It Ends With Him.

The Power of One

My favorite book as a young adult was The Power of One by South African-Australian author Bryce Courtenay. It’s a classic white savior novel but it had a demonstrable impact on me as it came out when I was in college. As some of you know, I don’t read a lot of fiction so I think that’s one of the reasons it stuck with me. I was young, impressionable and very poorly read, so this book took on an outsized place in my life. Ultimately, it’s the story of apartheid and the power of one person to change the narrative and start a movement. And there’s one metaphor that became a guiding principle in my life. “A waterfall begins with only one drop of water.”

It’s entirely simplistic and hardly serves as the basis for any movement. But it’s the sentiment that powers my ambition to learn, grow and share. Each of us has the ability to start the waterfall in our own communities and when it flows, no one drop is more significant than another, they all work in gravitational concert to roar. In their fullness, waterfalls have the ability to power hydroelectric dams to produce energy for the masses. They have the power to cleanse and restore. And they’re as beautiful as they are awesome.

I imagine waterfalls, large and small, forming all across the country. In coffee shops, diners and bookstores. Perhaps online. Good, like-minded Americans who see the blatant hypocrisy of the Democratic establishment and the ruthlessness of the Republicans. Americans who can no longer stomach what they perceive to be the end of progress and who understand that the path we’re on may not be un-American per se, rather a painful revelation of who we’ve always been. Americans who don’t like what they see and are ready to do something about it.

Friend-of-the-show Robert McDermott (Bobby McD) shared an article from Canadian writer Andrew Coyne that struck like a bolt of lightning. Particularly this passage:

“They will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.”

No sentiment explains my feelings about the urgency of this moment quite like this. And here’s where we head into a fraught conversation. It’s one we’ve had a few times on the surface but we need to go deeper.

The Allure of Third Parties

Since the beginning of UNFTR, I’ve promoted the idea of taking over the Democratic Party rather than supporting third party efforts to influence our elections. I’m tripling down on this idea though I’m keenly aware that many of you are still resistant to it. And for good reason. Decades of backsliding and being on the losing end of issues and legislation. Gains that were hard fought over decades with blood, sweat and tears suddenly erased in xenophobic moments of legislative and judicial barbarism. Voting rights. Reproductive rights. Civil rights. Privacy rights. Eroded and then crushed.

And now, by far the worst expression of ourselves since Jim Crow. Our better angels have been pummeled and left to die on the side of the road. Democrats helpless to stop the freight train of oligarchy. I get it.

A commenter on YouTube saw through my prose to write me off as a Trotskyite. (Clever fellow.) But whereas Trotsky failed to understand the central state he proposed would be easily co-opted by a new bureaucratic apparatus, (See: Mikhail Bakunin) he was spot on in his assessment of revolutionary forces.

“Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the role of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They constitute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.” -Leon Trotsky, from the introduction to The History of the Russian Revolution

We give far too much credence to the notion of parties in this country. Parties are themselves instruments of power. The question is really who wields the instrument. Elected officials aren’t divine. Nor are many of them particularly principled if we’re being honest. They are mirrors, hollow reflections of prevailing sentiments within artificially drawn boundaries of a community. Where the Republicans have succeeded more so than their adversaries is drawing those boundaries to consolidate sentiment. They’ve done a better job of identifying the inclinations of a community, feeding them false narratives and mining them for money and votes.

Only now, they don’t need the money anymore. The Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate money and now the GOP has sponsors and patrons. So today, controlling the narrative within these spheres of electoral influence known as districts and precincts is enough to deliver them victory.

And so, of course we feel helpless and are giving up on the other party. Most of us have been holding our noses in the voting booth for decades now and many were inclined to sit the last one out; a trend that Democrats are in danger of furthering it seems.

That’s why the prospect of a third party is so alluring. I totally get it. We’ve talked about this before. Eugene Debs won a million votes on the socialist line from prison in his last run. In five attempts, however, he never won more than that. Ross Perot earned a startling 19% of the popular vote in 1992. If there was a modern party formidable enough to mount that kind of challenge, I might allow more space for this conversation. But the moment has passed.

