Plutocrats and Authoritarian Leaders: Like Flies to Flypaper

by Liz Anderson on December 24, 2024

Curtis Yarvin, darling authoritarian ideologue of many tech billionaires, is back in the news, along with his deep links to J.D. Vance, via Peter Thiel. It’s no secret that plutocrats tend to be off-the-charts economic libertarians, with extreme hostility even to wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing. So, if they were principled thinkers, it would seem logical for them to oppose dictators and wannabe dictators. But no, more and more tech bros are fans of Trump and Yarvin’s very Trumpy brand of authoritarianism. Elon Musk is the most visible tech bro fan; there are many more. What gives?

Well, first, it should be clear that they are not principled libertarians. Principled libertarians believe in formal equality of negative liberty rights. You know, my right to swing my fist stops at your nose. Whereas the authoritarian-loving tech bros want absolute impunity to do whatever they like, without regard for anyone else’s rights or interests. Here, for example, is Marc Andreessen explaining who his enemies are:

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth” . . .

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences. . . .

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

So, full-speed ahead on building nuclear power plants without any safety regulation at all! Trust the genius tech bros, who will install safety equipment or not, just as they please, because they are the saviors of humanity whose judgment must never be questioned by experts with college degrees. Blindly trust them on everything they do, even though their contempt for everyone who expresses the slightest hesitation on giving them total impunity is absolute.

Who, exactly, is being “delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences” now?*

(Andreessen’s p(doom) is 0%, which seems rather low to me. Not because I fear that AGI will have a malicious mind of its own. Rather because sociopaths and megalomaniacs would do catastrophic damage harnessing AGI to their own ends.)

Yet it’s not even their supposed lack of impunity that enrages them against their “enemies.” In fact, Democrats have given the tech bros and other plutocrats de facto impunity for years. Obama failed to hold any of the Wall Street plutocrats accountable for the fact that they brought down the world economy in 2007-8. In fact, he bailed them out. His Attorney General Eric Holder was the great practitioner of deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements with criminal corporations. These essentially say “we’ll let you get away with crime this time, but only if you promise to be very conscientious in the future. And if you commit the same crime again, we’ll throw the book at you.” Except, all too often, criminal corporations, even ones not big enough for you to have heard of them, face trifling consequences (far lower than the profits from their crimes) even after repeating their crimes again and again.

No, what really enraged the Wall Street plutocrats against Obama was not that he held them to account, which he didn’t, but that he criticized them. He called them “fat cat bankers.” And in their rage at Obama’s insult, they threatened to seize up the economy again by refusing to loan money. They were still enraged even after Obama backed off his remarks. This is what you get when you join immense wealth and unaccountable power with infinite narcissism.

The authoritarian-loving tech bro set is no different. They already have practically unlimited wealth and impunity. What these wounded narcissists demand is to be worshipped, Ayn Rand style. Democrats, liberals, academics will never give that to them. They are too prone to fact-checking, too skeptical, too critical of the established order that put the plutocrats on top.

But Trump is happy to flatter the tech bros and all their malignant prejudices if they show love for him in return. Never mind that Trump’s flattery is entirely transactional. Narcissists don’t mind if the flattery is conditional, insincere, or even created by themselves. Trump boasts of fake golf championships. Musk got his employees to tweak the X algorithm to boost his posts over Biden’s.  Andreessen demands that his megalomaniacal self-glorification be accepted by everyone else without question, lest he brand them enemies of humanity.

Where will this end? Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, argued that the central psychosocial motive driving inequalities of wealth and power is the desire for superior esteem. People compete to acquire more wealth and power than others, because that is what people come to admire above all as inequality increases. (As early 20th century oil magnate Haroldson L. Hunt said, “Money’s just a way of keeping score.“)

Rousseau claimed that, in the absence of a republican social contract putting brakes on inequality, the rise of private property and commercial society will lead to runaway inequality and ultimately to despotism. In the end, even the rich will become slaves to the despot, forced to bow and scrape before him.

We are even seeing it now, before Trump has been sworn in, much less crowned. Jeff Bezos has bent his knee to Trump at Mar-a-Lago; Musk is constantly in his company. Both, of course, have their fortunes tied to lucrative government contracts. They are slavishly flattering the guy who has promised to abuse his power in awarding or taking away these contracts. Now they are trapped. Couldn’t these towering geniuses have gamed this out ahead of time? No, because their own narcissism got in the way.

