The Threshold: The 2024 Election and Everything After

The Stakes Part 2: What Is On The Line In This Election, What Success And Failure Would Look Like, And Wrapping Our Minds Around The Future

This is the second installment of a series that I am calling The Stakes. (You can find Part One here) It is meant to be a project that gets readers and the people they know up to speed as to what is going on as we head into the 2024 Presidential Election, exactly what is on the line, and the beginning of a discussion of what it is we can do in this election cycle and moving forward. For those looking for additional materials regarding these topics, please check out my book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis and the associated five-part Midnight Kingdom Lecture Series over on YouTube.

Please subscribe to Dispatches From A Collapsing State to gain access to this series and to keep this project rolling along. If you have questions about these articles, please reply to the post. When I’m finished I’ll try and put together a response to clarify them as an addendum.

Also, a couple of notes: I’ll be on the road covering the 2024 Election throughout the year, starting starting January 13th, when I’ll be reporting live from Iowa for the caucuses. I’ll be filing exclusive dispatches here on Substack, so subscribe to make sure you get those and get an inside look at what is happening on the ground before the first major contest. Also, I just published my conversation with Sarah Kendzior about 2024 and what we need to prepare for on The Muckrake Podcast. This is must listen stuff. Make sure, also, to subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter, if you haven’t already.

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Introduction: The Threshold

I am as tired of you as hearing about “the most important election of our lifetime.” It’s a trite phrase that has been used over and over again by horse-race and ratings-obsessed media hacks and political strategists addicted to hoovering up your hard-earned money in the form of coerced campaign donations that do little but fund their lifestyles. The concept has been beat-up, juiced, absolutely stripped of any and all meaning.

And part of the reason why is that politics has been turned into a consumer industry. As neoliberalism corrupted life in totality, it intentionally undermined representative government and bypassed democracy in order to assure the stability of capitalist agendas. As a result, we were left with a government that only existed as a veneer over institutionalized corruption and a dog and pony show to keep us entertained. Around it sprung up an entire ecosystem and assortment of news shows, tabloid operations, personalities, and clowns. The business of the people was shelved and the politicians grew more and more cartoonish. Soon, we had a full-blown soap opera, C-grade wannabe-prestige drama on our hands, replete with scandals and “villain and hero of the day” turns.

Politically, we were lulled into a false sense of comfort and continually assured that experts and authorities had everything under control and all we needed to do was go about our lives.

All you really need to see to understand exactly what happened is this clip from October 2001 when President George W. Bush, just a little over a month beyond the terrorist attacks of September 11th, told Americans that al-Qaeda’s plan was to attack freedom and keep Americans from shopping. “The American people have got to go about their business,” he said. “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t conduct business. Where people don’t shop. That was their intention.”

Politics was the business of experts and nondemocratic bodies staffed with people we could never possibly know doing things we could never possibly understand. Every four years we could head out to the voting booths - if we felt like it, anyway - and cast a ballot for whatever candidate the parties slopped out to us. If we felt so inclined, or if we wanted to feel a semblance of being “involved,” we could pay attention to “the news,” which was actually just thinly-veiled court gossip that occasionally turned into West Wing cosplay and amateur-hour Law & Order mimicry when there was a bit of “breaking news.”

These elections have been treated like season finales that everything flows towards. And every one of them is dressed up as an apocalyptic showdown between Good and Evil, between Hope and Despair.

Well. I’ve got bad news.

Because democratic energies were lulled into that sleep and intentionally repressed, every election for the rest of our lives is going to be the most important election. And that’s because authoritarianism feeds off of corruption and apathy and hopelessness and it is a present and clear danger that we’re going to be battling for years to come.

I don’t like it anymore than you do. But them’s the breaks.

What Does It Mean That An Election Is “The Most Important Election?”

It means that we’re racing down a raging rapids in a boat that’s filled with holes and threatening to capsize and drown our asses and every single juncture we approach is another opportunity to buy ourselves some more time or else run headfirst into the rocks and oblivion.

That sounds dramatic only because it is.

This whole thing sucks and I wish like hell that Americans could have taken any number of different turns along the way. I wish post-World War II we would have used our prosperity for good. I wish the New Deal could have been expanded instead of the military-industrial complex actively dismantling public investment in the good of the people. I wish we could have built on the momentum of the social revolutions of the 1960’s and 70’s instead of falling to the siren song of consumer individualism. I wish neoliberalism could have been strangled in its crib. I wish, I wish, I wish.

