At a combined 13,200 pounds, Lisa and Tracy make the wiry Royal seem like a Christmas pixie. But here in Hugo, such elephantine size is unsurprising. A windswept Oklahoma town, the jumbos come each winter, as much a festive tradition as the donkeys and the shepherds. With around 5,000 permanent residents, Hugo has long been known as “Circus City, USA”, and was once the Christmas home of nearly two-dozen circus troupes. These days, festive visitors are far less common. Yet like Lisa and Tracy, some old stalwarts endure, as much for family as business — even if there may be little to replace the elephants once they finally hang up their hats.

Hugo’s three-ring history dates back almost a century. In 1941, cheap land, warm winters, and a promise of free water attracted the Al G. Kelly and Miller Brothers Circus. Hugo’s own name, borrowed from the 19th-century novelist, may also have been a draw, lending a dash of Gallic sophistication to a corner of hardscrabble prairie. Soon enough, other groups arrived, with names like ​​Famous Cole and Circus Chimera, and even today circus life is everywhere in Hugo. Statues of performing elephants decorate the streets. A section of the local cemetery — “Showmen’s Rest” — is dedicated to vanished circus greats. It acts, one grave marker reads, as “A Tribute to All Showmen Under God’s Big Top Home”.

These bonds have been strengthened by money. In small-town America, the circus is both entertainment and fundraiser. Schools and Rotary Clubs will co-sponsor a circus and push tickets in exchange for a cut of the gate. Through regular routes, a group will tour the same hamlets again and again, with philanthropy guaranteeing warm welcomes. What started off, for instance, as a one-time benefit for a blind child is now a permanent partnership between Culpepper & Merriwether Circus and the Visual Bucket List Foundation. Altogether, America’s circuses give millions to good causes, with Circus Smirkus, a youth non-profit, raising $2.7 million alone.

As for the punters themselves? All year round, but especially in Hugo at Christmas, they come for the elephants. A handful still winter in Hugo, while others, like Lisa and Tracy, now live here year-round. Semi-retired, the duo spend their golden years at the 270-acre Endangered Arc, a community for aging circus beasts. Not that they’ve lost any of their enthusiasm, swaying excitedly at the sight of a visitor. The bobbing and weaving is a disarming non-verbal plea: “pet me.” Sweet nothings and a stroke of their trunks elicit what’s best described as a purr. Kids, pogo-sticks of excitement, squeal. Parents swoon. But these circus cut-ups are professionals to the tips of their tusks. At the appointed moment, Lisa strikes her “blue steel” pose. In a Christmas snap with visitors, Santa and Mrs Claus alongside, she’s as still as a statue, her bobble hat symmetrical, her dignity intact.

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Of course, Hugo’s magic is about more than its pachyderms. Take Armando Loyal, Lisa and Tracy’s minder. “They’ve provided entertainment and happiness for people all over the country, all over the world,” he says of his charges. “So, it’s their turn.” Listen to him speak, in fact, and they sound almost like family, with Loyal explaining how he cares for them on Christmas morning even before his own children.

That sense of the circus as something more than work is common here in Hugo. In Loyal’s case, it’s literally true. A ninth-generation showman, his grandparents were brought over from Italy by legendary impresario John Ringling. Some households make dentistry their lineage; for the Loyals, the “family staple”, as Armando puts it, is Roman equestrian riding, or standing atop two galloping draft horses while vaulting into a handstand. Tavana Luvas has lived a similar life. “I grew up with my family all day long,” says the fourth-generation trapeze artist, who learned her craft at her grandmother’s feet. Later, when Luvas had a husband and kids, she wondered how people could live like this.

It’s a question John Kennedy Kane, or “Eggroll” to his friends, has asked many times. Aging and balding, his career as “Canaan: the Human Volcano” feels like ancient history now. Yet his wry humor endures, as he describes the tensions of spending years on end with the same set of people. “You are with each other 24 hours a day,” Eggroll explains. “If you have an asshole that you work with, you only see them eight hours a day. I go back and his feet are hanging in my face because he’s on the upper bunk.”

