A week after the US elections one moment has stayed with me: the sight of former UK prime minister Boris Johnson being taken to pieces by UK television interviewer Emily Maitlis. It provided a glimmer of hope in the doom and gloom.
It was during Channel 4’s election coverage. With a puffed-up Johnson in full flow, Maitlis reminded him of his Trumpist habit of fudging the truth while in office. She quoted the findings of a UK parliamentary inquiry into the “partygate affair”, which found that Johnson had deliberately misled the House of Commons by repeatedly saying COVID rules had been followed at all times in No. 10 Downing Street.
In stark contrast, across the Atlantic US voters were returning to office a convicted felon and serial fraudster who had attempted to organise a coup against the US government. Never mind Donald Trump’s own COVID behaviour when he entertained the idea that people could inject bleach to kill the virus.
The chalk-and-cheese comparison tells us just how extreme America has become. At the same time, it holds out the hope that Australian democracy, like the UK’s, has the guardrails to keep itself intact.
The rank and foul
But as the last seven days have shown, nothing is guaranteed. This is why people such as LNP Senator Matt Canavan are so odious. Canavan celebrated Trump’s election by posting a photo of himself doing a Trump thumbs-up salute and about to tuck into McDonald’s fries and a burger. What’s he playing out? Does he mean to endorse everything that Trump stands for, including autocratic rule and a threat to prosecute political opponents? And then there is the juiced-up UAP Senator Ralph Babet, who decided that a Trump victory had given him license to unleash his own form of nasty bigotry on the world.
Canavan and Babet might be Parliament’s clowns but they are elected representatives and they’re playing with fire. More so than 2016, Trump 2024 has uncorked the extremes of libertarian America. The mob can do and say what it likes, without consequence. That is the essence and the lure of a Trump figure.
The wild card for we distant observers is the role of the tech billionaires who have common cause with the MAGA hordes. They too want to live in a world without rules. Who are they?
Musk sticks
Front of house is Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed free speech absolutist who turned Twitter/X into a misinformation powerhouse in aid of Trump. If you have a spare nine minutes or so, this investigation by UK activist group Led by Donkeys spells out how Musk did it, essentially by allowing the unfiltered gush of conspiracy theories which are so essential to Trump’s war on truth.
Less well known is Peter Thiel, the tech entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal among other big plays, and who has been a Trump backer since 2017. Thiel employed Trump’s running mate JD Vance at his fund, Mithril Capital, and helped Vance found a venture capital fund. Politico describes Thiel’s political worldview as “a mishmash of libertarianism and nationalism” which had led to his interest in cryptocurrency, funding of immigration hardliners and support for “seasteading”, floating autonomous ocean communities that are not subject to government regulations or taxes. Thiel wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Even less well known Marc Andreessen, a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist who switched his support to Trump after being a lifelong Democrat supporter. Andreessen believed Trump’s policies were more favourable for US tech, arguing that tech “prowess” was one of the three pillars, along with economy and military might, that allowed the US to be the most successful country, that Biden wanted to “overregulate” AI, and that Trump’s crypto regulation plan was “a flat-out blanket endorsement of the entire space”.
Least known of the group is American entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, author of The Network State which is a how-to guide to building “the successor to the nation state, a concept we call the network state”. He is close to Thiel and Andreessen. New Republic described the network state as “private zones where tech zillionaires can abandon democratic society to live under the rule of their own private micro governments”.
Mob mentality
Musk, Thiele, Andreessen and Srinivasan are just some of the influential operators who have been part of the increasingly libertarian movement of Silicon Valley. Like Trump himself — and the MAGA mob — they are hostile to democracy and have an ability to manipulate the info-sphere.
In an X/twitter post this week Srinavasan said the 2024 election showed that “institutions are over. It’s all individuals now.”
“White House → Trump
“60 Minutes → Rogan
“NYT → Greenwald
“NASA → Elon”
Decoded, it means the White House is now just Trump. The once powerful CBS network current affairs program 60 Minutes has been overtaken by Joe Rogan, the podcaster who conducted a three-hour pre-election interview with Trump. The New York Times is supplanted by contrarian star journalist Glenn Greenwald. And Musk, owner of SpaceX, has taken the place of NASA in space exploration.
It is hard to know how much of this extreme libertarian dream of a nation without government can become reality under Trump, but the safe bet with an amoral dictator in the White House is that anything is possible.
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