But that’s not what happened. And now we’re here.

The Trump Years needed to be a wake-up call. But the same system that brought us Trump profits from that chaos and all the worsening situations. It wasn’t going to learn any lessons or simply improve itself. And a whole, whole lot of people got caught up in QAnon-adjacent scams that told them everything was under control. Everything was all right. Just keep shopping. Just keep posting.

So now, for the foreseeable future, after all this disastrous momentum, we are facing a monumental task. In our lives, we must reignite our imaginations for a better future while healing the damage done to us by all of this. We must rebuild communities and coalitions while the entire heft of the system attempts to stop us. We have to organize and pressure our politics in order to reshape it into something even resembling representative government. And, yes, every election is going to be another juncture.

Wait. You Haven’t Even Mentioned Biden V. Trump II Yet.

Not yet, anyway.

Let’s get something very clear. Presidential candidates are largely avatars of things that remain almost impenetrable to the casual voter.

What?

Okay. Sorry. I dove into that real deep real fast.

What I mean is that when we are voting we are given a list of candidates or propositions. We choose one and then move forward. While we are being told that we’re choosing an individual or a direction, what is actually happening is that we are expressing our preference in terms of a political project or, as is the case more and more recently, we are choosing a mood and a speed.

Here’s what I mean: Joe Biden and Donald Trump are figureheads in front of a machine that has been working on a trajectory for decades now. There’s a reason why every president since Bush’s shrug at the 2008 Financial Meltdown has more or less admitted in public they were largely powerless to do anything. Because the presidency, as far as it concerns an individual or person, has been changed and contorted. This was a necessary component of the neoliberal movement and the shift to global capitalism. Sure, a president can make choices, but they’re choices laid out to them by a whole consortium of bodies and prevailing systemic opinions. They’re limited. Very, very limited.

It also doesn’t help that our choices are limited the way they are. Right now, in terms of philosophy, we have a contest between Joe Biden, one of the most status quo politicians of the last century, and Donald Trump, a demagogue who embodies America’s bristling fascist tendencies. That’s not great.

Are You Saying We Shouldn’t Vote For Joe Biden?

Nope. And if you read Dispatches From A Collapsing State you know that that kind of reductive and non-nuanced shit isn’t welcome here. Save it for social media, where people are just yelling at each other without anything even approaching constructive thought.

What I’m saying is that the 2024 Election is important because we are choosing the next juncture. As I detailed in a previous article, what Trump represents isn’t just MAGA, but rather a meticulously developed plan to take advantage of the democratic rot and mete out a death blow on behalf of a wealth class that has systematically eradicated representative government. It’s more than just Trump as an individual. And, if Nikki Haley, or some other Republican, were to become president, that plan would still be rolled out. The question would be how it was done and how successful it would ultimately be.

As I have said, Biden is not the man of the moment. There have been some accomplishments from his presidency, it hasn’t been the rollicking dumpster fire that was Trump’s Administration, and I’m glad, at the very least, that that third-rate conman isn’t in the White House, but he clearly doesn’t fully comprehend what we are facing and what is necessary should we avoid disaster. We need a robust leader with a vision of the future that answers our most pressing problems. We’re not getting that.

Voting for Biden, or a Democrat, isn’t a vote for change or a solution to the problem. It’s more or less a vote to tap the brakes a little bit instead of slamming on the accelerator and going over the cliff. But it’s important that we realize our democratic duty goes way, way beyond pulling that lever or stuffing that ballot. That’s what we’ve been taught we’re supposed to do and that that is where our democratic requirements end. And that’s part of the larger problem.

What Are We Actually Voting On?

Whether we should rush headlong into the abyss or if we should take a breath and consider whether that’s that the best action or if we might choose something different.

That’s Not The Most Inspiring Thing.

It is not.

Democracy isn’t just bells and whistles. It’s not slogans like “Hope” and “Change.” Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 was an expertly strategized marketing campaign that told us if we voted we could see a totally different world. That’s not unlike what cola companies do to sell beverages. I think Obama and the people around him liked to believe it would be so, only to get into power and realize quickly the inertia of this corrupted government was more substantial than they even believed.

It would do us very, very well to start viewing elections as the most basic and expected part of our democratic responsibility. It should be a somber, serious matter, especially as things continue to worsen. All these distractions and glorifications, the bright sets and graphics, the breathless horse-race analysis, needs to fall away and die. And we need to realize our responsibility goes a lot further than that.

