| | | Elon Musk is pushing Western democracy to breaking point
Society fails when the rich rule
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are testing to destruction anti-democratic ideas as old as Plato. The leaders of the American right take it for granted that the rich should rule because their wealth makes them wise.
They then take the next step on the road to hell and fall for the delusion that the heroic leadership of strong men will free society from the constraints that “little people” impose on great leaders.
For the good of democracy, they must fail. And it looks as if they will. Far from producing Nietzschean supermen who bestride the globe, the cults of Trump and Musk risk making America poor, weak and friendless. They are cutting the US off from global markets with their tariffs, and alienating America’s allies with their abasement before Vladimir Putin.
If you doubted that the far-right faction in the American plutocracy sees itself as above the constraints of democratic societies, the past few days should have been an education.
Elon Musk is using his wealth – US $327 billion at the time of writing, according to Forbes – to destroy those who dare to take on Donald Trump.
Conservatives once believed in the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary – or at least they assured the rest of us that they did. It is not an exaggeration to say today that in the United States the far right has taken over the conservative movement (without the conservative movement putting up much of a fight, I should add).
Now Musk t hreatens judges, who rule against the new regime, and gives campaign donations – that are bribes in all but name – to Republican politicians willing to attack judges with impeachment proceedings. To back up the threats, he eggs on his armies of Twitter trolls to bully the judiciary online.
Yesterday Trump exceeded his constitutional powers by ordering the closure of the US Department of Education. If judges and politicians in Congress try to stop him, however, they now know what the punishment will be.
As always with intimidation, the effect goes far beyond the chosen targets. The attacks are meant to “ encourager les autres” – to make other judges and politicians think very carefully indeed before crossing the new bosses.
A little fear goes a long way, and America is becoming a land of cowards. Lisa Murkowski, a rare Republican with guts explained that her colleagues were shutting up – staying “zip-lipped” – for fear that they would be “taken down” by Musk.
Musk, meanwhile, has been given the right to fire American public servants at will.
The power of the American plutocracy goes far beyond the United States. The UK government is trying to prevent Musk from buying his way into British politics by funding the extreme right. Indeed, across Europe we are facing the likelihood of Washington and Moscow working together to support the AfD in Germany, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Russian-sponsored proxies in France, Slovakia, and Romania.
Putin’s propaganda will attack us from one side. Musk’s money will attack us from the other.
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It is beyond obscene that the richest man in the world can interfere in democracies across the West, and wreck the American civil service while he is about it.
Of course, rich men and well-funded special interests have always been able to buy influence and access. But what is happening in America today is off the charts. No one – not even Rupert Murdoch in his gruesome prime – comes close to matching it.
The American billionaire class and its courtier intelligentsia are so self-confident they are recycling arguments against democracy that should have been left to compost in the dustbin of history decades ago.
From the 17th through to the late 19th century it was commonplace to think that the rich deserved the vote because their wealth gave them independence. By contrast, the poor and the ordinary were too dependent on others to be trusted with the ballot.
Opposing Britain’s Second Reform Bill, which aimed to extend the franchise, the Victorian parliamentarian Robert Lowe said in 1866 that the vote should remain in the hands of “wealth” and “intellect”. If “the working man” stopped spending his money on “dissipation,” he would be able to use his rising wages to “get the franchise for himself.” In other words, the undeserving poor did not deserve the vote. They were lazy. They were drunk. And if they had power, they would it use to steal money from the wealthy.
Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and the first member of the Silicon Valley elite to support Trump, pulled this old idea from the compost bin.
Indeed, Thiel’s case shows that, for all the claims that the techno-right is at the cutting edge of new ideas, it is merely recycling hackneyed prejudices.
In 2009, in a now infamous essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel wrote:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible…. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Thiel was repackaging old elite fears for the 21st century. The poor (in need of welfare) and women (too soft, too compassionate, and too keen on child benefits) used the franchise to demand higher taxes. As they did so, they drained the vitality from capitalism.
It is a short step from believing that the vote must be confined to prosperous men to believing that only a strong man can free a country from the debilitating demands of women and the poor
Again there is nothing new in such dark dreams, Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century essayist, defender of slavery, and precursor of Nietzsche and fascism , said that democracy was for the dull, little people.
“It means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting-up with the want of them.”
In a wonderful essay on Substack’s Comment is Freed, Sam Freedman shows how, as so often, thinkers the mainstream dismissed will seem more important to historians than the pundits who fill the respectable press.
The cod philosopher, Curtis Yarvin, built an audience in the 2010s by arguing that the power of liberal society in academia and the public sector could only be crushed by a dictator or king. Over time, Yarvin, conscious of his audience among the superrich stopped talking about “monarchs” and instead began talking about a CEO who would run the state – like, for instance, Trump or Musk.
Needless to add Carlyle was Yarvin’s favourite author.
J.D. Vance who was nurtured by Thiel lapped it up, saying in 2021:
“There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things. One has to basically accept that the whole thing is going to fall in on itself. The task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved and then when the inevitable collapse comes you build back the country in a way that’s actually better.”
In the same year he told another journalist that:
“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people….De-Nazification, De-Baathification ... I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”
As the new administration’s appointees smash up the American state as if they were drunks smashing up a bar, they are repackaging a “version of Yarvin’s concept of RAGE ‘Retire All Government Employees’.”
Some political correspondents, Freedman concluded, “are struggling to convey the magnitude of what Musk and his colleagues are attempting. It is still too often being framed – even by those not trying to be partisan – as merely an attempt, however chaotic, to improve efficiency, rather than a much more thorough undermining of the democratic state.”
Just so. And as so often in the past the attack on democracy is producing the usual miserable consequences. The most obvious is the spread of fear.
Remember that the justification for confining the vote to men of property was that they were independent. Wealthy men had no masters. They were frightened of no one and could give their independent judgement without fear or favour. They were not like women and paupers. They had the confidence to build a strong society.
But look at the America Trump and Musk are building. Its politicians are frightened to speak. Its judges are intimidated. Even Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, is so scared he muzzles the Washington Post to please his new masters in the White House.
This is not a nation striding confidently into the future under the leadership of one of Carlyle’s great men of history, or a Nietzschean Übermensch, or even one of Yarvin’s super-CEOs. It is a country under the thumb of vicious and stupid criminals. |
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