The End of the American Experiment.

Nations are like reputations. A lifetime to build, a moment to destroy.

That moment is upon us. The full-scale verbal attack from J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller on some amorphous (non-existent) enemy on the left was the war cry and official decree of despotism. It is not, however, without precedent. For only the second time in our nation’s history, we are being forced to make a choice—we will move forward as a unified whole or come apart at the seams.

The Civil War was fought under the banner of “liberty;” the freedom to enslave humans under the pretense of state’s rights. The war being fomented by this administration and the organized far-right in America is under a similar pretense: freedom of the executive.

The right is marching forward from every vantage point and flanking the liberal establishment at every turn. Trump recently announced a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times, America’s newspaper of record; just the latest attack on the press that has been wildly successful thus far even though this one was thrown out of court. After threatening to cancel Jimmy Kimmel in the wake of Colbert’s Late Show being cancelled, he has succeeded once again. He has beaten several media outlets into submission, forcing them to settle for enormous sums and chilling speech in the process.

The administration has showered a rogue enforcement agency with funding worthy of a branch of the military, all with the blessing of his hand-selected Supreme Court. This is the same court that has ruled in favor of some of his most aggressive actions to dismantle federal agencies, eliminate regulations, dismiss federal employees en masse and claw back appropriated funding from the prior administration. The very same Supreme Court that inoculated the chief executive from all wrongdoing in perpetuity.

None of this is normal in a democracy.

All of it is normal in a dictatorship.

The administration has partnered with the corporate class to ensure that they get a taste in the new regime. This is how they’ll keep us in check. With the expulsion of immigrants and the silencing of dissent, jobs will be a precious commodity in the new America. Corporate America will not be left behind in this coup, but there will be a price. There always is.

The tech companies have given in to Trump who is purportedly close to negotiating the sale of TikTok, a foreign-based platform, to an American company. The government is taking a stake in one of the largest chip manufacturers in the world as well.

Our universities are under attack. UC Berkeley handed over the names of 160 students and faculty members who engaged in campus protests against the war in Gaza. Cornell, Brown, UPenn and Columbia, among others, have caved to administration demands to eliminate all references to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Open Society Foundation (OSF) and Ford Foundations were name-checked by the President himself when speaking about the need to investigate liberal funding organizations, even mentioning potential RICO statutes could be used to target George Soros personally as one of the principal founders of OSF.

Vice President JD Vance took it a step further to suggest that these organizations were potentially contributing to terrorist sympathizers. (More on that in a bit.)

Environmental protections are all but eliminated. Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is dismantling it one regulation at a time. A 700 MW wind farm near completion in Rhode Island has been halted. And with it, thousands of jobs are gone in an instant. So too is the prospect of powering 350,000 homes with clean energy that was already 90% built and would have reduced the electric bills in Rhode Island moving forward. All because the Dear Leader despises wind power from that time the Scottish dared to build a windfarm visible from one of his golf courses.

And now our president has declared war on antifa.

Antifa stands for anti-fascist and is meant to describe one’s attitude, i.e. someone opposed to fascism. Like U.S. soldiers in World War II as an example. There are loose knit groups under different names who describe their beliefs as anti-fascist or “antifa” but there is no such organization. Some agitators dressed in all black have disrupted protests on the left and the right in the past, declaring themselves “antifa.” Many on the right and the left have suggested that agent provocateurs were among them. I guess we’re targeting anyone who dissents against fascism or dresses in black.

Antifa is an adjective, not a noun.

It isn’t an organization like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, for example. These are far right organizations linked most notably to the January 6 insurrection attempt and with a history of violent acts toward peaceful protestors. These organizations have official memberships and chapters throughout the United States. The Oath Keepers boast members from police officers to elected officials and the Proud Boys have merch and coordinated outfits.

To show just how extreme this stance on “antifa” is, it should be noted that the Ku Klux Klan also maintains chapters throughout the United States and is considered by the FBI to be an extremist organization, but not a terrorist organization.

