Last Chance Ride

Autocracy, democracy, and what’s in store for 2024

I drive the highways of America like I’m reading its palm.

When you live in the center of a nation that does not hold, you see it from all angles. I trace the past lining the roads in ruins. I trace the present in ordinary objects that will turn someday into dated clues, period pieces to a national puzzle. I make a retrospective inquiry because I know that the only way to put things back together is to track how they fall apart.

But I see a hole where the future once was.

The last time I felt like this was in December 2019. I was driving from Arkansas to Missouri when I hit a junction. A sign presented two options. If I turned left, I would hit Success. If I went straight, I would hit St. Louis.

Two roads diverged in an Ozarks wood, and I, I took the one more traveled, and it made no difference because a pandemic knocked out everyone’s future a few months later.

In the years that followed, I thought about that sign. What is Success, really? In Missouri, it is an unincorporated community, recognized but under no one’s control. That is the only kind of success I seek in a world of limits and labels. If I contradict myself, then very well: I am an unincorporated community, I contain multitudes.

*          *          *

It feels like I traveled less than usual in 2023. But when I look back on our family road trips, I realize they span nearly coast to coast. It did not feel like travel because I struggled to get out of my own head.

In March, we drove from Missouri to Oklahoma to Texas to New Mexico to Utah to Arizona and back, revelations about a terminally ill relative ringing in my mind. In May and June, we drove from Missouri to Illinois to Indiana to Ohio to West Virginia to Pennsylvania to New York to Connecticut, for a family reunion to which Death was not invited, but I was afraid he would come anyway.

“Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves — And Immortality —”

— I said to my kids as we watched rain pour down a Casey’s gas station window while my husband filled the tank outside. The kids asked me what I was talking about. I told them not to worry, it was just another resident of my unincorporated community expressing what I could not bring myself to say.

There is an invisible shroud that I’ve worn every day since I heard the news, a cloak that weighed me down until it felt familiar in its burden, and I am scared for the day I have to take it off.

Inside Casey’s, I scan the aisles for clues. You never know what you’ll find in the gas station.  I read bumper stickers like they are prophecies and feed dollars to animatronic wish-filling machines. I analyze Bible verses scrawled in restroom stalls and decode graffiti spraypainted on alleyways.

I do this everywhere we go, all year long. When you know something awful is going to happen, but you don’t know when, you fall into this sort of habit.

We are getting ready to drive south for Christmas, because everything went south in 2023, and we’re fixing to outrun Death once last time.

*          *          *

On road trips, I drink up all the America I can, because the free refill era is over. I used to take these drives for granted, but I don’t now, and I certainly will not in 2024.

It is so beautiful, this country of ours, I will never get over it.

The plains that turn into mountains that turn into desert when we go west. The farmland that turns into forests that turns into beaches when we go east. The Mississippi River that we follow south until it empties into steaming swamps and follow north until we hit lakes that look like oceans. The swirl of people and places and languages and lands; the commercial comforts of chintzy chains; the strangers so warm they make you feel like someone between guest and family – like one of those relatives you call Aunt or Uncle even though they are no biological relation. Like a compatriot, a companion, a fellow American.

There is that sweet surface, and then there are the bodies buried beneath.

Danger lurks on every American road. I drive them all, a cartographer of crime. I search for truth and justice and wind up on The American Way, a path of rampant violence that permeates to the present. You grow up here, you get used to it.

I’m not saying I like it — I hate it — but I know it like my own blood, and recoil at its sight the same way. The American flag, forever at half-staff, waving in the breeze of fresh slaughter.

America has never been a safe country. But the threat of 2024 is different and anti-American: the sterile grip of the mafia state.

I fear that Americans will accept transnational crime masquerading as government as the natural order of things — instead of following the most reliable road in America, the money trail.

I drive the highways of America like I’m reading its palm, and here is what I predict: Plutocrats will again market the corporate imposition of violent demagoguery as the common man’s cheap thrill. Pundits and politicians will — after decades of institutional corruption and erosion of voting rights — pretend that We, The People, choose our fate.

They will tell us we deserve to suffer or deny that we are suffering at all. Worse, they will use our suffering as propaganda for partition.

Talk of secession disgusts me. It is treasonous rhetoric from money-drenched operatives seeking to strip down our country and sell it for parts. It is the rhetoric of abandonment, built on a foundation of lies. There are no red states or blue states. There never were. As I wrote in my book The View from Flyover Country, “America is purple — purple like a bruise.”

There is no part of America I do not love, and there is no part not in pain. Plutocrats want to take advantage of your hurt, sell another region’s agony as a balm for your wounds, and then hurt you some more.

*          *          *

People ask me for more details about what 2024 holds. I addressed those questions years in advance, so it is easy to find the answers.

