Jared Yates Sexton: The Mythology of America:

Jared Yates Sexton:

That fear mongering is at the heart of all right-wing media, all right-wing politics. It fuels this irrational fear. And so, what actually happens is that right-wing white Americans, more or less, are living in a fear state, and they believe at any moment that they could die, they could be abused, they could be destroyed. That apocalyptic horizon is always over in the corner. So, anything they do, again, is rationalized.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions. My guest today is Jared Yates Sexton, a political analyst and author. His book, The Midnight Kingdom, examines how white supremacist lies religious mythologies and poisonous conspiracy theories, built the modern world, and threatened to plunge us into an authoritarian nightmare. Jared, what a way to start the morning. Welcome.

Jared Yates Sexton:

I always love it whenever we have to talk about this stuff. I want to be in a good mood. I want to have a good time. Meanwhile, we have to talk about all this nonsense.

Ken Harbaugh:

While I have been dying to talk to you in particular, because we've had a host of experts on the show talking about Christian nationalism. You are the first to talk about America itself as a pseudo religion. And it's a fascinating concept, and the more I've thought about it, the more my own experience growing up validates it.

Basically, in their mythologizing of America, conservatives have built their own golden calf. Is that more or less your thesis?

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah. And it's really disturbing when you start actually dismantling what has happened here. I've been trying to understand over the last few years, I sort of got thrown into the deep end of the pool during the Trump years trying to understand exactly how we had arrived there. And I needed to sort of update my conventional understanding of history.

And what I eventually came around to was that America because it's had hegemonic control since World War II, and particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, it sort of controls the gravity of reality. The story of America is what sort of holds everything together, which is one of the reasons we're having some of the problems that we're having right now.

But basically, America has been imbued with a mythological energy. The idea that conservatives, right-wing people, and even some people who don't even realize it, have sort of come to believe is that God or the universe has imbued America with the energy of all that is good.

And as a result, anything that we do, or whatever serves the purpose of whatever agenda, it's rationalized. We can hurt whoever we want. We can break whatever laws we want. We can do whatever we want.

And it also, weirdly enough, for the individual, like a Christian nationalist or a right-wing extremist, it means that whatever they do is okay. They can hurt other people. They can legislate over other people's bodies. They can basically destroy democracy before our very eyes.

And all of it has the sheen of some sort of mythological universal power. It's a really weird mindset, but it goes a really long way towards explaining what's going on.

Ken Harbaugh:

There's an apocalyptic element as well, which has always been part of the American version of Christianity, but it seems to be flaring these days. The eschatological conversation is dominant in churches these days. Trump is intimately tied into conversations about the end times. Where does this apocalyptic strain in American, especially modern evangelical Christianity in America come from?

Jared Yates Sexton:

Well, I mean, it starts in Europe, with everybody who ends up coming to America, they're absolutely terrified by what's going on around them. There's a ton of religious tumult. They have to leave basically in order to practice their own religion and save themselves.

Then all of a sudden, they end up in America. And that is an apocalyptic wilderness to these people. You know what I mean? Behind every corner, it's not just indigenous people, it's Satan. It's literally the devil is in the forest coming for them.

And what's weird about that is it continues as we move west. The entire time, every foot that we move west, it's again, the devil is in the wilderness. We're facing basic extinction. Unless we do whatever we need to do.

That mindset, manifest destiny, if you want to call it that, this American exceptionalism, which is what it's turned into as we've started to sort of take over the world, so to speak, that apocalyptic system. It absolutely energizes everything because, and this is again, what's happening with white Americans, what's happening in MAGA, what's happening with Christian nationalism, it basically says to people, win at all costs, because if you don't win, you're done.

If you literally sat down with a lot of right-wing Americans in this country, they believe that if they don't overthrow an election or overthrow the government that they're going to be sent to camps. They literally believe their guns are going to be taken away. Their families are going to be split up. Their kids are going to be indoctrinated.

That fearmongering is at the heart of all right-wing media, all right-wing politics. It fuels this irrational fear. And so, what actually happens is that right-wing white Americans, more or less are living in a fear state, and they believe at any moment that they could die, they could be abused, they could be destroyed. That apocalyptic horizon is always over in the corner. So, anything they do again is rationalized.

Ken Harbaugh:

And who's the devil today? Because there's no more wilderness.

Jared Yates Sexton:

It's everybody. Well, that's the amazing thing is the more that I look at it, the more that I think about how essential the War on Terror was in all of this.

