From Madison's Vision to Musk's Dystopia

How Libertarian Naivety Paves the Way for Reactionary Control

“A Trojan Horse on the beach of Troy” / Shutterstock.com

The fundamental failure of libertarian thought isn't its celebration of markets or individual liberty—it's its childlike theory of power. They imagine a world where removing state authority naturally leads to human freedom, as if power itself would simply evaporate rather than immediately reconcentrate in private hands.

What makes reactionaries like Curtis Yarvin so dangerous isn't their critique of democracy—it's their sophisticated understanding of how power actually operates. They recognize that power doesn't disappear; it transforms. When state capacity is dismantled, that power doesn't dissolve into individual liberty—it coalesces around those with the resources and capability to exercise it.

Consider what's happening with Musk: While a libertarian might celebrate the "private sector solution" of Starlink, reactionaries understand exactly what it represents—the creation of new chokepoints of control. They see how the fusion of technological capability with private power creates unprecedented capacity for coercion. They're not fighting state power—they're working to capture and redirect it.

This is why naïve libertarian theories of “just get rid of the state” are so dangerous—they create the intellectual cover for reactionaries to dismantle democratic institutions while building their own systems of control. When you have no workable theory of power, you become useful idiots for those who understand it all too well.

When James Madison wrote that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wasn't expressing some simplistic theory about limiting government—he was articulating a sophisticated understanding of how power actually operates in human societies. The Founders didn't just fear state power; they feared any concentration of power that could threaten liberty.

Consider how directly they had confronted the problem of concentrated private power through their experience with the British East India Company. They understood that corporate power, when fused with state authority, could be just as dangerous to liberty as direct government tyranny. This wasn't theoretical for them—they had fought a revolution against this exact fusion of private and public power.

Madison's genius in designing the Constitution wasn't just in creating checks and balances within government—it was in understanding that power itself had to be dispersed and counterbalanced to preserve freedom. When he helped design explicit powers of commercial regulation and taxation, he wasn't adding controversial innovations—he was responding to clear lessons from history about how unchecked private power could strangle political liberty.

This is where libertarians often go catastrophically wrong. While it's true that some regulations can be counterproductive—think of NEPA lawsuits tying up renewable energy projects—this doesn't mean all regulation is inherently bad. The problem arises when libertarians leap from critiquing specific regulatory overreach to advocating for the wholesale dismantling of democratic institutions and regulatory frameworks. In doing so, they're not advancing the Founders' vision—they're actively undermining the sophisticated system of power distribution that Madison designed.

Within just three years of the Constitution's ratification, Congress was already exercising its regulatory powers. They moved swiftly to standardize weights and measures across the nation, recognizing that commerce requires a common language of exchange. The regulation of railroads, too, was an early focus, demonstrating an understanding that infrastructure critical to national development needed oversight to serve the public interest.

The key is to recognize that regulation, when properly implemented, serves as a crucial check on concentrated power, both public and private. Madison's system wasn't designed for regulatory perfection, but for an ongoing process of balancing and rebalancing power.

Effective reform requires a nuanced understanding of how power operates. It means addressing regulatory inefficiencies and overreach without dismantling the fundamental structures that disperse power and protect liberty. The goal should be to refine and improve our regulatory frameworks, not to abandon the entire concept of democratic oversight.

The reactionaries, meanwhile, understand Madison's design all too well—which is precisely why they want to destroy it. When figures like Curtis Yarvin argue for replacing democratic institutions with corporate governance structures, they're not proposing something new or innovative. They're advocating for a return to exactly the kind of concentrated power that Madison's system was designed to replace. Yarvin's vision of a CEO-like figure running government as a corporation eerily echoes the structure of the British East India Company, where unaccountable private interests wielded quasi-governmental power. But today's threat is even more severe. With modern technology enabling unprecedented surveillance and control, the concentration of power that Yarvin advocates could create a form of digital despotism far more totalizing than anything Madison could have imagined. By dismantling democratic safeguards and replacing them with corporate-style governance, reactionaries aren't just attacking specific institutions—they're attempting to fundamentally rewrite the relationship between the governed and those who govern.

Look at what's happening now: Musk controls critical infrastructure through Starlink while the U.S. government leverages this private power to extort resources from a democratic ally. Reuters reports that U.S. negotiators have threatened to cut Ukraine's access to Starlink unless Kyiv agrees to hand over $500 billion worth of mineral rights. This is exactly the kind of fusion of private and public power that Madison understood as a fundamental threat to liberty. His system wasn't designed just to check government power—it was designed to prevent exactly this kind of private capture of public authority. That's what a monarch is!

