Trump is interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement. Musk is far more dangerous.
John
Feffer, Foreign
Policy In Focus
In Israel,
for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu is a relative moderate compared to some
members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who believes that letting two
million Palestinians die of hunger in Gaza is “justified and
moral.” In Russia, ultranationalists to the right of Putin espouse racist and
anti-immigrant views, while the country’s Communist Party recently declared that
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was “a mistake.”
And then there’s Donald Trump, whom
scholars consistently rank as the worst president in
U.S. history. Even here, in a country of only two main parties and a
blanderizing political discourse, worse options abound.
Imagine if Trump’s successor actually believed in something
other than his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement? What if Trump is simply
preparing the ground for an authentically far-right leader to take over,
someone even more extreme than Vice President J.D. Vance or Sen. Tom Cotton
(R-AR)?
Elon
Musk is prepared to use a lot of his considerable fortune to test that
proposition.
What Musk Believes
It’s tempting to believe that Elon Musk decided to create a
new political party in a fit of pique because of his personal falling-out with
Donald Trump. In public, however, Musk links his decision to the recent passage
of Trump’s legislative package and the several trillion
dollars that the measure will add to the national debt. After bonding
with Trump over eviscerating government, Musk was no doubt appalled to discover
that the president, in the end, turned out to a more conventional
tax-less-and-spend-more Republican.
Either way, Musk announced last week the creation of his new
America Party. The details of the party platform are scant, as
you might guess from a party created by tweet. Musk has naturally emphasized
“responsible spending,” debt reduction, and deregulation. He has also added
pro-gun and pro-crypto planks to his expanding platform along with “free
speech” and “pro-natalist” positions.
These preferences might qualify the America Party as a typical libertarian project—if it weren’t for Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, his support of the neo-Nazi party Alternative for Germany, and his fantastical accusations of “genocide” against the South African government for its treatment of white farmers. Not surprisingly, Musk entertains extreme views on race, genetics, and demography.
As The Washington Post reports:
He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.
In his latest sign of malign intent, Musk removed controls
from the artificial intelligence component of his social media platform. The
newly unshackled Grok—named after a verb in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi
novel Stranger in a Strange Land that means a deep, intuitive
understanding—began to rant
anti-Semitically. As they say in Silicon Valley: garbage in, garbage out.
You might argue that it doesn’t really matter what Musk says
or does, given that his approval rating plummeted to 35 percent during his tenure as
DOGE-in-chief. Even his popularity among Republicans has dropped from 78 percent in March to 62
percent after his break with Trump in June.
But Americans are political amnesiacs. The ravages of DOGE, the insults traded with
Trump: all of that could disappear down the memory hole once Trump’s economic
program starts to hurt the blue-collar constituents that supported his 2024
candidacy. That’s when Musk will likely dust off his earlier criticisms of the
“big and beautiful bill” and start promoting his new party in earnest.
Billionaires Gone Wild
Trump, a billionaire who has consistently overstated his
assets and his importance, proved that an idiot with a big bank account could
buy the presidency. Now along comes Elon Musk with even more money, a bigger
ego, and a comparable lack of shame.
Musk’s political trajectory resembles Trump’s in other
respects as well. They’re both supreme opportunists who have changed their
political views to suit the moment. Musk used to donate to both Democrats and
Republicans, considered the prospect of a Trump presidency to be an “embarrassment,” and
believed in the importance of addressing climate change. He was always
something of a libertarian in his embrace of the free market, but there was
little indication in the early 2000s that he would veer off into extremes.
If historian Jill Lepore is right, however, Musk is just
returning to his roots. His current views uncannily echo those of his
grandfather, J.N. Haldeman, who moved from Canada to apartheid South Africa
where his racist views were more the norm. She writes that Haldeman, in the 1930s,
Musk grandfather Joshua Halderman was a
notorious antisemite who moved from Canada
to South Africa to support apartheid
joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.
Like his grandfather, Musk escaped from his country of birth, in this case a South Africa just then shrugging off the apartheid system that had drawn J.N. Haldeman there. Eventually in Silicon Valley, Musk found a like-minded community.