This isn’t the first time the President has made this threat. He tweeted nearly the exact same thing in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement. The problem for the president, among countless others, is that the official terrorism designation is reserved for foreign groups. Domestic groups cannot be classified as terrorist organizations. Especially ones that don’t exist. Then again, there’s no rule, no law, no norm that can seem to hold this administration back.

The point of this exercise is to stop all dissent because the administration knows that it is breaking the spirit and back of the country. The people in charge are determined to enrich themselves and leave a white Christian hierarchy in charge of the white collar economy. By purging the nation of immigrants it is also opening up jobs on the bottom rung of the economic ladder for the poor white Christians who were long ago left behind by the political establishment. Black and Brown people are already being purged from federal positions and experience unemployment in the private sector at a far higher rate than white people.

What stuns me most, apart from the depravity of a Republican Party eager to greenlight every aspect of his agenda, is just how unprepared the Democrats are for this moment. For all my criticisms of this party over the years, I never imagined that it would cave so completely in the face of a demagogue. Then again, it’s not as though we weren’t warned.

Over the past five years with UNFTR and the fifteen before that I spent in alternative journalism, I focused on one question: how did we get here? Unpacking the 70 year neoliberal experiment was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of the night sky. Hundreds, if not thousands of stars that make up societal constellations. Religion. Culture. Education. Environment. Economics. Politics.

The living astronomers who mapped these celestial bodies were my guides along the way. Cornel West. Chris Hedges. Jeff Sharlet. Esther Duflo. Bernard Harcourt. Jane Mayer. Tomas Piketty. Tad Delay. Yanis Varoufakis. Mehrsa Baradaran. Noam Chomsky. They did more than map the stars for me, they turned me onto their forebears. Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg.

This is more than name-dropping to prove political literacy. These are the astronomers who saw the full picture and understood the forces of the universe. Each one mapped a constellation that helps explain how we arrived at this point in the American experiment because there are universal truths to social, political and economic developments. In other words, history repeating. And one circumstance that echoes resoundingly is inequality. Whether under capitalism or the feudal systems that preceded it, there comes a time when serfs turn on lords, the oppressed turn upon their oppressors, the working class turn on the elite.

So what do these visionaries tell us about what comes next? This is where we must turn our attention.

In his new book Visions of Inequality, author Branko Milanovic examines the work of some of the most notable economists throughout capitalist history. From Quesnay and the Physiocrats through to Piketty today, Milanovic parses each contribution through the prism of their times. It’s a worthwhile investigation of the fundamental weakness of capitalism’s design—capitalism produces inequality.

Each person attempted to first establish how inequality would appear and then theorize how best to contain it. But what his work also illustrates is how we have lacked cohesive mechanisms to test these theories over time. He rightfully acknowledges Piketty’s seismic contribution to the field, likening the importance of his work to Keynes’ General Theory. Piketty’s gift to the world is an economic and mathematical framework to understand how inequality occurs in capitalist systems over time and how external events such as war and progressive taxation are among the only ways to curtail the exponential curve.

Milanovic concludes this work with an observation that I take as a warning.

What we are empirically experiencing in the United States is happening all throughout the developed world. Therefore if we are to view this necessary tributary from capitalist tendencies as a global phenomenon then we must also understand that the social strife that it engenders will not be an exclusively American phenomenon. In other words, having exported our perverted version of capitalism to the rest of the world, we have also exported the natural tendencies and conditions of inequality. The whole world is reaping what we sow.

An obsessive focus on inequality is tantamount to understanding what comes next. With unfettered accumulation of capital comes the ability to control every aspect of political life and governance. A system wholly bought and paid for by ruling elites will elicit more of the same and the cycle therefore continues until it reaches a point where coexistence becomes untenable. This is the inflection point we’re building toward.

All the theorists Milanovic covers—Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Pareto and Kuznets—attempted to explain inequality and how best to contain it. But only Marx went so far as to predict the eventual collapse of the capitalist system. Many of the other theorists were considered well off—if not fantastically wealthy as in the case of Ricardo—during their lifetimes. As such their frameworks were privileged in my view. Only Marx who lived in exile and poverty nearly his entire life weaves this experience through his writings. And it is Marx alone, among this select group of theorists, who believed that inequality would create revolutionary change that favored the working class.

