A lot of the current crop of billionaires literally became billionaires by disrupting the establishment, overhauling whole industries and toppling the old systems of power and control. They were by definition anti-establishment. The problem is… now they’re the establishment and they’ve implemented their own, even worse systems of power and control.
Much of the pre-Trump establishment is gone now, and no one should regret that, except for the unfortunate detail that the post-Trump establishment is far, far worse than anything that came before it.
The problem with popular revolutions is that they don’t always end up being very popular once the revolution has succeeded.
That’s my point: billionaires are an establishment unto themselves, and they’re already in a cartel to control the US government.
Corey Robin put it better than I can in The Reactionary Mind:
Far from yielding a knee-jerk defense of an unchanging old regime or a thoughtful traditionalism, the reactionary imperative presses conservatism in two rather different directions: first, to a critique and reconfiguration of the old regime; and second, to an absorption of the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it opposes. What conservatism seeks to accomplish through that reconfiguration of the old and absorption of the new is to make privilege popular, to transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses. A new old regime, one could say, which brings the energy and dynamism of the street to the antique inequalities of a dilapidated estate.
There isn’t really any rehabilitation of his current image possible. It’s not like he did one or two bad things he could apologise for, it was systematic and continuous. He’s revealed himself to be a fascist which is pretty bad to begin with, but also a degenerate which repels even the fascists from liking him.
Before the not-a-cunt mask slipped he was seen as a cool, anti establishment troll by space nerds. I think he is trying to get back to that.
But that mask slipped long ago… and the longer you look at his past the further back in time it slips…
How anyone can see a billionaire as “anti-establishment” is beyond me.
A lot of the current crop of billionaires literally became billionaires by disrupting the establishment, overhauling whole industries and toppling the old systems of power and control. They were by definition anti-establishment. The problem is… now they’re the establishment and they’ve implemented their own, even worse systems of power and control.
Much of the pre-Trump establishment is gone now, and no one should regret that, except for the unfortunate detail that the post-Trump establishment is far, far worse than anything that came before it.
The problem with popular revolutions is that they don’t always end up being very popular once the revolution has succeeded.
That’s my point: billionaires are an establishment unto themselves, and they’re already in a cartel to control the US government.
Corey Robin put it better than I can in The Reactionary Mind:
There isn’t really any rehabilitation of his current image possible. It’s not like he did one or two bad things he could apologise for, it was systematic and continuous. He’s revealed himself to be a fascist which is pretty bad to begin with, but also a degenerate which repels even the fascists from liking him.