Its all Over Now: A Woke Memoir
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This blog post is a little different. Instead of the usual political dissection with surgical snark, I’m here to tell you—I’m writing a memoir. Yes, a memoir. Midlife crisis? Perhaps. But more like a mid-democracy crisis.
I moved to the U.S. from the UK in 1978, full of hope, curiosity, and an unreasonably large suitcase. America, I believed, was “the last best hope of mankind.” I didn’t expect it to be perfect—just better than Thatcherism with a flag on fire. But I sure as hell didn’t expect this: a nation that would elect a criminal, conspiracy-spewing carnival barker—not once, but twice. A man whose greatest achievement is convincing millions that felony charges are a sign of leadership, not, say, a reason to revoke someone’s library card.
This book—It’s All Over Now: A “Woke” Memoir—is my attempt to make sense of what happened, not through another dry policy autopsy, but through my own immigrant experience: studying, working, voting, despairing. From Congress to the Clinton administration, I’ve been inside the sausage factory of democracy—and I can confirm, some of the meat is rancid.
Now, here’s a sneak peek at the opening…
Introduction (Preview)
When I left England in 1978, it was a country running on resentment, lukewarm tea, and train delays. The Winter of Discontent had turned into the Spring of Nope. Strikes were everywhere—gravediggers, trash collectors, road hauliers. If you wanted to be buried, your best bet was a compost heap.
Meanwhile, London wasn’t literally burning—but The Clash sure made it sound like it was:
"London's burning with boredom now..."
And frankly, they weren’t wrong.
I got out with a one-way ticket to the University of Michigan, arrived in Ann Arbor and felt like I’d stepped onto a movie set—gothic buildings, sunshine, students discussing Plato and Pink Floyd with equal enthusiasm. This, I thought, was the future. America was modern, multicultural, and marvelously optimistic and such a believer in higher education that it supported world-class research facilities, medical school, libraries, law school, art galleries and sports facilities.
And now?
Now that the movie has been canceled as Michigan, like many Ivy League and Non Ivy League campuses, are living in fear that their federal funding will be cut, international students banned from their campuses, and their personnel decisions will be questioned as biased against white males. How did this felon, who was, according to one of his teachers, the dumbest students he ever had the pleasure of teaching, how did this reality TV star, who once described disinfectant as a COVID cure and reality as “fake news,” now appoint himself the higher education tsar?
From Dreamland to Dystopia
Back then, America felt forward-facing. Sure, the UK had Churchill and warm beer, but the U.S. had NASA, jazz, and sitcoms where nobody seemed to work but everyone lived in huge apartments. When I stepped off the plane the movie set came to life. The optimism wasn't manufactured; it was structural. Here was a country coming off a bicenntinnial celebrations that made clear that patriotism despite the tragedies of Viet Nam, despite Nixon’s disgraceful fall from power that believed in its own narrative that it was an exceptional country blessed with natural resources beyond compare, buffered from wars by two oceans, supplier of most of the world’s food, cars, machinery, airplanes, weapons-you name it.
But now?
Now “Yes We Can” has been replaced by “I Alone Can Fix It,” which, spoiler alert, he couldn’t. What we got instead was Diet Fascism: now with 34 felony counts, multiple civil convictions, and the world’s angriest Twitter clone.
Wasn’t January 6 not to mention his completely callous and way he presided over the covid pandemic with the Lancet estimating that 40% of US deaths during 2020 from COVID-19 would have been averted if the USA had death rates equivalent to those of the other G7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom) That is approximately 180,000 excess deaths that could have been prevented with a response comparable to other wealthy nations.
To put this in perspective, that's more American deaths than:
The entire Vietnam War (58,000)
World War I (116,000)
The Korean War (36,000)
Then, how about January 6? With nine people killed ( when you include the subsequent police suicides) how about the 34 felony convictions? How about the 34 felony counts, which legally count as one conviction with multiple counts?
Wait, How Did We Get Here?