Quesnay, Smith and Ricardo were less concerned with social outcomes than the later works of Marx, Pareto and Kuznets who had the benefit of living under capitalism’s authentic transition from theory to practice. Marx believed the system would collapse in on itself. Pareto believed that inequality was a social phenomenon that would exist absent capitalism. And Kuznets believed that growth under capitalism exists on a curve that generates inequality in the early stages then bends over time to produce greater equality. The ideas of the latter two are distilled in modern times to Pareto’s 80/20 Rule and the Kuznets Curve, each of which have been used to justify the distribution of wealth by the capitalist class.

While Marx was the only one who predicted that capitalism would eventually collapse under the weight and imbalance of inequality, it no longer appears as though his post-collapse prediction of a working class revolt resonates. A combination of nationalism and financialization has insulated global elites from the working class, sending us on a path closer to what Huxley and Orwell might have envisioned.

I offer this to suggest two things. The first is that social and political upheaval are sparked by economic precarity and fueled by inequality. Secondly, as a result of these conditions we are indeed headed toward upheaval but we are not headed toward a civil war. A civil war implies there are two sides that are evenly distributed and ideologically opposed. As much as the media likes to stoke the fire of a left/right divide in this country, the real struggle is between classes that are moving further apart from one another. As the talking heads like to say, we’ve moved from a K-shaped recovery to a K-shaped economy. And it’s getting worse by the day.

Much of what happens next depends upon how much damage the sitting president can do to the Constitution. Anyone who was paying attention knew this administration was going to attack federal agencies, universities and NGOs. It was also clear that the United States was set to embark on the most punitive anti-immigrant path since the internment camps of World War II.

It was clear because they wrote it all down in Project 2025. What makes this moment particularly terrifying is that many of the same authors committed the next phase of their ideological war on civil liberties and free speech to writing shortly before Trump was re-elected. Something called Project Esther. It’s even more bone chilling despite receiving far less attention. But it’s clear that the recent threats on social media by Donald Trump and on Charlie Kirk’s podcast by JD Vance and Stephen Miller are pulled directly from this playbook.

Consider this passage from Mondoweiss:

“Today, COINTELPRO’s framework has been rescripted in Project Esther, an initiative launched by the Heritage Foundation in October 2024 that frames pro-Palestinian advocacy as “terrorism” and seeks to dismantle the broader left by branding critics of Zionism as threats to national security. It calls for purging universities, defunding institutions, deporting foreign students, and weaponizing law enforcement to suppress dissent. Though marketed as an anti-antisemitism strategy, it ignores right-wing antisemitism and recycles antisemitic conspiracy theories in the service of political repression.

 

“Thus, while these tactics may appear new, putting COINTELPRO and Project Esther in conversation reveals a continuity of structure and intent, especially vis-à-vis the targeting of solidarity with movements abroad as a threat to national coherence. While COINTELPRO relied on federal secrecy and classified directives, today’s repression develops through public-private coordination, open-source surveillance, and layers of plausible deniability. The outcome is a more privatized, legally ambiguous, and digitally mediated mode of disruption that launders the violence of the state through university codes, NGO reports, and data-mining activism.”

For those who are unfamiliar with it, COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a covert FBI program from 1956 to 1971, aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI viewed as radical or subversive. Most notably it targeted Black liberation organizations and figures like Dr. Martin Luther King and wasn’t halted until leaked documents brought Congressional scrutiny from the famed Church Committee.

There will be no such intervention this time around.

Project Esther sheds light on the not-so-coded language being used by White House officials. It is intended to crush all dissent and Republicans in Congress, and some Democrats, are going along with it already by supporting anti-BDS legislation and sitting idly by as immigrants are detained and sent to concentration camps without due process. Only the progressives are calling for an end to the madness.

