There will be so much soul-searching in the next days and weeks as Democrats in the United States, and supporters of liberal ideas elsewhere, come to terms with their defeat and try to figure out a path forward. But the search for solutions must begin with the acceptance of the biggest lesson of this election: liberalism, as we know it, is dead.
“Let that sink in” wrote Elon Musk on X shortly after it became evident that Trump would return to the White House – four years after losing the 2020 election, attempting to overturn the results, facing two presidential impeachments, a criminal conviction and many other criminal charges (all of which will now melt away).
The post was accompanied by a smiling photo of Musk photoshopped into the Oval Office, holding a sink.
The last time Musk was photographed with a sink was in October 2022, when he made a theatrical entrance into Twitter’s headquarters shortly after acquiring the company. That moment, which went viral, was part of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, a move that would transform the platform into a hub for disinformation and political propaganda.
Musk was not the only bro excited by Trump’s victory: Trump’s win is a win for oligarchs, autocrats and their patrons of all shapes and shades everywhere. There was palpable, genuine enthusiasm in tweets from fellow populist leaders in Hungary, India, and Israel. The Kremlin’s official response was tempered but there was no shortage of glee from those who speak on Vladimir Putin’s behalf. Few paid any heed to the FBI allegations that Russia was behind bomb threats at polling stations in battleground states, choosing instead to celebrate “victory over Ukraine” as the inevitable outcome of Trump’s election. “Kamala is finished. Let her keep cackling infectiously. The objectives of the Special Military Operation remain unchanged and will be achieved,” posted Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev, referring, of course, to the full scale invasion. No wonder that Volodymyr Zelensky’s message of congratulations to Trump sounded like a plea.
“Fuck!” was the headline in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, the weekly Die Zeit. But should anyone really be surprised?
Liberalism has been on its deathbed for a while, for reasons that are many and varied: from our inability to resolve historic injustices and address the horrendous inequities that are inherent in neo-capitalism, to the toxic effect of America’s post 9/11 wars, to the tenacity and determination of U.S. enemies in the Kremlin and Beijing, and, in sharp contrast to that determination, the complacency and arrogance of individual leaders who represent the collective “liberal” West.
I often wonder whether the decline of liberalism actually began right at the point of its greatest triumph, when after winning the Cold War, the United States encouraged Russia to embrace the wildest, most unregulated version of capitalism imaginable.
The alternative could have been a “Marshall Plan” for the Soviet Union, a responsible, long term strategy to bring wounded, defeated Russia and its still frightened, traumatized colonies into the Western liberal world. Instead, the U.S. stood by and benefited from unrestrained privatization that bred corruption and nepotism.
How does this connect to what is happening in the United States today? It created the foundation not only for modern day Russia but also for the new geopolitical alliances of oligarchs and autocrats that have now come into full bloom.
At first glance, that first generation of Gucci-wearing Russian oligarchs has little in common with the fit, fleece-sporting super rich of the United States. And yet, just like the Russian tycoons of the 1990s who accumulated unseen amounts of wealth because no one regulated them, the Silicon Valley moguls celebrating Trump’s victory today have managed to acquire unprecedented riches by skillfully avoiding government regulation.
The latest, seismic political change is an aftershock from a bigger change that’s shaking the entire world. Because unlike the Russian oligarchs, the Broligarchs of Silicon Valley have not just grabbed untold riches, they’ve created products that none of us can or want to live without.
Just as electricity changed the way we ate, slept, and worked, artificial intelligence is transforming the very fabric of our society. It’s building on the foundation laid by social media, which has already fractured the very idea of truth, legitimizing and scaling the age-old human trait of believing what we want to believe despite all evidence to the contrary.
Now, as the power and the ubiquity of digital services grow, so does the power of the men behind the monopolies that have built the digital architecture of our lives. American voters, as Axios pointed out “have just decided – among many other things – that artificial intelligence will grow up in a permissive, anything-goes household, rather than under the guidance of stricter parents.”
It’s not Donald Trump, it’s the Peter Thiels, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world who will be making up the new rules that will govern our lives. These men, who have accumulated unprecedented wealth will now be able to translate it into unprecedented political power.
And they got it democratically. The decisiveness of Trump’s victory is sobering and it shows that liberalism, or at least its current political interpretation, is unable to offer people meaningful solutions to crises that they need resolved.
“Holy smokes! Literally nothing? Literally not one county?” gasped CNN’s Jake Tapper in the early hours of Wednesday morning as CNN’s election map showed that Kamala Harris did not outperform Joe Biden in a single county in Pennsylvania.
But is this not also just a more dramatic, more globally consequential version of a movie we’ve all watched before? In Brexit Britain or during countless recent elections around the world, where “liberal” and “progressive” forces failed again and again to match the imagination deployed by their opponents.
In 2012, I watched this very same scenario unfold in my own country, Georgia, when people, fed up with the government, voted in an oligarch who made his money in Russia in the 1990s. It was the country’s first democratic transition of power since the collapse of the USSR and it was applauded by the West as a “step forward” for a young democracy. At the time, Georgian multimillionaire reformer and educator Kakha Bendukhidze, made an astute observation: “We did make a step forward,” he said “But we stepped into deep shit.”
Very few at the time understood that what he meant was that the country was once again becoming part of an alliance built not on shared principles and values but on oligarchic alliances, criminal networks and the unregulated quest for money, power and impunity.
Georgia never managed to reverse its course. The oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, is still there, still supported by Russia and currently celebrating Trump’s comeback in the United States. The Georgian opposition says his party rigged the recent elections. Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets agree, but they are impotent: the government has passed enough repressive laws to quell any dissent. The tools of democracy that this particular oligarch used to come to power are no longer available for those who now want to get him out.
The global authoritarian playbook is effective because it is so simple. One of its core rules is: use the tools of democracy until you can make them obsolete. The formula works. Overwriting it will require bold new ideas and courage to re-imagine how we can collectively defend liberal values in the age of Broligarchy.
