Burning Down the House!

Jared Yates Sexton traces the rise of Right-wing authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, and conspiracy theory culture from ancient Rome to today

Hi People,

I hope you find time to catch this interview with Jared Yates Sexton, author of The Midnight Kingdom, among other works. I very much enjoyed Sexton’s book and found him a wonderful interviewee. I love when people wildly exceed my expectations! That was the case with Sexton: He offers a sharp, profound analysis of our current political situation. Honestly, I find this a very important conversation: We can’t make progress without a coherent, shared understanding of what’s happening now, and why. Sexton offers that context, going back all the way to ancient Rome, when Christians — a persecuted minority — became the core of the reconstituted Empire.

I want to build my following on YouTube as we will use that more as a platform, going forward. I intend to host regular YouTube Live events. If you appreciate my work, you would do me a big favor by subscribing to my YouTube channel (also please promote and comment on this interview, if you feel inspired after listening to it).

I have transcribed the beginning of the interview, down below. I look forward to everyone’s thoughts and comments on it.

Thank you!

Daniel

DP: Hey everybody, today I am here with Jared Sexton, author of The Midnight Kingdom. It doesn't exactly tell a happy story, but before we get into the story that it does tell, Jared, do you want to just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you got into writing this particular book?

JS: I’ve had a weird eight years. Back in 2016, I was a fiction writer who had an interest in politics. I'd worked in politics in the past. I decided I was going to cover the 2016 campaign, and I ended up going to Trump rallies and saw something really wrong growing within the MAGA movement. I was sort of thrown into the deep end of the pool very quickly. I had to change my understanding of history and politics as conditions were changing. As a result, over the past eight years, I've been covering the rise of Right-wing authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, conspiracy theory culture. I've tried to keep pace with what's going on, so as a result, I've ended up writing multiple books. One was covering the 2016 campaign, how Trump came to power, another was focusing and criticizing the idea of traditional masculinity and how it's played into Neo-fascistic culture. I reconsidered American history in my book American Rule and realized the authoritarian elements that have always been there, and The Midnight Kingdom was a broader effort to trace the lines of power in so-called Western Civilization, to understand how we've reached this point and how these conspiracy theories and narratives and nationalistic and religious mythologies have contributed to all of this. So basically, I'm a work in progress that is trying to keep a pace with this. 

DP: I noticed in The Midnight Kingdom you talk about your grandmother and your family background. What is, could you just remind me and maybe tell viewers a bit, did you come from a Christian American background?

JS: Yeah, unfortunately, I grew up in a very rural, poor, conservative Indiana town area in a Christian culture that was very cult and very extremist with elements of white nationalism and conspiracy theory culture. Some really extremist ideology that unfortunately, when things started really falling apart in the last few years, it was very recognizable. It was very familiar because even going back into the 1980s and into the 90s, my family and my community and my church, all of it were absolutely steeped in all of these things. So, I was able to escape that and find my way out of it and find a way to understand it, but I unfortunately was raised up within a lot of these principles and ideas.

DP: So had you been covering these topics in your fiction also, or was this just like a big sort of...?

JS: Well, no, in my fiction, a lot of what I was always covering was, and I didn't understand it for a while, obviously, when you're a young artist, you're spending a lot of time looking at yourself but not particularly understanding yourself. I was thinking about the men around me, the culture I was raised in, a lot of men who were angry but didn't understand why they were angry, which has now become, you know, an epidemic in this country. One of the reasons why our democracy is at stake is because you have a lot of people who do not understand themselves and don't understand their situation. So I was basically writing about this stuff before I started to realize the socioeconomic sort of consequences of it.

“The American Dream, the idea of American exceptionalism, these things are starting to fall apart. They need to be replaced by something else, and the battle is over what's going to replace it, what comes next.”

DP: And I got the sense from your book that, I mean, I'm sure you're not voting for Trump, obviously, you'll vote for Biden, but I didn’t feel that you are that supportive of the liberal Progressive establishment. You were critiquing, am I correct about that? You're sort of critiquing how they helped let it get to this state.

