Kings of the Apocalypse

Forces seeking to maintain a system of private property and privatized profits, exploitation, extraction, domination and inequality are willing to blow it all up rather than change it

Dakota Adams is the 25 year-old son of Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers who was recently sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and evidence tampering in connection with the Jan. 6 riot. He and his mother, Tasha Adams, have been talking to the press about Rhodes’ history of domestic abuse and the intensive scamming at the heart of the Oath Keepers’ operations. Dakota told the Billings Gazette that “it was an inevitability that that he would turn Oath Keepers into his private army. He had a fantasy about being president, but really I think he wanted to see the world go down, and emerge as king of the apocalypse.”

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Reuters

The most recent public spectacle of apocalypse pursuit was the manufactured debt ceiling crisis. An array of forces from the center to the right wing of U.S. politics “negotiated” about the future of the climate and the reach of the paltry social safety net, all under threat of economic catastrophe. The right wing professed a willingness to allow default if student debt payments were not resumed, IRS funding cut back, and work requirements for people needing social assistance were not expanded. The center performed a mode of crisis management that allowed the Biden administration and the Democrats to claim they had beat back the worst and saved the economy. But they basically agreed to relief from oversight for rich tax payers, and expanded extraction of money and labor from the indebted and vulnerable.

This is naked class warfare, neoliberal style. On the right, all pretense of “populism”fell away. Though many far right figures claim to represent the interests of working people, that professed goal was nowhere present at the level of Congressional crisis blackmail. The sheer zeal and glee on display as right wing politicans and pundits approached an imminent catastrophe exposed them as would be kings and queens of the apocalypse, with no long term vision, only a burn-it -to the-ground short term strategy to keep the rich on top.

Ever since the limited expansion of social benefits during the pandemic—a set of policies that seemed to portend a possible end to neoliberal assumptions about the economy—corporate centrist Democrats have reconstituted their power bloc in moves against the left. The have again allied with Republicans and dark money donors to defeat progressive candidates. During the debt ceiling debacle, they danced the dance of the “reasonable’ bipartisan Adults in the Room by negotiating rollbacks to minimally redistributive, slightly green, pandemic era policies. This is a back-to-the-status quo moment, during which the flickering hopes of debtors, tenants, workers, and inhabitants of a living earth are dashed.

Of course, the willingness to crash the system while grabbing goodies on the run is endemic to capitalism, though sometimes countered historically by movements focused on the common good rather than the private haul. The 2008 financial crash was just the most recent instance of systemic corruption, with stability restored by anti-democratic dealmaking among bankers and politicians. It is not just the right wing that is filled with kings of the apocalypse, the broad mainstream center of economic and political players have all been willing to risk collapse in the interests of profit and power.

The threateningly violent spectre of the anti-trans, anti-CRT, pro-gun, anti-abortion forces create the chaos aimed at eroding social solidarities. If things get out of hand and everything blows up, fine. At least the burning system is overseen by the kings of the apocalypse.

This naked class war is deeply intertwined with the so-called culture wars—they are in no way distinct. As Congressional deal makers extract money and labor under threat of imminent economic collapse, culture warriors (funded by many of the same dark money sources as the national politicians) fight to dismantle public education, and public health and to criminalize dissent and protest. The fiercely anti-black, anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-immigrant organizing at the state and local level is fed by the same bllionaires-against -democracy as the efforts to appoint right wing judges, outlaw abortion and bring back child labor. The polemics and harrassment of opponents are designed to attack sources of authority in civil society—e.g. public schools and public health—while restoring the private perogative of hierarchical institutions from the gendered family to the unimpeded racial capitalism of the unaccountable corporation.

Capitalism is incompatible with expansive forms of inclusive democracy—an empowered population will ultimately demand more participation, accountability and material equality than a system of private property for profit can accommodate. The project of limiting or eliminating democracy to preserve the system requires many fronts—compelling labor, expanding indebtedness, extracting resources, attacking progressive social movements, and privating social authority (familial, educational, medical and economic).

This scenario does not really cohere into the threat of a coordinated fascist takeover in the U.S. quite yet. As Matt Christman pointed out in a compelling interview on The Dig podcast, everyone is grabbing what they can and jumping into their privatized life boats, too busy harassing, hoarding and trolling to create any kind of coordinated front.

Our own best hope for countering the chaos is to organize, ally across differences, and intervene on behalf of our best vision of inclusive radical democracy. Yes that’s an easy cliche on the left! But really, without indigenous views of sovereignty and climate care, queer and feminist reimaginings of kinship and intimacy, anti-racist accounts of systemic racial capitalism, immigrant visions of a borderless globe, organized workers’ plans for cooperative economics, disbility activists’ dreams of an accessible world, and more, we can not fight effectively. If the culture warriors can attack the socially vulnerable without mass pushback from the left, then the class warriors (funded by the same forces) will win.