That’s the question, isn’t it? How did the country that defeated Hitler end up electing someone who name-drops Putin like he's a drinking buddy? How did the party of Lincoln become the party of QAnon fan fiction?
Philip Roth saw it coming, though even he seemed stunned by his own prescience, writing after the first Trump electoral victory. "No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today," he wrote, capturing the bewilderment of anyone who thought they understood this country. " No one (except perhaps the acidic H.L. Mencken who famously described American democracy as 'the worship of jackals by jackasses'), could have imagined that the 21st century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell'arte figure of the boastful buffoon."
The clues were always there, scattered through the decades like breadcrumbs leading to this moment. Murray Rothbard, writing in the 1960s, had identified the destructive strain in American conservatism that would eventually devour the movement itself. The paranoid style that Richard Hofstadter had diagnosed, the anti-intellectual backlash that had simmered beneath the surface even during the post-war boom—all of it was waiting for the right catalyst to transform from fringe sentiment into governing philosophy.
But recognizing the signs in retrospect doesn't answer the deeper question: what was it about America itself that made this transformation possible? Was there something in the soil, as I put it in those dark moments after the 2016 election, something in the air or the soul of this country that had always carried the seeds of its own undoing?
The globalization project that had seemed so promising in 1978 had begun to backfire by the time I was writing about it in 2022: "As globalization backfires and populists started to win the argument that it contains more challenges for people than it solves, the race is now on for who can now create their sphere of influence and protect them." The very interconnectedness that had made American prosperity possible had also made American workers expendable. The same trade networks that had spread American influence had also spread American jobs to places where labor was cheaper and regulations were looser.
The transformation didn't happen overnight. It took decades of preparation—the systematic undermining of shared sources of truth, the cultivation of grievance as a political strategy. Right-wing talk radio had been the beginning, creating echo chambers where reality could be bent to fit ideology. Fox News had industrialized the process, turning propaganda into prime-time entertainment. Social media had democratized it, allowing every citizen to become their own minister of information.
By the time Trump descended that escalator in 2015, the groundwork had been laid. Americans were already living in different realities, consuming different facts, operating from different premises about what their country was and what it could become. He didn't create the division; he simply recognized it and decided to profit from it.The signs were there. Hofstadter warned us with The Paranoid Style. Roth wrote novels that read like prophecy. Even H.L. Mencken, that misanthropic wizard, saw it coming:
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Well, H.L., we’re definitely getting it good and hard.
We laughed at Sarah Palin, rolled our eyes at birthers, and let talk radio turn into rage radio. Social media poured gasoline on the whole thing and handed matches to your uncle who thinks George Soros controls the weather.
By the time Trump rode down that escalator like a fascist-themed mall Santa, the groundwork was already there. Tribal media, shattered trust in institutions, and a political culture that confused cruelty for candor.
Why Write This Now?
Because I still don’t fully understand how it happened—not just once, but twice.
Was it:
A virus in the American operating system, left over from slavery, genocide, and centuries of exceptionalism?
The media’s cowardice, the public’s amnesia, and the GOP’s moral bankruptcy?
Facebook?
Probably all of the above. But I need to unpack it—not with footnotes, but with feelings. Not just as a political observer, but as someone who fell in love with an idealized America, only to watch it collapse into an actual reality show where the season finale might be a cross between The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games .
What the Memoir Is
This book is about the space between that dream and this nightmare.
It’s about what I saw from inside the government and what I missed entirely.
It’s about the distance between the America of 1978—sunny, bold, self-assured—and the America of 2025, where you need a VPN to access banned books and a body camera just to vote.
It’s about my journey—from hope to heartbreak—and the questions that haunt me:
Was this decline inevitable?
Did I miss the warning signs?
Can we turn this around?
Or should I start brushing up on Canadian immigration law?
If you want in on this messy, emotional, darkly funny, occasionally furious journey, you can sign up here for updates and pre-orders.
And if you’ve ever looked at the news and shouted, “WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL IS GOING ON?!”—this book is for you.
It's a story still being written, and I'm not sure how it ends. For more chapters sign up to receive the pre-publication copy.
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