Democracy v. Griftatorship

Five years after January 6, it is clear what the real battle of our times is -- and how we must win it.

Five years later, it is now clear that January 6, 2021 was in fact the very darkest episode in American history.

It is the darkest not because it was the most devastating — but because it is the most devastating attack on America to which America failed to respond.

Or rather, America did respond: with silence, with complacency, with complicity, with cowardice, with timidity, with indecisive waffling, with a shameful lack of urgency, with half measures that took twice the time at hand.

Pearl Harbor and September 11 were more devastating — but America responded to those attacks by fighting the attackers. After January 6, we let the attackers get away with everything — and we let them take control.

The aftermath of January 6 should have been one of America’s finest hours, a moment when We the People stood up and recommitted ourselves to upholding the Constitution, to stamping out tyranny and fraud and violence, to prosecuting even the most powerful of criminals, to affirming the principle that no one is above the law.

Instead, we legalized lying.

We legalized fraud. We legalized disinformation. We legalized demagoguery. We legalized abuse of power. We legalized predation. We legalized political terrorism. We legalized oligarchy. We legalized dictatorship. We legalized colonialism. We legalized imperialism.

We had the chance to set an ironclad precedent that such depredations were beyond the pale and would be met with the full force of the United States of America and all its laws and institutions.

Instead, we set the opposite precedent, that such atrocities are hereby normalized and not to be punished but celebrated, that the laws and institutions of the United States now exist in name only, a quaint period costume that can now be donned by our current despot and any others to come.

January 6 was, at first, a day of infamy, subject to almost universal opprobrium. Now, to the ruling regime — led by the very man who tried to overturn the government that day — it is considered a day of heroic sacrifice. The violent mob of terrorists he sent to the Capitol desecrated the People’s house, and a little more than four years later, in that same building, he used a Bible embossed with his own name¹ and took the presidential oath before an exclusive group of billionaire oligarchs and servile sycophants.

Yet our era of infamy is about far more than just Donald Trump and his Big Lie. Or even about all his manifold lies and abuses, his fake persona as a silver-spoon baby posing as a man of the people while he fleeces even his most devoted superfans and fattens himself rather than fighting the towering cost of living, his fake persona as an American messiah when he does the bidding of America’s biggest rivals and enemies, his fake persona as a peacemaking statesman while he uses American military might to push a neocolonial, neoimperialist agenda, his fake persona as a protective father figure when he’s actually a serial sexual predator and was close friends with the most notoriously disgusting predator of our day.

The infamy also extends to his followers and family members and fellow travelers, to their fundraising schemes and supplement pills, to their crypto pump-and-dumps and using campaign donations to buy yachts and luxury shoes and Botox injections, to the giant corporations and their multi-billionaire owners bending the knee and kissing the ring, paying their tributes to Caesar so he spares his knives from their business interests, to the oceans of foreign money flooding political coffers, buying favors, buying American policy decisions, buying off pieces of our sovereignty and our national security, and even to the formerly august halls of the Supreme Court, where billionaires and their lackeys can now change their money freely in the temple, pocketing life-tenured Justices in exchange for private jet trips and stays at five-star resorts.

It extends well beyond the fetid swamps of Washington and into every corner of our economy and society, into our ecosystem of information and media, utterly awash with crypto scams, gambling ads, snake-oil supplements, drugs designed to addict rather than to cure, schools designed to scam rather than to educate, online platforms that actively seek to hook and manipulate you psychologically, and to trick and trap you into paying them forever, while selling your personal data to the highest bidder, with banks that sign you up for products you did not even buy, with insurance companies that use comedic gimmicks to hide their wrongful refusals to pay claims or their efforts to spy on you through your car or through Trojan Horse apps on your phone purporting to help you save money on gas, with lying and tricking so widespread that it has become more noteworthy when a company does not rip off its customers rather than when it does, with companies of all sorts debasing themselves with monster-truck-rally jingoism to please Dear Leader so he does not use his bullying pulpit to call for their destruction, with so many of these companies and their billionaire CEOs paying lower tax rates than you or me.

It extends even deeper, into every household, every family, almost every individual in America, suffering from the highest levels of inequality ever recorded, an America where the middle class has been purposely and deliberately eviscerated with higher taxes, higher costs on groceries and rent and healthcare and education and almost everything, where tens of millions of Americans go hungry for lack of food, sleep on the streets for lack of housing, or die for lack of healthcare or insurance, where millions of Americans live in chronic terror of being rounded up and disappeared and their children abducted from them by masked thugs from Trump’s immigrant Gestapo, and where millions more Americans — predominantly women and children — are raped, molested, abused, groomed, trafficked, enslaved, dehumanized, gaslit, threatened, terrorized, blamed, hushed up, and paid off, trapped in cultures of fear and hierarchy and silence, not by just a single multimillionaire and his rich and powerful friends, not just one Epstein, but by thousands and thousands of Epsteins in communities all over, in churches and youth groups, on college campuses and in workplaces, in positions of authority great and small.