JS: So one of my biggest critiques of what's actually happening now is that for the past, let's go ahead and be conservative with this, the last 40 years if not going back into the late 70s, we've been dealing with a neoliberal consensus in this country, basically following World War II we had had the New Deal consensus which was the idea that we needed a robust government that regulated, they kept businesses in check but also made sure that the lives of the citizens were maintained or even improved, whether it was making sure their drinking water was safe or whether they could retire or weren't going to fall into penniless ruin. And what happened going into the 70s and the 80s was that neoliberalism, which is an ideology we can get into, there's a long history of how we got here and what it is and why it's doing what it is, basically in the 70s into the 80s the Democratic party realized very quickly that they were not going to compete with things like Reaganism or trickle-down economics, it simply wasn't going to happen. And as a result, the Democratic party changed themselves almost in totality, they left behind their traditional power bases of labor unions, vulnerable communities, basically anyone that used to support them, and started to become Reaganism with a human face. 

And so what we have dealt with for the past 40 years was a consensus within the United States government of deregulation, privatization, the destruction of the social safety net, and now we've reached a point where that project has produced really ruinous circumstances. And so now we have, unfortunately, within the duopolistic system that we have, we have a far Right-wing fascistic party with the Republican party which is trying to usher in an era of authoritarianism through neoliberalism, and then you have the Democratic party which has largely been reduced to a conservative party which is maintaining the institutions as they are, trying to protect what has been gotten as opposed to moving forward. So it isn't necessarily progressivism that I have a problem with, it's the project of neoliberal liberalism which I think has become the consensus for decades now and unfortunately has led us to the spot that we're in.

DP: I sometimes think, if Biden, all the Democrats are like, we have to fight to protect democracy, so we can't vote for Trump, we have to support Biden. Isn't that kind of like blackmail in a way because it's like, you know, you're giving me one alternative, so how is that democratic? It's like either I vote for fascism or I vote for a simulacrum of democratic choice where there isn't really any choice because they've stifled all the choice in a way.

JS: Exactly, and I think, and I want to be very clear about it, I've said this to anybody who's asked me, like I do plan on voting for Joe Biden in November, that is my own personal political choice. I am viewing it as voting for pressing the break a little bit on the spread of authoritarianism because to vote for Donald Trump or to have another Trump presidency is to, and by the way, I want to make this clear before we go any further, Donald Trump is a symptom of a larger disease. He is not the brain man on this, he is not the one with the strategies. What we're actually dealing with is a very complicated, organized, well-financed, well-resourced push by oligarchical Right-wing billionaires and donors in this country and corporatists. Donald Trump just so happens to be a really useful frontman for that because he creates a faux populistic movement which I'm sure that we'll talk about at some point. 

What I keep saying though is that I do not think that voting for Joe Biden or elections at this point are what's going to save us. They can pause things, you can sort of, it's almost like if you're thinking about someone who is, I always try and explain, I've never actually descended down a mountain, you know, repelled down a mountain, but you can sort of, you have a break and you can go faster, and right now the best choice is to hit the break and try and change something outside of it. I think there has to be a new populist Democratic movement that pressures the Democratic party or creates an alternative to the Democratic party. I do not think that elections are going to save us. I think it's going to take Democratic energy, and I think that that's what history has shown us, is that you're not going to simply win this thing by voting and going to the booth. That is the absolute bare minimum of democratic activity that you can engage in, and there has to be more beyond that. 

DP: Jane Mayer's Dark Money shows how, as you say, the far-Right oligarchs or plutocrats decided way back in the 60s that they didn't like the direction of modern society towards liberalization and more social services, but they realized it was a long haul struggle. So they put together a group of funders and then they went after it in a very deliberate way. They were like, okay, the Left has grassroots movements. We have to create top-down or astroturfed versions of those movements. The Left has captured a lot of the academic departments, so we're going to have to buy academic prestige. I think they bought the University of Chicago economics department and installed Milton Friedman. You know, the Left has all these intellectuals people rally around, so we need our own intellectuals. They supported Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, and funded him through the Heritage Foundation. So then these ideas that minorities don't deserve social services because they're inherently less intelligent and have less capacity for advancement, simmer through society, whether they're expressed explicitly or not. And I imagine since a lot of those people were also like the Koch brothers, like fossil fuel people, I'm sure they also had deep ties to the military-industrial complex, which probably helped lead to various attempts to create PsyOps, whether that's QAnon over the last years or maybe some aspects of this whole UAP and UFO thing as a distraction mechanism. Well, that's like a much longer discussion and something I've written about a bit.

One thing that fascinated me about your book was that you go all the way back. It's like a huge history lesson I hadn't anticipated. So why don't you take us back through your thinking process and why you felt it was important to go back to Rome, up to Napoleon, the Illuminati, and the whole thing?