And if you remember after 9/11, your neighbors could be part of Al-Qaeda. There might be terrorist acts inside of your small rural town. They might be coming after the water tower.

That idea has sort of continually churned. It started with communism, and then you move into the idea that Japanese Americans might turn against us, and there's always this internal threat.

And eventually what happens is it sort of eats the country from the inside out. So, now it's not just the devil. It's not the devil coming in and possessing people's souls. It's agents of the devil. This is why we're dealing with satanic cabals. This is why the QAnon conspiracy theory is there.

You're not having a political battle. You're not deciding what should be funded. You're not deciding where money should go. What direction we should go in. What you're doing is you're fighting an apocalyptic battle. You're literally fighting a war against Satan.

And these people are satanic, which is why people like Alex Jones and the people who are now borrowing his rhetoric, they're always talking about satanic evil. Because that means, again, you can do whatever you want, as long as you're saving yourself and the people you love.

Ken Harbaugh:

You go all the way back to the Roman Empire to show how that apocalyptic narrative has been exploited to further entrench Christianity.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah. When I wrote The Midnight Kingdom, I wanted to go back and I wanted to relearn modern history, and I got back there and immediately I found QAnon conspiracy theories, which blew my mind. I was absolutely shocked, and I'm in ancient Rome.

But here's the kicker, it was Christians that were being blamed for being satanic cabals. Because they were practicing in the darkness. They were abusing children. They were doing dark, dark things that couldn't be seen.

But eventually what happens, and this is actually part of a cycle, that if you notice, you can start to predict it, which is why I'm personally very worried about what's going on. And also, every single day brings new evidence that this is happening.

These cycles of power repeat each other. And when you start to bring in the ideas of Christianity, these sort of mythological elements that we're discussing, when they heat up, and when you start talking about satanic cabals, you start talking about these conspiracy theories. You start talking about winning at all costs. That coincides with major political, economic, and socioeconomic problems.

And so, what ends up happening is that those stories that we're talking about, they continue — I traced it through Rome, I traced it through millennia, basically from ancient Rome, all the way to the invasion of Ukraine. They're the same stories that keep getting told because they further power, and as they further power, things change, but they always sort of remain the same.

And the situation that we're in right now mirrors these other situations where authoritarian energies built and built and built, and then eventually pushed things further to the right and oppressed people.

Ken Harbaugh:

You write this in The Midnight Kingdom, and I think it's a fantastic distillation, “Fascist movements both created the appearance of a new religion while sanctifying sacrifice. They told men they should embrace patriarchy and the sacrifice of labor while women should embrace their roles in the kitchen and in the home for the good of the nation.”

This is the whole point. This is politics or a political movement, co-opting religion sanctifying the state to create a power structure that perpetuates that movement.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah. And what happens is eventually things start to break down. I know it's not going to be a surprise to you or your listeners and viewers, but things are not going great. America's in trouble right now.

The sort of the America that we thought that we were going to get or that we thought that we lived in is sort of falling apart. And when that reality that you and I were talking about earlier starts to fragment a little bit, you need to replace it with something else.

So, you and I could have a discussion about, I don't know, social justice, about actually making things fairer, actually reforming things. Or the right comes in and says, “No, we need to renew the old things. We need to go ahead and bring back that old time religion.”

On top of that, it's very strange that every time you start talking about these conspiracy theories and you start talking about these new authoritarian religions such as Christian nationalism, MAGA, you name it, it is always based on the power center being a white male, the patriarchal white male in charge of a family.

It's always strange how that happens and how that gives them more power and centers them at the center of everything.

But what you end up finding is that authoritarian movements, whether it's the fascist, it's the Nazis, whether it's people before them, and I mean the Confederates in America, what they always do is they take religion and then they dive into it, and then they twist it. They start turning it into their own story of how they are correct, and they should have all the power, which is again, what is happening with MAGA, with Christian nationalism, with authoritarianism around the world right now.

Ken Harbaugh:

You just used the phrase authoritarian religion, and I would love to pick that apart because authoritarianism itself is the culprit, and it might be at least an outwardly areligious regime. If you look at Stalinist Russia, even better example is Kim Il Sung's invention of modern North Korea all the way down to Kim Jong-Un.

And that is on the surface, on atheistic state, but it is just as religious in its conception of authoritarianism as what we're seeing evolve in the U.S.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah. I was actually really shocked when I was researching The Midnight Kingdom, and I got to Stalin. And I realized they created their own religion. It was Vladimir Lenin, like they turned Vladimir Lenin into Christ.

