2024 Election: Eulogy and Clarity.

Today we put a fork in the election. It’s done and we’re cooked.

The subject line of our last newsletter—If you’re still in mourning you weren’t paying attention—caught the ire of longtime Unf*cker Stephen S. who had this to say:

“If you want to unf*ck the republic maybe get off your high horse and stop pretending you actually know what’s going to happen or have a fucking plan. You don’t or I would see it here. Hand waving about ‘resistance’ isn’t a plan.”

It’s a valid critique. I was trying to shake our audience out of a state of despair by declaring the time for mourning over. But he’s right. We should still mourn. And we don’t have a plan. The bigger problem is that no one on the left really does.

I do, however, have some notes.

It seems like just yesterday we were talking about Medicare for all, free public college, $15 minimum wage, a wealth tax on the top 1% of income earners, paid family leave, free school lunches and a dignified retirement. Those were the days.

Alas, upon analyzing the recent election defeat, establishment Democrats think all we have to do is back away from wokeness. Progressives think that Bernie would have won with a populist economic message. Leftists are blaming progressives for kowtowing to the Party and social anarchists believe this is simply the end of the American empire.

The only silver lining is that the election wasn’t even close. I’ll explain.

If this was a tight race it would have bolstered the confidence among establishment Democrats that they were on the right path in terms of messaging. The internal arguments would have been about whether Josh Shapiro could have delivered Pennsylvania and the rust belt rather than Tim Walz. Some are already suggesting this as though a VP pick makes a difference. It doesn’t. (Allow me to enter J.D. Vance into evidence.) We would be talking about election interference and Russian hackers phoning in bomb threats in predominantly Black districts. How Biden pulled out of the race too late or myriad excuses for why they fell short in key districts. As it is, media pundits are trying to explain away the losses by blaming Black and Latino men and Muslim Americans.

The fact is Trump increased support among every constituency. If you want a complete breakdown of the election with stunning clarity, I encourage you to read Rashed Mian’s post-election autopsy on our website titled “Election Backlash.”

The election blowout is the ultimate reset. It reminds me of a scene from an early ‘90s movie called Searching for Bobby Fischer. While mentoring a young chess prodigy, the grandmaster instructor played by Ben Kingsley is trying to get his young prodigy to see a particular move in his head without moving the pieces on the board. When the boy hesitates Kingsley says softly, “here I’ll make it easier” then sweeps his hand across the board, sending the pieces flying across the room and crashing onto the floor. Only then does the boy see the move.

That’s what Trump, the symptom of the unfettered capitalist disease, just did. Now, before we examine our empty chess board, let’s recall some of our lessons; the first being, “Republicans with time.”

I made this reference when Project 2025 was released and related it to prior periods when Republicans suddenly found themselves out of power. The most recent example was after the defeat of George H.W. Bush. Republicans with time on their hands busied themselves preparing the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). This was the infamous planning initiative to invade the Middle East—Iraq specifically—to overthrow the dictatorship and seize its oil resources. Once back in power, the Republicans prosecuted a decade-long war on multiple fronts to execute on the plan. Feckless Democrats then maintained the new Republican status quo, as they do.

We remain firmly in control of Iraqi oil production to this day.

Unlike PNAC, Project 2025 isn’t an inspired plan on recent thinking about American imperialism. It is the culmination of a 50 year effort to undermine faith in American institutions, co-opt the entire legal system, overhaul higher education, consolidate power in the hands of the corporate class, subvert the labor movement, demonize immigrants, preserve the racial hierarchy, eliminate protections for the impoverished, center Christian fundamentalism in our politics and public school system, control the corporate media, silence dissenting voices, criminalize protest and turn us against one another.

The cornerstone of this movement was laid in the early 1970s by figures such as James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Aaron Director, Lewis Powell, Robert Nozick, Michael Horowitz, Doug Coe, Chuck Colson, Richard Fink, Charles and David Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, John Olin, Joseph Coors and Dick DeVos. The capstone was just laid by Leonard Leo, Peter Thiel and Russell Vought. There were several in between but the bottom line is almost no one who cast their vote for Donald Trump knows these names. Likewise, very few who voted for Kamala Harris do either. Unf*ckers are familiar with them because this is the part that we have tried to fix.

