Odds & Ends: Major Article/Series Coming, The Midnight Kingdom Lecture Series Finale, and a Call For Questions
Happy Sunday, everyone.
I’m writing with a few updates as we approach the New Year. Like a lot of other writers and analysts, I’m spending these final days of 2023 considering what 2024 might hold for us. Already I feel confident in predicting it will be one of the most unpredictable and dangerous years we’ve ever seen. As I’ve documented, the concerning shape of the GOP primary race, the open embrace of dictatorial ambitions by Donald Trump and his supporters, and the proliferation of authoritarians and grifters around the world absolutely ensure that much. There’s a whole host of other things coming that we couldn’t even predict if we had to. And so, I’m trying to find the things that I can prepare for.
This is an update on the work that I’m doing in order to prepare and a little bit of a guide to where Dispatches From A Collapsing State is heading in the next few weeks.
In getting ready for 2024 I am both collaborating with real-world organizers in order to fight the spread of radicalization through so-called “Red States” and prepare communities for what might be coming down the pike. To that end, and to spur awareness online and in discourse, I’m preparing a major series to define 1. Exactly what is going on. 2. What the stakes are heading into the presidential election. 3. Where our discourse and societal approach is going so very, very wrong. 4. A proposal for an entirely different approach in that sphere and a feasible means for a political party like the Democrats, or possibly an alternative body, to turn this ship around. And 5. What we, as individuals, can do to contribute to the fight while also maintaining our own sanity and taking care of our health.
The first article titled “The Inhuman Future: The Authoritarian Agenda and What It Wants” will publish this week and detail, with specificity, what it is that we are facing and what will likely happen if it isn’t defeated. I mean this to be a table-setter of sorts, something you can have as a definitive guide to what it means when we discuss “authoritarianism,” “Right Wing donors and infrastructures,” and what actually lies behind Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which are largely just public relations fronts for this movement and underlying momentum.
From there I will dive into the immediate situation regarding where the GOP/Trump are taking us in 2024 and attempt to explain how the idea that this is the “final battle” is actually just an oversimplification of this hard fact: every election from now until the end of this crisis is “the most important election ever.” I will discuss how I am viewing the political choices of the moment while also rejecting the type of un-nuanced discourse that plagues us and holds us back. And, eventually, I will lay out what I see as one of the only means of turning this ship around and creating a better, more human future.
As always, I appreciate your support. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so. It helps keep Dispatches growing and ensures we can keep fighting this fight together.
Relatedly, I am working on finishing my Midnight Kingdom Lecture Series over on YouTube. So far we have covered the merging of Christianity with dominant political power in Rome and how that created our modern structures, the capitalist apocalypse of World War I and how it set the stage for present circumstances, how capitalism led to the Fascism and Nazism before America established dominance, and then how capitalism used the United States to establish global neoliberalism and undermine democracy around the world.
The finale will look at modern events and see how the millenia-long battle between democracy and entrenched power has reached yet another climax. This will include explorations of modern conspiracy theories, the growing authoritarian movement around the world, and many of the themes and ideas we’ll be exploring in the series set to take place here on Dispatches From A Collapsing State.
If you haven’t already, please check out my book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, which inspired this series. I’m very proud of this book and the people I hear from say it changed their perception of history, modern events, and the world itself. If you’re looking for a late Christmas present and want to change someone’s mind, maybe give it a look.
Finally, I’m way overdue for a mailbag edition of Dispatches. So please, if you have burning questions, whether it’s about present politics, history, something going on, or even something about me or my work, feel free to reply to this article or email me at jysexton@gmail.com. I’ll be working on answering next week so if you could get your questions in by Tuesday December 19th I would be so appreciative.
It would be a breath of fresh informative air if the 24/7 mainstream corporate media had more REAL journalists like yourself and Sarah Kendzior on their daily broadcasts rather than the usual (waiting for a spinoff of their own) pundits. Nothing but former-politicians and lawyers rattling on with the same derivations of the same spin of disbelief.
I'm just a blue collar Johnny that is resigned and removed from the exhaustive outrage machine of cliched responses that come out of their mouths. It's like watching Sportscenter for corporate controlled politicians with news hosts and their semi-regular guests doing puff pieces and passive/aggressive hatchet jobs alike. Like Max Mercy the weasly sportswriter from Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural said, "I'm here to protect this GAME. And, I make it a bit more interesting."
To me, most of these televised careerist clowns are in it for the prestige and perks instead of the social responsibility. Every Trump move from "good people on both sides", the insurrection, and the "only on day one" dictator wink. But that's to be expected when parent companies control their properties output. They are as complicit in leaving the back door unlocked with the porch light on for all the autocrats, plutocrats and oligarchs to set up shop and reap the rewards of the tax haven and trickle the wealth upward that is and has been the USA. Yet still, the financially challenged lower rungs of the American middle class continue to suffer and the impoverished are always ignored.
BUSINESS....as usual....
Now and then over the past year or so I have thought about the contributions that US businesses, our federal government, and US financiers have made to create the modern China with which so many are now so troubled. In 1978-79, when Deng changed the orientation of the Party and government, China was desperately impoverished - lots of people starved to death every winter, there was no modern healthcare, although there was traditional medicine, there were not the modern tools and research labs that were in the First World countries, so Deng & others opened the country to foreigners, foreign money, foreign inventiveness and foreign investments. Western businesses, governments and financiers competed to "get in on the ground floor." Chinese people worked, learned, invented, copied and created their rather modern country. It now is assertive, sometimes aggressive, and seldom sees the world as the movers and shakers in the US do. But the Chinese did not create their buildings, wealth, research labs and financial institutions - and enormous army - out of mud; they used what they attracted from outside China, often developing and making it their own. But I never see any writing about our contribution to the creation of present day China, the contributions, that in my view, resulted from desires to make money. I am old and retired but once worked in a large law firm that had gotten in on the ground floor with an office in Shanghai, populated with American and Chinese people. The firm was very proud of that office, and partners who went there with their families for 2+ year terms were very enthused, which I understand. But even after ten years that office was still losing money - was, indeed, supported by the earnings of us in the US offices. Thus, even the law firm where I worked for a while was contributing to the growth of the now-fearsome Chinese juggernaut. And we (Americans & Murricans alike did it for money). Now we expend enormous resources to keep that money machine from eating us.
Rick Geissal