And actually, all the stories from Stalin were, “Lenin will rise again. We will create the technology and innovate things that Lenin will rise again.” Meanwhile, Stalin is like, “I'll take it from here. I'll be the center of this religion.”

But actually, what happens is religion is the shortcut. In the United States, I grew up in an evangelical home in Southern Indiana, and back in the 1980s, every service I was at was talking about the new world order. It was talking about conspiracy theories. It was talking about satanic cabals back in the 1980s, 1990s.

People are prepared for this stuff. It's a shortcut. It's a cheat code. It's a hack. And basically, you come along, and you say, the new world order, the deep state, the QAnon cabals, you say those things, it activates an entire framework of understanding.

People have been prepared for this for a very long time. You can cultivate your own religion, which is what's happening. You can go ahead and the Nazis, the fascist did this as well. Nazism starts with positive Christianity. Fascism starts with the Catholic church.

What you do is you take that framework that people have, and you use it, you abuse it, you pervert it, and you turn it into its own thing, and eventually it takes off as its own religion.

Ken Harbaugh:

Cultural decadence or the perception of cultural decadence in America seems to be the provocation that is triggering this response on the right. I think a lot has been written about that. I don't think you disagree with that.

The part that really is jarring to me is their selection of Donald Trump as the standard bearer to fight back against cultural decadence. How do they square those two?

Jared Yates Sexton:

They just simply don't. I mean, the amazing thing about it is, if you actually listen to Donald Trump, it's amazing for all of the flags of him on Rambo's body, or these memes of him as some sort of a powerful warrior.

This is a New York socialite who likes to talk about gossip. He likes to talk about Broadway musicals. They simply throw that out the same way, of course, that the Nazi party throughout the fact that Adolf Hitler, their great warlord was an artist.

It's simply the idea that they need something there. And if you take a look at all of this, that degeneration idea, fascists love this idea of what's called Kuklos, which comes back from ancient Greece, this idea that, “Oh, things have degraded.”

And you'll notice that whenever you talk about things being degraded, it always has the same things. Women have more power. They're allowed in the workplace; they're allowed to have their own independent lives. Gay and trans people … and this was the exact same again in Europe, in the early 20th century. It's the exact same before that, gay and trans people are suddenly allowed to live authentic lives.

All of a sudden, compassion and empathy is at the heart of things. The economy starts moving towards more information and collaborative ideas. The world starts working together. And that is blamed because again, surprise, surprise, the white male, and that aggressive male illness is not at the center of it.

So, they don't care who does it. They don't care if that person wears a uniform and they've never worn a uniform before. They don't care if that person is strong or weak or whatever. Whoever goes ahead and plays that card, they're ready to go.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, your framing of cultural decadence might help explain the elevation of Trump as the bastion against it, because you pointed to increasing rights for gay and trans people, for women. I can't remember if you left out race, but that's probably at the top of the deck when it comes to changes that the other side would describe as decadent and a marker of American decline.

And on every count, Trump is a champion for 50s or 60s vision of America, which puts women back in the kitchen and puts minorities in their place and ignores or persecutes gay and trans people. Maybe he is the standard bearer that actually isn't hypocritical in his approach.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah. And that's what matters at the end of the day. And I'm glad you brought up the 1950s, because whenever in conventional history, whether it's CNN or Time Life or whatever it is, you look at the 1950s, it's always sort of the nuclear family in the suburbs, and everything's great. Nobody's fighting, nobody's doing whatever.

Meanwhile, just out of frame are people of color who are just absolutely being held down, over here are women who are living lives where they're being oppressed, and over here are gay and trans people who can't live their lives.

They want to go back to that. It is very much a thing where they believe make America great again. They never say it explicitly. They want to go back to the time where that sort of ecosystem was in place, before civil rights, before the social revolutions of the 60s and 70s, “upset” everything.

They want to get back there at any cost. And Donald Trump is a great avatar for that, because what he tells them is that their desire for that isn't wrong. This is the amazing truth of Donald Trump. This is what does it, the reason why he was able to gain power wasn't because he asked for more from people.

He asked less from people. He said, you don't have to be a good person. You don't have to interrogate your privilege. You don't have to interrogate why you feel bad things. Those people who tell you those are bad things, they're wrong. You're actually a realist.

