Donald Trump is a vehicle for Musk and Thiel to implement their radical ideas of replacing accountable governance with an unaccountable techno-monarchy
Dim article. One doesn't need to understand a rabid dog to put it down.
One just needs a gun and one good eye.
In case you weren't aware, the President of the United States of America is presently physically hostage to a drug-addicted madman with a private security force numbering in the hundreds. This situation will not be tolerated long.
There are two types of libertarian. The ones who believe we should expand human freedom, and the ones who believe they, individually, should be made freer, screw the rest of the world. The latter admires a dictator because a dictator, after all, his made himself maximally free.
“The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against the Obama administration’s response to the crisis, especially government bailouts. As that movement gained momentum, it fostered a broader cultural shift that primed many Americans to be receptive to alternative political and economic theories. […..] The convergence of populist anger and techno-utopianism set the stage for more radical anti-democratic ideas that would emerge in the following years.”
Aren’t these attitudes older and more primal? Notably, humans harbor, knowingly or unknowingly the following: “You are not my dad -or Mom- you cannot tell me what to do!” Clear distrust of authority.
These attitudes become clearer in “transactional analysis” (“I’m OK, You’re OK”, Thomas Anthony Harris, 1967). Our dealings in life are simplified by archetypes of child, parent, and adult. In this conception, people do not like being spoken down to, as a parent might to a child. Government is the parent; citizens are the children. The point of the book was to recognize these transactional states and work towards adult-to-adult communications.
Government as the “nanny state”. Today, you can observe this in our elected officials, judicial agents, and self-proclaimed experts trying to navigate the most complicated of issues – often with very limited reliance on established data. The Dunning Kruger “I did my research” set is prominent. The lack of recognition of these biases overwhelming. Then, to feed data into an AI model and act as if it might pump out anything more than gibberish, is a dangerous act of malfeasance. Data itself can be corrupt. The models themselves biased. (“Weapons of Math Destruction”, Cathy O’Neal, 2016). Do not misunderstand me, I think that AI and these models have promise, but I question something seemingly just commercialized in 2024 being the basis for government 2.0 in 2025.
To me, it is a disconnect to replace one set of “parents” (government) with another set of (again) self-proclaimed experts wielding AI frameworks. Why are these new parents accepted? Where is the adult-to-adult conversation? The answer is clear. We are still the children against these agents of self-interest and chaos. Replacing one parent with another is not the answer.
Great article. One part really bothers me, however: "If we don't act now..." You go into great detail about how this reality has developed. Very edifying. And I supposed by delineating this history for us, you're acting. You don't provide actionable ideas for the rest of us, however. Other than sharing this article...what does acting now look like, to you?
“Donald Trump is a vehicle for Musk and Thiel to implement their radical ideas of replacing accountable governance with an unaccountable techno-monarchy.”
Because we had such great accountability before? Because the other side is free of oligarchic money and influence? Please. I’m not loving everything that is happening now, but you can’t seriously believe we had accountability on Jan 19 and suddenly now we don’t. It takes a special set of glasses/blinders to assert that the Constitution was not being routinely gutted prior to this administration. By many administrations. There is a simple message in this last election: do better, field better candidates, listen to the electorate.
It wasn't long ago that conservatives were decrying the terrible power of tech oligarchs over our lives. Now, many of them are celebrating the hostile takeover of our institutions by a megalomaniacal tech oligarch who clearly doesn't believe he should have to follow anyone else's rules.
Among Musk's first actions was going after people and agencies that were involved in overseeing his own enterprises or investigating complaints against him. Now he's also been steering new government contracts to his own businesses.
In general, he and his band of hackers have been hoovering up as much data as they can get their hands on, ignoring the question of legality, bullying their way past legitimately appointed gatekeepers, and sending out a stream of lies about what they're doing. Musk has also trashed the agencies that were already working on what he claims to be doing.
One of Trump's first actions was an illegal mass firing of IGs, without cause -- which does not bespeak a sincere concern about finding "waste, fraud & abuse."
The electorate did not vote for the stealth coup by Elon Musk & company. The main issue to voters was inflation -- which Trump's policies are making worse, and he doesn't care because it doesn't really affect him and his billionaire supporters.
Elections have consequences. Long before Obama said it, H.L. Mencken said it better. But your reply completely ignores the point: I don’t like a lot of what is going on, but do you really think we had accountable government before this administration? I don’t. Go back and re-read the headline and lede. Seriously, this was long in the works before now.
