Raw America Managing Editor Carl Gibson recently sat down with author and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton of the “Dispatches from a Collapsing State” Substack. They discussed the far right’s strategy for staying in power after Trump, and the insidious nature of right-wing populists like Tucker Carlson co-opting progressive language to radicalize new audiences. They also discussed how the Democratic Party has failed to meet the moment by shying away from making class-based arguments. And they covered the revolutionary potential of a general strike along with the organizing opportunity presented by the backlash to both AI and data centers proliferation. And they ended by offering ways Americans can maintain hope and as the U.S. empire enters a period of accelerating decline.
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Tucker Carlson’s Faux Populist Playbook
Gibson opened by asking Sexton about his recent essay “The Fascist Feint: Tucker Carlson and Faux Leftist Commentary.” Tucker Carlson has been discussed as a potential 2028 presidential candidate and Sexton observed that the far-right commentator is deliberately co-opting progressive language to stay relevant after Donald Trump leaves office.
“A right-wing movement doesn’t just suddenly wake up one day and they’re like, ‘Hey, we like democracy now,’” he said. “They grow worse.”
Sexton argued that MAGA figures actually view Trump as a moderate who is too soft on nationalism, and that Carlson has been positioning himself to capture that energy.
According to the author and political analyst, what Carlson is doing follows a well-worn historical pattern: make the necessary critique of capitalism and economic betrayal, but redirect the resulting anger away from the owner class and toward vulnerable working-class communities with no actual institutional power.
“The right wing does a very simple trick,” Sexton said. “They say, ‘yeah, capitalism isn’t working’ — or they don’t ever say capitalism, because they don’t want to address the actual system — they say there’s corruption, you have been betrayed, and then on behalf of the wealth class, they go ahead and say, ‘oh, we’ll tell you who did this,’ and it’s always vulnerable people.”
Can the Left Find Common Ground With Tucker’s Audience?
Gibson pressed Sexton on whether there are areas like opposing foreign wars and decriminalizing drugs where progressives and Tucker Carlson’s audience might find common cause, even if Tucker himself is a bad actor.
Sexton acknowledged the question but urged caution. While he said some Trump voters are genuinely reachable through class-based arguments, the danger is that Carlson’s critiques, even when they sound reasonable, are drawing people toward a dangerous project.
“We have to understand they’re not making this critique in good faith,” Sexton said. “They’re making it as political strategy to bring people into a project that is about capturing power.”
He also noted that many people in Carlson’s audience don’t realize how far they’ve drifted until it’s too late. He argued the key to reaching persuadable people is abandoning partisan stereotypes and having direct conversations about how the working class has been betrayed by the wealthy elite and the politicians they own.
Where the Democratic Party Falls Short
Gibson asked Sexton why Democrats — with a few notable exceptions like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar — seem unable to make the kind of trans-partisan, class-based arguments that could actually win people over.
Sexton was blunt: the Democratic Party is too beholden to the same donor class to make an honest critique of the system that’s oppressing the working class.
“It’s a captured party that is doing the bidding of billionaire benefactors who pay for all of this,” he said.
Sexton pointed to the already-emerging framework around “Project 2029” — a Democratic Party policy playbook that until recently was spearheaded by Jeffrey Epstein associate Larry Summers — as evidence that even a post-Trump Democratic majority would fail to address the underlying material conditions that gave rise to fascism in the first place.
“The cycle that we live in,” Sexton explained, “is that a Republican gets in office, they break all kinds of rules and laws, they take more and more power, and they run up the debt, they crash the economy, and then a Democrat comes in and they promise a lot of things — ‘but guess what, we just don’t have the resources right now.’”
The “Dispatches from a Collapsing State” publisher argued that manufactured culture war issues like transgender bathroom access are deliberately created by the right in order to prevent Americans from uniting around class issues.
“These issues are created in order to divert us,” Sexton said.
The Biggest Lesson from the Minneapolis General Strike
Gibson cited Sexton’s essay from January entitled “Shut It Down,” which he wrote at the height of the Trump administration’s ICE crackdown in Minneapolis. Sexton wrote about how tens of thousands of residents responded to the crackdown by organizing with local business owners to conduct a one-day general strike that ultimately contributed to a strategic retreat by federal authorities. Gibson asked Sexton whether targeted general strikes in key sectors —like trucking, nursing and education — could be an effective tool against the current administration.
Sexton said the potential for this kind of action is greater than most people realize, and that the primary obstacle is more psychological than logistical.
“This can end tomorrow,” Sexton said. “This whole facade, this whole crisis, this erosion, the growth of fascism, it could end tomorrow. What this relies on is a fear that has been instilled in us.”
Sexton argued that capitalism has deliberately destroyed American solidarity with each another, pointing to the assault on labor unions and social structures to ensure that American workers remain too precarious and too isolated to organize. However, he also said an economic collapse may change the calculus quickly, pointing to botj Bolivia’s recent general strike and South Korea’s response to its attempted coup as models.
“None of this works without us,” Sexton said. “We’ve been convinced that politics, that our representative government, is more important than us, that corporations are more important than us. We can stop, because the participation in capitalism is the only thing that keeps this thing going.”
The Organizing Opportunity Against AI Nobody Is Talking About
Gibson observed the backlash against AI and data centers, in which AI infrastructure is being forced on communities across the country — at the expense of water access and farmland — represents a rare and powerful organizing opportunity that transcends partisan lines.
Sexton agreed, calling data centers “the most uniting thing for people to go against.” He noted that opposition to AI and data centers draws together people who are concerned about environmental issues as well as rising energy bills, declining property values and job security. He added this coalition that would be nearly impossible to assemble around any traditional political issue.
“It just so happens that the hated and universally opposed product is the only product of an oligarchical, fascist, anti-human group,” Sexton said.
Sexton also argued that the broader “enshittification” of the internet — a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow — is creating organic openings for class-based conversations. When someone complains that they can’t watch their local baseball team without paying for multiple subscriptions, or that their Google search no longer works, and they ask “why doesn’t somebody do something about that?” — Sexton proposed that could be a doorway to deeper conversations.
“It cracks the entire edifice open,” he said, “and suddenly you’re not talking about who’s going to win in the midterms. You’re talking about class politics.”
Grieving the Empire and Building What Comes Next
Gibson closed by asking Sexton about his essay “Death to Empire: Trump, China, and Moving Beyond This Wretched Order,” and what ordinary Americans who are frustrated and searching for agency can do to maintain hope for themselves and their children.
Sexton opined that Americans need to move through a period of genuine grief about the end of U.S. dominance, and then recognize that what they are losing was always built on exploitation.
“The things that made our so-called first world lives so comfortable have come on the backs of exploitation, slave labor, coups [and] wars. Just violence upon violence upon exploitation upon exploitation,” he said. “We made a deal with the devil, which was capitalism.”
He rejected the nostalgic politics of both Trumpism and mainstream Democratic Party incrementalism, suggesting that a retreat to the past is no longer an option. According to Sexton, the lure of fascism may offer the promise of recapturing a lost greatness, but that’s a dangerous illusion that only leads to self-destruction.
“We can have better lives,” he said. “We deserve better than what we’ve got right now. We have to be honest with ourselves and accept that it’s falling apart — and that you can build something better on the other side of it. That opportunity is there.”
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