Ken Harbaugh:

And it's not just that Donald Trump is telling them they're not wrong. He's telling them they are righteous for wanting to return to the 50s, to that era where you had racial hierarchies, where you had very clearly defined roles. He has fed the religious fervor that upholds that.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah, and I'll tell you something that's really odd for me. I am surrounded by people, family, neighbors, people I love and care about who just have absolutely gone down the MAGA rabbit hole. I've seen people that I love and care about, just absolutely advocate some of the worst things imaginable.

But I'll tell you something else. They did it before Trump. It was quieter, and they did it behind closed doors, and they did it with hushed tones. They didn't say it in public, they didn't rally around it. They didn't make it their political identity.

What Trump did was he threw open that door, and not only did he make it acceptable for them to have a political identity to do this, he also, and this is a key thing a lot of people miss, he made it their consumer identity. He made it a thing where they could express their fantasy selves.

This is why you go around all the time now, and you see grown ass men wearing shirts that say, “Come and take my gun,” or, “You better be ready for a fight if you're coming for my gun.” They've got it all over their trucks. Their big giant trucks that they're buying to express their fantasy selves.

What he has done is he has given people a fantasy identity that can work against what they're afraid of, which is this: they feel powerless, and because they feel powerless, they need an expression that says, “I'm very powerful. I'm a warrior and I'm fighting on the front lines.” And meanwhile, all they have to do is give their money to Trump and people like him.

Ken Harbaugh:

It's entirely about compensating.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yes.

Ken Harbaugh:

When a political movement like MAGA becomes quasi-religious, how important is the prophet to sustaining that? How important is Trump himself because I'm very conflicted on this. You go through history, and you see examples of movements led by someone who dies or disappears in other ways, and the movement fades.

In other cases, the movement exists independent of its provocateur. What are we experiencing?

Jared Yates Sexton:

We are in a hinge point. Donald Trump absolutely has a role as a prophet to the MAGA movement. But here's the thing, and when we're talking about this politics, we also have to understand that Donald Trump is not cooking up these ideas. He's not working late into the night creating project 2025.

This is created by a bunch of right-wing billionaire donors who want to destroy democracy, who fund one think tank an institute after another in order to create all of these plans, all of these agendas.

Here's the thing, though, they don't have control over MAGA, Trump does. He's up in front of it. He's the one that gives them the figurehead. We don't know what's going to happen. There basically was an attempt to transplant the MAGA movement over to Ron DeSantis. Guess what? Ron DeSantis has all of the charisma of as a bag of fingernails.

This guy couldn't do it, and this is why he started off his campaign with over a quarter of a billion dollars and burnt through all of it. They don't know who can do what Trump does. That doesn't mean that somebody can't, that doesn't mean that somebody won't take the torch and run with it.

I'm telling you right now, they're reverse engineering this thing with all of their might. They're trying to find somebody besides Donald Trump to lead this thing. But it right now, he's got complete control over it as of right now.

Ken Harbaugh:

Do you think he's the kind of singular figure that it'll be hard to find a replacement for? I mean, I haven't encountered anything like him in the American political tradition. Part of that is that he's such a rare personality that narcissistic, that psychopathic.

It is difficult for people like that to rise as high as Donald Trump has. It was just kind of a perfect storm of family money and geography and other forces that propelled him, celebrity. Can that be replicated?

Jared Yates Sexton:

I don't know. I always hesitate to say this because there's one element of it that really frightens me. And actually, with the GOP primary kind of coming into view the way that it is I'm getting really worried because the one missing element from the Trump storm is starting to lock into place. That's American militarism.

That is somebody who can appeal to sort of America's military history and identity. Trump can’t, he dodged Vietnam. He has no respect for the military whatsoever. He's actually kind of afraid to use the military. It's weird actually, his relationship with it.

If they can find somebody who is as shameless as Donald Trump, which good luck with that, good luck trying to find somebody who lacks basic human shame. I mean, his superpower all along, we know this, is that he didn't respect any of the institutions and he exposed them as brittle or non-existent.

So, he has sort of laid out the trail simply by just running every way and messing things up. I think there are people out there who could do this. I think there are people who could take the helm of it, but it would take somebody — like you said, there is a weird recipe here that sort of has to be followed, but if you start locking in those other elements of it, including militarism, I really shudder to think about where that could go.

Ken Harbaugh:

It sounds almost like you're teeing up Mike Flynn to carry this torch. Did I misread that?

Jared Yates Sexton:

Mike Flynn, I think, has played a role, particularly within the QAnon community. The other part of it though, is I don't know if you've spent much time watching Mike Flynn. Mike Flynn is really off-putting.