As we’ve said many times, it’s hard to untie a knot when you don’t know how it was tied.

Donald Trump, just like George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon before him, is a show horse. The workhorses were the aforementioned men who deliberately set about eliminating any liberalism in our institutions. No matter how many clowns they parade around in the circus—Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz, Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio, Lee Zeldin, Elise Stefanik, and whoever comes next—they are all part of the great distraction machine. That’s what clowns are for. All eyes on their buffoonery while the real show happens behind the curtain.

It took three full generations for the neoliberal workhorses to complete the turn. Make no mistake, we are there. This is it. With full control of every branch and a demonstrated ability to simply ignore protocols, norms, precedents and even laws, the men in shadows who control it all will use Trump like a fucking battering ram against the gates of the kingdom.

I believe the American experiment can be divided into three epochs: The colonial period from our founding through the Second Industrial Revolution; the imperial-industrial period from the late 1800s to the Civil Rights Movement; and the current neoliberal era. During each period, change was ushered in on the heels of economic catastrophe. Sometimes for the better, other times not. Each time positive progress was made the establishment forces managed to fight back against progressive measures to preserve authority (all the while playing the victim).

It’s important to note, though it should be a given, that racism and misogyny are throughlines of these eras. It’s not who we’ve become, it’s who we’ve always been. In order to wrest control they’ve had to suppress these instincts but now that the shift is complete, there’s no longer a need for such pretense.

There are two ways to emerge from this era. We can choose at this moment to see this as the tipping point toward true authoritarianism, or we can view this as the Empire Strike Back phase. Timing matters a great deal and so does our level of awareness.

Awareness can only be driven by education and information, which is why the right wing establishment has worked so doggedly for the past fifty years to undermine education and our confidence in information. No, you’re not a conspiracist if you feel this way. This was deliberate and they’re winning the battle. Whether they win the war depends upon what we do next.

So let me offer a silver lining to the timing equation.

Had Kamala Harris run the table, as I alluded to before, the progressive movement would have been officially destroyed; perhaps never to rise from the ashes again as it has periodically done throughout history. Why? Because Harris ran a Republican strategy to win the country. Had it worked, progressives would have been outcasts.

It’s why we were so adamantly opposed to the perfunctory nominating convention that robbed us of a democratic process. It’s why we had already given up on this election long before it even started.

But now, because Democrats blundered so badly, we have a chance to rise again. That’s been our message of hope all along. The painful part was knowing how much suffering we would have to endure to get there. The Republicans will run this country into the ground, destroy our standing in the world, hoard resources for the wealthiest among us and rip the social and economic welfare state to shreds. And we will experience economic catastrophe once again as a result of their single-minded desire to maintain white and economic supremacy. To repeat one of my favorite phrases: they will burn the barn to get to the nails.

I choose to view this as an opportunity. An opportunity not to revolt but to prepare; to build and strengthen alliances between marginalized groups and those who are unwittingly about to enter their ranks.

But back to timing. When Nixon planted the seeds of economic destruction, Jimmy Carter inherited the stagflation crisis. It was a crisis so widespread and severe that it birthed the Reagan era, which was furthered by his Republican and Democratic successors. When catastrophe struck again in 2001, we feared for our very lives. This paved the way for the neocon phase, granting ourselves permission to terrorize the entire world as a result. And when our deregulatory recklessness came home to roost, it paved the way for a generational candidate named Barack Obama to ascend to the highest office in the land.

And what did he do with his mandate? He continued on the well established corporate neoliberal path. He pardoned the bankers. Regulated nothing other than to create more paper trails. Gave away our healthcare to the insurance companies. And cozied up to a corporate class that never accepted him as one of their own, because, well…you know.

That was our first big, recent opportunity. The chance to build a progressive movement united in opposition to the establishment. We had momentum and meaning. And then we had nothing.

At every turn, it wasn’t the right wing that buried populist progressive movements. It was the Democratic Party. That’s why my animus has been directed at the corporately controlled Democratic National Committee (DNC). The Democratic Party is not a party controlled by people, it’s a corporation run by executives who work hand-in-hand with other corporate leaders who donate equally to both parties to hedge their bets. Kamala Harris raised a billion dollars in record time and it wasn’t enough. Why? Because the money was matched on the other side and the ideas were all the same.

