Populists vs. Oligarchs

Infighting within the Trump Coalition

Newsflash! Democrats are Very, Very Upset. Flummoxed that they have no Procedure for dealing with Trump administrative coup. Hold press conference to spout cliches about rule of law, saving democracy, and fighting back. Met with yawns by disengaged electorate.

Maybe that's unfair. The Dems might yet figure something out. But it's really not in their DNA to fight this kind of fight, so I doubt it. Is it likely that any street fighter is going to emerge from their midst? I like Chris Murphy, who seems to understand the moment, but when push comes to shove, he's a Connecticut suit, not a populist rabble rouser. That's what they need. What they need, in fact, is someone like Steve Bannon.

If you haven't listened to the two recent Douthat podcasts with Marc Andreessen and Steve Bannon, I think you should. If nothing else it demonstrates how the debate is being shaped on the right in such a way that is actually dealing with 21st Century realities rather than with the concerns that preoccupy those living in the Dem/Liberal establishment bubble.

Let me first say that I have not ever listened to a Bannon podcast. Nor do I listen to any of the Trump-adjacent podcasts like Joe Rogan's et al., Maybe I should to understand the zeitgeist better, but I have so much bandwidth, and I have so much toleration for nonsense. So I was somewhat surprised to learn in listening to Bannon's conversation with Douthat the degree to which Bannon was not spewing nonsense.

There's much I find objectionable about Bannon, and yet I doubt there's a sentence in my Cathedral Lectures that he would disagree with except the negative stuff I say about Trump—and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that privately he agreed with that too.

So while his over-caffeinated rhetoric is annoying, there's very little I, in turn, would disagree with in what he says here--

Now here’s the point. In techno-feudalism, you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit — they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them.

They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity.

And that’s why they’re all rushing—whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.

You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction “Dungeons & Dragons” guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every [expletive] step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that.

And the progressive left made a deal with these guys.

His point is that Obama and Biden made a devil’s bargain with tech over a decade ago in which tech could keep its monopolies so long as they kept the U.S. ahead in the AI arms race. And now with the DeepSeek reveal last week, we see Tech failed to keep their end of the bargain. His point is that tech oligarchs, like the Wall Street and bank buccaneers after 2008, abetted by the Dems, take and take and take, and do almost nothing that’s in truly in the national interest. And yet the Dem establishment is responsible for creating these monsters in ways that the typical Dem-voting American has no clue about. These oligarchs might talk a nationalist game, but they don't care about America or how their greed continuously and callously disrupts the lives of ordinary Americans. Is Bannon wrong?

He goes on--

And they have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world. And you see this in artificial intelligence. We have no controls over this. We’ve allowed these monopolies to exist. And now we know they’re getting their ass handed to them, I think, by the Chinese Communist Party.

We’re in deep [expletive] right now. We’re in a crisis.

Who on the Left is talking with this sense of urgency? If you think the rhetoric is overheated, you just don't get it. He's absolutely right that we've turned the nation over to these 11-year-old nerds. It's the point I've been making for years now. And he's right that as a result we're in deep expletive.

So say what you want about Bannon— he gets it. Does someone like Rachel Maddow, to take a a reperesentative case, get it? She is on a mission to save American democracy from people like Bannon, but she doesn't really seem to understand where the long-term threat to the "demos" is coming from. It's not from Bannon and MAGA--MAGA is the miner's canary; it's symptom, not a cause. Rather it's from these transhumanist, techno-feudalists and the cage they've built in which we’re all slowly suffocating. Does Maddow plan on doing a podcast on that? Doubt it. She's focussed on the 1930s not the 2030s.

On the other hand, Douthat's interview with Andreessen was a perfect way to set the stage for Bannon. Andreessen, a former Al-Gore, DLC Democrat, is a pure techno-capitalist who moved over to Trump last year for two reasons. (1) because, he says, that the Great Awokening in the 2010s was so disruptive to corporate control as young "radicals" demanded that their so-called Leftist program be implemented.

But the Great Awokening was never a threat to techno-capitalism. At most it was just annoying for these old-guard, Liberal-ish CEOs like Andreessen to have to give in to the kids by tacking up a Black Lives Matters poster in the break room and by instituting a DEI program. They went along, he said. They needed to retain the talent, and they didn't want to look like bad people to their own kids when they came home from their elite colleges on vacation. But the Great Awokening never threatened the fundamental structures of capitalism in any of its sectors. What really pushed Andreessen over the top was (2) the Biden administration's attempt to control Crypto and AI. Now that's a real threat. In other words when Dems made a feeble attempt to do something right for a change, that was a bridge too far for Andreessen.

Listen to the podcast if you want to hear how the Biden folks freaked him out and why this pushed him into Trump's embrace. To listen to him now, he clearly singing from the Trump hynmbook with all the fervor of a convert. What a chameleon. And, I'm sorry, in the long run, these kinds of controls have to be imposed on these pirates. Yes, they have to be imposed in China and elsewhere as well, but Bannon's right when he says that--

...Andreessen and Musk are smart enough to be able to get below the surface on the numbers and see the direction of the country and climb on board as the techno-feudalists early on.

They are hard-core techno-feudalists. They’re not populist. I tease Elon all the time. If I could turn him from a techno-feudalist globalist to a populist nationalist, we could make some progress here. He’s definitely a techno-feudalist. One of the hardest-core techno-feudalists. And so is Andreessen.

With these guys you’re talking about genius level intelligence. These are not dumb people. But they’re not with us when it comes to the little guy.

Bannon's right about the threat they pose; he's wrong that Trump is going to do anything about it--except support their efforts to make it worse.

If the Dems and the Liberal elites they represent really cared about the little guy, they'd find a way to work with the Bannon Populists. Bannon himself recognizes that he shares common ground with Bernie, Maddow, and AOC, all of whom he name checks in a positive way. Is it impossible to imagine that Bannon Populists, as soon as they realize that Trump is siding with the techno-feudalists, will reach out to the Left?

If they did, would anybody on the Left reach back?