The Ideology of Velocity
America is beginning to speak the language of great power competition again.
Not explicitly, at least not most of the time. Few people openly invoke the Cold War anymore. Fewer still consciously argue that communities should be sacrificed in pursuit of geopolitical dominance. Yet the ontology of great power competition — the assumptions, incentives, and moral logic that defined the twentieth century — appears to be quietly returning beneath the surface of American life.
What is striking is not that anyone announced this transition. It is that it increasingly arrives as self-evident reality.
A recent opinion piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer urging support for Ohio’s expanding data center industry framed the issue almost entirely through the language of strategic necessity. AI growth is inevitable. Energy demand will rise. Ohio must compete. Misconceptions and resistance threaten economic progress. The article, written jointly by business and labor leaders, presents acceleration itself as civic responsibility.
None of this language is unusual anymore.
That may be the most important fact.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek often argued that the strongest ideologies are not the ones loudly proclaimed, but the ones that disappear into the background assumptions of society. Mature ideologies do not present themselves as ideology at all. They present themselves as practicality, inevitability, realism, common sense.
No one needs to explicitly say that America is reorganizing itself around perpetual strategic competition with China. Instead the assumption emerges indirectly through phrases like:
“we must stay competitive,”
“we cannot fall behind,”
“AI infrastructure is strategic,”
“permitting must accelerate,”
“energy demand is unavoidable.”
The ideology exists in what no longer appears to require justification.
This is where the second Cleveland.com article becomes haunting. A long investigative report on the buried legacy of nuclear contamination in Ohio during the Cold War reminds readers what great power competition looked like in practice during the twentieth century. Entire communities were exposed to contamination and long-term health consequences while government institutions minimized risks, obscured information, or simply treated those harms as acceptable collateral damage within a larger strategic framework.
The article is not merely historical. It is the afterimage of an ontology.
During the original Cold War, acceleration became virtue. Strategic urgency overrode competing moral concerns. Environmental damage, secrecy, labor exploitation, and regional sacrifice became normalized because the organizing principle of society was existential competition. Under such conditions, questioning velocity itself could be interpreted as weakness.
What makes the emerging rivalry with China even more dangerous is that China is not the Soviet Union.
The United States and China are not separate civilizational systems divided by an iron curtain. They are deeply entangled economies. American companies rely on Chinese manufacturing. Chinese growth relies on American consumers and financial systems. Supply chains, research ecosystems, higher education, semiconductors, and digital infrastructure all exist within conditions of profound interdependence.
Yet despite this entanglement, America increasingly appears to be importing the ontology of the Cold War into a world fundamentally unlike the Cold War.
That matters because the ontology itself changes how society processes moral questions.
Once great power competition becomes the central organizing principle:
every technology becomes strategic,
every delay becomes weakness,
every objection becomes obstruction,
every sacrifice becomes necessity.
No singular villain is required. No conspiracy is necessary. The system itself begins generating momentum through incentives, institutions, fears, prestige structures, and political pressures. People inside the system may sincerely believe they are acting responsibly and rationally. That is often how these ontologies become most powerful.
The historian Colin Woodard, in American Nations, describes the United States as a collection of distinct regional cultures rather than a single homogeneous civilization. Within that framework, regions like Greater Appalachia and the Far West have repeatedly functioned as extraction zones for national projects: coal extraction, uranium mining, military manpower, industrial sacrifice, and now perhaps the energy-intensive infrastructure required for the AI race.
The benefits of national competition tend to distribute upward and outward. The costs tend to localize.
Communities absorb contamination.
Workers absorb instability.
Landscapes absorb extraction.
Then decades later, investigative reports uncover the hidden costs after the strategic urgency has already passed.
This does not mean America should abandon technological development or ignore strategic realities involving China. Great power competition is not imaginary. AI infrastructure matters. Energy infrastructure matters. National security matters.
But ontology matters too.
The danger is not merely competition with China. The danger is allowing competition itself to become the unquestioned moral framework through which every other concern is filtered. Once that happens, velocity ceases to be a tool and becomes a civilizational ethic unto itself.
And when societies begin treating acceleration as morality, they often discover the human costs only decades later, buried beneath reports about contamination, forgotten towns, and communities that were told the sacrifices were necessary for the future.