He palled around with Peter
Thiel—and created PayPal together—before eventually falling out over artificial
intelligence. Thiel, too, has uber-libertarian beliefs, as do other Silicon
Valley disrupters like Marc Andreesen who have shifted rightward. They all have
a fondness for the latest avatar of the Technocracy movement, Curtis Yarvin,
himself a refugee from saner realms of the political spectrum, who has waxed rhapsodic over
replacing a democratically elected president with a CEO-in-chief.
And that, perhaps, is the position that Musk imagines for
himself. So what if the Constitution forbids a foreign-born president? As Trump
has made clear, the Constitution too is ripe for disruption.
Anticipating Musk’s Next Political Move
Vladimir Putin was once a fairly conventional apparatchik
before he donned the costume of a Russian nationalist. Viktor Orban was an
ego-driven liberal before he found political opportunity in Hungary as an
illiberal autocrat. Elon Musk’s political evolution could be compared to the
trajectory of these two opportunists.
Elon Musk has indeed cultivated a relationship with
Putin over the last two years—after initially supporting Kyiv following
Russia’s 2022 invasion—and has floated pro-Russian peace plans to end the
conflict in Ukraine. Musk met with Orban at Mar-a-Lago, along with Trump, and
has tweeted support in the
Hungarian leader’s direction from time to time. But the illiberalism of Putin
and Orban is not really a model for Musk.
In an op-ed in
the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper that was calculated to
influence the German elections, Musk wrote that only the AfD could save Germany
by “ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of
globalization.” This was a particularly rich observation from one of the most
powerful promoters (and beneficiaries) of globalization.
Musk himself lost his earlier identity as a globalizer to
become today’s xenophobe. It’s a new type of “whitewashing” whereby
internationalism somehow loses its prefix in the laundering process.
The center, however, is not giving up so easily. Even as a larger portion of the electorate is supporting the AfD, the German establishment is mobilizing against the right-wing party. The country’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution determined in May that the AfD is an extremist organization.
More recently, the Social Democratic Party began the process of banning
the AfD, which requires that a qualifying group meet two criteria: it must
threaten Germany’s democratic order and it must be sufficiently popular to pose
such a risk. If, after a lengthy legal process, the party is deemed
unconstitutional, it is dissolved.
Obviously, such a process can’t dissolve public support for
the party’s positions. Currently the AfD is polling at 23 percent, behind the Christian Democrats (28
percent) but ahead of all other parties. For the time being, these other
parties are refusing to collaborate with the AfD at a federal level, though
there have been some cases of collaboration at the subnational level. A ban—of
a party or of collaboration with that party—may be satisfying, but it doesn’t
address the reasons that the party is flourishing.
The Musk Effect
In the first flush of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory
in 2016, Steve Bannon attempted to build a National International out of
far-right governments, parties, and movements. He largely failed. Now, Elon
Musk has stepped up to the plate, with his media platform and his deep pockets.
As NBC reports:
Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.
As Bannon discovered, the obstacles are many to creating a
far-right network. Simply put, entities devoted to the politics of hate often
end up hating each other as well.
Musk faces numerous speed bumps at home as well to the
creation of a third party. The administrative hurdles are enormous, which is
how the Democrats and Republicans have managed to preserve their duopoly. “I
was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” one political
analyst told The New York Times. “A lot of
them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard
this is, he’ll give up.”
But Musk, like his Silicon Valley buddies, knows how to
apply maximum pressure to weak points in a system in order to make it crack. He
has promised to focus on just a few races where he might have the greatest
likelihood of winning. It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in
building a vehicle for his own self-advancement.
Musk is far more dangerous. He actually has ideas. They’re
terrible ideas, to be sure. But they are motivating him to build something more
durable and, in the long term, potentially more disruptive.
It’s too terrifying a prospect to grok.
© 2023 Foreign Policy In Focus
John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel "Splinterlands" (2016) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His novel, "Frostlands" (2018) is book two of his Splinterlands trilogy. Splinterlands book three "Songlands" was published in 2021. His podcast is available here.