The duopoly went into full gear after the shock of Perot’s bid and worked diligently to increase the barriers to entry on the state and federal level. As we’ll talk about more in our “money in politics” episode, the fourth non-negotiable, Citizens United wasn’t the beginning. It was the culmination.

No one is going to start a party that dismantles the corrupt system we have and take on Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And no party currently exists that has the organization and backing to mount this challenge.

There are 180,000 election precincts in the country.

There are 55 political parties recognized by the Federal Election Commission.

1,900 State Senate seats

5,300 State House seats.

The Libertarian Party is on the ballot in 38 states for the presidential election and it’s been around for 51 years. Know how many libertarians are currently in Congress? None. Zilch. Zero.

The Green Party is on the ballot in 23 states. The Green Party as currently constituted has been around for 24 years now, but the organizing efforts began 41 years ago. It has elected members to positions in local city councils, parks and recreation boards, school boards and water boards. Know how many are in Congress? None. Zilch. Zero.

I’m not dismissing third parties out of hand. In fact, I would treasure third party representation in Congress but we have to see the circumstances for what they are. We either mount a revolution in the streets to overthrow the government and hope that our side has more guns than the other or we take over the levers of power district by winnable district. If there are other options available, I’m all ears. But that’s how I see it.

We’ve “Lost the Room”

I’ve been writing about politics on and off since college. I did it professionally for 15 years then took a three year hiatus before starting this show. I’ve read countless political theory books and I’m still in the nascent stages of this political journey. But I’ve seen, studied and read enough to develop a sixth sense. This is the pivot. The end of something known and the beginning of something very different and very dangerous.

In addition to political journalism, I also spent a few years in hospitality and ran an event center. Sometimes we ran events that went late into the night. Anyone who’s been in hospitality can tell you that nothing good happens after a certain point. The composition of the audience doesn’t matter either. Age, ethnicity, even the reason for gathering. Could be social, corporate, a room full of strangers or worse, a room filled with family members. Talk about a tinderbox.

‘Round about 2am, assuming alcohol was involved to some degree, you could always sense a shift. The same place for hours numbs your senses to the outside world pretty quickly. There are no visible signs at first. Just a sense that some shit was about to go down. A misinterpreted glance or deep seated resentment between two people that was about to surface; could be anything. 2am was the make it or break it time when you either slowed things down and gradually cooled things off or you lost the room.

We learned along the way that abruptly shutting things down was a bad idea. When the lights suddenly go on, the music stops and the doors blow open it startles people and can accelerate a mishap or dispute. Through trial, error and outside advice we learned to gradually bring the lights up. Maybe play Closing Time by Semisonic. If it was cold out, turn the heat down ever so slightly. It was hot out, turn up the A/C. Start circulating your staff throughout the party and make sure they smile. “Hope you had a great night! Get home safe folks.” Put coats out in the lobby with an attendant and prime the valets. A coffee station and pretzels work wonders by the way.

Unf*ckers. It’s 2am. My ‘spidey senses’ are tingling. The 70 year long neoliberal dance party is coming to a close and we’re about to lose the room. Either we let them tear the whole place down or we set up a coffee station, put on their coats and show them the door. If they tear it down, you’re welcome to start a new party. Otherwise, my preference would be to turn the room over and set up for the next event.

It Ends With Him

I’ve been joking with 99 in Show Notes about my obsession with the Justin Baldoni/Blake Lively saga so I took this opportunity to shoehorn in my obsession with Donald Trump. He’s all of our obsession now, of course, as he should be. But this is more than an opportunistic framing with a pop culture reference. This truly does end with him. All of it. Everything we thought we knew about our precious democracy, the power of the executive, who we are as a people and the seventy-year neoliberal movement.