What’s This “Abyss” Look Like?

Go read The Stakes Part 1.

If Trump or another Republican wins the election we’re more or less plunging into an environment where Project 2025, a meticulous and malevolently designed antidemocratic death blow, comes into play. At that point, the government itself could become the engine of a strong Right Wing push seeking to create an incredible surveillance state and oppressive machine. It doesn’t mean it would happen, but good god almighty the chances would be greatly increased.

Our current culture of increasing radicalization is pushing the country and its citizens to the Right. Extreme conspiracy theories, white supremacist ideologies, and oppressive beliefs are now commonplace and part of the GOP’s expected orthodoxy. The climate of historic inequality uses this to further cement control (Hey! The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and The Coming Crisis is still for sale!) and our oligarchs are practically already in control of our government and economy. This would just further unleash that and make it worse and worse.

You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but the best way to defeat a totalitarian regime is to stop it before it takes control. Once in control, it can reign for generations and it leaves a terrible imprint on everyone it touches.

And, it’s important to remember, it’s not just the GOP and the Christian Nationalists and New Right that want this, or that they’re the only ones who will accept it. History shows us white moderates and even large swathes of white liberals generally come around and live happily within these nightmares. So, pushback might be more performative than substantial. But after these last few years, I think you probably already recognize that.

Okay. So, Let’s Say Biden Wins. Or A Democrat. What Then?

I wish like hell I could tell you that’d be it. After all, that’s what Biden promised in 2020. If we just got him into the White House he’d undo the damage of Trump and get things back to “normal.” That was a line of bullshit. I think he and a lot of other people around him and in our media and culture might have believed it. But again, Trump was a symptom not the disease. And just continuing “business as usual” wasn’t just an option, it wasn’t even real.

If we manage to get through 2024 without electing a Republican it’s only the beginning of something else. A modern Democrat (unless something really, really unexpected takes place in the next few months) will more or less govern as Biden has, with maybe a little more energy if it’s somebody else. Hell, we might even see a vigorous agenda put forth. I could see someone like a Gavin Newsom rolling out a technocratic Christmas list. But there is no actual reason for the Democratic Party to spontaneously change itself and its priorities. I mean, it would mean incredible electoral victories, but the party itself is guided by a relationship to the professional managerial class, corporations, and an assortment of neoliberal interests. It’s not going to just change the way we would need it to.

And, what’s more, we need to shed this belief that a party or its politicians or really anybody should do this work for us. Sure. It would be great to just “get back to shopping,” as W. Bush told us to do. I would love not to have to do this fight anymore. I didn’t want it in the first place. But those aren’t the circumstances we now have. We are in the shit. And unless we want to surrender to a future that is less human and less decent and very possibly unlivable, we have a lot of work to do.

What Does That Work Entail And What Would It Accomplish?

Well, that’s an article for later in the series.

I Don’t Like This Election Or Anything Associated With It.

You and me both.

This sucks. But it’s what’s happening.

A few months back, someone close to me was diagnosed with cancer. It was right there on the screen, in all the tests. There was no denying it was there and it needed treated. He could’ve ignored it and let it consume him. His dad died from the same cancer after deciding not to treat it. He could’ve gone down that road. It would have been tragic and awful and I’m grateful every damn day he didn’t.

But deciding to treat it was also tough. There were hard, heart-wrenching appointments. So many tests. And then, he underwent a surgery that was painful and life-changing. Now, months later, he’s still in some pain and learning how to live a different day-to-day existence. But I think he’s happy he did it. Living a longer, fuller life was worth going through the process.

Nothing about this is fun. Before we were even born, before our parents or grandparents were born, this was set into motion. America, from its beginning, was founded with inherent faults that would cause untold damage and suffering. We missed a whole hell of a lot of opportunities to set things right (Hey! American Rule: How A Country Conquered The World But Failed Its People is still for sale!) There are SO MANY moments even in recent history where we could have gotten on the right track and avoided this.

But we didn’t. And that sucks.

Now, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives fighting this thing. But there’s no other choice. We’re in it. And democracy isn’t a spectator sport or an entertainment on television or the internet. Unless we want to dive into that abyss, and it would mean incredible suffering and death and destruction and so much more, it’s on us now to recognize it’s time to get this treated.

It’s time to get serious.