From Edsall's column this morning:
Gil Duran, a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner, who produces a newsletter covering the tech industry, is sharply critical of recent developments. In an email, Duran wrote:
Having realized that money buys political power, these tech billionaires are now trying to buy the entire U.S. government. This is an unprecedented hostile takeover. With Elon Musk as their avatar, they openly dismantle the government and disregard the Constitution. They pose an existential threat to American democracy, and they see this as their moment to seize power.
Many of the tech billionaires who have merged with Trump believe democracy is an outdated software system that must be replaced. They want a future in which tech elites, armed with all-powerful AI systems, are the primary governing force of the planet.
The tech oligarchs, Duran argued,
are an existential threat to democracy. Look at the news. It makes no sense that a presidential administration would seek to crash the economy while allowing an unelected foreign-born billionaire to rip apart the government. This goes against every rule in politics. Trump’s poll numbers are sinking yet he’s taking no steps to correct the course. This is the logic of a suicide bomber.
These billionaires, Duran argued, “are fully in control of Trump’s MAGA Party,” but their ambitions go beyond that. “The Republican Party is simply a host organism for the parasite of tech fascism,” Duran wrote, but “it’s not just the Republican Party that’s lost its soul. The tech authoritarians are also moving to co-opt leaders in the Democratic Party.”
There are many ways to divide the world in two, and one of them is Minimizers and Maximizers. You see it regarding one's bodily health. Maximizers might discover a lump somewhere on their bodies and jump to the conclusion that they're among the walking dead. A Minimizer will ignore it and make fun of the Maximizer for being such an alarmist baby. Obviously, the sane response is to keep your cool and get it checked out.
If there's one thing we've learned during the Trump era--it's that the Maximizers have almost always been right. However bad Trump was, we never learned the half of it.
The Minimizers in the mushy, low-information middle are responsible for electing Trump. They made fun of the Maximizers, and accused them of having Trump Derangement Syndrome. He's too foolish and ignorant to be a threat, some said. Better him than the Woke Libs, others said. But a threat to democracy?! Get a grip!
But Trump himself isn't the problem. He's the lump. Even if he were to be cut out, the underlying disease would remain. It's systemic. Neither is the problem MAGA populism, which in my bodily health metaphor plays the role of confused, ineffective antibodies. Both are symptoms of the underlying disease, which is the structural logic of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. In a guy like Musk, we're seeing the disease progress to its next stage.
Is there a therapy that can get it under control or Is it too late? The old remedies have proved time and again that they don't work, so I hope somebody somewhere is developing something new.