JS Well, I'm really excited to get into all of this. What we're actually talking about is interconnecting groups of self-serving interests, which is one of the reasons why capitalism is what it is. It directs a lot of different people to do things that work in concert with each other. We're not having a discussion about smoke-filled rooms or groups meeting at Bohemian Grove, although some of them do meet there and have some really nefarious plans. So, what we're actually talking about is not necessarily a unified theory of things. It's more about the evolution of the powerful who are using narratives and attacks on reality to pursue their own interest, which is power and profit. That's how this system has been set up, that's how the system works. 

I went back to Rome because, as a person raised in Evangelicalism, I never understood how Christianity took over the Roman Empire. It didn't make sense to me. You had this group being oppressed and killed, and it never made sense to me how that happened. Whenever I start asking questions, I always end up asking the question before the question that I asked. I wanted to go back to the start of so-called Western civilization. What I found from the very beginning, going back to Rome, was incredible. We're talking about Christians in catacombs, being oppressed. That's where the QAnon narratives came from. What were the Christians doing in the catacombs? They were sacrificing children for secret powers, they were abusing children. Those were the rumors about them, and that's what allowed the powerful to go after them and oppress them. Immediately, what I realized was it wasn't that QAnon had its origins there; it's that there are stories that continue in a cyclical nature that humanity keeps telling itself. These stories eventually are acted upon by the powerful when they realize it's incredibly useful for maintaining the power they have and gaining more power. 

One of the things that happens when you're powerful is you're responsible for what's happened. Take, for instance, Donald Trump as president, who promised all of his supporters he was going to drain the swamp, build the wall. Why is the swamp not drained? Why is the wall not built? Why are these lies not coming true? Instead of them being bad faith lies, there's a simple alternative: The Deep State kept him from doing it. What I figured out was there's always a nugget of truth in these stories because, to be frank, there is a deep state. We're talking about oligarchs and plutocrats who are working behind the scenes, beyond the consequences of representative government. There is something that makes sure that things keep going the same way, regardless of whether George W. Bush is in office, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Joe Biden. There's stuff that's behind the scenes, which is the administrative state that has been built. These stories take the onus off of these things. For instance, in Rome, why is stuff going to hell? Why is the empire in decline? It couldn't possibly be the emperor; the emperor is a godlike figure. It has to be conspiracies; it has to be the Christians who are doing this. 

Eventually, though, what ends up happening, and this is one of the reasons why Christianity has been woven through the history of capitalism, power, and particularly white supremacy, there is a double sort of weapon against cognitive dissonance. There's martyrdom, but there's also righteousness. God is on my side; I get to do what I want. At the same time, I'm always going to be discriminated against, and as a result, I should do anything in my power to protect myself. That ideology has been woven through so-called Western civilization, white supremacy, and also capitalism the entire time, which is why we keep seeing these cycles play themselves out through the ages, regardless of what century we're in, what country we're in, what culture we're in. These things are constants, and that's what we're watching again at this moment.

DP: Okay, so what did you discover? So you discover the origin of Christianity had to do with the scapegoat of Christians. At a certain point, how did the scapegoats become the core element of the new structure?

JARED: Well, what I noticed, and it took me a while to sit with this, I started to realize that at the core of any moment, there is a gravity of a chosen reality. For instance, in the United States of America, the binding reality that has kept everything in order is the American Dream, which is the idea that we are a society where people can work their way up to the top, they can have better lives, they can have more safety. As long as the gravity of that reality is strong, there's usually not a lot of discord. There are some fights, some disagreements, some political infighting, but eventually, at some point, when the gravity of that reality starts to lose its power, you start to see more disruptions. You start to see a lot of fights, wars, genocides, democracy, and liberal democracy at stake. Eventually, you either have to reinforce that old reality or you have to replace it with a new one. 

In Rome, the reality was that the emperors were gods. They were the main gods on Earth, and as a result, they couldn't be wrong. Their direction was perfect; the Roman Empire was everlasting; it was never going to be challenged. When there started to be civil war, infighting between potential emperors, or even warlords between themselves, that reality starts to fall apart, and it needs to be replaced by something. Instead of replacing it with an imperial cult, it merged with Christianity. All of a sudden, now you have an almighty monotheistic God that has all of these elements that you can use to rule, to have legitimacy, and to basically do whatever you want. So it was the replacement of one reality with another, which is where we're at now. The American Dream, the idea of American exceptionalism, these things are starting to fall apart. They need to be replaced by something else, and the battle is over what's going to replace it, what comes next. What we see in the cycles is the conflict over what reality is going to replace the old reality.

