You have 200 followers and then write graduate level political analysis? Where did you come from and what have you been doing? You should write a book or something. Honestly lots of refreshing ideas. I’m so tired of all the standard stuff I’ve been reading in both sides and even in substack. I have been slowly more sympathetic to trump because many of my favorite journalists whom I respect have gone that way like Taibbi and shellenberger. But I think they are too obsessed with the censorship issue that they overlook the frightening erosion of liberal norms and values that Trump and his allies represent.
I'm a former tech executive that recently stepped down from 10+ years at the same company, with a bit of background in philosophy and political theory, and I've decided to start writing! Not sure where this all goes!
Well written. But I would say that America didnt actually deeply politically and economically centralize until the advent of the so called neoliberal Era, its banking and finance architecture, which was in some senses perhaps the primary mechanism of decentralization, didnt become undone until between the latter 1960 and mid 1980s (the de facto nullification of interstate banking inhibitors with things like "brokered accounts", the world of regulatory changes around the time of ERISA, the legal changes that made credit unions not really credit unions anymore, the effective killing off of S&Ls without a replacement and they themselves were replacement of prior variants of community banking, the effective nullification of state usury laws, etc.) and most of that action actually happened in the latter 1970s/early 1980s. Other issues as well, people have recently brought up the unfortunately named 1950s deportation program Operation Wetback, but their forgetting to mention that was done state, states that didnt want to deport didnt those that did, did, for example, Cali didnt, but then after OW in the 1960s a movement of farm worker led by Caesar Chavez, got the cali state gov to do immigration restrictions, so as late as the 1960s, immigration was still party a state level policy matter. The post war decades were a sort of phase space between the Old Republic and the Centralized Technocratic Dictatorship, somethings, like education where we constructed what we know today as the American Higher Education system by consolidating and centralizing the diversified, pluralistic, vibrant, and decentralized educational/training system of systems of the Old Republic (big mistake!) but even their it was lagging in effect, and the American Academy didnt really start to come into its own until the early 1960s
I'm glad you touched on purveyors of wokeness and market fundamentalists. Both camps are not huge to the electorate as a whole, but seem like substantial blocks in their respective major party homes.
The liberal vs. reactionary thread is powerful. I'm aware of Yarvin and his influence among the Broligarchy of Silicon Valley. My Common Sense Paper No. 30 was tilted "Risk of Yarvin Vision" (link: https://commonsensepapers.substack.com/p/risk-of-yarvin-vision). From that essay:
"Details of the NRx formalism rest on the idea that the main problem for humanity is that of violence. Choosing to look at violence as an engineering problem, rather than a moral problem, the ideology proceeds toward something monarchist with technocratic underpinnings, for the good of all society. Monarchy and technocracy both present problems when considering the potential for human freedom and government based on self-determination."
I tend to think the desire of dark MAGA for corporate monarchy is overblown. But the shift to technofeudalism feels very real to me. Bannon as the "useful idiot" looks tragically correct.
Your analogy to the sports match where referees have lost authority is highly emblematic of our current moment. I'm uncertain about the Broligarchy having a well-defined ideology, but wealth and platform power can outmaneuver the state these days, so I'm not sure they need to educate the electorate further on their views. They certainly know how to mask intent while neutering opposing regulatory authority.
The rise of AI coupled with surveillance powers make tech lords quite formidable. Seeing violence as an engineering problem at the domestic level is one thing. The international order is a whole different ball game. I really like your emphasis on international playbooks that erode when a powerful actor uses instability to reorient the game. The new military tensions may compete with the desire for tech lords to expand their international fiefdoms (EU tech regulation, China tech opportunities, etc.). I would like to see a liberal populist platform emerge away from the Democratic Party, but capable of reorienting MAGA. In the spirit of Karl Polanyi, perhaps a New Great Transformation could emerge dedicated to reclaiming democracy and the economy with balanced reforms between markets and society. Thanks for stirring my thoughts further!
Thank you for your thoughtful response, Joe. I think there's an important distinction to be made about the ideological bent of technical elites that helps us understand where this is heading. While they may not present a formally articulated ideology in the traditional sense, their worldview contains clear and consistent assumptions about how society should be ordered.
At its core, this ideology holds that technical elites and private enterprise would be fundamentally better at providing public goods than democratic government. This isn't just about efficiency—it's about a vision of authority based on technical competence rather than democratic process. When we examine the statements and actions of figures like Musk and the broader PayPal Mafia, we see a consistent pattern of working to transfer public functions to private control while maintaining enough government influence through informal channels to ensure this transfer continues.
The direct influence of Yarvin's ideas on these technical elites is particularly revealing. While they may not openly embrace his more explicit calls for corporate monarchy, they've absorbed his core argument that democratic processes are inherently inefficient and should be replaced by more technically competent authority. The creation of the DOGE under Musk's leadership represents exactly this kind of transfer—using claims of technical competence to justify moving public functions under private control.
What makes this particularly concerning is how clearly we can see where this leads. When technical elites gain control over both crucial infrastructure and the platforms where public discourse occurs, while simultaneously wielding informal influence over government policy, they create a self-reinforcing system of power that becomes increasingly difficult to challenge through democratic means.
The outcome isn't hard to predict without sufficient institutional, political, and cultural resistance: a form of techno-feudalism where public goods are increasingly provided by private interests who maintain their authority through control over essential infrastructure rather than democratic legitimacy. This isn't speculation—we're watching it unfold in real time with the FAA situation.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
You have 200 followers and then write graduate level political analysis? Where did you come from and what have you been doing? You should write a book or something. Honestly lots of refreshing ideas. I’m so tired of all the standard stuff I’ve been reading in both sides and even in substack. I have been slowly more sympathetic to trump because many of my favorite journalists whom I respect have gone that way like Taibbi and shellenberger. But I think they are too obsessed with the censorship issue that they overlook the frightening erosion of liberal norms and values that Trump and his allies represent.