He's no Ron DeSantis, but there is something very strange about him that like, it just doesn't sort of hit. Unfortunately, because of what I do and the research I do, I've watched way too many Mike Flynn speeches, and they are abysmal. I'll just say that.

And like you said, with Donald Trump, it needs some type of a showbiz factor, because that's another part of this MAGA movement. These people want to be entertained by it. They want the cruelty to be fun.

They want to engage in ritual abuse that makes them feel better about who they are and what they're going through. I don't know if it's Flynn. I know Flynn wants to be that guy. I mean, he’s definitely made a decent amount of money and build enough cloud off of it. But yeah, there's something very weird about Mike Flynn.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, the way you describe their attachment to Trump and MAGA suggests that it's superficial, that absent the entertainment factor and the way it makes them feel, there's no real ideology there or no real sense of devotion or purpose. If that's the case, does that suggest there might be a breaking point?

Jared Yates Sexton:

Well, I mean, MAGA is a fantasy environment. It's, it's a pseudo populous movement. Basically, the people who have created the problems in this country created a pseudo populous movement to capture people and tell them, “Hey, we didn't do this. Those people did it.”

I mean, it's complete fabrication top to bottom, but I'll tell you the ingredient of it that goes along with what you're saying. People … and I don't know if you remember this, but there was a rally, I want to say it was a couple of years ago, where Trump basically left all of his people at a rally to almost get hypothermia in the winter. He just got out of there and they were left standing outside.

Ken Harbaugh:

I remember.

Jared Yates Sexton:

And people are like, “Is this where people leave the MAGA movement?” No. The thing is, they like being abused by him. And by that, I mean that a lot of these people, and this is part of the research I'm doing for my new project, they are looking for the replication of the abuse that they've suffered at home, in their religious communities, in their communities.

And basically, there is a relationship where they kind of love that Donald Trump doesn't respect them. And that's one of the reasons why they don't expect him to do anything for them. They simply want their pain and their anguish to be projected onto other people.

So, again, there is a weird recipe here that's being followed that I don't know if it can be replicated, but if it is, if they can figure out how to do this, I mean, it's already dangerous. It would get a lot more dangerous very quickly.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, there certainly are powerful forces, which you've alluded to that are trying to figure out how to pass the torch. You mentioned Project 2025. Can you give us … I mean, it's over 900 pages, so don't give us the full version, but what should we be most worried about when institutions, vaulted institutions like the Heritage Foundation start drafting blueprints to dismantle American democracy?

Jared Yates Sexton:

Well, I'll just go ahead and say with a little bit of history that these presidential agendas started with Ronald Reagan. Basically, Ronald Reagan got inaugurated and he walked off the platform and he was handed a Heritage Foundation document that told him how to run the government.

And do you know what he did? He did it. He absolutely did it to a tee. I think he carried out 70 to 80% of the agenda, and it changed America. It basically gave us the modern world that we have, because a bunch of billionaires and all of their associations came together, told the president how to do things, and basically let Ronald Reagan go out and sell it to the public.

Donald Trump got the same agenda in 2016 or in 2017 when he became president. He carried out, I think, another 70/80% of that agenda as well.

Here's the thing. They were not ambitious enough in his first term. They weren't prepared. They didn't understand how effective of a tool Donald Trump was, or how he was going to carry out their agenda.

This is the fantasy of a group of billionaires and millionaires who have funded every Republican campaign, and by the way, have created most of the conspiracy theories and most of the legislative agendas that you and I and every other American has suffered from, they've taken over the judiciary. They're rolling back rights.

I mean, listen, they want children working across the country in factories and slaughterhouses. These people understand what it is that they want. They're very motivated, and this project 2025, it's their moonshot.

They understand that getting Donald Trump — and by the way, if any other Republican gets elected, they're handing it to them as well. Nikki Haley would get this. This agenda is basically like it's checkmate is what it is. And if it's allowed to go through, and if one of these people gets elected and this agenda doesn't get opposed, and somehow or another put in place, it's going to be a really bad situation.

Ken Harbaugh:

Do they understand that that agenda is wildly unpopular with the American public? And if they do understand that, do they care?

Jared Yates Sexton:

No, they do not. And they do understand it's wildly unpopular. Everything that they do, I think our media does us a disservice. The media basically tries to tell us that the Republican Democratic split is like 45%, 45% with 10% independence in between.