P.S. Not sure what conservatives “decrying the terrible power of tech oligarchs” has to do with my point. I’m not a ”conservative,” whatever that is, and I have an awful lot of pluses and minuses about tech in modern lives. Just the same, check out Caplan’s piece about the hollowness of populism. It also happens to apply to Unpopulism in this case.
If anyone wanted more accountable government, electing Donald Trump was the worst possible way of getting it - or second worst, next to letting Elon Musk make himself the accountability czar and lord emperor of everything.
I've seen people who decried a lack of "democratic accountability" go on to excoriate the efforts to hold Trump accountable for criminal abuse of power and applaud the SCOTUS ruling that the president shouldn't need to worry about consequences for violating law. Now, he and Musk have been openly gutting the institutional structures that are supposed put some checks on power, and demanding personal fealty
Whatever failures of accountability we had before, they have been made much worse by the terrible choice of the voters.
"The institutional structures that are supposed put some checks on power"? If the objective is to put some checks on power, the solution is not to grant more power to those institutional structures themselves. That merely shifts the locus of oppression -- offering us a binary choice between personal fealty and a Kafkaesque matrix of rules (and those who enforce them).
Trumpism is obviously not the solution -- but neither is "The Cathedral." (We've already tried that.) That seems to be Greg's point.
Surrounding the President of the United States of America with your personal private security force has consequences that Mr Musk may soon learn the hard way.
‘There is a simple message in this last election: do better, field better candidates, listen to the electorate.“
You are delusional. The message of 48.3% of the votes cast was “Resist. Donald Trump is a fascist and the greatest threat to democracy there has ever been”.
After all, look how democracy was ended the last time he was elected.
And who cares if Trump won 49.7% of the popular vote and won the Electoral College decisively according to the democratic rule of law? Democratic elections don’t matter if *we* decide they are a threat to democracy.
Why should we listen to MAGAt fascists when we know we are correct (and that they are racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-LGBTQ+++ bigots)?
The threat to democracy is far too great to allow democracy to decide who wins elections. Or to let MAGAt fascists exercise constitutional, democratically elected power.
I'm afraid we passed GO on that one when Kash Patel became director of the FBI. Who is going to detain these people, even if every Federal court in the land says they should be indicted? With Patel in charge of the FBI, what agent will enforce the indictment against the director's orders? If what you are saying is true (and it is highly likely) forceable removal of those involved is probably the only course of action open to us at this point. And yes, that would likely trigger civil war.
“The threat to democracy is far too great to allow democracy to decide who wins elections.”
It does help if one provides a clear signal of sarcasm. If you’re being sarcastic, cool. [There are internet conventions for signaling so.] But if not, then I would say.
I’m delusional? For suggesting Dems should field better candidates? Across the board, Harris underperformed Biden, who beat Trump. Simple message it seems to me.
How did “democracy end the last time he was elected”? I seem to recall he was replaced by a democratically elected candidate. Hyperbole much?
We have far, far, *far* more transparency now than the bygone era these guys want to return too. Or rather “had,” because they are dismantling transparency by firing inspectors generals and anyone who demonstrates integrity. Ethics rules? Gone.
Jimmy Carter had to out his farm in a blind trust, but these days the president can launch meme coins and pump his crypto advisor’s bags by putting them in the idiotic crypt reserve.
You want to return to the pre-Church Committee, pre-FOIA era? Because that’s what’s happening. The Trump admin can’t even give courts a straight answer about who runs DOGE.
1. "Donald Trump has no ideology or convictions besides a desire to look like a winner." - Donald Trump with Barbara Walters, 1980, expressing America First (MAGA) sentiments exactly as he does today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TwVCuPJrMw
2. "Yarvin argued that the [2008] financial crisis was fundamentally an engineering failure caused by a deviation from what he called “Misesian banking,” based on principles outlined by economist Ludwig von Mises." Borderline delusional. Bill Clinton, his HUD chief Andrew Cuomo, Jamie Gorelick (Fannie Mae), Barney Frank, and a range of Democrats obliterated mortgage underwriting standards to help the poor. Here's an infographic that shows Congressional testimony of Democrats claiming in 2004 that everything Clinton had done was just fine. And that any fixes were "racism". https://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/09/root-cause.html
Adjacent question: how is it that the phrase "MAGA" is offensive to so many Democrats? Could it be because Obama's Democrat Socialists of America (DSA - i.e., a Communist movement) hate America and seek to destroy it?
Your "fact check" consists of (1) challenging a claim made in the brief intro to the piece, not in the piece itself, and (2) disagreeing with Curtis Yarvin, one of the targets of the piece, not with the author himself.
