No One Knows How This Will End (But I Do Not Think It Will End Well for Them)
I can sum up the Trump/Musk/Vance theory of power in five words: "We have power; you don't." Alternative version in six words: "we can do anything we want." They seem to believe that nothing is really connected to anything else and nothing should be. This is why they're hacking away at the US government and international alliances and good relationships with everything and everyone from the European Union to Canada and Mexico to a whole lot of the American people. They think they can go it alone.
Vance's performance a few days ago in which he went to Europe and patronized and insulted a lot of national leaders and experienced statesmen and stateswomen probably made this political novice feel very powerful. It was a stupid talk full of distortions and outright lies and lines like "If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk," which is one of the worst analogies ever made, as well as a petty swipe at a young climate hero who did nothing to hurt him except maybe being a female person with a voice she used to say climate change is a real and urgent crisis.
The sulky arrogance of Vance's performance made him disliked and despised by the people he spoke to and the Europeans (and not a few Americans) who listened. Only a few days after being rebuked by the pope himself for getting his theology wrong during a week in which he also got rebuked by legal scholars for a tweet in which he got his Constitutional law wrong, he was reveling in the power to be an asshole while getting his facts about European politics wrong and weakening his own and his country's actual power.
Timothy Snyder wrote in his latest newsletter, "As a television show, American foreign policy is about strength. In reality, it is about draining power from the United States and its allies, thereby creating atmospherics in which Donald Trump feels good and Elon Musk converts lost state capacity into personal profit... Without the alliances, however, the equation is different. It is not just that the United States loses the economic, military, and political strength of its allies. It is that the U.S. must now compete with them and try to subordinate them." Political power is relational. It manifests as alliances, relationships, networks, as the ability to win and maintain support and cooperation, to bring others to your cause rather than push them away or piss them off.
These would-be dictators are rushing about severing alliances, sabotaging support, undermining cooperation within the nation and across the world. It seems to be in their nature to segregate, isolate, and disconnect. They cut the United States off from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Treaty. They cut off the countless beneficiaries of USAID programs as they left USAID workers stranded across the world. They cut off crucial parts of the federal government with reckless disregard for how those parts contribute to the functioning of the whole--or maybe with enthusiasm for its malfunction, perhaps because they're bought into the rightwing idea that all this stuff is unnecessary, obstructive. It's certainly in the way of some of their ambitions.
Hannah Arendt described men like them well long before this era. A few days ago, the Arendt scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge called my attention to this passage from Arendt's On the Origins of Totalitarianism: “What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible.…Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous conviction that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior organization will certainly destroy.”
These three horsemen of the MAGA-tech-bro apocalypse are in the position of penthouse dwellers who think their top floor apartment doesn't rest on all the floors underneath, or so it looks to me as they rush about wrecking things with an apparent conviction that they're immune to the impact, that they have a monopoly on power, that their power is not merely part of larger systems, that they have defeated everything including cause and effect. Trump just tweeted a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte, "He who saves his country violates no law," which is maybe supposed to justify the attacks on the Constitution and the outrageously illegal actions we've seen since the January 27th attempt to seize Congress's power of the purse.
But Napoleon didn't end his career as an emperor. He ended it as a prisoner of the British on a small volcanic island more than a thousand miles off the coast of southern Africa. I don't know where Trump, Musk, and Vance's story ends, but I know it doesn't end with them in power, and I don't think it will end particularly well for them, though my main concern--and yours, I presume--is trying to prevent damage along the way. And I'm convinced that if we take action, we get to write some of the chapters and maybe revise or erase some of what they're trying to impose.
A huge portion of the American public and the world already regards their actions alarm or horror or fury, and that matters. We're already seeing revolts inside the federal government--some of them undoubtedly invisible to us, but the drama late last week in New York made a huge impression on the legal world and not a good one. Seven attorneys in a row resigned rather than carry out the Justice Department's utterly corrupt quid pro quo arrangement to let New York Mayor Eric Adams off from corruption charges in return for his cooperation with the administration's attacks on immigrants. The extortion and corruption were clear, and with them the administration further antagonized those who understand and care about the US justice system and the rule of law and some who administer it.
There's an extraordinary thread on Reddit of federal workers talking about the firings and how it impacted them. One said, " The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I make $50k a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer." Americans overall like safe drinking water, national parks, the putting out of forest fires, education, healthcare, reproductive rights, environmental protection, and a host of other things under attack.
After hasty casual mass firings at the National Nuclear Security Administration, it turned out that Americans like having some safety oversight for the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, and they were hastily reversed. The Trumpist assumption is that what we care about doesn't matter. It's our job to make it matter, and we have ways to do that (which I'll be talking about a lot here). One part of our job is to constantly point to the consequences of their actions and their culpability in the harm, to connect the dots when people find out some system they depend on is failing them, some price is skyrocketing.
