Daniel
Lazare
03.28.25
In early December, Permanent Revolution said it was increasingly clear where America was heading – “toward militarization and authoritarian rule.” Three months later, thanks to war, mass deportations, and a growing assault on universities and the judiciary, the destination is now in sight. If the US hasn’t gotten there yet, it will shortly.
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| Columbia University protest supporting Mahmoud Khalil |
Columbia’s capitulation last week is a sign of how thoroughly bourgeois-liberal resistance is collapsing. Confronted with a list of Trump administration demands, the university agreed to expel or suspend students who took part in last spring’s anti-Gaza protests, to place the Middle East studies department in receivership – tantamount to abolition – and to “formalize, adopt, and promulgate” a pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism equating it with anti-Zionism. Columbia even agreed to hire 36 special officers with power to eject or arrest anyone who violates the rules.
“Please,
sir, can we perhaps ask Israel to hold off on bombing Palestine just a little longer?” All it will take is one Israel supporter
hollering “anti-Semitism” for the new Gestapo to hustle anyone uttering such
words off campus faster than you can say “Oliver Twist.”
Paul Weiss’s decision to throw in the towel last week was no less important. A Democratic law firm whose luminaries over the years have included Ted Sorenson, a member of JFK’s inner circle; Arthur Goldberg, LBJ’s ambassador to the UN, and Adlai Stevenson, the liberal icon who ran against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, it is an international powerhouse with 1,200 attorneys from New York to Tokyo who charge as much as $3,000 an hour for their services. But now Trump is taking revenge because the firm allowed a partner named Mark Pomerantz to help Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg put together a criminal case against him for paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The case was a disaster. Even though it ended in May with a conviction, it was a classic case of over-aggressive prosecution in which Bragg took a non-disclosure agreement and somehow managed to blow it up into 34 counts of federal election law violations. As this writer said at the time, Democratic “lawfare” was sure to backfire:
Instead of cutting [Trump’s] lead, it is boosting support among voters turned off by the Democrats’ all-too-obvious misuse of the legal system. Voters figure that anyone who earns the enmity of media moguls, Hollywood liberals and neocon warmongers must be doing something right. So they are rallying around a bourgeois rebel whose anti-immigrant tirades are growing more and more fascistic and unhinged by the day.
But after vowing to resist Trump, Paul Weiss caved once the White House threatened to suspend its security clearances and bar its lawyers from federal buildings. As penance, it agreed to perform $40 million worth of pro-bono work on behalf of causes that the administration supports such as veterans and fighting anti-Semitism, which is to say suppressing anti-Zionist dissent. The results spell doom for Paul Weiss since, as one legal publication notes, “Would you want to be represented by a law firm that can’t even stand up for itself?” Since the administration will have no trouble bulldozing lower-priced firms out of the way, it also spells doom for the right of legal defense in general.
Then there are the immigration and travel cases that seem to multiply by the day. The action started on March 8 when ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement – arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and Columbia grad student who had emerged as a leader of the Gaza protests. With Khalil now languishing in a Louisiana detention center, dissent is vanishing from college campuses much as it did in the 1950s.
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| Mahmoud Khalil |
A day later, immigration authorities barred entry to a French scientist after an iPhone search revealed text messages critical of Trump scientific policies, messages that officials said “conveyed a hatred toward Trump and could be considered to be terrorism.” A week after that, Trump defied the courts by barring entry to a Lebanese kidney transplant physician named Rasha Alawieh even though she had a valid visa and a judge had ordered her not to be removed. Her crime: attending a mass funeral in Beirut for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the victim of last September’s Israeli air strike. The same day – March 16 – the administration defied another judicial order by putting 261 alleged Venezuelan gang members on a plane to El Salvador.
No less alarming were the attacks on James Boasberg, the federal judge in the Venezuelan deportation case, that followed. Boasberg is a “Radical Left Lunatic ... a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump posted on Truth Social, his personal internet platform. “...This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Violent threats ensued.
What does it all mean? Simply that the Trump blitzkrieg is pushing America over a cliff into outright dictatorship. With the president at war with everyone from the Houthis to the New York subway system – he’s threatening to cut federal aid if the city does not do away with congestion pricing – liberals are dazed and confused at the rate at which democracy is crumbling.
“It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American constitutional democracy now rests on a single question: Will President Trump and his administration defy court orders?” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley law school, wrote in the New York Times.
