The Ruling Class Second Tier
it's a convocation of tech bros
One of the insights of Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class is that every ruler or ruling elige needs a second tier, “a numerous class to enforce respect for his orders and have them carried out.”
Well, if Donald Trump is the ruler in the new ruling class, the next question is who is going to be the “numerous class” to enforce his rule? In the current order the “numerous class” is the credentialed elite and the bureaucracies and NGOs that go with the program and enforce the edits of the ruler.
But whatabout in the Trump Era?
Well, we know now, two weeks into Trump 47. It is the tech bros.
But why? It wasn’t so long ago that the tech bros were good faithful Democrats, voting for Obama and Hillary Clinton and Biden. What happened?
Maybe the clue is Marc Andreessen talking to Joe Rogan (podscript). In the days of Clinton-Gore the tech bros knew the government had their backs. But not any more.
And basically what happened is the last 15 years or so (02:49:27) Democrats culminating in this [Biden] administration basically broke every part of that deal for people in my world. Like every single part of that was shattered, right? Where just like technology became presumptively evil, right? And like if you're a business person, you were presumptively a bad person. (02:49:40) And then technology was presumptively had bad effects and dot, dot, dot. And then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you. And then the kicker was philanthropy became evil. And this is a real culture change in the last five years that I hope will reverse now, which is philanthropy now is a dirty word on the left because it's the private person choosing to give away the money as opposed to the government choosing a way to give the money.
In the immortal words of Lina Lamont: “whaddya think I yam? Dumb or somep’n?”
As Curtis Yarvin writes: “there is no politics without an enemy.” He gets his idea from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt who wrote that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. So when Marc Andreessen detects that he and his tech bros are now the enemy of the Democrats, it’s time for him to do something about it.
So now the tech bros are on the Trump Train. Not because they are crazy MAGAs and MAHAs. But because they are MATAs. The want to do their tech startup stuff and birth new tech companies, and seek out new talent, and the only way they can do it is if the government gets out of the way and lets them do it.
And Trump is smart enough to let them do it.
So we have tech god Elon Mush running the DOGE show.
We have tech lord Marc Andreessen appearing on the bro circuit with The Joe Rogan Experience and the Lex Fridman podcast.
We have Mark Zuckerberg appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience and telling us about how the government’s Censorship Industrial Complex put the pressure on. As Marc Andreesseen puts it:
[B]asically the government over time and then culminating in 2020, 2021 in the last four years, just decided that the First Amendment didn’t apply to them…
And they just decided that they can just arbitrarily pressure, just like literally arbitrarily call up companies and threaten and bully and yell and scream and threaten repercussions and force them to censor.
And Zuck and Facebook were Target No. 1.
Now we have Elon Musk and DOGE with his young tech kid prodigies:
Well. Does that give you a nice warm feeling or what?
Do you think that with a couple dozen more kids like this and a spot of AI we could completely replace the entire federal bureaucrat workforce? I’m sure that there is useful work out there for our faithful government servants to do.
Do you see what we have here? It’s the Second Tier of the New Regime.
Tech god Elon Musk running DOGE.
Tech lord Marc Andreessen thinking deep thoughts.
Tech yeoman Curtis Yarvin thinking up the memes.
Tech kid geniuses fixing disfunctional government.
And I like it.