What did dual-class shares just do to my democracy?
Trump/Musk, the billionaire-CEO, and the American soft spot for tyranny.
Sinclair Lewis’ fictionalization of a fascist takeover in the U.S., “It Can’t Happen Here,” contains a passage first published in 1935 that still feels hot to the touch almost a century later. From the ravings of a liberal newspaperman:
“Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical — yes, or more obsequious! — than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip [the book’s dictator] owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio — divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the — well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition — shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor — no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”
But the nature of what’s unfolding in Washington D.C., right now has a unique industrial character — specifically, the figure of the billionaire-CEO.
The billionaire-CEO cows lesser business leaders as he demolishes government services, contracts, international bonds in a frenzy of creative destruction that we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives. The courts have been slow stepping in, Congress is nowhere to be seen, and the public… well, the public is just watching it all unfold.
When 20th century thinkers like Hannah Arendt traced the roots of totalitarian politics amid the ashes of World War II, they labored to reconcile why well educated masses approved and cooperated with openly criminal regimes, all the way up to self-annihilation. Before the mass movements, “a whole literature on mass behavior and mass psychology had demonstrated and popularized the wisdom, so familiar to the ancients, of the affinity between democracy and dictatorship, between mob rule and tyranny,” Arendt wrote in her “Origins of Totalitarianism.”
What was less predictable, Arendt thought, was the European masses’ “cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes,” and “the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.”
The era of 20th century totalitarian politics remains a tantalizing but often pointless dead end for the political thinker, a rusty radiation sign hung on the mineshaft gates of history. There’s only so much you can learn from a single generation of Europeans who lost their fucking minds when more durable and replicable methods of authoritarian aggrandizement have since emerged across all corners of the world. The new tyrannies are less lethal, less demanding on the citizen, but more adaptable, being more reliant on apathy than mass action.
After all, it’s easier for political entrepreneurs to bet on the ennui, cynicism and distrust of consumer societies than hidden appetites for mass rallies and military mobilizations. People like being left alone and then wondering, in their living rooms, why things don’t get fixed. The new tyranny thrives less on participation than on loneliness.
What better remedy for loneliness than some charismatic leaders to liven things up a little? The middle institutions that once ordered democratic engagement — parties, newspapers, membership clubs, unions, churches — have seen their levels of trust and engagement drop in favor of the politics of personality. In a 2021 study of world democracies from 1991 to 2020, scholars Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Carisa Nietsche and Joseph Wright, noted the rise of “personalist” political leaders — the “domination of the political realm by a single individual,” whose “personality has an outsized impact on policies and outcomes, often trumping institutions and rules,” including their own parties.
Personalism is something you’ll see in many autocracies; what was troubling was that personalism was showing up in so many democracies, too. It’s usually linked to “populist” movements that “separates society into two homogenous groups—the ‘pure people’ and the corrupt elite.” Regular parties tend to create classes of politicians climbing the ladder and figuring out the art of democracy as they go; personalist parties tend to feature “political outsiders” who “tend to lack this sort of exposure and commitment to democratic institutions.”
One major contributing factor to these new personalists’ consolidation of power inside of democracies was digital technology, the authors wrote:
“Anecdotal evidence links the rise of personalization to the growth of electronic media, especially television in the 1950s and 1960s. Televised media, including the growing importance of on-air political debates during election campaigns, significantly influenced how voters viewed their leaders. … Today, digital tools are likely amplifying these dynamics by allowing leaders to reach an even larger audience. Beyond granting the sheer power to broadcast, digital technologies—including the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through vast amounts of online content or social-media bots that amplify influence campaigns and produce floods of distracting or misleading posts—create new opportunities for leaders to censor and manipulate their media environments by shutting down critical voices and more effectively "controlling the narrative."
All this brings me to Elon Musk — the emotionally volatile federal contractor who also sells cars that make fart noises — and his ascendance to the right hand of world power.
What’s so interesting to me about personalism as a political force is that you’ll also notice personalism everywhere else you look. Even vast institutions now fall into the shadows of their largest personalities — the entertainers who turn everybody else into consumers. In the business world, this type is known as the founder, the charismatic innovator whose swashbuckling manner is distinct from the McKinsey consultancy robots who might succeed them as external hires. The founder needs control above all else; the founder needs dual-class shares to assert their interests ahead of all other shareholders.
C-suite Caesarism was the perfect training ground for the real thing. The billionaire-CEO voids contracts, violates constitutional edicts, opens a new front in the class war by attacking the civil service. Civil rules might bind other types of citizens. Not this one. This one acts charismatically, while everyone else just seems to watch.
I enjoy most of your writing but in this case you missed the mark. There is nothing special about dual-class shares, we have had robber barons in the US since the beginning. The difference here is not the use of wealth to promote an agenda, the Koch brothers have done that for decades. The difference here was the election of a candidate with no respect for the norms or laws.
Highly credentialed professionals are telling one another to tune out from the news and politics to protect their mental health. That's one problem. Another is that the flood-the-zone tactic is working. When people feel overwhelmed, they tune out.