But the hard truth for those
looking to the courts to rein in the Trump administration is that the
Constitution gives judges no power to compel compliance with their rulings – it
is the executive branch that ultimately enforces judicial orders. If a president decides to ignore a judicial
ruling, the courts are likely rendered impotent.
Quite right. A judicial ruling is a scrap of paper that is
no more powerful in and of itself than the piece of parchment known as the US
Constitution. The only thing that matters
is whether elected officials abide by it, which Trump clearly will not. With constitutional “checks and balances” falling
by the wayside, the only force capable of stopping America’s runaway presidency
is now extra-constitutional: the proletariat.
How did this happen? Ultimately, the reason is a growing post-2008 capitalist crisis that is wreaking not just economic damage, but political havoc across the globe – in Turkey where turmoil reigns following Erdogan’s arrest of Istanbul’s secularist mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu; in Kenya, where President William Ruto is barely hanging on following last summer’s anti-tax riots; in South Korea, where politics are in turmoil following President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempted coup, and so on.
But it is in America where the breakdown is most advanced. After 30-plus years of global hegemony, the United States is paying the price. Internationally, the American empire is over-stretched due to war in the Ukraine and the Middle East and fraying relations with its European allies. Domestically, the situation is even worse thanks to three presidential impeachments since the 1990s, two stolen elections in which the Electoral College trumped the popular vote, one attempted coup, and ceaseless gridlock on Capitol Hill. As politics grow more and more toxic, social conditions continue to plunge thanks to police killings that are now running at more than 800 per year, fatal drug overdoses that are running at 82,000, plus gun deaths that are 19 times greater per capita than those of France, 75 times greater than Germany, and approximately 400 times greater than the UK. Unsurprisingly, faith in government, is down 60 percent since 2001.
So stifling is the political atmosphere that Columbia historian Adam Tooze said he was unsure if he could even use the word “Israel” now that the university has surrendered to the ridiculous notion that anti-Zionist protests violate provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I believe if we use the phrase ‘Israel,’ we may be in violation of Title VII norms,” Tooze said. “...You can see how tenuous and weird it is.” (See the Apple podcast, “A Conversation about Abundance,” starting at 11:45, for the full exchange.)
Yet the process has only begun. As the Trump offensive intensifies, Americans are going to learn that there is a lot more they will not be able to say, do, or perhaps even think. “The land of the free” is now the scene of growing conformity and regimentation.
The Silicon Valley connection
The tech sector’s role in the disaster is particularly striking. In 2017, the New York Times reported that:
...tech entrepreneurs are ... among some of the most left-leaning Democrats you can find. They are overwhelmingly in favor of economic policies that redistribute wealth, including higher taxes on rich people and lots of social services for the poor, including universal health care. Their outlook is cosmopolitan and globalist – they support free trade and more open immigration, and they score low on measures of ‘racial resentment.’
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| Peter Thiel |
Sacks, PayPal’s first chief operating officer, is Trump’s AI and crypto czar, while Howery, another PayPal vet, is ambassador to Denmark. This, of course, is the country that owns Greenland, which Trump covets and which tech covets as well since it may harbor rare earths critical for such cutting-edge industries as computers, electric vehicles, super-conducting ceramics, space exploration, and weapons development.
The Dark Enlightenment
A new wave of alt-right theoreticians has meanwhile gotten Silicon Valley’s ear. They include Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger under the name “Mencius Moldbug,” who is known as Thiel’s in-house philosopher, and Nick Land, a former philosophy professor at the University of Warwick. Together, they are the creators of a school of thought known as the Dark Enlightenment or Neo-Reactionism, sometimes abbreviated as “NRx.” Neo-Reactionism’s distinguishing characteristics include “a predilection for authoritarianism over democracy, commitments to various forms of libertarianism, antipathy towards the supposed cultural hegemony of ‘progressive’ discourses, and an inclination towards racism and misogyny,” as a pair of English academics named Harrison Smith and Roger Burrows of the University of Sheffield put it in 2021.
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| Curtis Yarvin |
Yarvin, who says he is “not a white nationalist” but is “not exactly allergic to the stuff” either, has called for America to be ruled by a “CEO-monarch ... unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures.” Land goes further, declaring in a 2012 essay that “democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself.” He went on:
Predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, [NRx] conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption.
