us.