It's not, the Republican Party is wildly historically unpopular. The only reason that there's still a national party is because this country's institutions were designed to reward minoritarian white and wealthy power, the Senate, the electoral college, the judicial system, you name it.

So, they do understand that, which is why they create all these conspiracy theories. For instance, I always try and explain this to people, this gay and trans CRT stuff, kindergartners using kitty litter boxes, all that stuff, that didn't happen organically. It was designed in boardrooms and think tanks in Washington DC.

It was rolled out like franchises throughout the country in order to defund public schools, in order to privatize public education. Those ideas on their face are not just unpopular. They're only held by about 10% of the population, the people who are millionaires and billionaires.

People want their children to get better educations, but they give it the cover, which is why Donald Trump is out there talking about poisoning the blood, why we're talking about CRT, why we're talking about gay and trans people. All of that stuff is a cover story that keeps us from talking about what's actually being discussed and what's actually being rolled out.

Ken Harbaugh:

You brought up the assaults on public education, the imposition of a certain vision of morality on public institutions. I would love your reaction to this video of a student taking on Bridget Ziegler.

We've done a couple of pieces on this crazy story of one of the founders of Moms for Liberty. Bridget Ziegler, her husband, I can't remember his name, but head of the Florida GOP, and this salacious scandal that they've been caught up in after years of preaching to other people how they should behave in their own bedrooms. I'm going to share screen and play this and would love your reaction.

Male:

“Bridget, our first ever interaction was when you retweeted a hate article about me from the nationalist while I was a Sarasota County School student. You are a reminder that some people view politics as a service to others, while some view it as an opportunity for themselves.

On this board, you have spent public funds that could have been used to increase teacher pay, to change our district lines for political gain, remove books from schools, target trans and queer children, erase black history and elevate your political career all while sending your children to private schools because you do not believe in the public school system that you've been leading.

My question is, why doesn't an elected official using our money to harm our students and our teachers for her gain seem to matter as much to us as her having a threesome does?

Bridget Ziegler, you do not deserve to be on the Sarasota County School Board, but you do not deserve to be removed from it for having a threesome. That defeats the lesson we've been trying to teach you, which is that a politician's job is to serve their community, not to police personal lives.

So, to be extra clear, Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job, not because you had sex with a woman.”

Ken Harbaugh:

I don't know about you, but young people give me hope.

Jared Yates Sexton:

They do as well. I spent over a decade as a college professor and every single day outside of being frustrated by certain administrative problems, which we don't need to talk about, I was inspired by them constantly.

I love what happened there. I love that this student went ahead and made sure not to shame the person for their hypocrisy, but to go ahead and point out why the actual problem is.

And what happens here. And this is important because we got really, really focused for many years, I call it the Daily Show effect. We got very focused for many years in always pointing out the hypocrisy of the Republican Party, and conservatives. Like, look what you said today, look what you did tomorrow.

They don't care about that. They actually don't because that hypocrisy, it only points out something which is these principles are never real. They're not actual principles, they're weapons. The Republicans run up deficits. They're not actual fiscal conservatives, they're not social conservatives. Lauren Boebert cannot be reached for comment on this. They're not interested in small government. They want government everywhere.

What they are interested in is they're interested in a two-tiered reality, which is a reality where they can do whatever they want, and other people are going to be put in their place. And whether it's the legal system or the government or economics, you name it.

And here's the reason why. Deep at the heart of the Republican Party and conservatism is the idea of what's called a natural hierarchy. They truly believe that they are better than other people, and that democracy gets in the way.

This has been the same thing from the very beginning. It's at the heart of all the arguments we're having. This is why they don't care about giving up national secrets when Trump is president. This is why they don't care about running down America when they're not in power.

It's because it does not matter. The only thing that matters is that they get what they want. The hypocrisy is just one of the features. It's not a way to necessarily destroy them because those principles were never real to begin with.

Ken Harbaugh:

You believe that we're living through an ethical moment. Can you explain that? And hopefully, offer a vision for how we come out of this stronger.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah, I'll try and do this as quickly as possible. We have been on this train for a very long time. Trump is a symptom of a much, much larger illness. A healthy, well-run country does not elect Donald Trump president. This doesn't happen.

Basically, over the last 50 years, we have watched a redistribution of trillions of dollars on purpose from middle- and working-class people to the wealthiest. We've created a historic inequality. Guess what history tells us?

When you have that inequality, things don't work. Eventually things start breaking down. And when things start breaking down, and when America, which has been completely co-opted by these things, and again, Midnight Kingdom, I looked at the history of corporations and the wealthy. You know what happens when they get that historic wealth? They start to buy off the government. They start to corrupt the government.