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| Nick Land |
Popular sovereignty leads to crime, homelessness, drug abuse, and other disorders that are presumably absent in Shanghai, where Land now lives.
JD Vance is the main White House vector for such ideas, although there are others as well. Thiel gave the vice president his start by hiring him onto his tech fund, Mithril Capital, in 2017 and then contributing a record $15 million to his senate campaign in 2022. After donating $1.25 million to Trump, Thiel then lobbied him to take Vance on as his running mate in 2024. Yarvin, for his part, says he never met Vance until running into him at an Inauguration Day bash in Washington, where he greeted him with the words: “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.”
“I don’t think he meant it in a bad way,” Yarvin added, “but I don’t think he meant it in a good way either.”
Regardless, Vance, who says he’s “plugged into a lot of weird rightwing subcultures,” has plainly been channeling the California guru for years. Where Yarvin has repeatedly said that the solution is something he calls RAGE – “retire all government employees” – Vance told a conservative podcaster in 2021:
If I was giving him [Trump] one piece of advice, [it’s] fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people ... and, when the courts stop you, stand before the country ... like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.’
Where Yarvin says that Americans “are going to have to get over their dictator-phobia” if they want government to change, Vance said in the same podcast: “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.” Four years later, Vance is in a position to give America the Yarvin-style brain-wash he thinks it needs.
Thiel has persuaded Trump to take on other favorites. They include Michael Kratsios, a principal at Thiel Capital, who is now Trump’s chief technical advisor, and Michael Anton, author of an influential rightwing screed called “The Flight 93 Election,” which argued that Americans should “charge the cockpit” and take back the government before the country self-destructs. “There are no guarantees,” Anton wrote. “Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.”
Where Anton was a senior national security official in the first Trump administration, he is now director of policy planning in the second.
Then, of course, there is Musk. “I’m not just MAGA,” he proclaimed last year, “I’m dark, gothic MAGA.” Trumpism and the Dark Enlightenment are overlapping more and more thoroughly.
“What’s happening in Silicon Valley is insane, right?” says Mark Cuban, the billionaire sports investor who backed Kamala Harris in 2024.
It’s not so much a support thing, it’s more like a takeover thing.... They want Trump to be the CEO of the United States of America, and they want to be the board of directors that makes him listen to them.
The economics of authoritarianism
It is not so much ideas that are propelling NRx to new heights as the politico-economic forces behind them. These include economic polarization, which is multiplying the power of the billionaire class; political breakdown, which is encouraging the Silicon Valley bourgeoisie’s most ambitious takeover fantasies, and of course the rise of Christian nationalism and other far-right ideologies with which NRx feels increasingly at home. It also includes the growing tech bubble. Since the 2008 meltdown, the tech-heavy NASDAQ index has risen at nearly twice the rate of the S&P 500, while, by 2022, hi-tech firms accounted for eight of the world’s ten biggest companies in terms of market capitalization. Crypto, which in the form of Bitcoin has tripled in the last two years alone, is further fueling tech mania by making it seem like Silicon Valley now has the ability to spin fortunes out of thin air.
Then there’s artificial intelligence, another super-power that Silicon Valley seemingly has in its grasp. Thanks to the AI boom, Thiel’s Palantir Technologies, an AI analytics firm with extensive government contracts, has more than quadrupled in value over the last twelve months. Musk, who is moving into artificial intelligence via his new spinoff, X.AI Corp., has built what he says is the world’s largest super-computer in Memphis, Tennessee. This means money, and money means influence in a period of fictitious capital.
NRx likes AI because it fits in neatly with an “accelerationist” ideology that Land and his colleagues began developing at Warwick in the mid-1990s. The idea, nothing if not bold, is that once AI outpaces human intelligence, the relationship between man and machine will be reversed. While this is not an uncommon viewpoint, what’s different about accelerationism different is that it welcomes the turn-about and in fact wants to speed it along. As a blogger named Park MacDougald writes, “Land ridicules the idea that an AI vastly more intelligent than us could be made to serve our goals”; to the contrary, he holds that humanity will serve AI’s goals instead. As he put it in 2019:
Modernity has Capitalism (the self-escalating techno-commercial complex) as its motor. Our question was what ‘the process’ wants (i.e. spontaneously promotes) and what resistances it provokes.
Observes another veteran of the Warwick accelerationist movement:
We all live in an operating system set up by
the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI.