There is a four-year gap between when my books are derided as flights of fancy and when they are accepted as grim reality.

My first book, The View from Flyover Country, is a collection of essays written between 2012 and 2014 about America’s social, political and economic crises. At the time the essays were published, they were seen as needlessly pessimistic. After Trump won, they were considered common sense. The View from Flyover Country became a bestseller in 2018.

In 2020, my second book, Hiding in Plain Sight, was published. It describes how not only Donald Trump but transnational organized crime infiltrated US institutions — and how Trump’s rise mirrored America’s forty-year decline.

Hiding in Plain Sight was a bestseller despite much of its content being taboo: particularly the sections on mafia activity, espionage, and Jeffrey Epstein. Chapters are full of loose ends that I wish were tied up. The book inspired one individual to create a website to help people do so, which I appreciate.

Hiding in Plain Sight discussed the threat of American autocracy. In 2020, this was dismissed as a fringe concern, but not anymore. Four years later, many of the conclusions of Hiding in Plain Sight have gone mainstream — in a way that I abhor.

Today’s pundits talk about American fascism like it’s inevitable — which it is not. What we are fighting is not even fascism, since fascism requires a loyalty to the state that Trump and his backers do not possess. The real threat is a mafia state autocracy offering up America to the highest bidders, both foreign and domestic. Lies about the nature of the threat are what allows the threat to thrive.

Pundits focus on future fascism to dodge discussion of current complicity. They avoid the question of why every US institution failed to curtail an obvious security threat for decades on end, regardless of which party was in charge. They ignore Biden’s apathy toward an attempted coup and how the US became the first country in world history to allow an unpunished seditionist to run for president again. They present a transnational security crisis as a domestic partisan feud.

For it is easier to reduce the threat of autocracy to one man and one party — and reduce the solution to one day: Election Day. It is easier to tell people to Vote Harder than to ask what will happen to their votes.

My third book, They Knew, describes how US officials knew the information from my first two books, but refused to acknowledge or act on it.

Instead, they feign shock to avoid accountability, enabling the current crisis.

They Knew came out in 2022. If the four-year pattern holds, its insights will become conventional wisdom in 2026. I recommend you get a copy before then, since They Knew is about — among other things — politicians plotting civil war and billionaire fanatics trying to carry out a manmade apocalypse.

Let’s hope I am wrong — or more to the point, that folks who read my analyses act on them, and I am made wrong.

*          *          *

In 2023, I wrote a travel and history book, The Last American Road Trip. It will be published in 2025 in a country that I pray is still comprised of fifty states. It has to be. There is no other home for me than the USA.

I wrote The Last American Road Trip because when the threats you fight against are so obvious and severe, it is easy to forget what you are fighting for. I wrote a love letter, bittersweet as it may be, because my country needed one, and I did too.

I could not function with pain as my primary guide. If I learned anything useful in 2023, it was that.

I spent 2023 in anticipatory grief, and I will spend 2024 in active grief. That is what happens when a loved one is terminally ill. But I refuse to grieve my country and my family in the same year. I will fight for America like it is family, because like family, it shaped me, and I love it, no matter how angry I am with it sometimes.

No one should accept American autocracy as inevitable or deserved. We should never apologize for our desires and demands or consider them secondary to those of people in power, because their power rightfully belongs to us. We should insist that “America be America again”: that the country fulfill overdue promises and redress original sins.

We should keep our expectations high even if we do not think they will be met, because if we do not, we will lose more than America.

The danger and beauty of America is that it is so malleable. That is the origin of the betrayal and the dream. I refuse to accept betrayal and I am not much for dreams. But I know what I love, and what we deserve, and it is not this.

On road trips, I watch my kids gaze out at 21^st-century America, the only version they know. They take for granted that their homeland went to hell. That is why everyone fears their generation, because they see it plain and say so.

I see a hole where the American future once was — but that’s because the future is open-ended. There is no inevitable autocracy and no inevitable democracy. There are only people trying to survive a broken-promise land.

I spent 2023 looking for signs and found that the most reliable compass is in the soul. If we get through these crises, it will be due to our humanity, because that cannot be stolen. You have to surrender it. That kind of surrender does not come natural or easy.

I will not end on a note of optimism or pessimism. My notes are a singular song, a song of myself from the unincorporated community of my mind. They cannot control you if you defy categorization. They cannot manipulate you if you are inscrutable. They cannot buy you if you are not for sale.

And they cannot break you when your love won’t bend.

Note to Everyone: I am taking the last two weeks of December off to be with my family. I probably will not post again until January, but I will return with plenty to say.

Thank you for reading! If you want to support my writing, please consider a paid subscription, so I can keep this newsletter going. See you in 2024!

Monument Valley, March 2023

Route 66, Texas, March 2023

Take me home, Missouri Roads