All of a sudden, you look around, you don't have representative government. You have basically a tool of the wealthiest people, which is what has happened.

We have reached a point where people do not have trust in this government. We've reached a point where people do not have trust in this country. Now we're facing a crisis in which things are not going to work unless something changes.

So, either we go ahead, and we start making sure that people can live better lives. We start living up to those principles that we're talking about, and we create a fairer and working society, or the authoritarians who are backed by the same people, who also backed the Nazis and the fascists because these things happen every single time, the exact same way. They are going to go ahead and implement changes in this country that are going to make our lives much, much worse.

The answer is this, and this is why I'm optimistic. You have people with absolutely no training starting unions and beating up historically wealthy corporations. They're holding up Starbucks and Google and Amazon, the UAW racked up major wins this year.

Ken Harbaugh:

Which cascaded.

Jared Yates Sexton:

It's a giant movement. And yes, they've done it without a lot of political help. They've been political orphans largely. On top of that, you brought up young people, they don't have time for this nonsense. They're tired of it, and they're demanding things change.

This looks a lot like the 60s and the 70s looked. We are sort of coming to this point, and the good news in all of this is when the authoritarian right does rise up in power and starts carrying out power plays like the one that we're watching right now, there is always a counterbalance. There's always a group of people that say, “No, this is terrible. We need to fight against it.”

There is hope here, but it's going to take grassroots work, and it's going to take us realizing that democracy is more than showing up at the voting booths every four years. It is a lifestyle, and it's a way that you have to carry out your entire existence.

Ken Harbaugh:

The effectiveness of that counterbalance, though, in our context, depends on democracy working.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yes.

Ken Harbaugh:

And let me give you the terrifying case in point that we're living through in Ohio right now. We passed by an overwhelming margin issue one, which is supposed to codify reproductive rights in our state constitution.

Do I need to tell you what the Ohio State legislature run by Republicans has decided to do with that referendum? Do you know the backstory?

Jared Yates Sexton:

I'm absolutely shocked to discover gambling in this establishment.

Ken Harbaugh:

So, that's the weak point in our system. The assumption is that if the Democratic will can be expressed, the ship can ride itself. But in situations where the democratic will is expressed and ignored, how long before the pitchforks come out?

Jared Yates Sexton:

Well, I'll go ahead and say this. One of my biggest disappointments is as Roe v. Wade was struck down by a stolen supreme court, the response was not just inadequate, it was shameful. Basically, we have left God knows how many women and people in red states completely without any representation or we're only starting to see the real consequences of this.

And I've heard a lot of strategists and communications people say, “This is great for voting.” No, it's not. You need to take care of people.

I also lived in Georgia for over a decade, you know who's exhausted? People of color in the South who have been working day in and day out to register people to vote. And basically, all they've heard is, “That's great. I'm glad you're taking care of it.”

These are things that have to be addressed. And this is one of the reasons why people do have a frustration with the Democratic party is because they'll say a lot of the right things. They'll go ahead and tip their cap to these things that are happening. They don't feel like there's any institutional push behind these things.

So, you do have people in so-called Red States, who feel like they've been abandoned because they have been abandoned. I think Ohio is a great example of this, basically because we don't have a 50-state strategy, Ohio, it's like, well, we can't do anything there. We're not going to use any resources there.

Same thing with Florida. These are states that have just been almost completely abandoned because of electoral map.

But you're right, these people have been pinned into these places. These legislatures have gone … they know what's happening. They know they're historically unpopular. They know this is their chance to go ahead and try and disenfranchise people and try and break the game. And so, that's what they're doing. And it's only predictable. We all knew this was coming, and now it's happening.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can you talk about this sentiment you sometimes hear expressed from the left, in particular elite communities on the left who say that those red states deserve what they're getting. There's even the occasional opinion that we should just let him secede.

And every time I hear that, I mean, I understand the political argument, but I think about the people in those states who are fighting for their communities, who are fighting for their families.

I went to high school in Alabama and writing off a state because it is so thoroughly gerrymandered and voter suppression has reached its highest art form, writing that off because it's politically inconvenient, just frustrates the heck out of me.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah, I'm going to be really frank about this. It pisses me off. I've lived in red states my entire life. I know plenty of people who are trying their hardest. They're there because their family's there. Or by the way, they're there because they're cheaper to live in because they've been sort of hollowed out. You know what I mean?

