Yes, I Had to Look Up The Word "Struldburgg"

Citizens United first formalized the notion that money is speech, ruling in 2010 that individuals and corporate structures can donate unlimited amounts of money in support of political candidates. The more money you have, therefore, the more speech you have. I suppose this has always been the case in these here United States of America, but their bullhorn grew exponentially louder when the oligarchic class’s largesse to their favored candidates was deemed very legal, very demure.

Elections have now moved past the “popularity contest” era and into the “how much is that doggy in the window” era. To win even statewide elections now requires so much money that the only reasonable expectation any aspiring politician without instant name recognition to win is to court the “cast pearls before swine” set.

(In case you’re wondering who the swine are in this particular analogy, it is you and I, the plebes who do not appreciate all the good doings of our benign billionaire overlords.)

The financier Peter Thiel, for example, released a nutso editorial yesterday in The Financial Times referring to the second Trump administration as an apokalypsis, the Greek word for “unveiling.” His argument is that such an unveiling will reveal the various lies shrouded from light by “the ancien regime.” Thiel writes:

My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) - the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.

Am I the only one who feels like my public conversations have not been “delimited”? Not pre-internet and not now. If anything, the post-internet world has unleashed so much information, and with it, so much bad information, that the problem we have isn’t that of a soviet farm system in which some corrupt bureaucracy is limiting the amount of wheat that can be grown. Rather, it’s the problem of having so much wheat that it’s impossible to sort what is edible from the chaff. Thiel’s notion that the new Trump administration will have a hand in promoting truth instead of obscuring it is as blinkered as Mr. Magoo.

Thiel places his trust in the new guard because he believes the old guard – that ancien regime – has fostered lies about, as he says in his piece, everything from the JFK assassination to the covid pandemic to the Jeffrey Epstein suicide. Only a great, whirling gust of wind will reveal the truth, he seems to believe. Trump is certainly windy, but the gales that erupt from his various orifices have little to do with revelation.

I will say this in Thiel’s defense: he is right to express the distrust too many Americans have towards their institutions. Thiel seems to believe that the reason too many of us feel let down by them is because they are in some sort of shadowy league (the so-called DISC) which works to promote ignorance and quash public discussion. So why, when I turn on the television news, do I see so many loud-mouthed Trump supporters expressing their devotion to the man? Shouldn’t the DISC have shut that down toot suite? How are our institutions so powerful that they can unleash a global pandemic but so weak that they cannot prevent a cretin like Trump from winning two elections?

Thiel writes:

Our ancien regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the moral arc of the universe but by 2020 they hoped to shake Trump off as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rearguard action of a struggling regime and its struldbrugg ruler.

Struldbrugg refers to a Jonathon Swift parody about immortal beings who are declared legally dead upon reaching the age of 80 because if not, according to Swift, “those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.”

Financier Peter Thiel.

Yes, we are living in an American gerontocracy. But Trump is part and parcel of that class, whereas Biden is the elder who chose to withdraw from the election following his first debate performance which called into question his age and fitness for office at the age of, yes, the downright strulbruggian age of 80. The same age Trump will be within a year or so. Does Thiel believe we should declare Trump dead upon the celebration of his eightieth? If so, I’m good with that.

The dangers of gerontocracy – that ancien in the so-called regime – hold not a single candle to the klieg light illuminated by the oligarchy which Burger King and his coterie of billionaires are shining upon 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It is a club of which Thiel himself is a dues-paying member, along with Chancellor Underpants and Zuckleberry Grim, the tribe’s newest pledge.

These men (and it’s all men), which include Thiel proteges Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance, have founded the world’s most exclusive circle jerk club, each of them stroking the cock of the one beside him in the hopes that they will ejaculate gobs and gobs of money, money which will be deposited, Smaug-like, in their doomsday bunkers or buried on their private islands or injected directly into their bloodstreams.

What matters to them isn’t their wealth but their access to - and manufacturing of - power. The vision they have for the nation, and themselves, is a libertarian paradise, a place ruled by the whims of those who control the capital. It’s maximal freedom for those who can afford it and maximal servitude for those who cannot. It’s a return to feudalism, and for Thiel to decry our current regime as “pre-revolutionary France” smacks of self-delusion. The fact that Thiel, apparently, casts himself among the lot who stormed the Bastille rather than as part of the monarchic class that lost their heads, says way more about his worldview than the turgid editorial published in his name.

Thiel believes the apocalypse is upon us because there are always though who believe the end is nigh. Maybe the end of an era, or the end of the world. I don’t know which apocalypse this Second Coming will turn out to be, but I know that those wanting truth and reconciliation, as Thiel claims to seek, would be advised to preserve all of their own records for when the rabble turns their attention towards them.