The divisions within America’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) right are deepening by the day. On one side are the far-right nationalists, and on the other is the tech right. MAGA is the Trump brand, from the campaign slogan to the red hats emblazoned with the letters to the closing line of Trump’s speeches. A MAGA Republican is first and foremost a Trumpian.
Today, it is bitterly divided into ‘NatCons,’ ‘NeoCons,’ ‘FreeCons,’ and ‘New Republicans.’ Within the Republican Party, one side calls the other “far right.” While the far right calls the others “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only), they both call themselves “conservatives.”
MAGA right is based on three ideological pillars: racialized beliefs in genetically hardwired human nature, hard money, and hard borders. Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, believes the MAGA right has “successfully married market competition with ideas imported from neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, genetics, and other natural sciences…” It is a “new fusionism,” with echoes of the old Social Darwinism.
However, a far bigger danger comes from the new plutocrats of Silicon Valley, who are working like predatory wolves. Many believe America’s high-tech czars, led by Elon Musk, are taking the country towards what Japanese economist Taichi Sakaiya called “a high-tech Middle Ages.”
Big tech bros are now shaping American politics. They are the self-appointed guardians of public trust and gatekeepers to corporate culture and thought. Tech billionaires are creating a world where the rich wax, the middle class wanes, and the poor live in hardscrabble conditions.
The big tech industry and the Silicon Valley moguls are ushering in techno-fascism, which stands for conformity in thought and values and loss of historical memory.
The worldview of techno-fascists is outright decadent. A few years ago, Peter Thiel, a close associate of Vice President J. D. Vance, supported the idea of a pre-drugs version of the Olympics, called the ‘Enhanced Games.’ In 2009, he lamented women being given voting rights, which dealt a blow to libertarianism. To the techno-fascists, techno-utopianism is a tool for self-aggrandizement and to play God.
Techno-fascists are protagonists of dark enlightenment, which is all the rage in the white supremacist circles. The self-styled internet philosophers trace modern-day problems to the end of the Middle Ages. They believe that the Enlightenment’s humanism, democracy, and quest for equality are responsible for the decay of Western civilization.
In his pivotal 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel asserted, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He argued that the increase in welfare beneficiaries and the expansion of the franchise to women have undermined the libertarian cause. He went on to propose a solution: create a world devoid of historical nation-states, emphasizing a corporate rather than democratic structure of governance.
To the ideologues of techno-fascism, technology is a space for colonial reproduction. It is hardly surprising that large technology companies should become allies of authoritarian governments. In the history of humanity, dominant technologies have served to control nature and to foster an idea of what society, work, and relationships should be like.
The way big tech bros have gravitated towards Trump marks a dangerous new phase in the concentration of their power. Today’s fascism is internationalist by design and overtly structured around a theory of victory.
Elon Musk and other high-tech bros are often good at selling dystopian dreams. And they are in the right company of Trump, who is equally good at selling lies, abuses, and misogyny. In 2016, Musk claimed his driverless car was only two years away. It continues to remain sci-fi movie magic. His car is still a road to nowhere.
Earlier, the governments depended on domain experts and think tanks for advice on foreign policy. Today, Trump depends on MAGA oligarchs-intellectuals. Trump believes they read the tea leaves of technological determinism with perfect clarity. They don’t prescribe; they merely translate the gospel of inevitability.
Some believe big tech bros have come together because of their fear that the American left has overreached culturally and that the election of Trump reflects the cultural mood of the country as a whole. They have joined hands to pronounce the death of wokeness. They also see themselves as Friedrich Nietzsche’s “ubermensch” (the ideal superior man of the future). As disruptors, they resent any barrier in their path.
It is not difficult to understand the metapolitics of tech giants. By buying social media platforms, the super-rich want to become political gatekeepers. We are witnessing what Nietzsche had called “chaos of modernity” (weakness of truth, death of God, and reversal of values). Elon Musk has moved to the inner circle of American power by channeling his inner Trump.
Thiel and his intellectual guru Curtis Yarvin believe universities, media organizations, bureaucracies, and non-governmental organizations have failed to sustain popular trust. Yarvin is a follower of the 19th-century British polemicist Thomas Carlyle, who argued that monarchy was inherently better than democracy. Both blame progressive political correctness for ruining tech, education, and governance culture. They believe Trump is an agent who will reverse American decline.
The Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute is working on a proposal to make America first in AI. Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist billionaire, has published a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in which he claims technology is the solution to environmental degradation. He further writes that AI is a ‘philosopher’s stone’ that can stop pandemics.
As Trump consolidates his position, Americans have begun to realize that they are in the belly of the beast. A world in which eccentric billionaires control their public spheres is a very dangerous world to live in.
The left criticizes the big tech bros as ‘alt-right’ who are bent on undoing the efforts of egalitarian liberal humanism. Some see them as a version of what Karl Polanyi called the “double movement.” Quinn Slobodian describes the conservative movement as “new fusionism.”
It refers to how libertarians and neoliberals have made race and intelligence an intellectual hobbyhorse, laying the foundation for today’s nativist right. They have forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ.
Trump doesn’t forget, nor does he forgive. The bro-oligarchs have bent over backward to praise the king. But Trump’s tariffs haven’t spared them. Only Elon Musk seems to have extracted his pound of flesh. That prompted Le Monde’s Anne Deysine to assume that tech magnates could turn against the president.