Links to historical documents don't qualify as hysterical polemics. Link 1 is from 1980. Link 2 is from 2008. Can you address them? Or are you simply avoiding real-world data?
An old youtube video of Trump ranting and a link to a conspiracy theory (that conveniently elides the central role of risk magnification via derivative bundling) do not qualify as ‘data’.
They aren't avoiding the data, they are ignoring it because it is 100% irrelevant to the topic at hand. Next time you want to challenge an argument, make sure that the data you are using is actually relevant. Otherwise, you are just blowing smoke.
"Make America Great Again" and "America First" are cheap slogans. Like the ostentatious use of the label "patriot," they're bandied about to shield whatever they're attached to from criticism. It's comparable to how leftists will attach the word "justice" or "fairness" or "progress" to whatever policy they want, and then say that anyone who finds fault with it is ipso facto hostile to justice or fairness or progress.
Right now, Trump's tech-bro allies are essentially setting about to undo the American founding and impose an entirely different form of governance. Some of his Christian nationalist allies evidently want to undo the Enlightenment too.
Trump's own concept of "patriotism" and American "greatness" is inseparable from his malignant narcissism and lack of an ethical compass (which even Jeffrey Epstein commented on). "All my life I've been greedy. I grab and grab and grab," he boasted in his first campaign. "Now I'm going to be greedy for the United States of America." That is not about defending American principles or institutions, but about swaggering about on the world stage like a mob boss and complaining that everyone else is cheating us, just as he claims that any contest he doesn't win was rigged against him. He thinks the Constitution gave unlimited, absolute monarchical power to the president - which the Framers assuredly did not intend, but his ideological allies on SCOTUS, along with craven GOP legislators, disgracefully chose to give him anyway.
He is now aligning what used to be the leader of the free world with the aggressive, imperialistic Russian autocracy, ending democracy-promotion activity, ceding the ground in soft power and scientific research to China, and dismantling services that ordinary Americans rely on to give a bailout to the crypto-bros and tax breaks to billionaires - under the banner of "populism."
MAGA apologists will keep insisting that their psychopathic god-king (with dementia) is courageously saving the constitutional republic and putting America first, but our long-time allies recognize that America has turned into something unrecognizable domestically and switched sides globally.
I never said that nobody else uses cheap slogans. In fact, I explicitly noted that leftists have used certain words as a way of trying to place their own policies beyond criticism. Both left & right do it by describing whatever they want done as "common sense."
My point was that Doug did the same thing by insinuating that people who object to what Trumpers have swept under the banner of "Make America Great Again" must hate America and want to destroy it. The argument is absurd.
Due respect, but Doug did not insinuate “ that people who object to what Trumpers have swept under the banner of ‘Make America Great Again’ must hate America and want to destroy it.”
He was responding to the outrageous, false claim that "Donald Trump has no ideology or convictions besides a desire to look like a winner.“
Just because one doesn’t like Trump’s ideologies and convictions doesn’t mean he has only the desire falsely claimed.
And just because you and I would almost surely agree that Trump does not have a consistent, intellectually 100% coherent ideology doesn’t mean he has none.
The irony of an implicit or explicit requirement for 100% consistent ideology from this Substack and its commenters being almost too rich to even have to point out…
Oh mate, come back when you’ve stopped jacking off to your fanta chugging degenerate of a supreme leader, and have a definition of socialism/communism which doesn’t include the driver who cut you off on your morning commute.
An interesting aspect of decentralized technology, as mentioned in the article, is its impact on media. Advocates of technological decentralization often emphasize co-creation, including collaborative media production, reporting, and the ways in which we, as humans, construct our understanding of social reality. This means that decentralized technology and decentralized forms of co-creation play a crucial role in fostering awareness of our world and the events shaping it.
Therefore, the future of media is not necessarily about expanding traditional outlets like The New York Times or Los Angeles Times, but rather about developing decentralized media platforms. These would allow individuals to actively participate in shaping narratives, collectively constructing an understanding of reality, and ensuring a more inclusive approach to truth-seeking.
The editorial line at "The Unpopulist" is that they're representative of and defending the moral pieties represented by Western liberal democracy. So I used the word "normie" because I think most everyday Westerners run a cultural software that is in concert with liberal democracy (this is a reference to Henrich's whole W.E.I.R.D. thesis).
Very interesting article --both as background info/analysis, and for its flaws.
I don't share the author's belief that we should look to "The Cathedral" for a solution -- nor even to the left-anarchist conceit that the solution will arise from a vanguard clique creating alternative political institutions (which, ironically, mirror the right-wing notion of "contractual" communities -- albeit based on political systems rather than on "ownership" -- with the same conflicts-of-interest and exclusionary consequences).
