REVOLT OF THE MASSES

Finding the Narrative Through Line In Yet Another Week That Changed Everything

“De mortuis, nil nisi bonum.” Ezra Klein & every other mainstream media commentator

“De liberalibus, nihil nisi malum.” Trump and every MAGA media commentator

There is nothing more to add about Charlie Kirk’s murder and the divisions in America it deepened. You can’t fast forward reality so there is no telling whether the event marks a major moment in America’s descent or is just another incremental step on the society’s 1000 mile journey to fascism.

But as this is a first rough draft of history, I want to bookend the event between two others.

Friday, September 5th, most mainstream news outlets carried an item about this:

This New York Times headline is certainly eye-catching and probably designed to get clicks because the small print is in the opening paragraph:

Tesla’s board on Friday proposed a pay package that could make its chief executive, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire as long as he meets a series of very ambitious corporate goals.

Ambitious is one word for it. The compensation would take the form of Tesla shares — not cash — and would only kick in if he octuples Tesla’s stock market value from a little over $1 trillion today to $8.5 trillion over the next seven and a half years.

With Tesla sales falling off that is an improbable ask, but the corporate press release that broke the news had achieved its purpose: pleasing the boss. Elon wins the race to be the first trillionaire, is a headline he wanted to see, even if that day is in the far-off future.

James Murdoch, estranged son of Rupert, sits on the Tesla board and agreed this new compensation for his friend Elon.

On September 8, he and his sisters agreed to be bought out of the family trust set up by their media empire building father for a little over a billion dollars each. This meant the oldest son, Lachlan, reported to be even further to the right than his father would inherit the company and safeguard Fox News, Rupert’s not dying quite yet wish.

On September 10, Charlie Kirk was shot. Fox News became command central for the rhetorical assault on all who didn’t think the provocateur was a great American and martyr of the war on wokeness and the radical left ( a meaningless term since it is applied to virtually all critics of MAGA world)

On September 13, more than 110,000 people attended the Unite the Kingdom rally in central London.

The Unite the Kingdom rally

Charlie Kirk’s name was invoked, posters bearing his image paraded:

©Carl Recine, Reuters

The rally was organized by Tommy Robinson, who is either an agitator who came out of British fascist parties and football hooliganism and has served five prison terms for violence (the majority view in Britain); or as MAGA-mouth Steve Bannon calls him: “the backbone” of England, and a “force of nature.”

Whatever he is, Robinson has been bankrolled by American tech money, in many cases the same tech money that helped bankroll Charlie Kirk, primarily the late entrepreneur, Robert Shillman and, inevitably Elon Musk. In addition to cash, Elon unbanned Robinson from Twitter.

Elon beamed in to address the Unite the Kingdom rally. He told the crowd,

“The left is the party of murder”

Before taking aim at the Labour government

“We must have revolutionary government change …

“I really think that there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. You can’t – we don’t have another four years, or whenever the next election is, it’s too long.

“Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.

“If this continues, that violence is going to come to you – you will have no choice. You’re in a fundamental situation where whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

Whether this kind of interference will help Tesla sales in Britain only time will tell. But at the moment they are way down, even as electrical vehicle sales are up more than 40% so far this year.

“Liberal” Tesla board member James Murdoch might want to have a word with Elon but I doubt any more will come of it than his attempt to get his father to make Fox News less of a mouth piece for Trump.

If the regulatory authorities in America were awake they might want to look at whether the Tesla board is discharging its fiduciary duty of loyalty to the company’s interests by voting the absurd compensation package to someone busily interfering in the internal politics of a foreign country which is having negative effects on sales.

The reason I am linking these last ten days’ events is to show the interconnectedness of America’s new industrial elite with anti-democratic political elements. This is yet another point of contemporary American life which has worrying echoes of Germany a century ago.

The Elon and Tommy show made me think of Babylon Berlin, the German entry for greatest streaming-TV series of the 21st century competition. The series is set in the final years of the Weimar Republic and the plot is complicated and occasionally surreal but the historical backdrop is the slow take-over of various institutions of German life by the Nazi party especially law enforcement and industry. It has many storylines and takes a little getting used to but it is one of the great pieces of long-form narrative art made in the last decade.

One of the echoes with today is a storyline involving a drug addled, borderline insane steel magnate named Nyssen (I’m sure the rhyme with Thyssen is intentional) who is working behind the scenes to overthrow the democratically elected Weimar government.

He is convinced that rockets will be the ultimate weapons of the future, has one built and tests it — utter failure. You see the parallels with Musk.

Industrialist Nyssen (white hair) showing his rocket model in Babylon Berlin

This past week, when the consequences of billionaires furthering their interests by funding political provocation became bloodily apparent, also put me in mind of a book I read in Mr. Fisher’s advanced economics class in high school: The Revolt of the Masses by Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset.

The book was written in 1929 as fascism was taking root around Europe and tries to explain why this is happening, not from an economic or political point of view, but from a social point of view. Ortega y Gasset is a lively stylist — the book started out as a series of newspaper columns — and his thinking is a bit scattershot. He is often criticized from both right and left which is only fair as his critique takes both to task.

Despite the title, the “masses” referred to are not out of a Marxist tract. The masses are not the proletariat but what most of us are: middle class, well-fed, satisfied. Plenitude is the word he uses frequently. People have got so used to having enough that they have forgotten how this world of plenty was born

The old democracy was tempered by a generous dose of liberalism and of enthusiasm for law. By serving these principles the individual bound himself to maintain a severe discipline over himself. Under the shelter of liberal principles and the rule of law, minorities could live and act.

Democracy and law — life in common under the law were synonymous. Today we are witnessing the triumphs of a hyperdemocracy in which the mass acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure. It is a false interpretation of the new situation to say that the mass has grown tired of politics and handed over the exercise of it to specialised persons. Quite the contrary. That was what happened previously; that was democracy.

Now, on the other hand, the mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.

Or in our historical moment, notions born in social media.

Mr. Fisher, who was definitely of the liberal persuasion, brought the Revolt of the Masses to our attention during a discussion about how rights bring with them obligations, a theme of the book.

The American masses — in the Ortega y Gassett not Marxist-Leninist sense — have long since forgotten the obligations and the responsibilities that come with rights. This is not a question of economic class. It applies from working class to the billionaire (and someday trillionaire) class.

Very specifically: the right of free speech in the public sphere brings with it an obligation to think about what you are saying and how you say it. That obligation is not much in evidence in social media and other platforms of mass communication. The obligation becomes a responsibility to think clearly about how you express yourself the larger your audience.

And it is the irresponsibility of those with large followings — like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk — that has brought America to the brink and made the prophetic words in Hosea, chapter 8, verse 7 literal in the case of Charlie Kirk:

“For they have sown the wind, and shall reap the whirlwind”

1. https://monoskop.org/images/b/bd/Ortega_y_Gasset_Jose_The_Revolt_of_the_Masses.pdf