> 1000 words
Barry Blitt’s masterly New Yorker cover says everything you need to know about the tryst between Trump and his favourite Techlord. It also cleverly suggests the strategy that will in the end do for Musk — continually to ask the question: who really speaks for the US now? The detail is exquisite: note the size of the hands, and who has the wider grip of the bible. Trump’s narcissism means that he will eventually find Musk’s infinitely greater wealth and public profile intolerable. Which is why from the moment he became invaluable to Trump before the election, I thought of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. And, as students of contemporary Russia know, politics can be deadly for oligarchs (gift article).
Quote of the Day
”When the people are afraid of the government, that is tyranny. But when the government is afraid of the people, that is liberty.”
- Thomas Jefferson
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Richard Wagner | Ride of the Valkyries
Seems appropriate, somehow.
Long Read of the Day
With his toxic revamp, Emperor Zuckerberg is preparing to be Trump’s puppet
My column in yesterday’s Observer
Years ago the Economist magazine had a striking cover in which Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was portrayed as a languid clone of the Roman emperor Augustus. This was inspired by stories that Zuck was fascinated by Gus. On honeymoon in Rome in 2012, for example, he took so many photos of the emperor’s sculptures that his wife joked it was as if there were three people on the holiday. The couple even named their second daughter August.
Explaining his fascination for Rome’s first emperor, Zuckerberg told the New Yorker that “basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace… What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today but that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.”
He had indeed. And guess what? Last November, Zuckerberg – who had thrown Donald Trump off Facebook and Instagram in the wake of 6 January 2021 – flew to Florida to dine with the US’s new emperor, a man who a few months earlier had said that his dinner guest would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he attempted to interfere in the 2024 US election.
It seems that the Meta boss emerged from Mar-a-Lago convinced that – like Augustus before him – he had “to do certain things”…
Books, etc.
Anne Applebaum’s prescient book came out last year, when Trump was just a threat on the horizon. Now, I guess people are speed-reading it everywhere. Wikipedia describes it thus:
The book describes the relationships between Autocratic governments in the 21st century, which are no longer based on shared ideology but “rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”. This networking of autocracies, that include Russia, China, Islamic Republic of Iran, Venezuela and others, use the global economic system and personal connections to support each other to maintaining their personal wealth and keeping their peoples oppressed. The author explores how these autocracies cooperate in several key areas: propaganda and media control, trade in weapons and technologies, and money laundering.
Another book published last year may also be useful for understanding how things will pan out.
Here’s the summary:
Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d’état or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Using original data capturing levels of personalism in the parties of democratically elected leaders from 1991 to 2020, this book shows that the rise of personalist parties around the globe is facilitating the decline of democracy. Personalist parties lack the incentive and capacity to push back against a leader’s efforts to expand executive power. As such, leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely to succeed in their efforts to dismantle institutional constraints on their rule. Such attacks on state institutions, in turn, reverberate throughout society, deepening political polarization and weakening supporters’ commitment to democratic norms of behaviour. In these ways, ruling party personalism erodes horizontal and vertical constraints on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and raising the risk of democratic failure.
Note the bit about “parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform”. It’s a pretty a good description of what the Republican Party has become.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Daron Acemoglu’s Nobel Lecture One of the better things that happened in 2024. Link
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