We don't need to choose between living on our knees or dying on our feet. We can live on our feet -- but each of us might need to tap-dance.
IMHO, we've reached an evolutionary bottleneck where the ambition for "Humanity to take control of its own destiny" [or of history] will itself prove to be an act of hubris. We're about to lose our perch as the planet's apex predator, and it's not for us to determine what follows. We don't have the Authority.
Thanks for summarizing this. I've been obsessed with this and completely flummoxed that this isn't getting more attention. It's so terrifying it makes me sick.
I wish you had addressed how and if we can act to defeat this. Is too late? Can it be defeated?
Yarvin says Americans are too weak, lazy, and cowardly to fight back.
Shikha, thanks for sharing Mike Brock's Work. See my substack's Other Work for a Taxonomy of this kind of rightwing libertarianism. https://michaelalandover.substack.com/. I would be glad to write it up as a guess essay if you would like.
While you are at it, see my new op-ed length piece Our Common Enemy: Totalitarian Theocratic Patriarchal Power Brokers. I was not aware of Mike Brock's own typology. Mine is across the entire political spectrum; a complete retinking of right, center, progressive and left based on 15 years of work since first presented.
Mike Brock's post is somewhat consistent with Row Two, Libertarianism in my political sociological taxonomy of 16 ideological tendencies and associated possible regions of the state (in terms of Poulantzas). Libertarians of right, center, progressive and left varieties exercise power in service of the ideal of freedom. They exercise power through organized citizen action to minimize state, corporate or religious power over individuals. On the right whis is supposed to be 5. Classical Liberalism (Free markets for capital and labor are the primary freedoms). But in practice, as this article shows, they are willing to use state power to dismantatle state formations which interfere with their notion of freedom, and of course they have always believed in the need for a military and police to protect propery. I see Vance as in Box 4 but Trump in Box 12 (Patrimonialism), but together than may produce a Box 8 Authoritarian/Fascist regime if we do not reign them in.
I wasn't happy with row four until last month, as I called it Individualist/Monarchist but that didn't quite do it. Reading Wendy Brown's Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Weber last fall helped me to see that row four is Patrimonoalism (right, center, progressive and left versions).
My table is available on a link in Other Works in my free substack.
"Reign" them in, or REIN them in? That question's not merely about a typo (or a misspelling); it's a crucial difference in how we address the problem at-hand!
This is both amazing and terrifying. To me, a crypto-novice, it’s another in a long long line of takeovers by authoritarians from all sorts of political philosophies who think they know better how 350,000,000 individuals should be governed and live their lives than those same individuals. There will be a backlash. It will not be pretty. And their failure will end up in a footnote in political history’s chapter entitled: “Well, we’ve seen this one before, haven’t we?”
Thanks for sharing! The article seems simultaneously salient and hyperbolic. I agree that citizens that can, should stay engaged and stay the course of liberal democracy where possible. But what's the pathway to reversing or slowing this present course of events?
Very important article. Thanks for summarizing so much that we need to know.
Dim article. One doesn't need to understand a rabid dog to put it down.
One just needs a gun and one good eye.
In case you weren't aware, the President of the United States of America is presently physically hostage to a drug-addicted madman with a private security force numbering in the hundreds. This situation will not be tolerated long.
The Idiocracy has brought us to this. Terrifying.
There are two types of libertarian. The ones who believe we should expand human freedom, and the ones who believe they, individually, should be made freer, screw the rest of the world. The latter admires a dictator because a dictator, after all, his made himself maximally free.
Thanks Mr. Brock for a must read article.
“The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against the Obama administration’s response to the crisis, especially government bailouts. As that movement gained momentum, it fostered a broader cultural shift that primed many Americans to be receptive to alternative political and economic theories. […..] The convergence of populist anger and techno-utopianism set the stage for more radical anti-democratic ideas that would emerge in the following years.”
Aren’t these attitudes older and more primal? Notably, humans harbor, knowingly or unknowingly the following: “You are not my dad -or Mom- you cannot tell me what to do!” Clear distrust of authority.
These attitudes become clearer in “transactional analysis” (“I’m OK, You’re OK”, Thomas Anthony Harris, 1967). Our dealings in life are simplified by archetypes of child, parent, and adult. In this conception, people do not like being spoken down to, as a parent might to a child. Government is the parent; citizens are the children. The point of the book was to recognize these transactional states and work towards adult-to-adult communications.