The path forward is clear and getting clearer but it’s not set in stone. Here’s what the path currently looks like:

• There will be deeper and more severe recriminations against dissenting voices.
• The regulatory infrastructure of the country will be utterly dismantled within a year.
• A speculative asset bubble will burst. Perhaps housing. Possibly cryptocurrency. Maybe a retail banking crisis turned contagion.
• There will be more acts of political violence from nihilist figures that will be blamed upon practitioners of free speech, no matter how disconnected from reality this response is.
• The economy will reach a tipping point with mass layoffs across multiple sectors leaving state budgets completely strapped and under water.
• Bankruptcies, both business and personal, will increase at an alarming rate.
• Homelessness will also increase dramatically along with violence toward the unhoused.
• Domestic law enforcement agencies will grapple with isolated protests and uprisings against the surveillance state and economic dislocation. One of these will be met with unusual force and violence from armed and untrained agents leading to a widespread crackdown on social media and free speech. Palantir’s stock will rise on the news.
• U.S. migration will show a net outflow as the assault on immigrants becomes increasingly aggressive.
• Inflation and job losses will enter a vicious cycle to first pressure the long end of the yield curve and then the short end, causing the deficit to balloon beyond projections.
• The Federal Reserve will prop up overnight settlement markets with startling frequency, which will ripple through the global economy as official and unofficial sources seek safe havens elsewhere.
• The government will have no other choice but to intervene once again in the financial markets that begin to collapse under the weight of margin calls and leverage.
• Those at the top end of the economic ladder will insulate themselves by funneling money into the mattress, speculative assets and short positions, taking as many gains on the way down as they have on the way up.
• Their grip over central banking activities and the political process will tighten.
• Tens of millions of Americans will abruptly lose access to healthcare.
• Several red states will appeal to the federal government for bailouts.
• There will be one or more extreme weather events that cause loss of life and decimate a regional economic infrastructure for an extended period.
• A war will break out somewhere on the planet that requires our attention because our policies or interventions will have been partially if not wholly responsible.
• The President will continue to win in the courts and be granted emergency powers over every aspect of our politics and economy.
• All of which leads to the possibility that midterm elections are suspended. And the real constitutional crisis will be upon us.

Remember, a lifetime to build and a moment to destroy. This is our moment.

But again, this isn’t set in stone. It’s calcifying as I speak these words. But it is not set in stone. Before I tell you why, let’s level set.

Before any collapse there is erosion. It’s subtle at first. Until it’s not.

When reactionary conservatives in positions of authority write things down, it’s wise to take heed. In response to the Civil Rights movement, the wealthy white conservatives founded think tanks and produced manifestos and white papers on how to attack the liberal institutions that they believed were infecting the body politic. The legal system. Higher education. Religious institutions that had become too permissive. The business community.

And so they seized on the economic belief system of the Mont Pelerin society steeped in the Austrian economic tradition; a system with deeply rooted animus toward socialists whom they blamed for both world wars and the subsequent Cold War.

The Powell Memo in 1971 was a call to action to rally the business community against the regulatory state and Great Society programs. Its author was rewarded with a position on the Supreme Court.

They uplifted the most strident and perverted Christian doctrinaires of the era and invited them into an alliance with the Republican Party. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family was founded in 1977. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was founded in 1979. Over the course of the next several decades, evangelical doctrines made their way into political discourse and became a litmus test for acceptance into the Republican Party.

Think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation thrived from the Reagan era forward, even bragging that the vast majority of their formal policies had been signed into law or implemented by executive order. John Williamson’s Washington Consensus identified the policy framework toward Latin America and the Caribbean, a paternalistic and violent neoliberal approach that saw these major economies coming under the thumb of U.S. foreign investment. Any attempts to rebuff our dollar diplomacy was met with force in the form of insurrection and assassination.

This destabilization would rear its head over the decades in the form of a mature and violent drug trade fostered by covert CIA operations and U.S. government slush fund money. One by one U.S. backed dictatorships would seize the economies of Central America to ensure the free flow of drugs and weapons manufactured by U.S. corporations forcing desperate populations to continuously migrate to the country responsible for the instability of their homelands. All the while they were welcomed across the border because America was at the top of the Kuznets curve in rapid and rabid expansion mode and desperate to keep domestic wages low.

George H.W. Bush crafted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), striking a blow further up the economic ladder and stripping the unions of their power by shipping manufacturing jobs to Mexico. It was late in his term so he wouldn’t be the one to put signature to paper.

