rich9 ‘The Best Government Money Can Buy’

For a while, it seemed, the future had disappeared from American politics. Bill Clinton sold us his bridge to the 21st century. George W. Bush plotted a rebranding of the conservative party and then reimagined American empire. Barack Obama campaigned on hope and change in what was called, at the time, the first Facebook election.

But by the time Donald Trump descended that golden escalator to announce his candidacy for president in 2015, toward the end of a long and anemic economic recovery, the country had succumbed to a mood of pervasive reactionary nostalgia. One party was selling a retributive story of national decline, and the other, in response, declared that the country was “already great.” As president, Joe Biden made historic investments in green tech and industrial renewal, but — perhaps because of his own age or mumbling mutedness or Scranton sentimentality — the rhetoric was all lunch-bucket throwback, without even a side dish of science fiction.

By the bleary-eyed end of the pandemic emergency, it was hard to find almost anyone, anywhere in the country, offering a truly positive vision of the future; in the wake of mass death and Covid disruptions and public-health resentments, national prospects looked, to most Americans, zero-sum at best. You might have seen the economic data depicting a national economic “miracle,” but what you felt was surely more “vibe-cession.” Even the grandiose architects of the A.I. revolution appeared, to much of the public, like apocalyptic doomsayers. And the crypto bros? Simple scammers and obvious frauds.

Large majorities of Americans still believe that the country is on the wrong track, but more now believe that the country’s best days are ahead of it than believe it is in decline, according to polls. And though the partisan splits are predictably volatile, they are also striking: 67 percent of Republicans now believe the country’s brightest days lie ahead. The staffing of the incoming Trump administration suggests a generational shift, as well, with enough millennials selected by the president-elect to put talk of America’s “gerontocracy” somewhat to bed. When Trump assumes the White House in January, he will still be carrying a reactionary torch. But thanks to an influx of technologists and bro-ligarchs, and especially the influence of Elon Musk, he’ll be returning to Washington carrying the banner of a new futurity, too.

Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.

Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.

In 2016, it seemed to be just Peter Thiel who dared campaign so boldly for the outsider Republican; the other major tech chief executives only grudgingly made their way to meetings at Trump Tower, after the election, with some later working to silence him on their platforms. This time, it seems, many of Silicon Valley’s titanic figures have been riding with Trump all along, at least a couple of them directly into the White House. For the price of $277 million in campaign donations, Musk seems to have gotten what he paid for — a program inspired by what Silicon Valley calls accelerationism but one that looks to liberal normies more like anarcho-capitalism and hands-off techno-oligarchy. Even Jim Cramer is calling it the “best government money can buy.” Perhaps it will be enough to finally get Thiel those flying cars he felt he was long ago promised. At the very least, an accelerationist experiment is about to play out in government, through some mix of deregulation and kleptocratic patronage. We are all about to see what, exactly, that yields.

“It felt like a boot off the throat,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared just after Trump’s recent victory. “Every morning I wake up happier than the day before.”

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