Politico, almost as a throwaway, recently gave up the Big Reveal about the true nature of our collapsing political order in How the Internet Turned on Elon Musk.
For those who missed Musk's recent star turn on SNL (streamed live via the World Wide Web) The Hill covered it: ''I'm actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger's to host 'SNL,''' Musk said. ''Or at least the first to admit it. So I won't make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don't worry. I'm pretty good at running 'human' in emulation mode.''
It's not just Musk. A lot of multibillionaire leaders of giant tech companies are somewhere out there on the autism spectrum. This, not a spurious leftist bias, underlies the painful disconnect between the Digital Masters of the Universe and the many angry neurotypical conservatives.
Many gifted-multibillionaires-with-Asperger's display that their signature syndrome often comes conjoined with a superpower beyond facility in coding Java, Python or Solidity: the ability to ''think different.'' We Washington Insiders are baffled by the utter nonsense into which politics and both parties have descended. Meanwhile the Aspies see through the pretenses and into the stark reality.
How is it that so many curable social morbidities, such as American gun violence at 10x the rate of the equally locked-and-loaded Switzerland, persist? How can so many CEOs of even money-losing companies inequitably make as much in less than a day as a median-income worker makes in a year?
There are pragmatic policies that would improve things without plunging us into a socialist dystopia. Harry S. Truman hit the nail on its head when he observed, in a 1958 speech to the Reciprocity Club in Washington, D.C., ''I'm proud that I'm a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead ten or fifteen years.''
What's going wrong?
Politico's Derek Robertson, in a sly aside, spills the beans. ''Musk shares [with his fellow techno-optimists in the Democratic Party like Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg a] cardinal sin: that of cringe, an obliviousness toward, or unwillingness to acknowledge, the tastemakers who define pop culture at its highest level — which increasingly includes policy positions, like police abolition or massive wealth redistribution. Musk has remained stubbornly committed to a brash and vague tech-bro libertarianism that was already wearing out its welcome among cultural elites in 2011, and seems fully retrograde in the world of 2021.'' (Emphasis supplied.)
Revealed! Policy as pop culture, a fashion statement rather than a practical mechanism for improving the lot of us commoners. An insidious deepfake shift from practicality to purity testing underlies our current surrealistic political pillow.
The central political narrative now is that of Donald Trump hunting down the GOP's leading families, the Bushes, Cheneys, Romneys, to replace them his own dynasty (as I warned last year at Newsmax). This, not policy nor coherent philosophy nor even a really plausible tale of America again rising to epic greatness, is The Narrative. Shakespeare said it best. This is a tale told by "an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
As Noel Yaxley summarizes the essential insights of the late Guy Debord at The Article, ''In his theory of the spectacle, Debord sees society slowly being divorced from reality, culturally denuded and subjected to false needs.'' I emphatically disagree with Debord's twee Marxism, that disagreement at least as strong as my admiration for his penetrating cultural criticism: ''Boredom is always counter-revolutionary.'' Yes, as Napoleon once said, ''Imagination rules the world.'' (Something about Frenchmen!)
Musk, in accord with these insights, has minted himself paper wealth worth about half the value of all the gold in Fort Knox. With his ''Man-from-Mars'' perspective, Musk recognizes that fame (or notoriety) offers more financial value at lower risk and cost than does selling product. By the miracle of this rare device Musk has driven the value of his companies to many multiples that of companies producing orders of magnitude more goods than his, making himself incalculably wealthy.
Elon as Iron Man?
Auric Goldfinger: call your office.
As above so below. Despite his many foibles, flaws and cringeworthy unforced political errors, Donald Trump, reality TV star, perhaps uniquely understands the Debordian divorce between society and reality. Some rising politician who can conjoin an ability to feed the hungering popular imagination with an ability to feed the hungry may well, like Caesar Augustus, rule the world.
Elon Musk (born in South Africa, thus ineligible for the presidency) shows the way. We —Washington Insiders, voters, and spectators alike — can only hope that an inspired and more capable successor to Trump also will take to heart the wisdom of the omniscient narrator respecting Peter Parker. With great power comes great responsibility.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $88T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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