Stranglers in a Strangled Land

The American people have been conditioned from the cradle by the cleverest and most thorough psychotechnicians to believe in and trust the dictatorship which rules them. … If you free them without adequate psychological preparation, like horses being led from a burning barn, they will return to their accustomed place.

— Robert Heinlein, If This Goes On —

Earl Fowler

So it occurs to me, reading about the role Elon Musk is being tapped to play in a second Donald Trump presidency, that science fiction fandom has seen it all before.

For that matter, so have devotees of stock western or war stories — or Tarzan books or Greek myths or Ayn Rand’s Objectivist fiction — since the glorious heroes of those early sci-fi pulp magazines were simply parachuted into space from ancient Troy or lawless 19th-century El Paso.

As the last honourable man in a world of ignorance, the white saviour figure, often a genius entrepreneur with steely-eyed vision and unfathomable wealth, outwits all the bureaucratic dunderheads to reshape society into a libertarian utopia with minimal government interference but oodles of taxpayer resources at his disposal.

An online article in The Atlantic this week by Franklin Foer was chillingly clear about what might be in store:

In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government — not to mention the business opportunity of the century.

Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state — and therefore American life — in his own image.

Musk’s pursuit of this dream clearly transcends billionaire hobbyism. Consider the personal attention and financial resources that he is pouring into the former president’s campaign. According to The New York Times, Musk has relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee Trump’s ground game there. That is, he’s running the infrastructure that will bring voters to the polls. In service of this cause, he’s imported top talent from his companies, and he reportedly plans on spending $500 million on it. That doesn’t begin to account for the value of Musk’s celebrity shilling, and the way he has turned X into an informal organ of the campaign.

Musk began as a Trump skeptic — a supporter of Ron DeSantis, in fact. Only gradually did he become an avowed, rhapsodic MAGA believer. His attitude toward Trump seems to parallel his view of artificial intelligence. On the one hand, AI might culminate in the destruction of humanity. On the other hand, it’s inevitable, and if harnessed by a brilliant engineer, it has glorious, maybe even salvific potential.

Musk’s public affection for Trump begins, almost certainly, with his savvy understanding of economic interests — namely, his own. Like so many other billionaire exponents of libertarianism, he has turned the government into a spectacular profit center. His company SpaceX relies on contracts with three-letter agencies and the Pentagon. It has subsumed some of NASA’s core functions. Tesla thrives on government tax credits for electric vehicles and subsidies for its network of charging stations. By Politico’s tabulation, both companies have won $15 billion in federal contracts. But that’s just his business plan in beta form. According to The Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is designing a slew of new products with “national security customers in mind.”

Musk has only begun to tap the pecuniary potential of the government, and Trump is the dream. He rewards loyalists, whether they are foreign leaders who genuflect before him or supplicants who host events at his resorts. Where other presidents might be restrained by norms, Trump shrugs. During his first term, he discovered that his party was never going to punish him for his transgressions.

In the evolving topography of Trumpland, none of his supporters or cronies will have chits to compare with Musk’s. If Trump wins, it will likely be by a narrow margin that can be attributed to turnout. Musk can tout himself as the single variable of success.

It’s not hard to imagine how the mogul will exploit this alliance. Trump has already announced that he will place him in charge of a government-efficiency commission. Or, in the Trumpian vernacular, Musk will be the “secretary of cost-cutting.” SpaceX is the implied template: Musk will advocate for privatizing the government, outsourcing the affairs of state to nimble entrepreneurs and adroit technologists. That means there will be even more opportunities for his companies to score gargantuan contracts. So when Trump brags that Musk will send a rocket to Mars during his administration, he’s not imagining a reprise of the Apollo program. He’s envisioning cutting SpaceX one of the largest checks that the U.S. government has ever written. He’s talking about making the richest man in the world even richer.

It won’t come as a shock that a man fixated on sending astronauts to Mars was an avid sci-fi reader as a teen. Along with Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, Musk has cited Frank Herbert’s Dune series, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (which he says was “fundamental to the creation of Space X”), Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as among his favourite books.

In case you’ve forgotten or have been avoiding it for decades, here’s a Wikipedia summary of Atlas Shrugged:

The book depicts a dystopian United States in which publicly traded companies suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations. Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, struggle against "looters" who want to exploit their productivity. They discover that a mysterious figure called John Galt is persuading other business leaders to abandon their companies and disappear as a strike of productive individuals against the looters. The novel ends with the strikers planning to build a new capitalist society based on Galt's philosophy.

Has kind of a familiar ring to it. How one chafes at those burdensome laws enacted to protect renters and minimal rights for child labourers. How one seethes at those loathsome regulations designed to shield the natural world from the most egregious depredations of full-throated capitalism.

Stranger in a Strange Land is a sort of Martian Mowgli story, featuring a MAGA-like “Church of All Worlds” cult and a fabulously wise and wealthy Martian-raised hero (a white male, of course) who comes to Earth to show us the way, takes to sex like a duck to water (brother!) … and just might just be an incarnation of the Archangel Michael.

Stop me if you’ve grokked this one.

Struggles for control and a retooling of empires are at the heart of both the Dune novels and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The latter in particular lays out a libertarian vision for the future. (It also won’t come as a surprise that for the most part, women are shallow, one-dimensional prizes for the protagonists in all of these fantasies written by boys and men who spent a lot of time alone in their rooms, eating cereal. Devil or angel, I can’t make up my mind.)

I doubt whether Musk would have hit it off with Kurt Vonnegut, an atheist who was in love with the Sermon on the Mount and didn’t pretend to be a Christian like the crude and boorish Trump or tens of millions of ignorant, sexist, racist American evangelicals.

But for my much tinier allotment of money, the sci-fi figure Musk most resembles is the arrogant Malachi Constant of Vonnegut’s novel The Sirens of Titan. In preparation for an interplanetary war, Constant, the richest man in America, travels from Earth to Mars … and I’ll leave the plot at that, except to urge you to read or reread this under-appreciated tour de force.

(Will note in passing, though, that if you want to know what’s going on inside the heads of MAGA acolytes, Vonnegut nailed it:

Rented a tent, a tent, a tent;

Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.

Rented a tent!

Rented a tent!

Rented a, rented a tent.)

But back to planet Earth.

If Trump wins the Nov. 5 presidential election, by hook or by crook, the fate of the U.S. and to a large extent that of the whole world will be in the hands of two paranoid confidence men — each of whom sees the other purely as a means to achieving his own ends. Each of whom thinks he is playing the other.

For at least one of them, as for the rest of us, it will not end well. As Asimov once observed, “no movement can have two Messiahs.”

And may God have mercy on our souls, all through the day, from Don to Musk.