'The notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism', Land adds, 'is a deep theoretical error.'
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| Friedrich Nietzsche |
Rather than constituted subjects, with minds that mirror Nature, we are transformed into machinic parts for some super-personal intelligence. We become inorganic cogs within a whole which no longer cares about our individual welfare or needs. Far from an indictment of an authoritarian capitalism, this is its speculative apotheosis. Humans are the mere ‘meat puppets’ of the real agent of history, an ever-expanding capital or technology.[2]
The goal is not freedom and progress but subordination to a post-human form of higher intelligence.
Enter Trump
Batty? Quite – which is why it once seemed possible to write off accelerationism and its NRx offshoot as the work of “very silly rightwing nutjobs” hanging out in obscure corners of the internet, to quote the journalist Elizabeth Sandifer. But then Trump surged, Democrats collapsed, inflation rose, and demands rose to regulate AI as well. Its back to the wall, tech responded just the way accelerationists said it should, i.e. by fighting back. Musk poured $243 million into the Trump campaign while other Silicon Valley executives contributed $150 million more according to the Guardian.
In a recent interview, billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen explained the reasons for tech’s ideological about-face. They ran the gamut from “government-mandated enforcement of DEI in very destructive ways” to the phony Russiagate scandal that Democrats cooked up in 2017 in an attempt to cripple the new Trump administration and censor social media. (Thanks to Russiagate, Andreessen said he felt he was “just being lied to 500 nights in a row.”) But the final blow, as far as Silicon Valley was concerned was a 20,000-word executive order that Biden issued in October 2023 subjecting AI to wide-ranging federal regulation. Andreessen said he met a few months later with “very senior people in the White House” who told him that the aim was to centralize AI research in two or three major companies subject to careful government oversight. “We will directly regulate and control those companies,” he said the officials told him.
There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet, those days are over. That’s not happening.
Andreessen says he and his colleagues were “shocked” because “it was even worse than we thought.
Payback came when Trump repealed the executive order just a few days after taking office. Where Silicon Valley executives were once said they welcomed regulation, the mood now is one of uncompromising militance. As the New York Times puts it:
In recent weeks, Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others have asked the Trump administration to block state AI laws and to declare that it is legal for them to use copyrighted material to train their AI models. They are also lobbying to use federal data to develop the technology, as well as for easier access to energy sources for their computing demands. And they have asked for tax breaks, grants, and other incentives. The shift has been enabled by Mr. Trump, who has declared that AI is the nation’s most valuable weapon to outpace China in advanced technologies.
The outlook
Accelerationism is thus back, as is NRx. In 2021, Neo-Reactionism comprised “a significant part of the theoretical universe that contemporary political figures and ‘proto-theorists’ ... are attempting to promulgate into mainstream political discourse,” Sheffield’s Smith and Burrows noted. Four years later, thanks to the explosion of authoritarianism in both Silicon Valley and Washington, it is no longer trying to penetrate the mainstream, but in fact is the mainstream. Its rise is an index of how thoroughly bourgeois liberalism has collapsed and how authoritarianism has risen to take its place.
We can expect that ascent to continue as rightwing radicalization intensifies. Presumably, Trump doesn’t know transhumanism from transgenderism. But there is not the slightest doubt that he will draw on NRx’s ideological resources in the same way he has drawn on the practical advice of Project 2025. With Vance just a heartbeat away from the presidency, NRx could draw even closer to the centers of power. The more dictatorship intensifies, the more its role will expand.
The lessons for the working class are clear. Capitalism is not only sharpening its
political instruments, but its ideological instruments too. If “the masses are asses,” to quote one of
Yarvin’s bon mots, it’s plain that capitalism is on the offensive and that
workers are coming under growing assault.
Not only will the bourgeoisie attempt to cut wages and crush unions, but
it will further undermine social conditions while crushing what little remains
of political democracy in America’s decrepit constitutional system underfoot. Workers must mobilize – not in defense of the
constitutional order, but in defense of democracy that the constitutional order
consistently undermines. They must
constitute themselves as the reaction to the reaction, an immense counter-force
that will destroy authoritarianism so as to create a socialist democracy that
will serve the interests of those who produce the wealth.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The
Will to Power (Edinburgh: TN Foulis, 1913), no. 898, vol. 2, p. 328.
[2] Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology,
and Anti-Humanism (London: Anthem Press, 2022), 105.
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