DP: That makes sense. I was thinking about René Girard. He had this whole thing about the scapegoat mechanism and mimetic violence. Somehow he's now been very much, I think he was quite Right-wing and also Christian, but in a way, the scapegoat or the martyr is like the necessary figure for society to reconstitute itself, kind of a scary thought, I guess.

JS Well, and I want to point something out on that note because something you're bringing up is really important, which is I think the Right fundamentally understands this more than the Left, which is actually really interesting when you take a look at history. 

DP Left is a complicated term.

JS I'm glad you said that. So you and I, I would make this argument, I think that you and I are sufficiently Leftist, but I think people need to understand that we throw around the Left so much. We say the Leftist New York Times, and it's a corporate lens for reality, which is wild. MSNBC is a corporate company that goes through a corporate lens, and people say Leftist MSNBC or the Left wants this or the Left wants that. To be specific, the Left was decimated, absolutely destroyed over the past century. They were hunted down by multiple state-run agencies, they were undermined economically and culturally. The Left basically doesn't even exist anymore, and that's part of the issue. It's starting to grow a little bit, but it doesn't have any fundamental power. In America, there is no Leftist party, there are barely any Leftist politicians, or anybody who could even be qualified as center-Left. 

But I do think that's part of the issue, is that the Left in a lot of ways has been relegated to theory and relegated to sort of logically trying to eke around at the margins, or thinking that maybe you're going to talk sense to people, when, in fact, the Right has understood the power of narrative. One of the most influential Right-wing philosophers Right now is Harry Jaffa, who is behind all of these Right-wing think tanks and institutes and America First groups. Jaffa basically was one of these people who was just like, you need the noble lie, which is a Platonic idea, Right? You just need a story, and you need a story that people can believe in, that they can gather around, and have faith in. 

That's one of the issues we have now, is that the Right is gaining power because they're telling a story. It's absolutely incoherent, it makes no sense, it's a complete and utter fraud, but it's a story that people can get behind, as opposed to means testing or tax credits or qualified federal debt relief. Nobody cares about that, nobody actually believes in any of that. They need a story that they need to insert themselves in, and the Right understands that fundamentally, for a lot of different reasons, and it goes back to what you were talking about. There's one Right-wing or Right-wing adjacent philosopher after another who is talking about the story doesn't need to be real; there just needs to be a powerful story that organizes society, and the Right understands that in a way the Left has had a real problem with.

DP: With the Right, there was George Bush, kind of rock-ribbed Republicans who were okay with a certain level of Democratic choice. Now, there's this new group who recognize that, demographically, as society becomes more pluralistic, they have to intervene, essentially illegally, to maintain white power and privilege. 

JS I want to go back quickly to the first Bush, GHW Bush. GHW Bush was a technocrat and part of the military-industrial complex we've already talked about. He was the beginning of the neoliberal consensus but still had a bit of the New Deal consensus in him. He didn't get up and talk about ethnic nationalism or call into question the institutions. You get to GW Bush, same thing, which is one of the reasons why you still see these moments with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W Bush hanging out, even though he's a war criminal. What has happened now—and our idea in America of conventional politics and history is so shallow and thin that people don't understand how fundamentally our politics have changed—there has been a civil war within the GOP, and establishment Republicans, such as Mitch McConnell, have been pushed to the margins by a new authoritarian GOP. This new GOP offers a critique of neoliberalism while also pushing neoliberalism. 

It started with the Tea Party, which was astroturfed, back to our discussion earlier about the oligarchs and plutocrats. They've now created a pseudo faux populistic movement that has replaced the old GOP. It's not politics as usual. The beginning of globalism was this moment where the American Empire created a global structure of trade and politics. We created this structure where America was on top of a pyramid, and we were going to get the benefit of all of it. Unfortunately, to keep countries in that second and third world category, it relied on authoritarianism. You had to fix their elections, take away their rights, break labor unions, and sometimes support a dictator or warlord. 

Neoliberalism has always been authoritarianism with a mask. It's not about us; it's the market doing this. Eventually, it gets to the point where it comes back around to the host country. We've reached a point where the progress of neoliberalism requires that America loses its democratic features. It requires the total takeover of representative government. What's happening with MAGA, the America First, whatever you want to call it, the new right, they're providing a critique of neoliberalism while quietly and sometimes aggressively putting into position a new authoritarian version of neoliberalism. They're taking the onus away from the people that have caused it, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, and putting it on their political enemies. This is how things have always worked, whether it was in those second or third world countries. The process is now playing itself out again in the United States.

(Please catch the rest of the interview via YouTube — looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it)