But like all families, rowdy and rambunctious, circusers find a way — with every member vital to a show’s success. That means performers, yes, both four-legged and two, but also the backstage help. How could it be otherwise with such a grueling schedule? Consider a group like Culpepper & Merriwether, which over an eight-month season plays some 200 shows. The rhythm is relentless: arrive at dawn, bring down the house, then depart to do it all again tomorrow. And, in each new town, the big top must go up — without it, says Dave Williams, the Culpepper booker, “you don’t get to play”. Little wonder he reserves special praise for “the true stars of the show”: those tough folk who drive 120 stakes into the ground to hold and harness the tent.

For decades, this family effort, this “with it and for it”, paid off. Focusing on communities of less than 3,000 people, circuses like Culpepper brought out crowds — eager for some fun, but hinting again at the deep connections between big tops and small towns. “Nothing else goes there,” Williams says. “But the circus does. I think that’s part of it, another big part is that they are supporting their local group, whoever is bringing it to town. This is about civic pride.” When a circus came to Hugo in the old days, a pageant of animals and performers would parade down Broadway, the town’s main thoroughfare. Schools closed, businesses shuttered, and local celebrities rode elephants as part of the pomp.

Such festivities are getting rarer. A century ago, nearly 100 circuses and their menageries toured the nation. Today, there are 50, and that’s on a good day. Bad news for Hugo: winter retail has collapsed, and a once-bustling downtown, with its 11 department stores, now feels ominously still. Television and smart phones have doubtless played their parts here, but so too have changing mores toward the circus’s four-legged titans. “My God, protesters would be out there trying to stop us,” Eggroll says of animal-rights activists, with grand parades increasingly swapped for furtive night-time setups. “When did we become the bad guys?” Eggroll adds. “When did we become the villains?”

To be fair, there are genuine problems here, or anyway there used to be. In 2011, for instance, the Ringling Brothers circus was fined $270,000 after revelations that its elephants were chained, whipped and left in cages full of feces. By 2017, the iconic group had ended its 146-year run, though has since reopened with an animal-free show. Other challenges are harder to resolve. In September, a 37-year-old animal tamer, related to Loyal by marriage, was killed by his own tiger as his wife and daughter watched ringside.

On this second tragedy, Loyal is grimly philosophical. “We all know what we signed up for.” On the broader question of abuse, he concedes that “bad apples” will always exist: but emphasizes that throwing “everybody into one single pot” is wrong too. Turning to Lisa and Tracy, he shrugs and smiles. “Come and meet me. See how I take care of them. See how I love them.” Eggroll makes a similar point, suggesting that activism has actually changed the circus for the better. “We all saw animal treatment improved on shows because of the spotlight being on it,” he says. “Well, now — the elephants can roam free.”

The circus is modernizing in other ways too. Once upon a time, the big top was about clean-cut fun, all mimes and magic. Now, audiences craving some post-Covid liveliness go for something bawdier, with groups offering blue-humored clowns and strip teases. It may help, too, that the circus has remained gloriously apolitical, perfect for punters desperate to escape the bitterness of American politics. No wonder Royal the ringmaster describes his work as a “reply to our terrible times”.

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Whether that’s enough to save Circus City, USA is another matter. With only three circuses now wintering in Hugo, it could soon become just another prairie town, with its rodeo team and its Walmart. Even so, circus lifers remain sure of their work. “Nobody’s farther away than about 40 feet from the ring,” Williams says. “So, you’re right on top of it. You can see them sweat. I think that’s the whole thing, and it’s the joy.” There are financial calculations here too. A ticket for four will set you back a mere $50, a godsend for people in places like Hugo, where 25% live below the poverty line and where per-capita income is less than $12,000.

Not that anyone really cares about the money. “You don’t go into show business wanting to get rich,” Williams says, who quit a stable job in accounting to book circus acts. “That’s not what it’s about. You either feel it in your heart, or you can’t do it.” Loyal is just as romantic, explaining how he can tell whether someone is a would-be circuser just by looking at them. You’re either the type to love “good trouble” — or you’re not. “Let me tell you,” Loyal says, “you can look in the crowd, and somebody that’s from the circus can tell. You can just look at people and know.” Being “with it and for it” means connection, a spiritual bond that’s invisible to most — but rainbow clear if you’re a member for life.

