America The Warning

America is saturated in fats, sugars and oligarchs, avarice, violence, spectacle and cruelty.

It’s a land that eats hungrily its young but never gets full.

A bloated colonial superstructure that has never been sated or known when to stop.

It’s the ultimate cautionary tale, a warning about what not to do.

Trump, Musk and co aren’t an aberrant moment in a fairy-told history of liberty, equality, fraternity.

They are no flash in the pan.

They are the long story.

They are America.

What we’re seeing isn’t a fall from grace, it’s a continued ascent to vulgarity.

The latest term du jour to explain away what’s happening in America is that this is a coup.

A coup?

What the fuck are you even talking about?

Elon Musk is one of the single largest recipients of US government money.

YOU CAN’T BE COUPED BY THE GUY YOU ALREADY GAVE POWER TO.

YOU CAN’T CRY HARM AT THE HANDS OF AN IDEOLOGY YOU WHOLEHEARTEDLY ENDORSED.

As for Musk, he cosplays as the slayer of the liberal and conservative elites that gifted him his empire to begin with.

It’s not a hostile takeover. America is a joint stock corporation run by elites. The shade of their voting slip hardly matters.

Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, each have their own hero and villain narratives about who is to blame and who is coming to the rescue.

It’s all bullshit.

They think they’re wrestling the other guy but they’re actually tag-teaming against the wider citizenry.

I suppose it’s worth recounting a few of the ways in which this is true.

After the ‘aberration’ of Trump 1.0 and the return to ‘normality’ more people were deported, more wall was built, more money was spent on war, more innocent children were dismembered, more viral deaths were recorded, more oligarchs were minted and more oil was extracted.

Such a platform demands a new stage, a fresh chapter. Trump couldn’t do what he already did. Not least because it was often less MAGA than Biden.

Men who have tasted everything must cook a new dish.

Trump 2.0 is the inevitable acceleration.

If it wasn’t Musk and his band of merry techno-libertarians it would have been someone else in the course of time.

Because this is what America does.

It’s what America is.

America is oligarchic power.

From Vanderbilt to Carnegie, Mellon to Stanford, Rockefeller to Ford, American capitalist power has always been entwined with political power. The richest men have always become the most powerful political men. This is the real indivisible union.

It’s totally absurd to claim that America is going through a historically unique moment. This explanation is a liberal freakout cope-show that seeks to disavow nothing less than American history itself.

What’s new this time? Nothing, other than the source of the wealth and power. This time it’s not bankers or industrialists, steelmen or rail barons, it’s crypto kings and AI evangelists.

This time it’s men in hoodies not men in suits.

Epic sloganeering t-shirts have replaced staid starched collars.

The shadow power structure with its hands on the wheel this time are the tech oligarchs, the men, to reiterate, that America has already coiled into the political fabric of the nation.

It’s not just Musk of course, he’s just the most identifiable face of the movement.

Take Peter Thiel, a key architect of the escape-to-paradise manifesto being executed by Musk. He also built his power on the back of US government contracts - Palantir, the company Thiel founded, rakes in two-thirds of its income from the federal government. Thiel was built by the public-private partnerships beloved of the liberal middle managers he, like Musk, proclaims to detest. Last week, Palantir’s CEO said they are expecting a windfall from Musk’s evisceration of the US federal government.

Men like Thiel and Musk spent years watching neoliberal politicians outsource key governmental functions to billionaires and have now decided, not unreasonably, that every department would be better outsourced. To them.

They are running the rationale of neoliberal capitalism to its logical conclusion.

Keep electing neoliberals and it was never going to end any other way.

So what is their ultimate vision? This, again, is no mystery.

Thiel, Musk and other leading techno-libertarians like Marc Andressen, Ben Horotwitz, Brian Armstrong, and Balaji Srinivasan have been very open about their plans to create zones of exit from all government control. The philosopher king of this movement is a man called Curtis Yarvin, who has spelled out clearly the future to which Musk, Thiel and the techno-libertarians subscribe:

In 2009 Thiel wrote that ‘democracy and freedom are no longer compatible’ and outlined his plans for ‘an escape from politics in all its forms.’ They want a free-for-all, law-of-the-jungle world where the strong thrive and the weak die. They have spoken about this, written about this, podcasted about this.

When on election night Musk awkwardly stuttered that he was ‘dark MAGA’ it was a reference to those who call Yarvin’s philosophical thought ‘dark enlightenment.’

It didn’t, technically speaking, have to come to this.

The tech monopolies could have been broken up, the oligarchs stripped of their power and influence. America could have stopped handing multi-billion government contracts to Palantir and SpaceX. They had more than enough ammo to jail the political figurehead that enabled their entry into government. They could have allowed alternative left-populist figures to emerge as a counterweight. They didn’t do it. Not only didn’t they do any of this, they shut down critiques of neoliberal governance and of the oligarchs and willingly handed over the keys to power. Through their private platforms, Musk, Theil, Zuckerberg et al had access to the data long before they entered the Treasury department.

The conditions for the next stage in American capitalism, and the possible crack-up of American society itself were put in motion by the refusal of politicians to interfere with billionaire wealth and power hoarding. From the tax breaks to the preferential visas to the deregulation, tech billionaires were long ago handed the keys to the kingdom.

What was good for big tech, was good for America. Well that theory will really be tested now.

In Trump they found the ideal cipher, the easily charmed and bought ego who will usher you into the club.

Countries not yet fully captured by these influences should be looking at America and making plans to not be America.

And the only way to do that is to asset strip the tech billionaires.

Remove their privileges, their power and their wealth.

Use every legal avenue possible to tie them up in litigation and break up their companies.

Stop giving them government contracts.

Stop handing them our data.

Stop allowing them to monopolise the digital infrastructure underlying our societies.

Stop enabling the creation of shadow power structures.

Because these companies are global, their influence is global and their plans are global.

Fail to strip them of their power, and it will be your country next.