Let’s reflect on yet another lesson: Crisis has made the DNC think it is good at its job.

The DNC was sniffing its own farts after Obama dominated the electoral college in 2008. Obama was a generational candidate running against a historically inept Republican ticket during the worst financial crisis in 75 years. A potato would have swept the contest. Then in 2016 and again in 2020, the DNC squashed the Bernie movement to platform an establishment retread in Hillary Clinton and then a twice-failed presidential candidate in Joe Biden. Because the pandemic was so grossly mishandled by Trump that we lost a million American lives. Every day was a new scandal. By the 2020 election, the country had whiplash from Trump’s erratic behavior and so an actual potato won the day, leaving the DNC to believe that it was really good at picking candidates.

These brilliant strategists confined the Harris campaign to “say no to Donald Trump’s vision for America” instead of expressing a vision of its own. To emphasize the point, Harris surrounded herself with Republican icons, touted endorsements from corporations, Nobel laureates, economists, former Trump staffers and celebrities. And the kill shot: When she said she wouldn’t have done anything differently over the past four years.

They thought it was a good idea to campaign alongside the Cheney family. If that doesn’t say it all, I don’t know what does.

If you run a Republican campaign as a Democrat—a proud glock-toting, tough on immigration, genocide supporting fan of corporate America—you’re going to lose to the party that already owns these issues. It’s as simple as that. The Democratic Party’s inability to tap into economic insecurity and fear of an AI future that will leave workers behind opened up a wide lane for the Republican Party to tell you who to blame for your fears. It’s a pretty simple equation.

I believe they will try to accomplish every line item in the Republican’s 900 page manifesto; they’re far more prepared and aligned than they were in 2016. As a result, we are about to bear witness to one of the more extreme periods of xenophobic punishment this country has ever seen and certainly more than any of us has lived through. Yes, it’s going to be that bad. Sugarcoating it does no one any good. And hopefully now you believe that our historical analysis is clear and accurate.

Donald Trump is a low IQ pure populist with no ideology or personal competence. That said, the difference between his first and second terms will be competence, preparedness and a definitive ideology, even if none of them are his.

I have been questioning who on earth would be stupid enough to be in this man’s cabinet. Now I’m beginning to understand that his people are anything but stupid. They are evil and corrupt, but not stupid. The difference between his two terms is that he and his people will evade corruption charges at every step, because they fully control Congress (in numbers and ideology) and will continue to pack the courts with blinding speed.

There will be no “adults in the room” to preach caution or consider legality, because there will be no legal system to contain them. There will be no conscientious objectors in the Republican controlled Congress to put guardrails in place. They’re all gone.

Be fearful. For many in this country it will be as bad as you think it will be. And they’re going to get away with all of it. For a time. The only question is whether we’re prepared to work as hard at rebuilding progressivism as they did to tear it down.

That brings us to the here and now.

For the past couple of years I’ve been dancing around the idea of systems. Our first episodes in 2020 even spoke to the notion that we were in a post-capitalism era as the system that Adam Smith envisioned was itself a cautionary tale. In other words, Smith was proposing a market system with clear regulations to prevent speculative behavior and obscene wealth accumulation; one that produced enough surplus to fund the arts, education and general welfare. He proposed a system to prevent where we find ourselves today.

The election wasn’t a victory for capitalism as it was conceived; rather it cemented the notion of inverted totalitarianism, a state in which corporations control the mechanisms of the economy, media, society and culture. Everything is curated by the corporate machine and we accept what it feeds us like lab rats. They can starve us, overfeed us, manipulate our behavior or kill us. And like the rat, we don’t know we’re in the experiment. All we know is the reality they’ve made for us.

Professor and researcher Stanley Deetz published a theory that resonates with me much the same as Sheldon Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism. The theory of Corporate Colonialism whereby corporations exert a form of “colonial” control by embedding their values, priorities, and decision-making processes into the social and political fabric, often at the expense of democratic ideals and the public good.

Personally I find this a more satisfying explanation of our condition for two reasons. One because it’s an apt description, but also because colonialism is a familiar pattern with weaknesses that can be exploited once understood.