Government as the “nanny state”. Today, you can observe this in our elected officials, judicial agents, and self-proclaimed experts trying to navigate the most complicated of issues – often with very limited reliance on established data. The Dunning Kruger “I did my research” set is prominent. The lack of recognition of these biases overwhelming. Then, to feed data into an AI model and act as if it might pump out anything more than gibberish, is a dangerous act of malfeasance. Data itself can be corrupt. The models themselves biased. (“Weapons of Math Destruction”, Cathy O’Neal, 2016). Do not misunderstand me, I think that AI and these models have promise, but I question something seemingly just commercialized in 2024 being the basis for government 2.0 in 2025.
To me, it is a disconnect to replace one set of “parents” (government) with another set of (again) self-proclaimed experts wielding AI frameworks. Why are these new parents accepted? Where is the adult-to-adult conversation? The answer is clear. We are still the children against these agents of self-interest and chaos. Replacing one parent with another is not the answer.
Great article. One part really bothers me, however: "If we don't act now..." You go into great detail about how this reality has developed. Very edifying. And I supposed by delineating this history for us, you're acting. You don't provide actionable ideas for the rest of us, however. Other than sharing this article...what does acting now look like, to you?
David, if you want to act you need to embrace the same tech but for democracy https://www.wfm-igp.org/federalist-paper/the-dao-and-the-dao-finding-a-path-to-govern-the-world/#:~:text=DAOs%20fulfill%20the%20principle%20of,but%20also%20the%20entire%20world.
Stand outside the White House, point at it, and hold a sign that says, "Free the President."
All day, every day, until Musk no longer lives in this country. That before anything.
Then we impeach -- Trump and Vance both. Utter dereliction.
If you have the feet for it, keep standing after Musk is gone, and change your sign to "President Mike Johnson."
“Donald Trump is a vehicle for Musk and Thiel to implement their radical ideas of replacing accountable governance with an unaccountable techno-monarchy.”
Because we had such great accountability before? Because the other side is free of oligarchic money and influence? Please. I’m not loving everything that is happening now, but you can’t seriously believe we had accountability on Jan 19 and suddenly now we don’t. It takes a special set of glasses/blinders to assert that the Constitution was not being routinely gutted prior to this administration. By many administrations. There is a simple message in this last election: do better, field better candidates, listen to the electorate.
It wasn't long ago that conservatives were decrying the terrible power of tech oligarchs over our lives. Now, many of them are celebrating the hostile takeover of our institutions by a megalomaniacal tech oligarch who clearly doesn't believe he should have to follow anyone else's rules.
Among Musk's first actions was going after people and agencies that were involved in overseeing his own enterprises or investigating complaints against him. Now he's also been steering new government contracts to his own businesses.
In general, he and his band of hackers have been hoovering up as much data as they can get their hands on, ignoring the question of legality, bullying their way past legitimately appointed gatekeepers, and sending out a stream of lies about what they're doing. Musk has also trashed the agencies that were already working on what he claims to be doing.
One of Trump's first actions was an illegal mass firing of IGs, without cause -- which does not bespeak a sincere concern about finding "waste, fraud & abuse."
The electorate did not vote for the stealth coup by Elon Musk & company. The main issue to voters was inflation -- which Trump's policies are making worse, and he doesn't care because it doesn't really affect him and his billionaire supporters.
Elections have consequences. Long before Obama said it, H.L. Mencken said it better. But your reply completely ignores the point: I don’t like a lot of what is going on, but do you really think we had accountable government before this administration? I don’t. Go back and re-read the headline and lede. Seriously, this was long in the works before now.
P.S. Not sure what conservatives “decrying the terrible power of tech oligarchs” has to do with my point. I’m not a ”conservative,” whatever that is, and I have an awful lot of pluses and minuses about tech in modern lives. Just the same, check out Caplan’s piece about the hollowness of populism. It also happens to apply to Unpopulism in this case.
“…check out Caplan’s piece about the hollowness of populism. It also happens to apply to Unpopulism in this case.”
Excellent point.
If anyone wanted more accountable government, electing Donald Trump was the worst possible way of getting it - or second worst, next to letting Elon Musk make himself the accountability czar and lord emperor of everything.
I've seen people who decried a lack of "democratic accountability" go on to excoriate the efforts to hold Trump accountable for criminal abuse of power and applaud the SCOTUS ruling that the president shouldn't need to worry about consequences for violating law. Now, he and Musk have been openly gutting the institutional structures that are supposed put some checks on power, and demanding personal fealty
Whatever failures of accountability we had before, they have been made much worse by the terrible choice of the voters.
