Trump Is Privatizing America

Like the Tudor nobles of old, he’s rallying a coalition to challenge the modern centralized state.

(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.)

Recently, like some sort of half-drunk, half-mad amnesiac historian, I’ve taken to asking any interlocutor I can find—family, colleagues, whomever—if they can think of any historical parallels to what the two-man wrecking crew of Trump and Musk is doing. The usual answer is that nobody can come up with anything. A great deal of what’s going on is brand new. There has never been a password coup before, where an outside team has, essentially, gotten hold of all of the passwords of the bureaucracy and used them to rewire the administration. There has never—so far as I know—been this kind of leveraged buyout with, as it were, a publicly-traded state taken private and subject to a round of layoffs and budget-slashing from its own elected administration.

But to call something “unprecedented” isn’t good enough for those who are prone to historical analogies, and I figured there must be some framing for understanding what Trump and Musk are up to. A few weeks ago, I argued that Trump is Warren Harding, reversing the New Deal, dismantling the Rooseveltian administrative state, and returning to the combination of laissez-faire domestic economics and trade protectionism of the Republican Party of the 1920s. While I stand by that, it now occurs to me that I wasn’t being nearly obscure enough and the real framing for how to understand Trump/Musk lies 400-odd years before that, in the (rather delicate) establishment of the nation state.

If we are to understand the emergence of the modern nation state, we have to start with a knowledge of what it replaced—the reign of “principalities” with their own security forces and sources of wealth which were less than fully convinced that they benefited from participating in a centralized state. For a long time in the West, the triumph of the centralized state was touch-and-go. Louis XIV spent the first years of his reign putting down ferocious fighting from the nobles. Peter the Great found himself personally clipping boyars’ beards in order to assert the primacy of the state, as well as its standards of personal grooming. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were far from the only rulers of their era to execute sundry nobles in an effort to solder their state together.

But the state, in its triumph, rested on two attributes: a monopoly of violence within a given territory, and a treasury substantial enough to fulfill whatever obligations the state takes to be its social contract. Lose either of those and the state (as the Tudors and Bourbons well understood) ceases to function; it becomes, at best, a broker between different principalities. What seems to be happening with Trump and Musk is a return over that horizon—a belief (or acknowledgment) that the state is actually very weak and that power has shifted in the direction of the principalities.

The better analogy for what’s going on may not be to Warren Harding, after all, but to Cardinal Wolsey, who was the representative of the principalities during the early reign of Henry VIII and who endeavored to maintain a balance between the centripetal forces of the Tudor state and the centrifugal forces of the nobility and clergy; or, if we go a shade more obscure than that, we get into the realm of the Northumberlands, Gloucesters, and Warwicks, the kinds of lords your untalented kid may end up playing if the school is putting on a Shakespeare history play, whose speeches we glaze over whenever we have to listen to them but who, in their day, represented the lifeblood of the old feudal order. Those nobles were duly hauled to the Tower of London or else took their place within the new state, but that is not to say that the centrifugal forces they stood for disappeared for good or that they wouldn’t one day have their revenge.

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Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization

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This needn’t be all that surprising. There is no particular reason to think that the state would ever enjoy unidirectional supremacy. States all over the world break down into competing factions. And even the United States, which had the benefit of skipping over a feudal past, has had a way of losing its ascendancy to big business. It tends to be a mumbled-over detail of American history that J.P. Morgan bailed out the U.S. Treasury to abate the Panic of 1893 and then did it again by shoring up the banking system in 1907 (he had previously underwritten the pay of the entire U.S. Army in 1877). Morgan’s role was understood as an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution creating massive new sources of wealth (above all from railways and utilities) that competed with the state itself. The historian Carroll Quigley notes that, in 1930, a single corporation controlled by Morgan (the American Telephone and Telegraph Company) had greater assets than the total wealth of 21 states of the Union.

The sort of Whig history of the 20th century is about how heroic civil servants and zealous reformers wrested this outsized power away from the fat cats, creating a more bureaucratic, middle-class state based on equitable tax revenues as opposed to the whims of private largesse. But, as we enter into the New Gilded Age, with the top 1% owning 30% of the United States’ wealth and with Silicon Valley comprising nearly 10% of its GDP, it shouldn’t be any particular surprise that the “principalities” would begin to view themselves as a power apart, with the state largely an inconvenience.

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What is maybe more unexpected is a shift in public trust from the state to the principalities. It may be the defining image of our era—Elon Musk showing up at a Cabinet meeting claiming to be “humble tech support” and wearing a t-shirt to match. What Musk was channeling (and what Trump has clearly bought into) is an image of private tech companies as can-do operations that work hard, cut costs, and know how to fix broken machines. That is seen to be far preferable to the image of blob-like government bureaucrats clocking in at 9, clocking out at the dead stroke of 5, and generating very, very little of what would ordinarily be considered “work.” The fact that private companies’ sole purpose is to make money, as opposed to serving the common weal or honoring the social contract, doesn’t bother any of the Trumpies or the Musk acolytes. The perception is that government itself is bloated and ineffective and, maybe apart from the monopolization of violence, no longer serves any particular purpose that can’t be covered by the private sector.

That perception was a long time coming. The writer and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri contrasts the “towering ambitions [of governments] of the industrial age” with the style of modern democratic governments as that of “a kindly uncle, passing out chocolate chip cookies to his favorite nieces and nephews.” The state itself has been losing the war of information with the private sector. A great deal of the premise of Trumpism is that the state is a poor cousin to private enterprise—with Trump, for instance, comparing the White House unfavorably to Mar-a-Lago. Musk made that explicit in his talk to the Cabinet, reducing governance to a simple dollars-and-cents proposition and advocating, as any incoming CEO or CFO might after a merger, for a round of heavy layoffs and cost-cutting.

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If the success of the corporation is the prevailing political headwind at the moment, the other one is the resilience of the Putinist conception of the state. What is crucial to understand about Putin’s Russia is that the state administration doesn’t precisely flow out of a social contract with the citizenry, as in the Westphalian nation state model. The administration is more of a parallel entity—often called “Kremlin, Inc.”—that amasses wealth through its own means (usually through the capture of different sectors of the economy), enriches those within its structure, and then overlaps in certain respects with the constitutional administrative structure. The general idea is that you can have your state and eat it too, that it’s possible to be the legitimate elected power but also to do whatever you want. Putin and his crew have benefited handsomely from this arrangement and that has had its influence on Putin’s admirers in the West.

What everything here is based on is the presumption that the state is hopelessly weak. It has for a long time lacked the ability to generate significant wealth or to initiate projects of its own. If the potentates of the Industrial Revolution were ultimately willing to play nice with the state, as in Morgan’s bailouts, it’s not so clear that that’s the case for the gilded rich of the tech boom. They simply believe that the private sector is where it’s at and that the best outcome for the state is for it to be run like a business. It’s in some ways a very new conception but in other ways it goes back a long, long time—to the Northumberlands and Gloucesters and Warwicks, to the principalities being far from convinced that the state has any real hold over them or that there is any social contract that they have to follow.

Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

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