America is, of course, a capitalist nation. Everyone knows that, and also that it’s a democracy, albeit an imperfect one. Most people take this state of affairs for granted, and assume it’s permanent.
An essay in Harper’s magazine argues that capitalism doesn’t need democracy, fascism is a better fit, and America is reaching a turning point:
“Eighteenth-century Britain could not afford democracy. Today, as the economy reverts to a similar structure, America is encountering the same problem. It is difficult to carry out a mass economic expulsion, after all, while everyone has a vote … if the present order is to continue, an almighty war must take place in U.S. politics.”
Enter Trump who, like Britain’s Boris Johnson,
” … equivocated when it came to protecting their populations from the coronavirus …. This was not merely because they wished to spare the economy; it was also because saving lives would reinforce the political bargain they were in office to undo.
Now. Have you heard of Peter Thiel? He’s a German-born, South African-raised, American-transplant Silicon Valley multibillionaire who co-founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook, is the founder of Palantir (which developed controversial people-tracking software for ICE), and is a big-time reactionary and Trump supporter. The guy is a fascist:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Peter Thiel, Trump’s principal advocate in Silicon Valley, once wrote in a techno-libertarian manifesto. “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
Not safe for people, and certainly not for democracy, but for capitalism. Enter Trump again:
“Trump took every opportunity to weaken Americans’ attachment to the electoral system that had brought him to power. Like many demagogues, he encouraged his supporters to prize the removal of others’ rights above the preservation of their own. … But the defeat of democracy is difficult to accomplish from the Oval Office [and] Trump, in the broad scheme of things, is insignificant. … The assault on American democracy will outlast him, and it will be engineered—even if unintentionally—by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley. …
“Tech firms will not just transform the nature of democratic access …, they will alter the nation-state itself, placing ever more of its functions under unelected control. … Big Data is quite different from, say, Big Auto or Big Oil, which bully and bend the state but ultimately share its organizing principles. … Silicon Valley offers new political and economic arrangements that are irreconcilable with the old. …
Thus, the “real political battle in America” today is not between left and right, but “between the people and a grandiose private system … that has the power to bring to an end” the democratic system Americans take for granted, and “if we wish to preserve [it], we will have to do a lot more than remove Donald Trump.”
What this writer is telling us is that Trump isn’t the source of the threat to our democracy, but only an agent of it, which exists in people like Thiel and companies like Facebook; and defeating Trump doesn’t end the story, but only the first chapter, with much more to come.
Read the entire essay here.
Photo: Peter Thiel, enemy of the people
Capitalism is safe.
Democracy in America is no longer safe.