And, perhaps, for even for longer than that. When he dies, Jim Royal will be buried in Showmen’s Rest, and his plot will come with an inscription: “He knew how to read a lot.” Not that Royal, or the circus he so loves, is quite there yet. This, after all, is Hugo at Christmastime, a place where “with it and for it” is sung as loud as any carol. And so, for the moment, the festive parades go on, with their face paint, and floats, and a pickup truck pulling the Grinch on a flatbed. And, at the center of it all come Lisa and Tracy, swinging their trunks for all they’re worth, the Santas on their backs a sideshow for once. Oklahoma smiles a Christmas Day grin, and the circus family does too. “Look at where we are,” says Luvas. “We’re watching Santa on an elephant. Where are you going to see that? Just here.”

But comparisons to Weimar are a dime a dozen in the West, and their explanatory power is incredibly questionable. Our modern historical lexicon often seems to be a book with all the pages ripped out, save for one or two badly smudged chapters on the European interwar period. And this is a shame, because there are many other historical periods that could do more to advance our understanding of current political events, both in the US and elsewhere. History is, after all, quite expansive.

More than any other, one particular moment, mostly unknown today, may have a lot to tell us about where the US is headed next: Japan’s bakumatsu period — the polarised and chaotic end period of the old Tokugawa shogunate.

To understand the bakumatsu, one should know what came before it. In 1600, Japan’s ‘warring states era’, or the sengoku jidai, came to a close with the Battle of Sekigahara. Soon afterwards, the victorious Tokugawa clan implemented a policy of almost total national lockdown, known as sakoku (literally: locked country). Generally, foreigners were forbidden from entering the country, and Japanese commoners banned from leaving on pain of death. Though there were some minor exceptions, Japan essentially closed itself off to the rest of the world.

There were a host of benefits to this, including more than two centuries of internal peace, economic growth and innovation in the fields of arts and culture. Under the surface, however, contradictions in Japanese society slowly built up. The samurai were now a caste of warriors without any wars left to fight, while low-born merchants grew in wealth, slowly undermining a society that assigned status according to birth.

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Moreover, the divisions that led to the battle of Sekigahara were never really mended; Japan’s most powerful samurai magnates, or daimyo, were split into two different camps: the tozama, and the fudai. The former were descendants of magnates who had been neutral or against the Tokugawa in 1600, while the latter came from families that had been on the winning side. Still, the tozama remained quite rich and powerful, even later in the 19^th century, but they were barred from almost every important post in the Government. Their resentment at this never dissipated, but merely simmered on a low boil for centuries, waiting for an opportune moment to roar back to life.

This brings us to the bakumatsu period itself. In 1853, the US Navy forcibly entered the bay of Edo (modern day Tokyo), and demanded that the country open itself up to trade. The Japanese, after their centuries of isolation, could do very little to defend themselves against Commodore Perry’s Black Ships. At gunpoint, the Japanese were forced to abandon a policy that had been the cornerstone of their existence for the last two centuries.

The immediate result of this shift in policy was the start of an extreme social and political chain reaction; abandoning isolationism at the hands of foreign barbarians upended not just Japanese public opinion, but the very basis of legitimacy for the Tokugawa shogunate. Meanwhile, uncontrolled foreign trade also led to a collapse of the Japanese currency system, which only inflamed public opinion further. Suddenly, Japanese society went from (a somewhat deceptive) placid calm, to rapid, uncontrollable polarisation. Street violence became common; there were attacks on foreigners by patriotic mobs, and armed violence between supporters of the Shogun and increasingly organised opponents of the status quo.

Sound familiar? Of course, elite consensus in 2016 America turned out to be, if anything, built on an even more precarious foundation than Tokugawa’s peace in 1853. Beneath the surface, all manner of social and economic ills had already built up; deindustrialisation was slowly choking America’s working and middle classes, while the wars in the Middle East were poorly run, costly, and corrupt. And, just as with Commodore Perry, the election of Trump merely served to topple the first domino, unleashing a chain reaction that was already primed into the system, inaugurating a period of intense polarisation that exists to this day.