Colonization occurs when a strong entity is in search of a weaker one in possession of resources the colonizer requires, such as land, natural resources, labor, ports and so on. In the age of empires, colonies were typically acquired through force, especially when racial hierarchies were at play. The British in India, Dutch and German Afrikaners in South Africa, Portuguese in Brazil, Chinese in Tibet. Our own history is defined by breaking the colonial yoke of France, Spain and Great Britain. History is rife with such examples.

Modern colonial projects are often political and economic in nature. The absence of force and population control make them no less insidious though perhaps more ingenious. This is a hallmark of neoliberalism, which partnered with the neoconservative movement to suppress democracy in foreign nations while throwing a life preserver in the form of loans, investments and political resources. Dollar diplomacy with teeth. We overthrew nearly every democratic movement in Latin America in this fashion.

An insurrection here. Guerrilla movement there. Loans and sanctions like carrots and sticks. Eventually, we’ll get what we need.

The first step in colonizing is to divide the people. When a people stand together as one it’s difficult to attack the pillars of a functioning society. When people are divided, they’re insecure. That’s where the play on the word ‘disease’ comes in. Dis-ease. Uneasiness and insecurity—dis-ease, dis-order—that’s the foundation of any colonial movement because the colonizer can offer security and order in return for a few small favors. Then it can go about eroding the pillars of society. The law. Education. Healthcare. Religion. Labor. Media. Science.

People think politics is the driving force of movements and change. It’s not. Politics is a reflection of sentiment, the culmination of movements for or against something.

You don’t have to look through history or even abroad to understand this. You’re living through it right now. The Southern Strategy under Nixon, the show horse, was devised by H.R. Haldeman, Harry Dent and John Tower, the work horses. (Ask a MAGA voter if they know these names.) Their goal was to divide the electorate over the Civil Rights movement and social welfare programs popularized by FDR and LBJ. These men created politics of fear and othering that set the white working class against people of color and northern elites. Once this foundation was set, our aforementioned protagonists (that no one remembers) entered the picture and started chipping away.

First, the legal system. They trained conservative legal professors and placed them in law schools by tying them to donations. They started universities of their own. They worked with the corporate class to ensure that they were placed in high profile corporate positions and prestigious law firms. Over time they were appointed to state and federal judicial positions during Republican administrations.

Today they control the courts, including the highest one.

They attacked unions in the workplace and tenure in universities. They cracked down on protest movements and militarized our domestic law enforcement agencies. They deregulated industry after industry to further prevent oversight and labor organization. Created right to work states. Demonized cities and immigrants. Gave white clergy unprecedented access to power in return for spreading a perverted form of Christianity to other parts of the world through force. Took control of the media and handed it over to the corporate class.

They ascribed more rights to money than humans to influence our elections. Handed the keys to our healthcare system to insurance companies and middlemen. Generated policy papers in billionaire funded think tanks that were copied word-for-word into model legislation. Gerrymandered districts to crowd out ethnic minorities from power. Attacked science by allowing corporations to fund alternative studies that sowed doubt in our minds. Made work more precarious and welfare harder to secure.

All the while telling us the opposite was happening through the media mouthpieces they control and the corporate committees who run our elections.

We only hear what they tell us and we’re not to believe our lying eyes.

The movement to privatize everything has been underway for decades and now they have the ability to finish the job under Trump.

Why have a military when you can have mercenaries?

Why have public schools with federal standards when you can have state-run charter schools that teach creationism?

Why bother running prisons when you can outsource incarceration?

Why would a wealthy person follow the law when the person in charge of the country routinely broke it and was able to buy his way out of it?

Why believe science when it stands in the way of profit?

The state is controlled by corporate interests and the punitive arms work at the pleasure of the state. The state has been fully colonized by corporate interests, which is why inequality is widening and corporations are writing policy and dictating terms.

But here’s the thing…

Remember why colonizers colonize: To extract something they otherwise do not possess. For our corporate colonizers it was labor and wealth.

27 million Americans work part-time jobs. Highest it’s ever been.

10% of the workforce is unionized. Lowest it’s ever been.

A Trump administration ensures that guardrails to manage the rollout of AI in the workforce never come to fruition. And this won’t be a Schumpeter-like vision of creative destruction with machines replacing manual jobs over several decades thus allowing the workforce to retrain and reboot; this will happen in a matter of a few short years and it will upend the nature of work as we know it.

