For the first time since the time of the American and French revolutions, Pluto is in the astrological sign of Aquarius. Astrologers consider this a very big deal—presumably because everything you heard about the Age of Aquarius in that the song from Hair is true. Astrologers seem to love Pluto, which astronomers only discovered in 1930 and then reclassified as a “dwarf” in 2006. Astrologers wasted little time in obsessively following the planet’s 248-year orbit around the sun, and they call this March 23 crossing “Pluto’s return.”

Since I learned what astrologers think about Pluto’s movements a few years ago, this small, cold planet has been my mascot for earthly behaviors that I don’t understand. For instance, it seems to me that American voters who call themselves independents are secretly longing for some extra-worldly force to knock them heedlessly in love with authoritarian rule. Even those who don’t yet feel it—the MAGA craziness—want to feel it. It seems like they intentionally put themselves in places (i.e., watching Fox News) where such a conversion might silently occur. In the face of so many Americans metaphorically holding up theirs arms and yelling “Take me!,” the magical thinking of astrology doesn’t seem all that weird.

Astrologers believe that Pluto rules over the shadow side of everything and everyone. According to their magical logic, Pluto in tandem with Aquarius will shake everything from the bottom up—out with the old (violently) and in with the new—and eventually deliver a world that is much different but also much better. Sounds OK if Pluto is on your side. But what if Pluto is on the other side . . . the authoritarian side, the Putin side? Who, after all, ever declared that astrology was even democratic? The only hedge we have is that Pluto goes back and forth between Aquarius and Capricorn over the next year and a half until it finally parks itself in Aquarius until 2044.

So what have we seen so far with this rare transition? For one thing, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the grand jury criminal indictment of Trump on March 30. When unsealed on April 4, the indictment showed that the grand jury had voted to charge Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. This time around with Trump and a movement of Pluto, it wasn’t mythology that sprang to my mind but Shakespeare. That’s because Trump’s overnight rage-posting has taken on the sanctimonious whining of King Lear: “I will do such things— / What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!”

In mythology, when a god no longer has the power to hurl lightning bolts, he gets cut from the script. Not so with Shakespeare. The point at which a human god becomes an ex-bolt-hurler is the moment everything starts—when payment comes due for power that was both ill-gotten and ill-used. Since the announcement of the indictment, Trump has made grievance his one and only message: “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning”! (And you will note the Cordelia favorite keeping a quiet distance while Goneril and Regan float ever more dangerous conspiracy theories.)

Another thing we just saw with Pluto in Aquarius was Fox News’ April 18 agreement to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million. The settlement averts a trial in Dominion’s lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s network for pushing Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election. The settlement was announced just as opening statements were supposed to begin in a case that would probably have required Murdoch and his lie-telling hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity to testify.

Lest you think that this is some fast work on the part of Pluto, remember that Rupert Murdoch controls the minds of 2.2 million Americans every night. (And the clips from Fox shows that get posted to social media and talked about on right-leaning podcasts reach many millions more.) On October 7, 1996, Fox News sicced itself on a U.S. audience hungry and ready for extreme right propaganda presented as “fair and balanced.” Murdoch and his founding CEO, Roger Ailes, knew that it was time. Why? Perhaps there was something in the air. Peak stupid, you might call it. Two years before, America seemed enamored with the “stupid is as stupid does” ethos of Forrest Gump, outdone only by Dumb and Dumber, an adult version of everything eight-year-olds loved about Home Alone. It was palpable, Americans’ frustration with a world changing too fast, with all this complexity on the nightly news. And to make matters worse, in the upcoming presidential election, Republican candidate Bob Dole did not sound all that different from the incumbent Democrat. These two guys appeared to be friends, just like Clinton and Helmut Kohl. Where was the Monday Night War of the WWF? Where were the paternity tests of Maury Povich?

Yes, the stars were aligned for Ailes and Murdoch despite Bill Clinton’s victory. They realized that Americans wanted the complexity removed and the contrast (preferably stark) put back in, just like in the British tabloids, where Murdoch had played politics for decades. Since its launch in 1996, Fox News has been phenomenally successful at making the most extreme elements of the Republican party appear to be the status quo. By the time of Trump’s presidency, it was the most-watched network in cable news history.

Yet another thing that happened after Pluto’s move was the season premiere of Succession, the crème de la crème of prestige TV. People love the acting and the writing, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to stomach our obsessive platforming of extreme wealth. Americans just won’t let go of this shared identity as “the ruled” when it comes to generationally wealthy families holding on to undemocratic power. Every TV drama that has achieved critical mass in the past decade is about money, power, and bloodlines: Game of Thrones, The Queen, Yellowstone, Succession. With the super-rich, we study the clothes and the brands, the interiors and the landscapes. We say “Aren’t they terrible,” but we seem to have this void in our lives that only their mythology can fill.

If people binged on history and not just TV, they’d know that a large percentage of the super-rich have worked to destroy our democracy for the past 50 years. At the start of Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s bestseller about the Koch brothers and other billionaires bankrolling the radical right, she describes a secret desert meeting called by Charles Koch in 2009—a real Masters of the Evil Universe affair—to undermine any and all of President Obama’s efforts to lessen income inequality in the wake of the recession. It’s stomach-turning reading one bio after another of these pathologically greedy men, most of whom had made it their life passion to nullify income tax, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and all federal regulatory agencies.

Whatever magic Pluto’s Return might deliver to earthlings over the next 21 years, Americans direly need to turn its “bottom up” vibe on themselves. Although Democrats loathe the tactics that made Rupert Murdoch a billionaire, we love being entertained by the corrosive wit of Brian Cox, his Logan Roy prototype. We need to recognize our quiet complicity in this decades-long evil billionaire project of building the radical right that got Trump elected. Why is it we care less about “the people’s house” (i.e., the Capitol) than about how many houses particular people own?

And we need to stop being duped by a mainstream media that has become a Trump-enabling Fox Lite. Alex Shephard in The New Republic rightly blasted the media’s “dumb” and “desperate” nonstop commentary the day Trump had to appear in court. I dropped off CNN when either Jake Tapper or Anderson Cooper asked Andrew McCabe to comment on Trump’s courtroom expression like he was a preschool teacher explaining pictures on flashcards. The thing that is “historic and unprecedented” is not that a former president was being indicted at all; it’s what he did as a sitting U.S. president on January 6, 2021.

Two years after Trump’s exit from the White House, America is still living under the darkness of Pluto’s Helmet, what I think of as a force that conceals our true nature from ourselves. While Trump himself keeps his immorality and stupidity in full view, his infiltrated party is working with much more opacity to spread the fear, the doubt, the intellectual sloth, the civic turpitude across every demographic of this country. And it seems to be working because we are still drowning in lies. I would like to believe that this Age of Aquarius will shake things up in a good way, that we will finally be able to repair the massive societal damage that this mass deception has done. But . . . well, to paraphrase an American visionary of 1994: magic is as magic does. §