I know I focus a lot on neoliberalism, but it’s been the guiding system of governance and economics in this country for most of our lives. It took root in the 1950s in response to Brown v. Board of Education and took up the mantle of the John Birch Society and Know Nothings before that. If you’re not familiar with them, they too were white nationalist movements that were bold and provocative in their racism.

You might be more familiar with the organization that existed between them: The Ku Klux Klan. That’s why I’m so adamant about keeping neoliberalism in our sights and in our discussions. Know Nothings, The Klan, John Birch Society and Neoliberals exist along the same spectrum. Each informed the next.

The Know Nothings organized around anti-immigrant sentiments, specifically against the influx of German and Irish immigrants in the mid 19th century. While the movement and party it inspired didn’t last, the spirit of it was revived shortly after its demise when the first Klan organization sprung up during Reconstruction, for even more obvious reasons. As America entered the 20th Century, the Klan was seen as too violent, too overtly racist and murderous to form the basis of a political party; a civil society could never tolerate such expressions, even if it reflected the ideology of the elites in society.

After the upheaval of the Great Depression and Second World War, the far right Christian nationalist core of American industry once again sought to insert itself into political affairs. The John Birch Society was formed in 1958 as a response to what it considered dangerous liberalism creeping into society, particularly gains made by Black Americans. These industrialists were closer to forming what we know today as neoliberalism. Racism and xenophobia packaged in the soft language of economic liberalism, protectionism and nationalism.

The Birchers were as offended by communism as they were liberalism; communism because it encouraged collectivism and liberalism because it was needlessly inclusive. Both perspectives were rooted in the notion that white American Christian men were superior and should control the levers of power.

Sound familiar?

In the maelstrom of this presidency we’re losing touch with our civic body. We talk broadly about the end of democracy under Trump but how many of us actually probe that sentiment? National politics in this country is hardly democratic. We have democratic mechanisms but the idea that we live under a functioning democracy is a stretch and for another episode. The mainstream media backlash to Trump has more to do with the end of civility and norms. Will our institutions hold? What does this mean for democracy? Is this just an overcorrection to the woke DEI movement of the left? Can we just have a do-over? Obama, save us!

The answer to Trump isn’t more Obama. To suggest this is to ignore what delivered Trump in the first place. Trump is more than the inevitable expression of a dissatisfied electorate seeking to thumb its nose at the establishment. It’s only being characterized as such because that’s the lens through which they’ve been selling this narrative. The mainstream media—which includes the corporate media and outlets like Pod Save America, and even the right wing media apparatus—have succeeded in portraying American politics, economics, culture and society as a binary. Zeroes and ones. Good guys and bad guys. Nativists versus immigrants. Black versus white. Democrats and Republicans.

Neoliberalism comfortably professionalized racist white nationalist ideology for the modern era.

In reality, America has always been the story of imperialism, white nationalism and Christian fundamentalism. We have no rich cultural history of kingdoms and conquests. No dynasties or epochs. We’re in our first experiment and so far it’s going great for one particular segment of the population. The ones who first arrived and proceeded to forcibly mold the entire system in their likeness and to their favor.

Neoliberalism was always a fetish; a white supremacist fantasy of American exceptionalism built on the image of the rugged individual. To wit, the whole conceit of neoliberalism is that America was at its pinnacle in the late 19th Century during the second industrial revolution exactly when the Know Nothings and Ku Klux Klan were having a cultural moment. However, by cloaking it in economic terms of the second industrial revolution they were able to wash off the stink of slavery and absolve themselves of America’s original sin. This was the time of industrialists, when innovation flourished and capitalism was pure. America was isolationist. The government was subordinate to industry.

Neoliberalism comfortably professionalized racist white nationalist ideology for the modern era. It looked like Ronald Reagan and sounded like Milton Friedman but it acted like every movement that inspired it and it produced the same results.

Only now, we’re seeing something else entirely. And even the neoliberals aren’t exactly sure what comes next. And they may have indeed outsmarted themselves.