All of this is theoretically manageable when social safety nets are in place and we’re in an economic growth cycle. But when the cycle turns—as it always does and is designed to—the level of precarity the next time around will be unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. Only this time, there won’t be enough immigrants to blame. And because our collective wealth comes from wage labor, when labor crumbles our wealth follows leaving the colonizers in a predicament: They won’t need as much of our labor to run their machine but they will still require our wealth.

In a normal colonial relationship, the colonizer leaves when they’ve either taken all they can from the population—extracted every mineral, cut down every tree; or they’re violently overthrown because they went too far and the scraps from the table are no longer enough to fill our bellies.

Only in our scenario, there’s nowhere for our colonizers to go. And then it’s our turn.

When most people think of overthrowing a system they think of overthrowing the government, the political apparatus of society. But we need to look beyond that. The government of the United States exists now to do the bidding of the corporate class. It’s them who are to be overthrown. This means we have to think differently about the nature of revolution and prepare a different path forward.

The corporate class could have gotten on just fine under a Harris administration. But in board rooms and quiet country club conversations, they knew that Donald Trump was the accelerant they needed to complete the coup. It’s why they are celebrating and why we will see a peaceful transfer of power to the real administrative state. The privatized one.

Lenin called the failed Revolution of 1905 a dress rehearsal. He didn’t know when the real show would begin, only that they needed to prepare the script. And the most important part of the planning process was to prevent the spontaneous uprising of the working class. That might come as a surprise to many who believe that labor uprisings sparked the dual revolutions of 1917. In his own words:

“The task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social-Democracy.”

Remember from our socialism series, especially the one that covered Eugene Debs. There’s a historical tension between labor and social democrats that persists to this day. Ultimately Lenin’s Revolution was undone by the authoritarian tendencies of the Stalinist wing of the Party and the lack of a resource-rich and mature economic infrastructure that existed in places like France and Germany. Russia simply wasn’t ready for such upheaval. But Lenin understood the nature of revolution and knew, “the role of a vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.”

The masses didn’t have to know the theory, only to trust that it would deliver them from crippling austerity.

We don’t have to look back a century to be guided by these sentiments, mind you. One need only look to present day Brazil, itself recovering from the brutal whims of Jair Bolsonaro, an authoritarian in the mold of Donald Trump. He did it by prioritizing the poor and working class and protecting the environment. How novel. There are countless examples of movements that excised corporate and political colonizers and we have an opportunity to do the same.

We know how the knots were tied. Together we can untie them but only when we begin to speak the same language and that, my friends, is what this journey has been about. When our religious leaders, educators, new media figures, doctors, scientists and labor leaders come together to take control of their silos under the common banner of decolonization, our politics will follow.

I choose to view the Occupy movement as our dress rehearsal. Even if it too was early and spontaneous. Even if it was quickly co-opted and eventually smothered by corporate interests. The heart of Occupy lasted only three months. But so did the Paris Commune and its flame burned so brightly it inspired socialist movements the world over for generations that followed.

Can we do the same? Because it’s the first time our corporate overlords, as Chris Hedges calls them, were scared.

In that park, religious leaders, indigenous people, ethnic minorities, artists and musicians, working class people, unemployed and underemployed citizens, students and scholars all came together to decry the corporate class with one voice. The corporate class gathered its composure after a few months and unleashed the mainstream media and the domestic military force on the gathering. But the movement persisted in the form of Bernie Sanders. And when his star shone too brightly, the corporate political class coalesced to smother him.

When the opportunity arises again from the ashes of a broken system that has extracted the remainder of the wealth from the masses, it’s incumbent upon us to give them the language of dissent. It’s in this language that the answers lie.

The enemy of corporatism is the nationalization of critical industries.

The enemy of corporatism is regulation and taxation.

The enemy of corporatism is education.

So from now on, when we talk about unf*cking the republic, what we’re really saying is “decolonize America.” Just like no one remembers the names of the neoliberals who set this in motion, no one will remember yours or mine. But they don’t need to. All they need to know is what it feels like to take back control of our lives and, god willing, our planet.

If the Powell memo was the clarion call for the corporate class to rise up against us, then let ours be “we are the 99%.”

Here endeth the lesson.