When Republicans were sidelined by the surprise election of Bill Clinton, they hunkered down to draft the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a foreign policy manifesto for the 2000s centered around pillaging fossil resources from the Middle East. The only hurdle they foresaw was the absence of a catalyzing event that would galvanize the war-weary American public to support foreign incursions. They didn’t have to wait long. After 9/11 the PNAC plan was executed to the letter and our full scale assault on Middle Eastern nations that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11 were pushed forward.

In order to quell any anti-war sentiment, the mass media served as cheerleaders to the next generation of the Bush dynasty as we laid waste to Iraq and Afghanistan and spent trillions of dollars to realize the vision of PNAC. Dissenting voices were quieted as laws were passed to grant the executive extraordinary powers over all branches of government and to build the surveillance state. Warrantless wiretaps and extraordinary rendition became hallmarks of the Bush administration until fading into buzz words and eventually the norm.

Barbara Lee was the lone voice in the Congressional wilderness warning us of what was to come. But no one listened.

Regulations in the banking industry, in place since the Great Depression, were stripped away. It took the industry a few short years to create such convoluted and highly leveraged financial packages that bundled every home mortgage in America. And in under a decade, the entire ponzi scheme collapsed and brought the global economy to its knees and dragged us into the Great Recession. Tens of millions of Americans have yet to recover from it and likely never will. No one responsible for the mess was held accountable.

The authority granted to the executive didn’t happen overnight, but it was telegraphed each step of the way. Which is why we should pay close attention to Project Esther. Again, identifying what comes next is the easy part. Because, once again, they wrote it all down.

But hang on. This all seems a little one-sided, no?

In fact, it is. There’s a D to the R in this story; a flip side to this coin and they both come up heads. (Or tails depending on your net worth.)

There is complicity and there is collusion.

Complicity is silence. Tacit consent. For example, that’s what Democrats are doing now because Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries cannot meet the moment.

Collusion is active engagement, full participation.

So let me make a few things clear about our timeline.

Jimmy Carter was a good man who ran an extremely capable administration. But he and his economic advisers didn’t understand that Nixon unleashed a monetary genie in 1971, the year of the Powell Memo. Left unattended, the genie grew more powerful and destructive leaving Carter powerless to contain it. He was also the father of modern deregulation, which loosened the cap for the Reagan administration. Carter’s politics were value based and smart. His economic policy was the beginning of neoliberalism.

Our health secretary’s uncle, Ted Kennedy, was part of the liberal establishment that never accepted Carter as one of their own. So Kennedy primaried the sitting president, weakening him during the Iran crisis and kneecapping his presidency and authority, taking away valuable time and resources as Ronald Reagan gained momentum and eventually took over the country.

The Democrats were complicit in the 1980s as they sat idly by watching the Reagan team try to shrink the size of government to fit in a bathtub, or so they liked to say. In the ‘90s under Democrat Bill Clinton, the administration ushered in a wave of dehumanizing bills that led to the mass incarceration of Black Americans, criminalized immigration, threw millions of welfare rolls and increased inequality. They promoted privatization of schools and prisons and cut enough spending to balance the budget, which put us into a recession and delivered us another Bush administration.

It was also the Clinton administration that signed NAFTA into law after George Bush senior’s administration crafted it and they didn’t change a thing. On the way out Clinton also passed the measures that repealed Glass–Steagall from the 1930s that prohibited investment banks from accessing consumer depository funds and eliminated regulations that led to the mortgage backed security financial crisis just eight short years later.

Democrats actively participated in promoting the war effort after 9/11. They signed off on the mass surveillance state bills and looked the other way even after rendition tactics came to light. When Obama took over after the financial crisis, the administration gambled away its political capital on a health insurance scheme designed by the Heritage Foundation and implemented in lockstep with lobbyists from the private insurance industry, foreclosing on the opportunity to provide universal healthcare. Not a single banker was punished for their speculative activities and so much money was printed and given to corporations that they’re still sitting on it today.

