They Want Us to be Peasants

The key to authoritarianism is a world where we are left in the dark

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Late Tuesday night the Federal Aviation Administration abruptly closed airspace over El Paso, Texas for the extended period of ten days. It was unprecedented. Odd. A little over seven hours later, the airspace was reopened with no explanation.

Over those seven hours, social media was flooded with speculation. Some seemed certain the United States would attack Mexico or cartels within hours. Others turned toward aliens. Over on the UFO/UAP site Enigma, a user posted footage of what he claimed was a “mothership” hovering over El Paso. The picture was blurry, but it was enough to convince many that the closure had extraterrestrial origins.

Even the eventual official story offered left many confused. It was claimed the government had neutralized a “cartel drone” but within hours another explanation emerged: border officials had caused the closure when they used an anti-drone laser…on a party balloon. Since, the story has evolved to reveal a completely unnecessary standoff between the regime and the FAA.

Regime buffoonery aside, this entire affair was a perfect encapsulation of our modern political moment. Something rather large and unprecedented happened without sufficient explanation. We were left in the dark to guess why, which spurred conjecture that reflected everything from fascist imperialism to the supernatural. When an explanation was offered, no one believed the official story. And, for good reason.

These are the ideal conditions for both authoritarian growth and control by a powerful, elite minority.

We are not supposed to know what is going on.

We are not supposed to trust anything.

We are supposed to live in a controlled existence in which we vacillate between demoralized obedience and everpresent insecurity.

For all of its faults, liberal democracy as a product of the Enlightenment was meant to create a society predicated on rational decision-making in a world that was supposed to become more understandable over time. Enlightenment figures fought a revolutionary battle against religion and, by extension, superstition and autocratic control. This battle was based on the concept that as people learned about objective reality they would make better decisions and in turn create a better world.

Of course, the path of this aspirational liberal democracy was derailed from the star as Enlighenent figures suffered fatal and damning classism, sexism, racism, and an inescapable need to control. You cannot understand modern American fascism without drawing a direct line from the failures and hypocrisy of the Enlightenment, particularly our Founding Fathers, and recognizing that, because of these failures and those hypocrisies, that the liberal democratic project has failed and barring some democratic intervention was always fated to fail.

It is the war between liberal democracy under elite control and actual democracy that has defined our eras and the path of this nation. The insecurity of our leaders in government and business, not to mention their prejudices and cruelties, damned us. With every bleeding, glorious democratic advancement, they reacted as conservative reactionaries grasping for power with endless desperation.

The beginning of the so-called “American Century,” which is groaning and gurgling a wretched death rattle at roughly eighty years of age, was marked by another of these counter-revolutions. The New Deal, or democratic socialism, if you will, had just saved the country and possibly the world, but the same interests and people who had preferred Fascists and Nazis over necessary reform would not brook continued progress. Just as we gained global power, they embraced undemocratic and unaccountable structures in bodies like the Central Intelligence Agency, a shadow power that merged state power with elite capitalists and set out to shape the world accordingly.

That “American Century,” from the beginning, was defined by skullduggery of the worst kind. Coups. Assassinations. Rigged elections. “Friendly” dictators who enjoyed our support to rape and murder and exploit as long as they kept our interests sacrosanct. Something would happen around the world, a headline would appear, and, if you knew the score, you’d be left to wonder: “Was that us?”

This broke forward into American understanding in the 1970’s when revolutionary and counterrevolutionary energies clashed like weather fronts. We learned that these forces had been hard at work domestically. We’d been spied on, experiment on, our rights shredded, our neighbors and leaders murdered and compromised.

That realization felt novel, but it was merely America’s authoritarian policies come home, much as we are now experience the violence and horrors of the War on Terror and Gaza and the abuses of Neoliberal Globalism’s authoritarian components being visited upon us. That feeling we have of constant threats and inescapable uncertainty is not novel. At least not elsewhere. It is the American awareness that is, in many ways, new.

Control of populations relies on this. The infamous “flood the zone with shit” strategy communicated by Steve Bannon is merely an expression of an age-old technique (I trace the historical threat of this in my book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis). If we are left in the dark, unable to tell real from fake, we cannot regulate or ground. We are left dysregulated. Irrational. And, as far as the wealth class is concerned, easy prey.

Behind so much of the destruction of representative governments and associated social programs, of which DOGE was merely the culmination of over a half century of concentrated effort, is a desire to unravel the Enlightenment itself. If we don’t have accurate weather information, we won’t understand climate change or assign blame where it belongs. If life becomes more precarious, we’re less likely to question authority and more likely to blame strangers who don’t look like us. If education is dismantled, we won’t be able to compare notes and will be more likely to accept conspiracy theories that have been designed by the very groups destroying progress in the first place.

The purpose is to recreate the concept of peasantry in a modern state. When humanity fought its way out of theocratic control, it was one of the greatest achievements in history. We were largely illiterate, had to fight tirelessly to establish even the most basic rights. Almost all power, political and economic and culture, was monopolized by the elite. By large, we didn’t understand why almost anything happened. In the event of a pandemic or a natural disaster, we turned to superstition or prejudice. Regarding the elite, we were left to gossip as we wondered what happened in the halls of power from which we were banned.

And now, here we are. Literacy is flagging. Storms are met with rumors of weather weapons. We’re transfixed by rumor regarding bullshit like who Elon Musk is impregnating. The COVID pandemic was cast as a grand conspiracy, a variant of antisemitic conspiracy theories that Jews had caused plague by poisoning wells.

Nearly every news story now involves wild and necessary speculation. Why is the fascist regime doing this? Is it a grift? Is it a threat? Is ICE building a system of concentration camps? Are we going to war with Iran, the EU, Mexico? Will there ever be another election? Meanwhile, we are being taught to accept this kind of life. We’re being inundated with the most grotesque stories of elite abuse and the corruption is obvious. And, yet, we continue to work jobs that don’t pay us enough, jobs that will likely be eliminated, and soldier on as if this will somehow stop of its own volition.

Like the peasants of old, we are supposed to own nothing. The movement toward digital and streaming, not to mention the unavailability of affordable housing to own, has moved us into a pretty predictable course. Already our ability to move freely is being restricted and, before too long, immigrants and citizens alike will be required to present papers, and those papers are already controlled by the state and will only become more so, much like nobles restricting peasant movement. Control by religious authorities in league with state power will be replicated by movements like Christian Nationalism, but with a special modern twist: AI programs that do the thinking for us and hear our confession through our “intimate” relationship with them.

We would be reduced to short, brutish lives in which every day is marked by toil and the occasional tragedy that goes without explanation. Wars that begin and end without warning, that sweep us and our children into their violence and then leave us rocked and tired and ready for whatever comes next. Our neighborhoods attacked out of nowhere by roving bands of secret police who steal us, our children, and our neighbors without warning. Some of us will be left to work, some of us will disappear.

This is the essence tech/fascist feudalism and it has always been the goal. We’ve seen enough to know it’s true. It’s not even hidden anymore. The choice is obvious. We either stop them and move beyond the failures of hypocritical liberal democracy or we end up in an even deeper hole than we were in centuries ago.

And that’s unacceptable.

For us, for our children, for our neighbors, and for our friends who live around the world in countries we’ve never visited and never will.

Unacceptable.