*I’m no enemy of well-regulated nuclear power, BTW, although I suspect that the economic case for new civilian plants is probably limited to a few extremely energy-intensive industries, given how inexpensive and rapidly deployable wind, solar, and storage are. But the tech bros can’t point to the safety record of highly regulated nuclear power to claim that unregulated nuclear power wouldn’t be playing God with everyone else’s lives.

 

 

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

1

Dr. Hilarius 12.24.24 at 8:40 am

I first encountered libertarians way back in 1972. They overlapped socially with the Society of Free Space Colonizers and the Society for Creative Anachronism. One group wanted to pioneer Lagrange 5 between the earth and the moon. There they could have a society freed from earthly regulations and constraints. The other group pined for the days when serfs knew their place, knights got the girls and, again, there were only self imposed constraints on their behavior. It wasn’t about money, it was about power and control over others. Power and control that denied any criticism.

I could say more but it’s late and I must be up early for work. Ms. Anderson, you are on the right track.

2

Alex SL 12.24.24 at 10:20 am

Yes to nearly all of this. Key is, “in the end, even the rich will become slaves to the despot, forced to bow and scrape before him.” In fact, while poor people may suffer more in aggregate, ultimately an individual oligarch is in much more danger from the despot than an individual citizen of moderate means. The taxi driver, petrol station manager, or teacher are below the despot’s notice as long as they keep their head down (and, of course, do not belong to a scapegoated minority). The oligarch, however, is in the despot’s field of vision. He may offend the despot’s narcissism. He has a lot of money that the despot may covet for himself, and a business that the despot may want to hand over to one of his cronies. He may suddenly want to go into exile, or find himself singled out for corruption charges, because of course the despot has dirt on all he lets get close. Or if the despotism is going really mask-off, balcony.

As per the OP, these billionaires are simply not very smart. Many people assume that they must be smart, because they think meritocracy ensures that only smart people can get very rich, but the opposite is true. Some people are in the right place at the right time, and from then on, their wealth insulates them against the consequences of their stupidity, at least in a law-based society.

Except, all too often, criminal corporations, even ones not big enough for you to have heard of them, face trifling consequences (far lower than the profits from their crimes) even after repeating their crimes again and again.

Fining the companies, even heavily, is really pointless if the managers get to walk away. What do they care if the company goes bankrupt from the fallout of their crimes? And do we really want to fine, say, a water company that is caught releasing untreated sewage? All they will do is pass the fine on to the customers in raised fees. Therefore, I believe the principle should be that the managers and CEOs should end up in jail, fined heavily, and/or banned from working in the same field ever again. In the end, it is humans who are responsible, not the corporation they use to commit their misdeeds.

3

Janus Daniels 12.24.24 at 3:16 pm

You write of plutocrats and claim, “wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing”? They disagree.
They think, “Every penny going to help anyone else should go to me. First.”

4

Shirley0401 12.24.24 at 4:04 pm

RE: Alex SL @ 2

I remember learning in middle school that the “fear of reputational damage” is all we need to incentivize companies to play by the rules and even self-regulate. Despite the fact that companies routinely just rebrand or reorganize when this occasionally happens because their actions are so harmful or disastrous it actually breaks through to the general public. It’s almost as if all of these things are post-hoc rationalizations for the rich and powerful to do whatever they want.

5

Liz Anderson 12.24.24 at 6:49 pm

To Janus Daniels: It’s not clear that plutocrats pay anything into Social Security and Medicare. They can get paid with capital income rather than wages, and hence avoid wage taxes. That’s what the carried interest loophole is all about. Real estate moguls have various ways to declare a net loss on their income tax, which can offset 100% of their taxable income. Trump has done that for years. Practically all of the insane complexity of the tax code is driven by plutocrats who don’t want to pay a penny. If the plutocrats haven’t figured it out, they can switch to another wealth manager who will do it for them. So their objection to social insurance is not that they are paying into the system. It’s that they resent anyone getting free stuff, imagining that they earned every penny of their own income through sheer hard work and genius. This is a fantasy, of course. Every one of them is propped up and bailed out by the Fed, government contracts, tax expenditures, waivers of tax obligations by states and municipalities, the DoJ’s lax enforcement of laws against them, etc., etc. They are all profoundly dependent on the government for their fortunes. Their narcissism prevents them from grasping this reality.

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