The Obama administration bombed more than seven countries that we weren’t at war with, and still holds the record for the most forced deportations, despite Trump’s best efforts to beat it. Under Obama the loss of civil liberties eroded even further with terrifying amendments each year to the National Defense Authorization Act that consolidated the power to designate terrorist organizations under the executive. Obama presided over military expansion, exploding deficits and an increase in the surveillance state apparatus of the country that would make the Bush dynasty proud.

Joe Biden didn’t just sit idly by as Israel launched a genocidal campaign against innocent civilians in Gaza, he funded the effort. He gave in to Joe Manchin and the Republicans on crucial Green New Deal measures and governed by executive orders that were easily repealable by a new administration. And he gave up on the all important direct child tax credit payment that lifted millions of children out of poverty during COVID and returned to business as usual, preferring to work with both sides of the aisle while homeless populations grew, children were massacred in Gaza, and inequality widened.

So you tell me. Complicity or collusion?

This is why Democratic Party polling numbers are below that of the Democratic Socialists of America. This is why Donald Trump, arguably the worst president in history the first time around, won a second term. Because the Democratic establishment is the other side of the same fucking coin.

Yes, the path to utter darkness and authoritarianism is calcifying with each passing day.

So what is to be done?

If Trump is truly sick, as many have speculated, and doesn’t make it the year then their plan will all come unraveled. Fascism, as Christopher Hitchens noted, is the cult of a leader. The GOP is depraved, of this there can be no doubt. And there are elements within the GOP Congress that are fueling this dystopian agenda. But there are more, I believe, who exist in a state of fear and stasis; incapable of fighting the tide and secure enough in their own financial freedom that they will be in the good graces of their dear leader and live comfortably. They know deep down we’re on a dangerous path and wouldn’t be as resolute as they are if not for the singular ability of this man to direct this party.

Never has one man in America so completely captured an entire party through absolute fear of recrimination. If he goes, the whole thing falls apart under the feckless Vance. But, like I said, that’s in god’s hands.

The only other way to take back the country is by a unified show of public and political force. Mass protest and a general strike among workers, not against the Republican Party or Donald Trump: Against the leadership of the Democratic Party.

I have argued before that trying to build a third party in this country on a federal level is tilting at windmills, because the two major parties control the political apparatus completely. They control it in a way that we have never seen, ever since Ross Perot stunned the establishment by winning 19% of the popular vote. This warning shot set in motion a series of events that consolidated electoral power within the two party system. Third parties are effective in regional and municipal elections but cannot be successful on a national scale. It’s not the fault of organizers and those willing to commit to these efforts, there simply is no way around the system that they have constructed.

Therefore our only option is to seize control of the party by demanding that the current leadership step down and make way for progressive voices to take over the party and put forward a vision for a new America that radically changes course from the neoliberal ideology that brought us here and the rapidly unfolding corporate coup d’etat taking place in partnership with a would-be fascist who is gathering momentum and racking up victories left and right.

This economy is going to fail. Quickly. It’s already coming apart at the seams and in this collapse there is opportunity on both sides of the political spectrum. The opportunity on the right is to weaponize this economic precarity further by blaming others. But they’re running out of people to blame. Immigrants have been shut out already. Black and Brown Americans hold no political power. Unions have been decimated. Thus the animus toward the so-called Radical Left.

It’s time for the real radical left to wake the beast within the rural communities and working class that used to hold power in this country with their votes and their labor. To reconnect with those who actually built this nation. If Bernie Sanders can travel deep into Trump country and bring people out by the thousands, then imagine what could happen if more people in power and on the streets rallied behind the real radical left vision of Medicare for All, a federal work guarantee, deconstruction of the military industrial complex by repositioning the might of our forces to build infrastructure.

Create the conditions for a new type of leader to emerge and be embraced by the masses before the Democrats trot out some corporate McKinsey Democrat like Pete Buttigieg or Gavin Newsom. Acknowledge the suffering of all races, genders, religions and creeds with a unifying working class message.

I saw firsthand in the early days of Occupy what terrified the establishment on the left and the right. The idea of the 99% recognizing itself. Realizing the true balance of power. It’s time to take over the Democratic Party. To lead with love and an ambitious radical left agenda that centers the masses.