Bluesky

Seven years ago, while we were both giving talks at a book fair in Northern California, I met author Leslie Berlin. I picked up a copy of her book, Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age, and then put it on my bookshelves and (I’m sheepish to admit) promptly forgot about it.

Seven years later, with tech titans accumulating wealth at an insane trot and inserting themselves in ever-more-nefarious ways into the political process, I finally got around to reading it. It’s a marvelously eye-opening history of the first decades of Silicon Valley’s explosive growth. It chronicles how the high-tech innovators of the 1960s and ’70s, and their counterparts a generation later, went from being iconoclastic, rebellious figures to eventually morphing into economic titans. Their companies are some of the largest and most powerful on earth, and they, as individuals, are among the very richest humans ever to have walked the planet.

I wish that I’d read Berlin’s book years ago. It helped me gain a deeper understanding of the cultural and political forces that have burst forth from Silicon Valley in recent times, and the self-confidence cum hubris that defines so many of the valley’s elites. These technological whiz kids take no prisoners and tend to have a remarkable lack of introspection. They believe they are entitled to rule the universe, and they have cultivated an extraordinary system in order to get there: of bulldozing their way into what they see as the future with little to no concern for the collateral damage.

That goes for how tech billionaires have steamrolled traditional news organizations in their quest to control the messages and stories that users see. And, increasingly, it goes for the rules and regulations that historically have bounded that now oh-so-quaint ideal of informed participatory democracy.

Want to understand how and why Trump’s appeal proved so extraordinary in the November elections? Look to Elon Musk’s quarter-billion-dollar intervention, and his tipping the scales of X firmly in Trump’s favor, especially when it came to advertising to young men. Look at the rumors that spread like wildfire on Facebook, with no sense of accountability from the corporate owners for the harm they caused in people’s lives or the damage they did to the body politic. Look at the ritual kissing of the ring performed by Jeff Bezos and how his Washington Post ordered its employees not to endorse Kamala Harris. Look at Peter Thiel’s hard-right political agenda and his patronage of rising political stars such as JD Vance.

And now, many of those same billionaires are raking in the cash. Bloomberg reported that Musk’s net worth has increased upwards of 60 percent since the election; the world’s richest man is now approaching the half-trillion-dollar mark. Bezos and Zuckerberg aren’t far behind. Between the three of them, they now have assets in the $1 trillion range. As Bernie Sanders recently pointed out in a scathing tweet, it is an utterly grotesque accumulation of wealth and power—and one that seems almost certain to accelerate as Trump’s American oligarchy kicks into high gear.

Making it more grotesque is that Musk, America’s most in-your-face oligarch, is strutting his stuff as co-head of the newly established “Department of Government Efficiency,” charged with slashing federal spending. He has gone about it with his usual lack of tact and dignity, targeting individual civil servants in social media blasts; intimidating political figures who might have reservations about the scale of his proposals—or, indeed, the legitimacy of the unelected Musk’s mandate to unilaterally redesign the entire federal government; denigrating the work habits of government civil servants, when his own companies face allegations that they have a workplace culture tolerant of everything from sexual harassment to racist messaging; and, most recently, demanding that Congress not pass a bipartisan spending bill designed to keep government operations functioning and federal employees receiving their much-needed paychecks.

If you don’t get heartburn at the sight of the world’s wealthiest individual pretending to be a people’s tribune and goading on a pliant GOP-led Congress to shut down the government and deprive hundreds of thousands of federal workers their paychecks just in time for the holiday season, I don’t know what will ruffle your feathers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Musk, with Trump’s full blessing, is treating America as he treated X; he is regarding it as his personal prize, as conquered corporate territory, its assets to be disposed of how he sees fit. And due process be damned.

That so much of America seems OK with Musk’s arrogating such extreme powers to himself is extraordinary. But then again, so much of our current political and cultural moment is entirely abnormal.

And that brings me to the point of this column. Since early 2021, I have been writing my “Left Coast” column, exploring political trends and goings-on through the coastal and desert West. By my count, this is number 180. I have loved every minute of it.

In writing columns on the Western states for four years, I have become ever more convinced that this part of the country is only now coming into its full political maturity and potential—and that, eventually, it will play a key role in recalibrating America in a more progressive direction. But, with the coming of a second Trump presidency, this one buttressed by the likes of Musk and his oligarchical henchmen, it’s time to refocus. And so, come the new year, I will be delving back into all things Trumpworld.

My new column, “Hiding in Plain Sight,” will kick off in time for the inauguration of America’s first felony-convicted, insurrection-inspiring president. If, as so many of us anticipate, this does indeed turn out to be a smash-and-grab presidency—an historically unprecedented exercise in grift, corruption, and cruelty, as well as in spectacularly antidemocratic and authoritarian praxis—the media will have a particularly vital role to play. My hope is that “Hiding in Plain Sight” will shine a light on the dark places and ugly political realities that too many Americans, in casting their lot with Trump, are choosing to turn a blind eye to. My intent is that, when terrible policies and oligarchic deals kick in, when vulnerable people are left even more vulnerable by the Trumpian assault on the edifices of civil society, I will be able to help readers understand the stakes and navigate the way forward.

Two and a half centuries ago, Thomas Paine wrote, in Common Sense, “Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

America’s new oligarchs are fast at work building their own citadels atop the wreckage, not of paradise but of a vibrant albeit flawed American democracy. For years now, Trump has held our democracy captive, his supporters threatening bloody mayhem if he didn’t get his way. For years, his enablers have conspired in his assault on the very concept of truth and on the institutions that make possible a pluralist society and the peaceful transfer of power.

Now, despite his voluminous criminal justice résumé, Trump is heading back to the White House. He will, on January 20, raise his hand and swear a solemn oath to uphold the very Constitution, and the very rules-based system of governance, that he desecrated four years ago. In the long saga of America, this will, most surely, rank among the most hypocritical of moments.

Cry, the beloved country, the South African writer Alan Paton once wrote. It’s a particularly apropos phrase for our moment. Yes, I shall cry. I shall weep for all of the damage done by these new would-be pharaohs. But then, I will get writing, because that is what I do.