The Salute

There’s a moment that I don’t think we should let pass: Elon, the salute. It was a Nazi salute. More than that, it was a test. A test to see how afraid we really are. It wasn’t designed to see who would support it. That’s pretty obvious. People are actually stupid enough to put their beliefs out there on social media. It was a test to see who on the right would excuse it, to explain it away. And a test to see whether the so-called left, or the liberal establishment, has enough control of the narrative to do what we’ve done to literally anyone else who gives an obvious and very aggressive expression of white supremacy.

Remember, he did it twice. In exactly the same motion and emphasis as the Nazis did. On the heels of defending the German AfD Party in writing, the heirs of the actual Nazi ideology in Germany. After promoting white nationalist and antisemitic posts on his own platform time and time again. It was a test. And we failed.

If ever there was a tipping point, that was it and we’ve already moved past it; swept up by Trump’s distraction machine.

I want you to think about this man and the position he occupies in the culture and on the globe. His network of satellites connects the world and it’s growing exponentially. In fact, it’s growing to such an extent that our own military and those of other nations have expressed concern that they’re reliant upon it. He owns the most important social media public square in the country. The biggest electric car manufacturer in America that sells an inferior product to its Chinese counterpart and at double the price because of specific tariffs that protect him.

His Boring Company is digging a completely unsupervised and unregulated tunnel in Las Vegas right now. Rather than a mass transit system that actually works for the public, Musk’s company has completed five miles of a proposed 68 mile loop in Vegas to help alleviate traffic congestion. But here’s the catch. The loop is for Teslas.

See how this works?

Every bit of his success relies on technology developed by others. That’s true of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink. His genius is leverage and a willingness to play outside of the rules. When PayPal formed, it was Peter Thiel who shepherded the deal to sell it to eBay, the foundation of Musk’s wealth. And the only way that happened was by ousting Musk from the company because he built his technology without protections against fraudulent transactions, which meant that much of his payment system was used for laundering money. But every billionaire has this kind of skeleton in the closet so in this regard he’s still not special.

What makes him special is that he’s an even better salesman than Donald Trump. Trump, the businessman with one of the worst track records in American history, succeeded because he lied his way through it and became so indebted to American banks they had no choice but to keep lending him money. Trump was too big to fail before it was cool. But Musk, he’s another level.

“You see, the whole world and the capitalist system that runs it, is held together by a complex network of threads. Sometimes, when one-too-many threads are pulled the whole thing comes crashing down.”

In gaining access to government systems and sidestepping Congress every step of the way, Musk is once again testing the American system to find its weaknesses. He doesn’t expect to win every battle but his strategy was revealed quite publicly when he recently called for the judge who blocked his DOGE initiatives to be impeached. Will it happen? Who knows at this point. It’s also besides the point. As he’s done in Las Vegas, he’s going to move forward until some force bigger than him stands in his way. It sure doesn’t seem like Congress is up to the task and given his control over our space program, the automobile industry and the satellites we rely upon, I’m going to suggest that he has the upper hand here.

That’s what happens when you dismantle the regulatory system. Now, Republicans and even Donald Trump himself is about to find out what this means the hard way. I’m going to save you the suspense in what comes next.

He’ll do just enough to bring about a collapse—somewhere.

You see, the whole world and the capitalist system that runs it, is held together by a complex network of threads. Sometimes, when one-too-many threads are pulled the whole thing comes crashing down. So if the goal of Project 2025, the resurgence of the John Birch Society in its stated goals and methodology, is to dismantle the administrative state and return white Christian nationalism to its rightful place atop the ideological mountain, then a lot has to come crashing down to make this happen. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not alone in the world and this isn’t just about us anymore.