What bakumatsu Japan and modern America share is a straightforward problem: that smashing an old, non-functional system to the point where it can no longer be repaired is not the same as building anything new. On the American Right, people today refer to the ‘dead consensus’ when they talk about political positions that everyone in the GOP had to hold to be taken seriously pre-2016. They do not talk about a ‘new consensus’, however, because no new consensus exists. And that doesn’t look like changing anytime soon.

To return to the bakumatsu, Japanese society eventually polarised into two broad factions; those who were loyal to the Shogunate, and those who supported the Emperor returning to political power (at this point, the Japanese royal family have been powerless figureheads for about 800 years). What followed was a civil conflict defined by its confused and contradictory nature.

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The backers of the Emperor attacked the Shogunate for being too friendly with the West. But many of the most powerful backers of this putatively xenophobic, anti-Western faction had also been the most eager importers of foreign instructors and weapons, who had then managed to defeat opposition forces with their smaller, far more Westernised armies. And indeed, once they won the ensuing civil war, their post-unification agenda turned out to be… the abolishment of the feudal caste system, the disarmament of the samurai, and the rapid industrialisation and modernisation of Japanese society. Whoops!

While ideology always plays a part in civil conflicts, the bakumatsu is not so much a story of traditionalism versus progressivism as simply what happens when a large political vacuum is created almost overnight, and there’s no good alternative on hand. The result is a very chaotic period of political free-for-all, as old coalitions rapidly collapse and new ones form, and centuries-old grudges suddenly come rearing back to life. And the creation of that vacuum, and the polarisation that fills it, is precisely what we are seeing in America today.

In the case of America, the empire is clearly in a very deep, systemic crisis. The military machine is deeply broken, the policy of spreading liberal democracy is a total failure, and the globalised economy has now frozen and seized up. Nobody, whether they’re on the Left or the Right, really has any solution to these problems. The vacuum is simply too big. And thus, we are slowly beginning to see the same sort of political dynamic manifest in America as it did in Japan during the bakumatsu. In America, just as in Japan, political street violence proliferates, and people form into armed and organised political gangs.

Yet, if 19^th century Japan offers some interesting parallels in terms of what has already happened in the last five years or so, it also gives us some hints of what is in store in America’s immediate future. First, the chaos that defined the bakumatsu suggests it’s probably foolish to expect American polarisation to cool down or improve anytime soon. If anything, it is likely to get a great deal worse, as nobody really has any sort of practical solution on hand to address the fundamental rupture introduced into the American political economy by deindustrialisation. This problem is especially acute, given the supply crisis that is now slowly choking producers and consumers. The current model is broken, but that breach is the result of decades of active policy choices. It can’t be unbroken in a week, and like a rotting tooth, it’s a problem that will keep spreading pain until it is finally dealt with.

Second, one of the most serious potential flashpoints in the years ahead is going to be the relationship between the federal government and various recalcitrant states. In the bakumatsu period, the Tokugawa government slowly lost control over the tozama magnates, who increasingly came to either ignore orders from Edo, or explicitly worked to undermine the Shogun.

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In America, this sort of political brinkmanship is starting to play out. Recently, Oklahoma’s Governor, Kevin Stitt, brazenly defied Washington by firing the commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, replacing him with a man whose first order of business was to free Oklahoma’s guardsmen from any obligation to comply with the Covid vaccine mandates. Though its effect didn’t extend beyond state borders, it’s a fairly ominous sign of where things are headed; the weight of federal writ is clearly not what it once was in America, and if the country continues to polarise and experience economic crisis, these sorts of conflicts will become increasingly common, and increasingly serious. In a couple of years, for example, if federal agents are ordered to arrest or imprison a popular state governor such as Ron DeSantis after some vexing display of Floridian insubordination, nobody really knows what could happen as a result.

More than anything, the most important lesson of the bakumatsu is simply to expect the unexpected in the days and years ahead. Political hypocrisy, back-stabbing, the embrace of exceedingly strange bedfellows, rapidly changing alliances, and much more; these things are not just likely but more or less guaranteed in times like these.

Just like the Japanese weren’t actually fighting merely for or against modernisation, or for or against the Emperor, the figurative (and increasingly literal) battles inside America today aren’t really about race, or taxes, or personal autonomy. They are about the heart, soul, and future of the nation, about what gets to fill the hungry vacuum left behind by the Black Ship that conquered the country in 2016.