The Brooklyn Rail

In the end, as always, it was the people who didn’t vote who decided this election and gave us our first openly authoritarian ruler. Only 63% of eligible voters went to the polls this time, and Trump got just over half of those to vote for him. Trump actually got fewer votes than he did when he ran before, and Kamala Harris got more votes than Barack Obama did in 2008 or 2012. But eleven million Democrats didn’t bother to vote, and that did it.

I attribute a significant amount of blame for this result to changes in the communications environment that have accelerated over the past two decades. Timothy Snyder has called this “The Phantom Campaign,” dominated by “digital demotivation,” designed to drive citizens “towards indifference, towards not doing anything, towards not voting.”¹ Trump and his allies have been able to flood all channels of communication with lies both big and small, and the nature and speed of transmission of these channels has made it almost impossible to respond effectively to the crisis in real time. This election was a victory for the Big Tech Billionaires and their political enablers, and the communication/information environment they have created.

Now the owners and purveyors of these channels—giant corporations like Meta, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc.—have effectively joined the authoritarian leader and his allies to take over the US government. Political technology has joined with these channels to create a fake world to believe in, and to pervert the sources of information. In reply to a question about the role of Truth Social, X, Gab, Parler, etc. in this process, the CEO of Gab wrote, “The right will continue to use our own tools and ecosystem to mobilize. Nothing and no one can stop us.”²

Tim Snyder has speculated that the competition for ultimate dominance between Trump and Musk may not end in favor of the President of the United States.

The general view in MAGA is that Musk is a hanger-on, whom Trump can dismiss at will. I think that this is an error.  Musk has money, and Trump has debts. Whatever Trump wants financed, he will need Musk to do it. Musk has Twitter, and Trump has Truth Social. What would happen to Trump's image were Musk to alter the algorithms on Twitter to aid Vance? Most fundamentally: Trump has needs, and Musk has wants. Trump needs to stay in power to avoid prison and poverty; Musk just enjoys breaking things, such as the United States. Musk and Trump are together on an island of oligarchy, and one of them might well outlast the other. But it would be wrong to assume that the survivor will be Trump.

Of course, it is really all voters who should take heed. Each of us is supposed to have one vote. If an oligarch has unlimited wealth, access to data about the rest of us, and malicious intent, he can use social media to affect how millions or tens of millions of us experience the campaign, and thus affect how we end up voting—or rather not voting. And now the oligarch, unelected, is taking power.³

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Remember all that Trump talk in his first term about “his generals,” and wishing he had generals like those of Adolf Hitler, who would do whatever he asked of them? Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump transition team has drafted an executive order that would establish a “warrior board” made up of retired senior military personnel to review all three-and four-star officers and purge those who are believed to be less than wholly loyal to Trump and MAGA, now or in the future. Trump has of course vowed to use the armed forces against “the enemy within,” to immediately fire anyone involved in the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, and to cleanse the military ranks of all “woke generals.” It is thought that General C.Q. Brown, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has supported diversity initiatives in the military, would be among to the first of the generals to be purged.

Autocratic takeovers generally concentrate on the “power ministries” first, including the defense department, the justice department, and the intelligence agencies. Trump wants to prove right away that he is in power and the Constitution is not, and that the other two branches of government have no say in what he does. He intends to break the Senate right away, by gutting their advice and consent function.

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Election Day 2024 coincided with the great writer John Berger’s birthday. If he had not died in 2017, he would have turned 98 on November 5. John died just as the US was crossing over from neoliberalism to the final melding of corporate power with state power that defines fascism. Berger fought his entire life against the thinking that brought Trump to power and against repressive regimes in Israel, East Timor, Syria, and his own UK, among many other places. He was an anti-fascist to his core.

In his introduction to my book Between the Eyes, he wrote:

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the “freedom” of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretenses. . . .

The political mechanism of the new tyranny—although it needs highly sophisticated technology in order to function—is starkly simple. Usurp the words democracy, freedom, etc. Impose—whatever the disasters—the new profit-making and impoverishing economic chaos everywhere. . . .

The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends to a large degree on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny’s nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame. . . .

Not a simple task, for most of its official discourse is pictorial, associative, evasive, full of innuendoes. Few things are said in black and white. Both military and economic strategists now realize that the media play a crucial role—not so much in defeating the current enemy as in foreclosing and preventing mutiny, protests or desertion. Any tyranny’s manipulation of the media is an index of its fears. . . .

Every form of contestation against this tyranny is comprehensible. Dialogue with it is impossible. For us to live and die properly, things have to be named properly. Let us reclaim our words.⁴