Bioneers

08/06/2025

As the U.S. approaches the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution next year, the Republic is in the throes of a hostile takeover by the same kinds of imperial monarchs and oligarchs the rebels sought to overthrow. At this hinge moment when the climate emergency demands an immediate systemic civilizational overhaul, this retrograde counter-revolution is working to drill, baby, drill, make feudalism great again, and colonize Mars.

As the late Mike Davis put it, “In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds.”

We have to believe that sufficient forces in the country will mobilize to stop this imperial coup in its tracks. The one certainty is that we’re living through times of radical uncertainty. Flocks of black swan events are poised to derail their best-laid plans. Their policies are so wildly unpopular and warped that a raging popular backlash is inevitable as the harms hit home.

No matter the odds, we’ve got to unwaveringly keep advancing the life-affirming work of restoring nature and people. The policy is not complicated. Taking care of nature means taking care of people – and taking care of people means taking care of nature.

Meanwhile, nature has stopped knocking and is simply blowing the doors off. As civilization is brought to its knees, slouching toward sustainability is not an option. Our salvation depends on regenerating the vitality of our ecosystems while leaning into community, connection and belonging – holding close the love, justice, diversity and equity that weave true democracy.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen,” offers lucid political perspective. “Authoritarianism, at its core, is about restricting or eliminating the rights of the many and giving vast new liberties to the very few… It rearranges government so that the rich can become even richer. The corruption and entitlement will be so extreme that the eyes of many will be opened.

“And then, one day, there will be a reckoning.It will come after the revelations and realizations of the terrible damage done by this autocratic government to the social safety net, to data privacy, to our well-being, to the very concept of human dignity in labor and life.

“From this reckoning,” she concludes, “we can work to realize democracy’s potential as the expression of social justice, inclusivity, equity, and solidarity, and love.”

It’s important to understand what we’re facing. It’s the predictable climax of a 50-year power grab launched by big business in the 1970s to re-capture the government. The mission has been to demolish the reforms that improved the lives of the many with the New Deal and the Great Society and War on Poverty programs of the ’60s. The oligarchs have used the fog of culture war to cancel the social revolutions of racial justice, feminism, gay rights and the environmental movement.

Project 2025 is the apex of these savage policies, whose shadow architect Russell Vought now heads of the critical Office of Management and Budget. The agenda is the same old song: massive tax cuts for the rich, promiscuous deregulation, insatiable privatization, and the clear-cutting of social programs and services.

As the zealous ideologue boasted, “I would rather burn this money in a parking lot than have it go for the types of things it is going for.”

As ProPublica points out, “Vought’s plan has been to do as much damage as possible to the machinery of the state in a short window of time, crippling it to the point that it ceases to properly function and can’t be easily put back together — or justifies further dismantling.”

In other words, it’s asymmetric warfare by nihilists who’d rather burn it down than lose.

Here the plot thickens. In his book “Crack-up Capitalism,” historian Quinn Slobodian chronicles the rise of a mutation of world-historic importance – capitalism without democracy. As the arch-libertarian tech billionaire and now political kingmaker Peter Thiel summed up “anarcho-capitalism” in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Sometimes called “zonal capitalism,” Thiel’s brand of “anarcho-capitalism” pierces holes in nation states to liberate and shelter mobile global capital from any societal constraints or obligations. There are now between 5,400 to 7,000 of these special zones worldwide. They’re essentially glorified company towns operated under corporate law, untethered from state regulation.

They now comprise an interlinked web of global command-and-control financial centers, from Hong Kong, Singapore and Shenzen to London, Dubai and South Africa. Historian Nils Gilman calls it “plutocratic secession.”

At their most extreme, anarcho-capitalists such as the intellectual godfather Murray Rothbard have ardently advocated that all services be purchased through the market, with no social safety net whatsoever. Contracts replace constitutions. People are no longer citizens of a place, but clients of a menu of service providers.

Rothbard and company’s ideology subscribes to biologically hard-wired racial hierarchy and the Great Replacement Theory – just as Peter Thiel has said giving women the vote was a mistake.

As Rothbard summed it all up: “We shall repeal the twentieth century.”