Elon and Trump Highlight the Seminal Battle of Our Time Against Major Capital

Listening to the Elon Musk / Donald Trump Spaces event was pure torture. It was bad enough that Trump put on full display his incapability to navigate even the most basic and straightforward political issue. It was nauseating hearing Musk butter Trump up as he attempted to transplant his plans and agendas into Trump’s potential second administration. But there was something troubling in the event even taking place.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X was a ground shaking development that, along with Jeff Bezos’s acquisition of the Washington Post, should go down in history as a turning point in this new generation of tech oligarchs cementing their control over discourse and media, but to see the platform so blatantly put to use as a propaganda tool was a whole different story. There have been rumblings of the event sparking an investigation into political gifts and donations, and though I have no faith whatsoever this will bear fruit, it absolutely should.

Once more, when discussing these things, it’s necessary to establish that Trump is a symptom of a much larger disease. His buffoonery and repellant behavior are a poisonous sideshow that has resulted in a carefully created pseudo-populist movement guided and directed by Right Wing billionaires who have meticulously dismantled democracy for the past few decades. As his first presidency previewed, another Trump term would simply be a long and torturous slog speckled with endless grifts and the carrying out of an agenda of those donors’ design. This is what Project 2025 represents: an escalation in an all-out assault on the progress of the 20th century.

That disease, however, remains and will worsen regardless of whether Trump is defeated or victorious. And it is the battle of this sickness that will define our generation and others to come.

Simply put, it is the control over the state, politics, culture, and economics by the wealthiest few. By leveraging accumulated capital and undue influence, the wealth class has managed to consolidate power and miraculously accelerate the accumulation of capital. And, in doing so, there is a long and traceable path that has brought us to this moment of crisis.

One essential landmark in this march was the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which overturned the so-called “McCain/Feingold Act” that limited how individuals, corporations, and groups could contribute to campaigns. Following Citizens United, the floodgates opened, allowing the wealthy to swamp our process with ungodly amounts of wealth that had been accumulated over the past few decades with assistance from the government itself.

It is notable that as historic inequality has increased that the power of the wealthy has similarly grown. It seems elementary, honestly, but it bares stating in a world that tries to hide that fact. This goes back to the beginnings of empire, in which powers funded voyages in search of wealth, trade, resources, and in order to viciously subdue indigenous populations. Eventually the corporation was created in the 1600s with the blessing of imperial power and gifted the authority to carry out its agenda. Over time, the corporations grew more and more powerful and, eventually, managed to use their ill-gotten wealth to then corrupt home governments and effectively take them over.

This has happened with superpowers time and again, whether it’s the East-India Company or our more recent super-corporations that have built their power base on our government’s outsourcing of empirical functions. After all, Elon Musk and his associates would never have so much as sniffed their historic wealth if it wasn’t for the neoliberal turn that has redistributed trillions of dollars from the working and middle classes to this oligarchical clique (and zero percent interest rates). And, as anyone could see who wanted to look, the results are the same. Accumulated capital has and always will turn to corruption. If left unchecked, total cooption of democratic powers is inevitable.

Right now, our representative government has been effectively bought and sold by these cretins, leading to a duopoly in which one side represents the nastiest and most antidemocratic impulses freely and the other expresses concern for the behavior but does little to thwart it. Of course, the gridlock of the system is a feature until the wealth class needs something done, whether it’s further austerity or emergency bailouts to keep this crooked economy rolling.

That hold is fueled by a whole host of factors, but the presence of unlimited funds in the election process certainly plays a role. If we are to move forward, and we must if we are to avoid the worst consequences of this crisis, meager economic agendas and, at most, lip-service, will not get the job done. Just as I’ve argued for a radical reformation of the Supreme Court, so must the opposition to corporate and wealth class influence in elections take center stage.

What’s more, reducing the power of our economic elite is an incredibly popular issue. It, along with any actual plan to shift redistribution from the bottom-up and rein in minoritarian institutions like the Court, is supported by a wide, wide berth of American voters. So, why is it not front and center?

The Democratic Party is as indebted to this flawed system as any other, and so any nod or attention paid to democratic ideas is carefully orchestrated and limited by design. It is the tenuous and infuriating position of the party to only flirt with populist ideas but ensure, at all times, that conflagration never gets out of control. Rhetorical strategy revolves around hinting at actual solutions while staying as timidly away as possible and then, eventually, blaming an incapability to do anything on minoritarian systems like the Court or the Senate or, if that fails, embarrassingly enough, you can always point to the parliamentarian.

We are at a hinge point. The Democratic Party is changing into something else, it just remains to be seen what that is. We already have enough evidence to wonder if maybe it will be another version of its most recent form, but if the desire is to actually change anything and preserve what’s left of liberal democracy, then caution must give way to actual solutions. And anything starts, immediately, with addressing the undue influence of the wealth class over our systems.