"The institutional structures that are supposed put some checks on power"? If the objective is to put some checks on power, the solution is not to grant more power to those institutional structures themselves. That merely shifts the locus of oppression -- offering us a binary choice between personal fealty and a Kafkaesque matrix of rules (and those who enforce them).
Trumpism is obviously not the solution -- but neither is "The Cathedral." (We've already tried that.) That seems to be Greg's point.
Surrounding the President of the United States of America with your personal private security force has consequences that Mr Musk may soon learn the hard way.
‘There is a simple message in this last election: do better, field better candidates, listen to the electorate.“
You are delusional. The message of 48.3% of the votes cast was “Resist. Donald Trump is a fascist and the greatest threat to democracy there has ever been”.
After all, look how democracy was ended the last time he was elected.
And who cares if Trump won 49.7% of the popular vote and won the Electoral College decisively according to the democratic rule of law? Democratic elections don’t matter if *we* decide they are a threat to democracy.
Why should we listen to MAGAt fascists when we know we are correct (and that they are racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-LGBTQ+++ bigots)?
The threat to democracy is far too great to allow democracy to decide who wins elections. Or to let MAGAt fascists exercise constitutional, democratically elected power.
That is the road to civil war.
Apparently this Substack is itself so over the top that even OBVIOUS. deliberately blatantly over-the-top SARCASM. cannot be detected… 🙄
I'm afraid we passed GO on that one when Kash Patel became director of the FBI. Who is going to detain these people, even if every Federal court in the land says they should be indicted? With Patel in charge of the FBI, what agent will enforce the indictment against the director's orders? If what you are saying is true (and it is highly likely) forceable removal of those involved is probably the only course of action open to us at this point. And yes, that would likely trigger civil war.
RFK Jr directed his department to respond to Musk's email as if they were speaking with a hostile foreign actor.
What do you think that means?
“The threat to democracy is far too great to allow democracy to decide who wins elections.”
It does help if one provides a clear signal of sarcasm. If you’re being sarcastic, cool. [There are internet conventions for signaling so.] But if not, then I would say.
I’m delusional? For suggesting Dems should field better candidates? Across the board, Harris underperformed Biden, who beat Trump. Simple message it seems to me.
How did “democracy end the last time he was elected”? I seem to recall he was replaced by a democratically elected candidate. Hyperbole much?
Anyway, hyperbole or not, 🍻
We have far, far, *far* more transparency now than the bygone era these guys want to return too. Or rather “had,” because they are dismantling transparency by firing inspectors generals and anyone who demonstrates integrity. Ethics rules? Gone.
Jimmy Carter had to out his farm in a blind trust, but these days the president can launch meme coins and pump his crypto advisor’s bags by putting them in the idiotic crypt reserve.
You want to return to the pre-Church Committee, pre-FOIA era? Because that’s what’s happening. The Trump admin can’t even give courts a straight answer about who runs DOGE.
Fact check:
1. "Donald Trump has no ideology or convictions besides a desire to look like a winner." - Donald Trump with Barbara Walters, 1980, expressing America First (MAGA) sentiments exactly as he does today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TwVCuPJrMw
2. "Yarvin argued that the [2008] financial crisis was fundamentally an engineering failure caused by a deviation from what he called “Misesian banking,” based on principles outlined by economist Ludwig von Mises." Borderline delusional. Bill Clinton, his HUD chief Andrew Cuomo, Jamie Gorelick (Fannie Mae), Barney Frank, and a range of Democrats obliterated mortgage underwriting standards to help the poor. Here's an infographic that shows Congressional testimony of Democrats claiming in 2004 that everything Clinton had done was just fine. And that any fixes were "racism". https://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/09/root-cause.html
Adjacent question: how is it that the phrase "MAGA" is offensive to so many Democrats? Could it be because Obama's Democrat Socialists of America (DSA - i.e., a Communist movement) hate America and seek to destroy it?
Your "fact check" consists of (1) challenging a claim made in the brief intro to the piece, not in the piece itself, and (2) disagreeing with Curtis Yarvin, one of the targets of the piece, not with the author himself.
Hysterical polemics do not constitute a 'fact check'. Just another lump flooding the zone.
Links to historical documents don't qualify as hysterical polemics. Link 1 is from 1980. Link 2 is from 2008. Can you address them? Or are you simply avoiding real-world data?
An old youtube video of Trump ranting and a link to a conspiracy theory (that conveniently elides the central role of risk magnification via derivative bundling) do not qualify as ‘data’.