We're witnessing a modern East India Company scenario: a private entity (SpaceX) controls critical infrastructure (Starlink) that a sovereign nation (Ukraine) depends on for its very survival. Meanwhile, the U.S. government uses this private leverage to demand natural resources, effectively treating Ukraine as a colony to be exploited rather than an ally to be supported. This isn't just a violation of international norms—it's a perversion of the very principles of democratic governance that Madison's system was designed to uphold.

When Zelenskiy is forced to choose between surrendering his country's mineral wealth and losing access to vital military communications, we've moved beyond normal diplomacy or even hard-nosed negotiation. We're in the realm of technological feudalism, where private companies wield state-like powers and governments use private infrastructure as a weapon. This fusion of corporate and state power, this ability to hold a nation's defense hostage for private profit, is precisely the kind of tyranny that the Founders fought against.

Two plus two equals four. The Founders understood what today's libertarians forget and reactionaries want to exploit: Power doesn't disappear when you dismantle democratic institutions—it simply reconcentrates in private hands. Madison's sophisticated balancing of power wasn't just about limiting government—it was about preventing any single force, public or private, from gaining the kind of unchecked authority that could threaten human freedom.

The blood now staining our hands isn't just from failing to defend democracy—it's from betraying the sophisticated understanding of power that Madison built into our constitutional system itself. We've allowed the very fusion of private and public power that he sought to prevent, creating a new form of tyranny that wears the mask of efficiency and innovation.

This betrayal has given rise to strange bedfellows, alliances that might seem contradictory at first glance. The apparent contradictions can be confusing: How do Christian nationalists and gay atheist tech billionaires end up on the same side? Why are some reactionaries pushing ethnic nationalism while others advocate for immigration? What binds together Catholic integralists, Silicon Valley oligarchs, and MAGA populists?

The answer lies in their shared rejection of Madison's vision. Despite their surface-level differences, these groups are united by a common desire to concentrate power outside of democratic institutions. They may disagree on the specifics of how that power should be wielded, but they agree on dismantling the systems that disperse and balance it.

Tech billionaires see an opportunity to reshape society through private control of crucial infrastructure. Christian nationalists envision a return to religious authority unconstrained by secular checks. MAGA populists dream of a strongman leader unencumbered by institutional restraints. What unites them is not a coherent ideology, but a shared antipathy towards the democratic dispersion of power that Madison designed.

In this light, their alliance isn't so puzzling after all. They're not united by what they believe in, but by what they oppose: the sophisticated system of checks and balances that prevents any single group from dominating society. Their seemingly contradictory goals—whether it's open borders for cheap labor or closed borders for cultural purity—are secondary to their primary objective of dismantling democratic constraints on power.

Understanding this common thread is crucial if we hope to defend what remains of our constitutional system. We're not facing isolated threats from various fringe groups. We're confronting a coordinated assault on the very foundations of democratic governance, carried out by forces that understand all too well the power dynamics that Madison sought to balance.

Their thought-leaders provide theoretical justification, the tech oligarchs provide infrastructure and resources, and the populists provide the political energy needed to dismantle democratic institutions.

Understanding this alliance is crucial because it explains otherwise baffling developments: Why tech billionaires fund religious nationalists. Why traditionalists embrace disruptive technology. Why populists serve oligarchic interests. They're not allies of convenience—they're united in a sophisticated project to replace democracy with something they see as more effective.

In the face of this unholy alliance against democracy, we find ourselves in a position that would make Cassandra blush with envy. We're not just witnessing the erosion of democratic norms—we're watching the deliberate dismantling of the sophisticated machinery of freedom that Madison and the Founders painstakingly constructed. And for what? So that a motley crew of tech oligarchs, religious zealots, and wannabe strongmen can play at being kings.

The tragedy isn't just that we're losing our democracy—it's that we're losing it to people who understand exactly what they're destroying and why. They're not misguided idealists or bumbling authoritarians; they're clear-eyed architects of a new feudalism, draped in the garb of innovation and tradition.

We stand now at the precipice, watching as the last guardrails of democratic governance are gleefully torn away by those who fancy themselves our new overlords. They offer us the chains of digital surveillance and call it freedom, the yoke of private tyranny and label it efficiency.

To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a Silicon Valley algorithm stamping on a human face—forever. And the most bitter irony? We're handing them the boot.

As Christopher Hitchens once said, “The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.”

Welcome to the brave new world, where the rules change at the whim of unaccountable private power, and democracy is just another disrupted industry. The Founders are not just rolling in their graves—they're trying to claw their way out to knock some sense into us.

Two plus two still equals four. Power doesn't evaporate—it concentrates. And if we don't wake up to this reality soon, we'll find ourselves subjects in a kingdom we helped build, wondering when exactly we traded our republic for a terms of service agreement.