There are millions of good people who are fighting the good fight, and they deserve your loyalty and respect and empathy.

This idea of just let them secede, or we don't need them anyway, let them starve, or whatever. That mindset is one of our biggest problems that's happening in our politics. We have gotten the electoral college in our mind. We have basically said those people deserve what they get.

Meanwhile, you're not looking at how many people are voting against this and working against this. We need to rediscover, and this is one of the bigger problems of the last 50 years, we need to rediscover that we are interconnected, that all of us depends on anybody.

And listen, I am so frustrated with people who want to write off red states. I'm frustrated by people who tell gay and trans people that they need to be quiet. You need to stop talking about CRT and social justice.

If you sacrifice people to this machine, the machine doesn't stop. You cannot reckon with them. The only thing that you can do is put up a united front. And it is way, way past time that we put up a united front against this thing.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm glad you talked about those groups within the Democratic coalition that are told to be quiet, that are marginalized even within that coalition. Because my take is just the opposite.

When so-called culture war issues rise to the top of our political priorities, we tend to win them because it turns out most Americans don't like bullies. They are ashamed of their racist uncle. And they believe in general, in fairness, as my wife often points out just about every house in America has a gender-neutral bathroom in it.

I think when those so-called cultural war issues become politically salient, we tend to win those wars.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah. So, here's the great news in all of this. The Republican Party is genuinely upsetting. They lose all these elections because they're getting in people's faces and they're like, “What about trans people?” And people are like, “Good God, leave me alone. This is disgusting and weird.”

Thank God the Moms for Liberty put people off because they're just in people's faces. You're right. Not only is it a viable electoral strategy, also we have a problem. And the problem is this, the coalition or the supposed coalition that is opposing what we're talking about, this authoritarian right-wing movement, it's a very wide umbrella.

It goes from the left or the supposed left, what exists of it anymore, all the way over to never Trump. Republicans that I need to remind people are the people who ran the Republican Party that became Trump's Republican party. Who were trying to make the Democratic Party more like the old Republican party.

So, what is happening in all this is that moderates and centrists, they don't really want to change anything. They'll put up a Black Lives Matter sign on their lawn, they'll post something that is supposedly going to show them as a good, thoughtful person.

Meanwhile, they don't want critiques of anything that is actually going to make them uncomfortable or possibly upset the privilege and the affluence that they have.

This is a major problem that we have in our media. This is a major problem that we have in our political class, which is we need to understand, and this isn't a comfortable thing to say, and I really don't like saying it, and just, people need to understand it.

When fascist and authoritarian regimes grow that middle that we're talking about, it splits. Some of them end up against it, and a lot of them end up with it because they're … you read a lot of things from the 30s. It's like, “Oh God, Hitler is a brute, but I'm glad that he is opposing the communist.”

There's a lot of that happening in this country. Our understanding of our politics isn't nuanced enough. We need to update it because these are serious times, and we need to get serious about it.

Ken Harbaugh:

I want to read for you to close us out one of my favorite paragraphs from your book and would just love your thoughts on it. You say, “Wielding the remaining elements of cultural Christianity, including its prophecies of hidden machinations and fear of persecution, conservatives have continually attempted to destroy liberalism, taking advantage of opportunities to crack down on individual liberties and reassert control lost in liberalization.”

Jared Yates Sexton:

Yeah. So, if you actually take a look at history the founding of the United States is really weird. It, of course was like a patriarchal elitist formation. But also, you know what? They recognized that religion had created years and years of war and death.

They looked over at Europe and they looked at the fight between Catholicism and evangelicalism. And they said, we don't want any of that.

And so, basically, they tried to construct a system that could get beyond that. From that very moment, from the moment of the enlightenment, from the moment that the idea of liberal democracy was supposed to exist, conservatives — and this is telling when it happened in America, when it happened in France after the revolution, what did they say? Satanic conspiracy. The Jews are doing this.

They've been against it from the very beginning. When it works for them, absolutely, they love the will of the people. When it works against them, they want to utterly destroy it. And we are at a point where it works against them. They're looking to destroy it and completely subvert it.

Ken Harbaugh:

Jared, thanks so much for joining us. We got to do this again.

Jared Yates Sexton:

Absolutely. Anytime. I loved it.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks again to Jared for joining me. Make sure to check out his book, The Midnight Kingdom. The link is in the show description.

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

For updates and more, follow us on Twitter at Team_Harbaugh. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to rate, and review.

Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs. And Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

Hide Transcript