All while seven men literally run the entire planet. All while our nation is led by a convicted felon fraudster, an adjudicated rapist and well-chronicled serial sexual predator — the epitome of the multiple depredations that afflict us. All while Earth will have its first trillionaire before we eliminate poverty, before we cure the world’s curable diseases, before we take any real steps to prevent the Earth overheating and expunging us as a failed species.

We live in a second Gilded Age, far worse than the first.

We live in a second Roman Empire, not of Augustus, but of Nero, of Caligula.

We live in a griftatorship — a confederacy of con men, of predators, of criminals, of bloodthirsty parasites.²

We began this century at a point when such criminals were still brought to justice, from Enron to Madoff to Theranos — but we now live in a world where the Sacklers pressured first the Bush and then the Trump administrations to let them off the hook, where the Trump administration let Epstein off with a slap on the wrist, where Trump got away with fraud and insurrection and stealing national security documents, where Trump pardoned the January 6 terrorists, where the very largest tech giants have legal immunity from liability for their misconduct, where gun companies have that same immunity, where the president has that same immunity, where former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is now literally working on her boyfriend’s new biotech startup from prison, and it has already raised over $20 million from a fresh batch of unfortunate marks. Accountability is dead. Justice is a joke. Blame is shifted from the perpetrators to the victims. You agreed to it in the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. It wasn’t the drug’s fault; the people were junkies. She was asking for it; everything was consensual.

We are battling not just a single foe but a hydra. The beast has not one head but nine. We have focused on only one, Trump, and we failed to do even that — while the other heads continue to poison us, to devour us. We must fight all of them, until all of them are defeated, until every battle is won.

We must expand this fight, not only to the voting booths, the knocks on doors, the calling and the lawn signs. Voting is not enough. Organizing is not enough. Winning elections is not enough.

The fight is not just political. It is legal. It is economic. It is technological and informational.

We need to fight all of the liars, the cheaters, the oligarchs, the dictators, the predators, the grifters, whether they are individuals or hiding behind corporate and institutional fortresses. We need to hit them where it hurts: we need to investigate them, blow the whistle on them, tell the truth about them, publish content about them, sue them, depose them, testify against them, boycott them, and amplify everything until everyone hears it, funding and supporting and re-posting every journalist or lawyer or activist who braves the barricades. We need to use our power not only as citizens but as economic heavyweights — as buyers or customers or plaintiffs, not “consumers” or “users” with all the passivity those words connote. Our dollars are the greatest single economic force in the world — while our attention is among the world’s most scarce resources — and we need to start exercising all of our power.

A truly dominant pro-democracy majority coalition in America would have 100 million voters — and it would also file 100 million lawsuits.

We must be an army of Davids to battle these Goliaths.

We are a quarter of the way through this century, and we have definitively lost this quarter-century. Democracy has lost. Justice has lost. Freedom has lost. It will take the next quarter-century or more to win back all that was lost, to turn the pendulum of progress forward again. This is not merely about the midterms this year. Or about 2028. This is about 2050. And beyond.

But win it we can. And we must. It took the abolitionists over 30 years. It took the original progressives over 25 years to end that first Gilded Age — and then another 25 years after that to win another wave of reform. It took the Civil Rights Movement over 30 years — starting in the courts, and in the streets, before finally winning in Congress and the White House.

Our alternative is to risk a Great Undoing, in which the entire Enlightenment is unwound, 350 years of human progress, to return to a world separated into billions, permanently saddled from the moment we are born, and a tiny privileged class of global superpredators, booted and spurred to ride us.

That is the road ahead of us. It is not for the timid. It is not for the complacent, the comfortable, or the contented. Not for the satisfied incumbents, the slick operators, the safe establishment. This is not business as usual. This is not just another cycle, another triangulation, another focus-grouped, poll-tested white paper for how to win 50% plus one — in other words, the way we have fought every political battle of the last 30 years, while our opponents have waged total ideological war with the objective of absolute subjugation of democracy, freedom, and the rule of law, to be replaced by fraud and abuse and dictatorship, by a world separated into predators and prey. By griftatorship.

We must meet their obsession to destroy democracy with an equal and greater devotion to defend and extend it.

This road will be difficult, but it must be trod — and it is one that we must commit to walking side by side, for as long as the world needs us.

The question now is how many of us will join this struggle. Will we all do what must be done to bend that arc of history ourselves, rather than waiting for it to bend itself? Or will we slip backward into the chasm? Will we fight off this Gilded Age, limiting it to a single generation? Or will we slouch toward a new Dark Age, lasting centuries still to come?

1. And also the “Lincoln Bible,” the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his first inauguration in 1861. I’m not sure which usage is more sacrilegious, although, perhaps appropriately, he failed to place his hand on either one, lest his hand burn to ashes in front of the assembled plutocrats.

2. Or of what Anne Applebaum called Autocracy, Inc. in her excellent book of the same name.