The tech-bro apocalypse–and Vance, like Musk, was formed in Silicon Valley--boils down to the idea that out of the wreckage of the existing system an elite can create hyper-authoritarian regimes and have even more power and wealth and status than they do now. It's born out of the misery of those who have a lot and can never have enough, and it's a fantasy as stupid as it is ugly: a vision of a sort of secular Silicon Valley Rapture in which they imagine themselves rising from the ruins to rule their version of heaven, one in which they consign us all to a hell in which they have everything and we have nothing. It's an extremist version of Frank Wilhoit's famous definition of conservatism: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
They do not understand power. I'm not sure they understand wealth either. Musk's and Trump's wealth is mostly ownership of things whose value can fluctuate, and nothing they made themselves, or control all by themselves. Musk didn't design or build Tesla's cars, Trump didn't build and doesn't maintain his own golf courses and hotels, and both these enterprises require the cooperation of workers and the participation of customers. Most of Musk's fortune comes from his Tesla stock, and Tesla stock has fallen in value quite a bit lately and could fall a lot more. Yesterday there were protests at Tesla dealers across the US, not just in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York but in a lot of smaller cities in less blue parts of the country--Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Raleigh, Cincinnati. The Tesla brand, so tied to Musk's identity, is being wrecked by his conduct across the world--"fuck off, fascist," says some graffiti on a Tesla sign in Wellington, NZ, I saw while admiring tons of BlueSky posts of Tesla protests.
The kind of people who bought Teslas in the past because they cared about climate or because they thought the cars were cool will hesitate to buy them now (besides which, there are now lots of other electric cars on the market). Protests and public outcry like yesterday's can impact Tesla's stock, which is another way to say that Musk's fortune is dependent on many things outside his control. Slate recently reported on how overvalued Tesla seems to be, noting its "astronomical price-to-earnings ratio of 181, which assumes mind-boggling profit growth.... With Tesla’s fundamentals looking shaky, the company’s elevated stock price becomes increasingly dependent on the belief that Musk the magician can deliver wildly creative new products. That image is fading." Musk has run Twitter into the ground by making it a tool for his stupidity, his malice, his love of haters, and his craving for attention. It's lost about three quarters of its value, a lot of its revenue and advertisers, and a meaningful percent of its users, including many high-profile accounts.
Another case study: this past week, Trump staged an unseemly mini-coup at the Kennedy Center, pushing out Biden appointees to its board, appointing himself its director and threatening to purge it of all progressive and diverse content. It's another gesture of petty resentment, another pursuit of personal revenge--in this case revenge on contemporary culture for not flattering Trump, who believes he can coerce respect rather than earn it, which is not how respect works. But just as Tesla requires customers and Twitter requires users, so the Kennedy Center performances require an audience.
If the right was producing wonderful culture that audiences were eager to consume they'd be consuming it already, and force-feeding it at a high-status institution seems likely to backfire. I'm sure that many Republicans in the D.C. area will show up for, say, the Ted Nugent rendition of Swan Lake or Kid Rock conducting Richard Strauss, but you can't force a broader audience to like what you offer there. There is no right-wing equivalent to the success of Bruce Springsteen and Beyonce; the plots of Shakespeare plays are unflattering to would-be dictators; and a whole lot of this country's great artists are BIPOC, are female, are queer, are progressive, are all of the above, and nothing can change that.
These isolationists confuse coercion with power and cooperation with weakness, when in truth it is more or less the other way around. Coercion and violence are what you resort to when you have failed at convincing and allying and negotiating. Meanwhile our power lies in cooperation and connection, those of us who are still striving toward a more perfect union. We now must do it by opposing and obstructing the attempt to shatter and corrupt that union. We have power, and our power arises when we connect, when we join organizations like Indivisible (whose very name proclaims this truth), when we come together as civil society, when we act together to protect the vulnerable, to defend what we love.
This marks two weeks since I launched Meditations in an Emergency. Huge thanks to every subscriber (and I just hit 15,000 today). I had been thinking about starting a newsletter for a few years, and I've always intended such a newsletter to be broader, to be about many literary, personal, and pleasurable things that I care about, but right now the emergency part of this newsletter's title demands more attention than the meditations.
Two recommended books: Lyndsey Stonebridge's We Are Free to Change This World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience (here at Bookshop.org) and Jonathan Schell's book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (also at Bookshop.org), which had a poor reception when it came out in the spring of 2003 just as the Bush Administration was invading Iraq with a a triumphalist faith in the power of violence that would prove to be false as Schell--who was a devoted Arendt scholar and drew on her extensively in this book about the power of nonviolence.
Schell had begun his career as a writer by going to Vietnam in 1967, where he witnessed firsthand the monstrosity of the US war and described it in The Village of Ben Suc. The USA's overwhelming military power could not lead to victory in Vietnam, which set Schell on his path to contemplate war, power, and popular resistance. His Unconquerable World has been hugely instructive to me in its vision of the power of nonviolence, the nature of power, the way that violence is what is resorted to when power fails, and the often unrecognized limits of what violence can achieve.
