Can democracy survive when it is targeted by the richest man in the world?

By: George Monbiot / The Guardian
Translation: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

This is what happens when successive U.S. governments fail to address inequality. While millions live in poverty, a handful of people become unexpectedly wealthy. Wealth begets wealth, and that begets political power. It was inevitable that one of them—now the richest man in the world—would embark on what appears to be a bid for world domination.

A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump uses Musk, Musk can use Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than an American president can wield. Musk's secret talks with Vladimir Putin, reported by Wall Street Journal last week, as well as his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that may be even more worrisome than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.

If Trump wins, he will do to the country what Musk did to it Twitter-it: The US will be e-Musculated. This means that those who have the power to attack, persecute and oppress people who do not share their toxic ideology will be free to do so.

Also from George Monbiot:

- The lie pandemic

- I did not believe that I would ask for rearmament, but everything changes with the threatening presidency of Trump

- We must confront Russian propaganda – even when it comes from those we respect

Elon Musk claims to be an "absolutist of freedom of speech". But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought it Twitterand renamed it to X, the platform has complied with 83 percent of governments' requests for account censorship or surveillance. When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan demanded censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform agreed. When Indian government officials demanded that a critical BBC documentary be removed, X-did as asked and then deleted the accounts of many critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Last month, X—blocked links to a dossier on Trump deputy JD Vance and suspended the account of the journalist who uncovered it. Musk has sued organizations that criticize him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people — racists, anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis — have been reintroduced and often promoted, millions more users have been turned off the platform, degrading their freedom of speech. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a special algorithm. Absolutism of free speech? Absolutely not.

Now he has deployed his vast wealth, power and double standards in a desperate bid to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics — cash bonuses and prizes — look like attempts to buy votes and interfere in the election. His lawyers this week managed to avoid having him appear in court challenging those tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his account on X to spread rampant disinformation in Trump's favor, giving him millions of dollars in advertising value. He has poured $118 million into the pro-Trump super PAC.

What would the richest man in the world gain from the e-Musclement of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has been demanding since workers won the vote: the curtailment of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital continues to try to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some protections (though never enough); that we cannot be robbed, poisoned, and plundered without any restraint.

Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve this problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, relying on both of these ideologies, it is reverting to an older and more crude form: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might ask, should they rely on middlemen to exercise political power? After all, in every other field, the world bows to them, not to their mediators. That, I think, is the direction Musk and some of the other tech authoritarians are going.

A Trump victory would allow Musk to sidestep the regulators with whom he often clashes. In fact, if he accepts Trump's offer to head a government efficiency commission, Musk would become his own regulator, capable of eliminating the rules that distinguish between a good society and barbarism.

But Trump's election may offer greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets such as satellite launchers SpaceX and the Internet system Starlink. As Ukraine discovered last year, he can turn them off at will. The kind of decision-making that state powers use has already been privatized. It is reported that the Kremlin has asked him not to provide access Starlinkin Taiwan as a favor to the Chinese government. Terrestrial Internet operators claim that Starlink-u can interfere and degrade their systems. StarlinkHe denied this. It is not difficult to see how his power could grow to the point where governments feel compelled to act on his demands.

He may not look like it. Villains who aim for world domination are usually elegant, calm and self-controlled. Musk dresses like an attention-seeking teenager and acts accordingly. However, he is equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond anything a plutocrat has had in the democratic era.

For decades, the centrist deal with capital has worked like this: we can try to improve the lives of the people at the bottom of the hierarchy, but we will do next to nothing to keep those at the top in check. As a short-term tactic, it has worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocracy reached a tense truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and others like them. But the long-term result was that the super-rich became so powerful that they could pose a direct threat to sovereign nations, even the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this is the likely outcome: pacification makes adversaries more powerful. But our governments claimed to be acting "pragmatically": it didn't matter how rich some people might become, as long as the poor were better off.

Decades of studies, some of which were summarized 15 years ago in the book The spirit of equality [The Spirit Level] by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show how unfounded this argument is. A society with high inequality, regardless of absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is destructive to social outcomes, to well-being, cohesion and democracy. But "pragmatism" prevailed and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The transition from democracy to oligarchy should not surprise anyone.

Now we face the general e-Muscle: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world where the poor could aspire to something better and where we could all aspire to a healthy planet to live. Governments that have not yet completely fallen must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer and the rich poorer. /Telegraph/