I'm a former tech executive that recently stepped down from 10+ years at the same company, with a bit of background in philosophy and political theory, and I've decided to start writing! Not sure where this all goes!
Well written. But I would say that America didnt actually deeply politically and economically centralize until the advent of the so called neoliberal Era, its banking and finance architecture, which was in some senses perhaps the primary mechanism of decentralization, didnt become undone until between the latter 1960 and mid 1980s (the de facto nullification of interstate banking inhibitors with things like "brokered accounts", the world of regulatory changes around the time of ERISA, the legal changes that made credit unions not really credit unions anymore, the effective killing off of S&Ls without a replacement and they themselves were replacement of prior variants of community banking, the effective nullification of state usury laws, etc.) and most of that action actually happened in the latter 1970s/early 1980s. Other issues as well, people have recently brought up the unfortunately named 1950s deportation program Operation Wetback, but their forgetting to mention that was done state, states that didnt want to deport didnt those that did, did, for example, Cali didnt, but then after OW in the 1960s a movement of farm worker led by Caesar Chavez, got the cali state gov to do immigration restrictions, so as late as the 1960s, immigration was still party a state level policy matter. The post war decades were a sort of phase space between the Old Republic and the Centralized Technocratic Dictatorship, somethings, like education where we constructed what we know today as the American Higher Education system by consolidating and centralizing the diversified, pluralistic, vibrant, and decentralized educational/training system of systems of the Old Republic (big mistake!) but even their it was lagging in effect, and the American Academy didnt really start to come into its own until the early 1960s
Another gem of ideological analysis! Kudos!
I'm glad you touched on purveyors of wokeness and market fundamentalists. Both camps are not huge to the electorate as a whole, but seem like substantial blocks in their respective major party homes.
The liberal vs. reactionary thread is powerful. I'm aware of Yarvin and his influence among the Broligarchy of Silicon Valley. My Common Sense Paper No. 30 was tilted "Risk of Yarvin Vision" (link: https://commonsensepapers.substack.com/p/risk-of-yarvin-vision). From that essay:
"Details of the NRx formalism rest on the idea that the main problem for humanity is that of violence. Choosing to look at violence as an engineering problem, rather than a moral problem, the ideology proceeds toward something monarchist with technocratic underpinnings, for the good of all society. Monarchy and technocracy both present problems when considering the potential for human freedom and government based on self-determination."
I tend to think the desire of dark MAGA for corporate monarchy is overblown. But the shift to technofeudalism feels very real to me. Bannon as the "useful idiot" looks tragically correct.
Your analogy to the sports match where referees have lost authority is highly emblematic of our current moment. I'm uncertain about the Broligarchy having a well-defined ideology, but wealth and platform power can outmaneuver the state these days, so I'm not sure they need to educate the electorate further on their views. They certainly know how to mask intent while neutering opposing regulatory authority.
The rise of AI coupled with surveillance powers make tech lords quite formidable. Seeing violence as an engineering problem at the domestic level is one thing. The international order is a whole different ball game. I really like your emphasis on international playbooks that erode when a powerful actor uses instability to reorient the game. The new military tensions may compete with the desire for tech lords to expand their international fiefdoms (EU tech regulation, China tech opportunities, etc.). I would like to see a liberal populist platform emerge away from the Democratic Party, but capable of reorienting MAGA. In the spirit of Karl Polanyi, perhaps a New Great Transformation could emerge dedicated to reclaiming democracy and the economy with balanced reforms between markets and society. Thanks for stirring my thoughts further!
Thank you for your thoughtful response, Joe. I think there's an important distinction to be made about the ideological bent of technical elites that helps us understand where this is heading. While they may not present a formally articulated ideology in the traditional sense, their worldview contains clear and consistent assumptions about how society should be ordered.
At its core, this ideology holds that technical elites and private enterprise would be fundamentally better at providing public goods than democratic government. This isn't just about efficiency—it's about a vision of authority based on technical competence rather than democratic process. When we examine the statements and actions of figures like Musk and the broader PayPal Mafia, we see a consistent pattern of working to transfer public functions to private control while maintaining enough government influence through informal channels to ensure this transfer continues.
The direct influence of Yarvin's ideas on these technical elites is particularly revealing. While they may not openly embrace his more explicit calls for corporate monarchy, they've absorbed his core argument that democratic processes are inherently inefficient and should be replaced by more technically competent authority. The creation of the DOGE under Musk's leadership represents exactly this kind of transfer—using claims of technical competence to justify moving public functions under private control.
What makes this particularly concerning is how clearly we can see where this leads. When technical elites gain control over both crucial infrastructure and the platforms where public discourse occurs, while simultaneously wielding informal influence over government policy, they create a self-reinforcing system of power that becomes increasingly difficult to challenge through democratic means.
The outcome isn't hard to predict without sufficient institutional, political, and cultural resistance: a form of techno-feudalism where public goods are increasingly provided by private interests who maintain their authority through control over essential infrastructure rather than democratic legitimacy. This isn't speculation—we're watching it unfold in real time with the FAA situation.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a semi-politically, semi-economically, and semi-scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in both economic and political decision-making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This shift has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
I appreciate that response. There is much to evaluate as DOGE tries to make its mark and Trump only plays for short-term scorekeeping.