Billionaires Are Incompatible With Democracy
Nice little inaugural ceremony yesterday… for the plutocrats. In the Capitol Rotunda— the likes of Elon Musk ($433.9 billion), Jeff Bezos ($239.4 billion), Mark Zuckerberg ($211.8 billion), Bernard Arnault ($179.6 billion), Sergey Brin ($154.0 billion), Miriam Adelson ($31.9 billion), Isaac Perlmutter ($4.9 billion), John Paulson ($3.8 billion), Tim Cook ($2.2 billion), Sundar Pichai ($1.3 billion). They had surrounded Trump, while elected officials were moved to the overflow room to make it less crowded for the oligarch. The billionaires were welcome to bring their spouses; members of Congress weren’t.
Also absent, cast aside: Bannon. Trump, more twisted than ever: “The golden age of America begins right now… My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all these many betrayals that have taken place and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”
Coming up next: inflationary tax breaks for these folks. Before sunrise yesterday, Vox published an essay about the dark vision of the “broligarchs” by Sigal Samuel. Acknowledging that the dominant media narrative about why tech billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos “are sucking up to Donald Trump… either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests. That narrative is not exactly wrong— Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires— but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros— or as some say, the broligarchs— this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image. It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.”
Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.
…All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman”— or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say— is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reader of the philosopher’s work.
The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this— it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys [Dartmouth sociology Professor Brooke] Harrington said.
For one thing, they valorize aggression, which is coded as male. Zuckerberg, who credits mixed martial arts and hunting wild boars with helping him rediscover his masculinity (and is sporting the makeover to prove it), recently told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is too “culturally neutered”— it should become a culture that has more “masculine energy” and that “celebrates the aggression.”
Likewise, Andreessen wrote in his manifesto, “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness— strength.” Musk, meanwhile, has jumped on the testosterone bandwagon, amplifying the idea that only “high T alpha males” are capable of thinking for themselves; he shared a post on Twitter that said, “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”
This idea that most people can’t think for themselves is key to Nietzsche’s idea of the ubermensch. What differentiates the ubermensch, or superman, is that he is not bogged down by common-sense morality (baseless) or by God (dead)— he can determine his own values.
…To escape the control of democratic governments, they are seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, a la Musk and Bezos. But it can also come in the form of “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth— independent mini-nations, carved out of the surrounding territory, where tech billionaires and their acolytes would live according to their own rules rather than the government’s. This is currently Thiel and Andreessen’s favored approach.
With the help of their investments, a startup city called Prospera is already being built off the coast of Honduras (much to the displeasure of Honduras). There are others in the offing, from Praxis (which will supposedly build “the next America” somewhere in the Mediterranean), to California Forever in, you guessed it, California.
The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.”
Crypto, of course, is the broligarchs’ monetary instrument of choice. It’s inherently anti-institutionalist; its appeal lies in its promise to let people control their own money and transact without relying on any authority, whether a government or a bank. It’s how they plan to build these startup cities and network states, and how they plan to supplant the traditional financial system. The original idea of crypto was to replace the US dollar, but since the US dollar is intimately bound up with global finance, undercutting it could reshape the whole world economy.
Trump seems to be going along with this very cheerfully. He’s now pro-crypto, and he’s even proposed creating “Freedom Cities” in America that are reminiscent of startup cities. His alliance with the broligarchs benefits him not only because they’ve heaped millions of dollars on him, but also because of how they’ve undermined the very notion of the truth by shaping a “post-truth” online reality in which people don’t know what to believe anymore. Musk, under the guise of promoting free speech, has made Twitter into a den of disinformation. Zuckerberg is close on his heels, eliminating fact-checking at Meta even though the company said it would be scrupulous about inflammatory and false posts after it played a serious role in a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.
“Even more pernicious is the fact that these guys can control the algorithms, so they can decide what people actually see,” [journalist Gil] Duran said. “The problem is not so much that people can lie— it’s that the system is designed to favor those lies over truth and reality.”
It’s a perfect setup for a president famous for his “alternative facts.”
But the underlying ideology that unites MAGA and the broligarchs is contrary to the aims of most ordinary Americans, including most Trump voters. If the US dollar is weakened and the very idea of the democratic nation-state is overthrown, that won’t exactly “make America great again.” It’ll make America weaker than ever.
Asawin Suebsaeng wrote yesterday that the anti-MAGA elites failed and then abandoned us, “now cashing in, paying millions in protection money, or laughing about what has happened. Others are pretending there was nothing they could do to stop it— and preemptively surrendering now… [Trump] was elected, this time with a plurality of the popular vote, on a platform that is somehow more rancidly authoritarian and anti-democratic, proudly corrupt and abusive, and ethnic-cleansing-prone than his and his party’s platforms were in 2016 and 2020. His personality cult and iron grip on the GOP only grew in the years since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that he instigated, as it did in the years since his first administration produced a four-year-long arterial spray of scandal, barbarism, and abhorrent mismanagement, including during the mass death and economic implosion of the coronavirus pandemic. He and the Republican Party now have trifecta control of the federal government. Trump retakes the White House with a largely demoralized Democratic Party as his opposition, and a far-right Supreme Court supermajority entrenched. The country is theirs, and we will be ruled by the meanest nerds and most nihilistic dorks, who now pretend to speak for a working class they despise.”
Suebsaeng’s point is that “no matter how venal or fascistic Trump is, he was never the sole author of this violent tragicomedy that we’ve endured for a decade, and will continue to endure for years. One morally vacant aristocrat could not have accomplished today on his own. This is all happening because everyone— every one— who was supposed to protect the American people from this failed in the most miserable, unforgivable ways. It was a catastrophic top-to-bottom failure that many millions of people at home and abroad will be living with, now and long after Trump is no longer leader of a nominally free world. Every institution you may have believed had value revealed itself to be for-sale or out-to-lunch... The fact that Trump is being sworn in on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is another small, cruel joke, as if to punctuate the last decade of American life with: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward the bad guy winning, getting away with it, then getting everything he desires. Everyone failed. This afternoon is proof of that, and there is nothing else polite to say. The story of the coming years and eras will likely be not a morality play of undoing the frenzied damage done, but a tragedy where we’re picking up the pieces of what’s left.”
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