Newsflash! Democrats are Very, Very Upset. Flummoxed that they have no Procedure for dealing with Trump administrative coup. Hold press conference to spout talking points about rule of law, saving democracy, and fighting back. Disengaged electorate shrugs.
Maybe that's unfair. The Dems might yet figure something out. But it's really not in their DNA to fight this kind of fight, so I doubt it. Is any street fighter leader going to emerge? I like Chris Murphy, who seems to understand the moment, but when push comes to shove, he's a Connecticut suit, not a populist rabble rouser. That's what they need. What they need, in fact, is someone like Steve Bannon.
If you haven't listened to the two recent Douthat podcasts with Marc Andreessen and Steve Bannon, I think you should. If nothing else they demonstrate how the debate is being shaped on the right in such a way that is actually dealing with 21st Century reality rather than with the concerns that preoccupy those living in the Dem/Liberal establishment bubble. So here are some thoughts especially about Bannon.
Let me first say that I have not ever listened to a Bannon podcast. Nor do I listen to any of the Trump-adjacent podcasts like Joe Rogan's et al., Maybe I should to understand the zeitgeist better, but I have so much bandwidth, and I have so much toleration for nonsense. So I was somewhat surprised to learn in listening to Bannon's conversation with Douthat the degree to which Bannon was not spewing nonsense.
There's much I find objectionable about Bannon, and yet I doubt there's a sentence in my Cathedral Lectures that Bannon would disagree with except the negative stuff I say about Trump.
So while his over-caffeinated rhetoric is annoying, there's very little I, in turn, can disagree with in what he says here–
Now here’s the point. In techno-feudalism, you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit — they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them.
They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity.
And that’s why they’re all rushing—whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.
You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction “Dungeons & Dragons” guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every [expletive] step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that.
And the progressive left made a deal with these guys.
He's talking about the deal that Obama and Biden made with the tech companies to keep their monopolies so long as they kept the U.S. ahead of the Chinese in the AI arms race. His point is that these establishment Dems accepted the tradeoff that creating these oligarchs was a risk worth taking so long as they kept the U.S. dominant in the AI arms race. And now with the DeepSeek reveal last week, it's clear that they haven't kept their end of the bargain. These tech oligarchs take and take and take and never really produce anything for the common good. Like the Wall Street and bank failures after 2008, they're richer and more powerful than ever. They might talk a nationalist game, but they're global techno-feudalists. They don't care about America or the everyday Americans' lives their self-seeking policies continuously, callously disrupt. He goes on–
And they have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world. And you see this in artificial intelligence. We have no controls over this. We’ve allowed these monopolies to exist. And now we know they’re getting their ass handed to them, I think, by the Chinese Communist Party.
We’re in deep [expletive] right now. We’re in a crisis.
If you think the rhetoric is overheated, you really just don't get it. He's absolutely right that we've turned the nation over to these 11-year-old nerds. It's the point I've been making for years now. And he's right that as a result, we're in deep expletive.
So say what you want about Bannon, but who prominent on the Left is making this case about where the real threat lies? Rachel Maddow is on a mission to save American democracy, but she seems a representative case in how she doesn't really seem to understand where the long-term threat to the "demos" is coming from. It's not from MAGA–MAGA is the miner's canary; it's symptom, not a cause. Rather it's from these transhumanist-techno-feudalists and the cage they've built I call the TCM. Does she plan on doing a podcast on that? Doubt it. She's focussed on the 1930s not the 2030s.
Bannon seems to get this future threat in a way that she–or anybody prominent on the cultural/political Left–does not. The Left's framing of the threat to democracy seems very 20th century, and as such oblivious of what the real 21st Century techno-capitalist dynamics at work here are.
On the other hand, Douthat's interview with Andreessen was a perfect way to set the stage for Bannon. Andreessen, a former Al-Gore, DLC Democrat, is a pure techno-capitalist who moved over to Trump last year for two reasons. (1) because, he says, that the Great Awokening in the 2010s was so disruptive to corporate control as young "radicals" demanded that their so-called Leftist program be implemented.
But the Great Awokening was never a threat to techno-capitalism. At most it was just annoying for these old-guard, Liberal-ish CEOs like Andreessen to have to give in to the kids by tacking up a Black Lives Matters poster in the break room and by instituting a DEI program. They went along, he said. They needed to retain the talent, and they didn't want to look like bad people to their own kids when they came home from their elite colleges on vacation. But the Great Awokening never threatened the fundamental structures of capitalism in any of its sectors. What really pushed Andreessen over the top was (2) the Biden administration's attempt to control Crypto and AI. Now that's a real threat.
Listen to the podcast if you want to hear how the Biden folks freaked him out and why this pushed him into Trump's embrace. To listen to him now, he clearly has drunk the Trump Kool-Aid. What a chameleon. And, I'm sorry, in the long run, these kinds of controls have to be imposed. Yes, they have to be imposed in China and elsewhere as well, but Bannon's right when he says that–
…Andreessen and Musk are smart enough to be able to get below the surface on the numbers and see the direction of the country and climb on board as the techno-feudalists early on.
They are hard-core techno-feudalists. They’re not populist. I tease Elon all the time. If I could turn him from a techno-feudalist globalist to a populist nationalist, we could make some progress here. He’s definitely a techno-feudalist. One of the hardest-core techno-feudalists. And so is Andreessen.
With these guys you’re talking about genius level intelligence. These are not dumb people. But they’re not with us when it comes to the little guy.
Bannon's right about the threat they pose; he's wrong that Trump is going to do anything about it–except make it worse. Trump is going to side with the oligarchs for obvious reasons.
If the Dems and the Liberal elites they represent really cared about the little guy, they'd find a way to work with the Bannon Populists. Bannon himself recognizes that he shares common ground with Bernie, Maddow, and AOC, all of whom he name checks. My hope would be that Bannon Populists, as soon as they realize that Trump is siding with the techno-feudalists and couldn't care less about the little guy, start to reach out to the new clear-sighted people on Left who understand how important people power is to resist the transhumanist-techno-feudalist flood to come.
Is there anybody on the Left who will reach back? Or is Bannon and MAGA just too yucky?
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