Somewhere in the range between anecdote and rant.
They aren't avoiding the data, they are ignoring it because it is 100% irrelevant to the topic at hand. Next time you want to challenge an argument, make sure that the data you are using is actually relevant. Otherwise, you are just blowing smoke.
"Make America Great Again" and "America First" are cheap slogans. Like the ostentatious use of the label "patriot," they're bandied about to shield whatever they're attached to from criticism. It's comparable to how leftists will attach the word "justice" or "fairness" or "progress" to whatever policy they want, and then say that anyone who finds fault with it is ipso facto hostile to justice or fairness or progress.
Right now, Trump's tech-bro allies are essentially setting about to undo the American founding and impose an entirely different form of governance. Some of his Christian nationalist allies evidently want to undo the Enlightenment too.
Trump's own concept of "patriotism" and American "greatness" is inseparable from his malignant narcissism and lack of an ethical compass (which even Jeffrey Epstein commented on). "All my life I've been greedy. I grab and grab and grab," he boasted in his first campaign. "Now I'm going to be greedy for the United States of America." That is not about defending American principles or institutions, but about swaggering about on the world stage like a mob boss and complaining that everyone else is cheating us, just as he claims that any contest he doesn't win was rigged against him. He thinks the Constitution gave unlimited, absolute monarchical power to the president - which the Framers assuredly did not intend, but his ideological allies on SCOTUS, along with craven GOP legislators, disgracefully chose to give him anyway.
He is now aligning what used to be the leader of the free world with the aggressive, imperialistic Russian autocracy, ending democracy-promotion activity, ceding the ground in soft power and scientific research to China, and dismantling services that ordinary Americans rely on to give a bailout to the crypto-bros and tax breaks to billionaires - under the banner of "populism."
MAGA apologists will keep insisting that their psychopathic god-king (with dementia) is courageously saving the constitutional republic and putting America first, but our long-time allies recognize that America has turned into something unrecognizable domestically and switched sides globally.
"’Make America Great Again’ and ‘America First’ are cheap slogans.”
Agreed.
The left NEVER would stoop to putting its beliefs into 2-4 word bumper sticker cheap slogans.
"Resist"
"Believe Women"
"Black Lives Matter"
"Love is Love"
"Defund the Police"
"No Human is Illegal"
"My Body, My Choice"
"The Future is Female"
"Tax the Rich"
"Silence is Violence"
"Yes We Can"
"Fight for 15"
"Workers Unite"
"Trans Rights Are Human Rights"
"Science is Real"
I never said that nobody else uses cheap slogans. In fact, I explicitly noted that leftists have used certain words as a way of trying to place their own policies beyond criticism. Both left & right do it by describing whatever they want done as "common sense."
My point was that Doug did the same thing by insinuating that people who object to what Trumpers have swept under the banner of "Make America Great Again" must hate America and want to destroy it. The argument is absurd.
Due respect, but Doug did not insinuate “ that people who object to what Trumpers have swept under the banner of ‘Make America Great Again’ must hate America and want to destroy it.”
He was responding to the outrageous, false claim that "Donald Trump has no ideology or convictions besides a desire to look like a winner.“
Just because one doesn’t like Trump’s ideologies and convictions doesn’t mean he has only the desire falsely claimed.
And just because you and I would almost surely agree that Trump does not have a consistent, intellectually 100% coherent ideology doesn’t mean he has none.
The irony of an implicit or explicit requirement for 100% consistent ideology from this Substack and its commenters being almost too rich to even have to point out…
Oh mate, come back when you’ve stopped jacking off to your fanta chugging degenerate of a supreme leader, and have a definition of socialism/communism which doesn’t include the driver who cut you off on your morning commute.
An interesting aspect of decentralized technology, as mentioned in the article, is its impact on media. Advocates of technological decentralization often emphasize co-creation, including collaborative media production, reporting, and the ways in which we, as humans, construct our understanding of social reality. This means that decentralized technology and decentralized forms of co-creation play a crucial role in fostering awareness of our world and the events shaping it.
Therefore, the future of media is not necessarily about expanding traditional outlets like The New York Times or Los Angeles Times, but rather about developing decentralized media platforms. These would allow individuals to actively participate in shaping narratives, collectively constructing an understanding of reality, and ensuring a more inclusive approach to truth-seeking.
It's interesting witnessing normie left liberal conspiracism in the wild. I was reliably informed they were immune to this type of thinking.
IMO a fantastically well-made point, except for the inclusion of the word “normie”.