Take, for example, the recent news that no one paid attention to in Brazil. As the new president of the BRICs alliance—an international trade alliance between Brazil, Russia, India and China—Brazil recently welcomed Indonesia to the fold. Indonesia is the 16th largest economy in the world and one of the fastest growing economies. It all happened right under our noses and the American political and foreign policy establishment barely blinked. Why does this matter? Because we’re losing allies and the world is losing faith in us. The major economies of the world are operating under the fool me once adage. 2016 we fooled them once, and “shame on us” for letting it happen. In 2024 it’s “shame on them” if they stick around and it looks like they’re not going to.

The world is designing plans that don’t include us so our allies are more crucial than ever. Allies like Canada. And Mexico. Trade partners like China and the EU. Trump is nuking these relationships with the carelessness of a toddler and the world isn’t going to stand for it. As a leftist, there are plenty of reasons why I’m thrilled we’re having a conversation about USAID meddling in foreign nations where our economic interventions are concerned.

But that’s not why the agency is under fire. The pieces that offend the likes of Elon Musk are those that provide humanitarian aid and relief. So we’re willing to sacrifice $40 billion of aid to impoverished nations and imperil efforts to contain the spread of deadly diseases, as one example. But we’re going to overlook the fact that the Pentagon has failed seven consecutive audits and now the DOD cannot account for $4 trillion of assets on its books. That’s how you know this isn’t about government efficiency, as if you needed the clarification.

No, this is about tearing it all down. Ironically, leftists who don’t support the Democratic Party have been pilloried for being accelerationists. Because we intuitively understood that holding the middle ground of the neoliberal era was destined to deliver us to this moment anyway. So now it’s the Republicans who have to deal with the fallout of accelerationism at the hands of a runaway billionaire who has outsmarted Trump and made him his lackey.

They won’t succeed in deporting millions of people from the country. They’re already failing. But if you deport tens of thousands of people and make a horrific show of it, it has the same effect. There are reports all over the country of prescriptions left behind at pharmacies; immigrants who are too scared to pick them up. Border crossings have dropped precipitously since Trump won the election, which the right will celebrate until we don’t have enough fruit in the stores, healthcare aids to watch grandma and fast food workers at the drive through. This is inevitable.

And yet we’ll gleefully fund projects to build more servers to promote the AI revolution, which in and of itself is designed to displace workers. And who stands to benefit from this the most? I don’t know, look at the headlines recently. None other than Elon Musk has entered a bid to buy out OpenAI on the heels of Republicans introducing legislation in the House to criminalize the use of DeepSeek, the Chinese competitor to OpenAI that is purportedly better, faster and orders of magnitude more efficient and cheaper to build.

How many threads can be pulled before it all comes apart?

Will it be another pandemic? An animal flu that ravages the nation as RFK and Musk dismantle food production guidelines and protections? Shall we reread Upton Sinclair to know what happens next?

Will it be mass layoffs in the government sector that increase the unemployment rate and spooks the Fed and the markets?

Maybe the planned dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will lead to price gouging across the board sending inflation through the roof, followed by the inevitable market crash, home losses and bankruptcies.

Maybe another major world economy that we’ve pissed off joins the BRICs alliance and entirely new global trade agreements are crafted that supersede the ones we’ve implemented since World War II.

Maybe more global transactions are settled in another currency and suddenly the dollar slips in value, which drives up commodity prices.

Maybe a famine breaks out in the Global South that causes an uprising in a country we rely on for key minerals.

Maybe the end of federal standards, guidelines and funding from the Department of Education leads to a food insecurity crisis in the poorest districts in red states that can’t absorb a shift in education funding from the federal government to the states.

Maybe plane crashes become a routine occurrence and travel and tourism collapses out of fear.

What will take the place of all this? Bible study? The invisible hand of the free market?

And We All Fall Down

I’ve told the story before of how Murray Rothbard, one of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, encouraged Charles Koch to brush up on Vladimir Lenin’s work to learn how to build a proper revolution. I promise you the folks like Russell Vought and others behind Project 2025 did this as well. Remember, Lenin’s revolutionary work started in the late 1800s and it wasn’t until the dual revolutions of 1917 that he was successful in bringing about the Bolshevik Revolution. But even Lenin, as prepared as he was to seize the moment, couldn’t build an apparatus quickly enough and strong enough to both overcome the entrenched system, the ravages of the First Great War and a struggling economy.

