Bernie’s Tour— “Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here”
Things aren’t ominous enough? Historian Janis Mimura is comparing Silicon Valley’s cozying up to Trump with the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government,” resulting, she told Kyle Chayka, in what she dubbed “techno-fascism: authoritarianism driven by technocrats.” [Technology] “is considered the driving force” of such a regime. There’s a sort of technicization of all aspects of government and society.”
Musk is the poster child for this kind of takeover of governance by the billionaire class— and Musk is the poster child for old-fashioned oligarchy, plutocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocacy… the whole gamut… as well.
American corporations of the twentieth century flirted with a merging of state and industrial power. The entrepreneur Henry Ford promoted a system of industrial organization that came to be known as “Fordism,” whereby the state would intervene in the economy to guarantee mass production and consumption. In the nineteen-thirties, I.B.M. did business with the Nazi government through a German subsidiary, lending its technology to projects like the 1933 census, which helped identify Jews in the country. As a recent feature in The Guardian by Becca Lewis laid out, Silicon Valley itself has exhibited right-wing tendencies for decades, embracing misogynist and hierarchical attitudes about achievement. The journalist Michael Malone was issuing warnings about emerging “technofascism” way back in the late nineties, when he warned about “IQ bigotry” in the tech industry and the willingness of people to push forward digital revolution while “tossing out the weak and wounded along the way.” But our current moment marks a new conjunction of Internet entrepreneurs and day-to-day government operations. American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with, in the vein of intermittent fasting or therapeutic ketamine doses. It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now as DOGE, staffed with inexperienced engineers linked to Musk’s own companies, rampages through the federal government.
… Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, [Erin] McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”
Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. MAGA reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; as the journalist James Pogue has explained, their goal is to reclaim an American culture “thought to be lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “technofeudalism” and declared war on Musk. He sees it as antihuman, with U.S. citizens turned into “digital serfs” whose freedom is delimited by tech companies. In a January interview with Ross Douthat, of The Times, Bannon said, “They have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world.” Whereas the MAGA right wants to restore things as they were (or as they imagine things were), the tech right wants to, in Mark Zuckerberg’s phrasing, break things. In The Times interview, Bannon called Musk “one of the top accelerationists,” referencing another technology-inflected political ideology that treats chaos as an inevitability.
Accelerationism has been popularized in the past decade by the British philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment movement populated by figures including Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for an American monarchy have enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0. The accelerationist attitude is, as Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at Chapman University who studies accelerationism, put it to me, “This collapse is going to come anyway— let’s rip the Band-Aid.” Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top. Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”
“Bernie Sanders,” wrote John Nichols, “is on an urgent journey across the red states of America to deliver a crash course on how a corrupt campaign finance system rewards billionaire oligarchs who now threaten American democracy. And he is using as his touchstone a 162-year-old message from the first Republican president of the United States. Before a hushed crowd of 1,000 mostly young people who had gathered on a Saturday morning in this eastern Iowa city to oppose Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s scheme to gut the federal government while engineering massive tax cuts for the billionaire class, the independent senator from Vermont recalled Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. ‘Lincoln was looking out on the fields of Gettysburg, where thousands and thousands of soldiers had died in a horribly bloody battle to end the horror of slavery,’ he told the crowd. ‘And he looks out on that battlefield, where so many people had died just a few days before, and this is what he said: We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain— that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.’ As Sanders spoke those words, the crowd began to echo them, with a chant rising from the back of the hall and surging throughout the room where students, young parents, public workers, and retirees had gathered to take back American politics, to take back their country, to take back their future.”
“Wild applause,” wrote Nichols, “erupted as the senator declared, ‘That is what this struggle is about! One-hundred-fifty years later, it’s the same struggle… We believe in a government of the people, by the people, for the people— not a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.’”
[Bernie] seeks to rally Americans to make the next turn in our politics, to raise a grassroots outcry against the seizure of not just economic but political power by billionaire oligarchs such as Musk.
The Bloomberg report on Musk’s exponential accumulation of wealth provided the practical underpinning for the senator’s “of the people, by the people, for the people” argument.
“Got that: When you’ve got political power, you can double your wealth in a few weeks’ time,” said Sanders, who explained:
“When we talk about oligarchy, it’s important to understand that we’re not just talking about the incredible wealth of the people on top, we’re not just talking about the struggle of the working class in this country. We are talking about the incredible political power of the oligarchs.“Today, as all of you know, we have a corrupt campaign finance system. And, as a result of Citizens United, billionaires are able to pour unlimited [money]— hundreds of millions of dollars— into super PACs. That’s what happened in this last presidential election. The most extreme case was Musk himself, who put some $270 million into Trump’s campaign [via two super PACs that backed Trump’s candidacy and Republican campaign efforts]. And his reward for that donation is that he is now, arguably, the most powerful person in the government— more powerful than Trump himself.”
Sanders, an independent, made a point of explaining, to loud applause from the crowd, “It is not just Republicans or Musk. Let’s be clear: Democratic billionaires also put huge amounts of money into their party.”
However, the senator focused primarily on Musk as “the clearest example of this campaign finance corruption.”
How so? “I’ll give you an example of just how crazy it is. It’s one thing to be putting money into electing a president of the United States. We just learned that he is now going to get himself involved in a Supreme Court race in the state of Wisconsin.”
Noting reports that Musk-aligned groups were spending $2.6 million on efforts to elect a right-wing candidate to Wisconsin’s high court— and that the billionaire was expected to spend more, perhaps dramatically more, on the race— Sanders illustrated what’s at stake in the Wisconsin contest between Judge Susan Crawford, who is backed by advocates for fair elections, for unions and abortion rights, and Republican former attorney general Brad Schimel, an ally of anti-labor former governor Scott Walker and corporate interests in the state. If Crawford wins, the court will retain a 4–3 progressive majority; if Schimel wins, conservative judicial activists will have the majority.
“Musk, in a Supreme Court race, in a small race in one state, is getting involved,” declared Sanders. “Now, if you can get involved in a Supreme Court race in the state of Wisconsin, where can you not get involved? You can get involved in every governor’s race, every Senate race. That is their intention.”
Why? “These oligarchs are not only happy to have huge amounts of money. They want more. I know, we all know, that addiction in America— drug addiction, alcohol addiction, cigarette addiction, all that stuff, is a big deal. I’ll tell you about the most serious addiction problem we have in this country: That is the uncontrollable greed of this billionaire class.”
The crowd roared its approval for Sanders’ message, as he argued, “They want more wealth. They want more power. And they just cannot stop themselves. So let us be clear: When we take on Trumpism, we are taking oligarchy and we are taking on the tale of two Americas: people on top doing phenomenally well, the working class struggling.”
The fight now, nationally and in states across the country, is about more than candidates and parties. It is, argued Sanders, about fundamentally different visions for America’s future. On one side stands Elon Musk and “a handful of multi-billionaires [who] not only have extraordinary wealth but unprecedented economic, media and political power…”— power bought through their exploitation of “a corrupt campaign finance system.”
On the other side, Sanders said, must stand an American majority that rejects the lies of big money and demands a new people’s politics— an engaged and impassioned voting class made up of “millions of Americans in Vermont, in Iowa, in Nebraska, in every state in this country who come together in a strong grassroots movement and say: ‘No to oligarchy!’ ‘No to authoritarianism!’ ‘No to kleptocracy!’ ‘No to massive cuts to programs that low-income and working Americans desperately need!’ ‘No to tax breaks for the wealthiest people in America!’”
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