The Three Coups

(This is a two weeks old but still, I think, useful.)

Watching the incoherence coming out of DC at this time there seem to be a bewildering number of policy initiatives which don’t seem to make any sense. This is because there are three different factions, competing, and they are all putting their oars in the water and trying to row the ship of state off in different directions. First, there’s Trump’s personal ideology of xenophobia, revenge, conquest, and betrayal. Second, there’s Russ Vought’s Christian nationalist Project 2025 coup. Third, there’s Elon Musk’s Nazi techbro coup.

Factions

Trump has many similarities to a fascist leader, but he is not ideological the way Hitler was Nazi or Mussolini was Fascist. For Trump, it is personal. He does not acknowledge the existence of other people except as reflections of his own ego. This view is xenophobic; anything that is not Trump, Trump hates. It finds popular support in misogyny and racism and leaders in figures like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon.

The Christian nationalists are a fascist movement, recognizably fitting Griffin’s definition of palingenetic [apocalyptic] populist ultranationism. Griffin used the word “palingenetic” to get away from the religious implications of “apocalyptic,” but Christian nationalism is a religious movement.

Musk, like Trump, is an egotistical man with little empathy, but he does have an ideology. This is the so-called “network state” or “techbro” faction. Other leaders of this movement include Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen. In thinking about them, remember this from Tolkein: “Only one hand can wield the One;” these are allies of convenience, not fast friends. The techbro ideology is rooted in a vision of the future derived from decades-old works of science fiction and fantasy. It is also a reflection of an abandoned set of ideologies related to historical fascism. The techbro ideology diverges from historical fascism in being anti-populist—Volkisch wisdom is not for the techbros. Rather they regard themselves as inspired Nietzschian Ubermenschen.

Politics and Policies

Trump expresses himself in incoherent dangerous executive orders. Because Trump is President and has an enormous amount of authority, when he talks about conquering Canada or Greenland, it becomes an international incident. Oddly, despite being so self-obsessed, he seems willing to surrender ignominiously to the likes of Vladimir Putin, as he did to the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Assad regime in Syria. I suppose somehow it feeds his ego, though I don’t understand how. He likes dominating, betraying, and hurting people. His brutal domineering behavior goes from his rapes, to his humiliation of his political opponents, and probably to the harm he is wreaking on the United States and the world which scorned him.

The policy goals of the Christian nationalists are expressed in Project 2025, which is only partly public. The project is, if one reads it, the work of obsessed religious fanatics and, like all such works, is long-winded, unrealistic, and impractical. The length and complexity of the document reflects the obsessive character of its authors. Such detailed programs reflect delusion; its authors expect the world to follow their script. Much as Clausewitz observed of battle plans failing to survive first contact with the enemy, such detailed programs do not survive contact with political and policy realities, but this doesn’t mean that they can’t do quite a lot of harm on the way to failing. The resources of the US federal government, while damaged, are still vast and abusing them can cause much harm.

The techbros are something new, and more complicated. Their thinking depends on realizable visions, however poorly implemented. The fiction that influences their thinking is grounded in real engineering and scientific possibilities, though they do also reference fantasies. Musk’s vision of space travel is that of Robert Heinlein in the 1950s: rockets and colonization of the solar system. Unfortunately for Musk, rockets are adamantly unreliable technology. Space travel is not very much like navigation; space is far more hostile than the sea and the resources required to launch a craft are much greater than those required to launch even a large ship, nor did anyone in the 1950s understood the biomedical implications of the hard radiation that Earth’s atmosphere screens out. I suspect that ultimately access to near-Earth space will not be accomplished through improved rocketry and if humans do ultimately expand into the solar system, it will be as a result of discoveries in biomedicine and ecology. Perhaps because of heavy drug use, the techbros seem to be taken in by the illusion of sapience generative language models project and want to apply them widely to replace human intelligence.

The most immediate danger from this group are their financial and economic fantasies. They do not understand how to manage a large modern economy or a large bureaucracy and they do not understand foreign policy. They are likely to bring on a depression or a war. In the longer term, their misunderstanding of science is likely to be a barrier to important advances. Indications are that biomedicine is going to be the technological forefront of the 21st century and they are hostile to it. Their ideas of space travel are also stuck in the 1950s. And, finally, they miss the moral center of the books they are using as sources and so are committing monstrous acts. In his early fiction, Heinlein valorized the industrial leadership of the first half of the 20th century but by his middle career he would have been repelled by the dictatorial attitudes that these men display. Likewise Peter Thiel named his surveillance business Palantir, after Tolkien’s seeing stones, but using a palantir as a tool of oppression was the work of Tolkien’s great villain Sauron.

Which means…what?

We cannot expect coherent policy from this administration. The factions are busy fighting each other and their elected leader, President Trump, doesn’t care who wins out as long as his ego is satisfied. We may see a resurgent sectionalism, with different parts of the USA tearing off in different directions. The likelihood of further epidemics and poor responses to them is high. Foreign policy blunders are likely to lead to wars.

Meantime, the rest of the world is not going to sit still. Europe may fail to resist Russian imperialism. China’s leaders dream of making China great again.

The technological projects of the techbros form an unpredictable element. Many failures are likely but unexpected successes are also likely.

Also, unpredictable are the impacts of global environmental degradation. Climate change is certainly occurring, but there is also habitat destruction and other unpredictable environmental changes.

I would like to end on a note of hope, but the truth of the matter is the opposition to the three coups is scattered and weak. The USA does not have the custom of a shadow government, and the party out of power therefore lacks leadership to focus opposition. It is important to uphold liberal ideals in the face of all this autocracy and authoritarianism, but a quick victory is unlikely.