Many have interpreted the rise of Stalinism as an inevitability; a natural outgrowth of Marxist ideology. This was hardly the case. Fear, irrationality, nationalism, economic depression and a collapse of support among revolutionary groups outside of Russia killed Leninism in the crib. Lenin knew the revolution was tenuous and would fail if it didn’t sweep other nations as well. The Russian economy and society needed to be buttressed by neighboring economies because of the fragile state it was left in after the war. But it didn’t happen. And so the centralized, consolidated power structure was taken over by the despotic Stalin who sold the false idea of Socialism in One Country, rather than a global movement.

Alas, no nation can go it alone and so one-by-one the threads were pulled until the cloak of Leninism came apart at the seams. This “Russia First” ideology is not different from America First, though it’s a little less racist.

And so now we have another modern group schooled in the theories of Leninist revolutionary tactics but for wholly different intentions. But the lesson remains the same. Pull too many threads, take away certainty and stability, try to go it alone and even the strongest revolution is due to fail. The only question is what will take its place? What is to be done?

I myself am not an accelerationist. I actually don’t want this all to fail. I much prefer the Schumpeter or Piketty notion that capitalism creates mass worker dislocation causing it to eventually give way to socialism. I know that’s pollyanna-ish and maybe there’s a timeline in which that happens.

But that salute. To me that was the moment. That was it. I know it’s one of a million insults we’ve endured under Trump. And even more than Trump. For so many people, America has been one long tragic insult. This moment isn’t special for so many groups and identities in America. But for the first time, I feel like even those who dragged us to this moment are totally unaware of the significance of it.

Elon Musk is Frankenstein’s monster. Even they don’t know how to control him, nor do they understand the power and importance of the imagery behind the moment that they normalized. There’s no turning back from a full fledged Nazi salute at the inauguration of a U.S. President. That’s why I went back to the drawing board to try and build a curriculum that can be easily adopted and spread throughout small networks of people who are as frightened of this moment and feel powerless to stop it. As I work through it and try to quickly but thoughtfully disseminate it to as many people as possible, I wanted to pause to explain why I’m doing it with such urgency.

“If the system didn’t sound the alarm at the sight of a Nazi salute then we’ll have to do it ourselves. It’s up to us to Paul Revere this shit.”

Musk follows the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things.” only in this case it’s what’s left of our Democracy. And here’s what I want you to consider if you’re having any doubts or having trouble convincing others that everything has changed. Elon Musk became the world’s richest man in 2021. When Joe Biden was President of the United States. That’s a one of one. A singular achievement. On his way, under that current system, under a Democratic administration, to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. And that wasn’t enough? If accumulating the greatest fortune in history isn’t the end game, what is?

There’s an insatiable sickness in him. Like Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood. “There’s a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.”

We don’t all have to know the history of neoliberalism or understand what the Project 2025 folks want. If we all just recognize that this has gotten past the Democrats, of course, but also the Republicans; that we’re in the process of opening Pandora’s Box then we can hopefully wake more people up to the idea of “what’s next” so they know the only thing more powerful than the designs of a despot and the whims of a madman is the will of the people.

If the system didn’t sound the alarm at the sight of a Nazi salute then we’ll have to do it ourselves. It’s up to us to Paul Revere this shit. I mean, first step, for the love of god get off Twitter, or X. Leave it now. En masse. That’s free. I don’t care how big your following is or how much time you spent there. Fuck it. Leave. Start building out your hives and commit to meeting people in coffee shops, or online, however you can build a solidarity network to share this knowledge and build the language of dissent.

Because there’s no one coming to rescue us and if we go down, it all goes down and you will not like what rises up in its place.

Image Sources

• The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.
• Daniel Torok, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.