This was at least 1.5 standard deviations - if not more - delusional than the standard illiberal leftist ideology these days.
It makes the immoral woke DEI intersectionality CRT oppressor-oppressed crapola seem positively sane and half-sensible in comparison…
The editorial line at "The Unpopulist" is that they're representative of and defending the moral pieties represented by Western liberal democracy. So I used the word "normie" because I think most everyday Westerners run a cultural software that is in concert with liberal democracy (this is a reference to Henrich's whole W.E.I.R.D. thesis).
Just a continuation of TDS, EDS. One can have their disagreements with Trump and Elon in a reasonable manner - this article is hysterical at best.
Very interesting article --both as background info/analysis, and for its flaws.
I don't share the author's belief that we should look to "The Cathedral" for a solution -- nor even to the left-anarchist conceit that the solution will arise from a vanguard clique creating alternative political institutions (which, ironically, mirror the right-wing notion of "contractual" communities -- albeit based on political systems rather than on "ownership" -- with the same conflicts-of-interest and exclusionary consequences).
We don't need to choose between living on our knees or dying on our feet. We can live on our feet -- but each of us might need to tap-dance.
IMHO, we've reached an evolutionary bottleneck where the ambition for "Humanity to take control of its own destiny" [or of history] will itself prove to be an act of hubris. We're about to lose our perch as the planet's apex predator, and it's not for us to determine what follows. We don't have the Authority.
The event is in the hand of God.
Mike, your text is among the best ones I have read in a long time. What you describe are things and processes that even many academics, journalists, politicians, and others are unaware of or lack enough knowledge of. As a member of Democracy Without Borders, I want to share that discussions about decentralisation, blockchain and crypto are part of discussions about world federalism and democracy https://www.wfm-igp.org/federalist-paper/the-dao-and-the-dao-finding-a-path-to-govern-the-world/#:~:text=DAOs%20fulfill%20the%20principle%20of,but%20also%20the%20entire%20world.
Musk has actually been quite open about what it was that set him off. Not sure why so many people refuse to see it.
Thanks for summarizing this. I've been obsessed with this and completely flummoxed that this isn't getting more attention. It's so terrifying it makes me sick.
I wish you had addressed how and if we can act to defeat this. Is too late? Can it be defeated?
Yarvin says Americans are too weak, lazy, and cowardly to fight back.
Shikha, thanks for sharing Mike Brock's Work. See my substack's Other Work for a Taxonomy of this kind of rightwing libertarianism. https://michaelalandover.substack.com/. I would be glad to write it up as a guess essay if you would like.
While you are at it, see my new op-ed length piece Our Common Enemy: Totalitarian Theocratic Patriarchal Power Brokers. I was not aware of Mike Brock's own typology. Mine is across the entire political spectrum; a complete retinking of right, center, progressive and left based on 15 years of work since first presented.
Mike Brock's post is somewhat consistent with Row Two, Libertarianism in my political sociological taxonomy of 16 ideological tendencies and associated possible regions of the state (in terms of Poulantzas). Libertarians of right, center, progressive and left varieties exercise power in service of the ideal of freedom. They exercise power through organized citizen action to minimize state, corporate or religious power over individuals. On the right whis is supposed to be 5. Classical Liberalism (Free markets for capital and labor are the primary freedoms). But in practice, as this article shows, they are willing to use state power to dismantatle state formations which interfere with their notion of freedom, and of course they have always believed in the need for a military and police to protect propery. I see Vance as in Box 4 but Trump in Box 12 (Patrimonialism), but together than may produce a Box 8 Authoritarian/Fascist regime if we do not reign them in.
I wasn't happy with row four until last month, as I called it Individualist/Monarchist but that didn't quite do it. Reading Wendy Brown's Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Weber last fall helped me to see that row four is Patrimonoalism (right, center, progressive and left versions).
My table is available on a link in Other Works in my free substack.
"Reign" them in, or REIN them in? That question's not merely about a typo (or a misspelling); it's a crucial difference in how we address the problem at-hand!
Rein tx
This is both amazing and terrifying. To me, a crypto-novice, it’s another in a long long line of takeovers by authoritarians from all sorts of political philosophies who think they know better how 350,000,000 individuals should be governed and live their lives than those same individuals. There will be a backlash. It will not be pretty. And their failure will end up in a footnote in political history’s chapter entitled: “Well, we’ve seen this one before, haven’t we?”
Thanks for sharing! The article seems simultaneously salient and hyperbolic. I agree that citizens that can, should stay engaged and stay the course of liberal democracy where possible. But what's the pathway to reversing or slowing this present course of events?