He is, of course, barking. He is also President of the United States, which rather complicates matters.
We know a bit about how this happened, but why is a deeper question. And more to the point, no-one is quite sure where it all goes from here.
Perhaps, it might be hoped, a sufficient number of Americans will wake one morning in the not too distant future and realise they’ve been drugged. The rhetorical narcotic must be wearing off even now as they lose what rudimentary public health they had, find their education system attacked and "christianised", their institutions burgled and their freedoms (ironically) curtailed.
Clearly, however, this American phenomenon is not down to one individual. In some respects we are fortunate to see the antics of Elon Musk, who obviously shares the performative psychological characteristics of his presidential colleague and so reveals at least some of the moving force behind him.
Numerous commentators have written about the murky forces that underwrite what appears to be some kind of coup. We glimpse shadowy figures like Peter Thiel and the "tech bros", a burgeoning Christian nationalism that has more in common with the Inquisition than any contemporary mainstream religion, and witness corporate liberation from the responsibilities that come with wealth and power through the elimination of taxes and regulation, not to speak of the groundwork laid for much of this by a highly politicised Supreme Court.
These things have not happened overnight, but have been some years in the making. Musk’s precisely organised departmental coups and the strategic placement of people like J. D. Vance and Peter Hegseth are not fortuitous. The next question, then, is what does this holy alliance of God and Mammon have to do with us?
In a broad sense, as an English-speaking product of European expansion through the 18th and 19th centuries, we share many fundamental social, political and religious traits with the USA. Over time the cultural dominance of the world’s richest nation has percolated through our once British-oriented culture, exacerbated and made ubiquitous by the technological expansion of global economics, driven by transnational corporations.
None of this is news and there have been benefits, though the downsides weigh more heavily by the day. I leave the environment for others, more knowledgeable, to talk about, but the universal imbalance of wealth and power that has eventuated since a brief period of relative equality post-World War 2 is the one issue that underlies most of the others.
We are fortunate that we have not yet experienced the religious side of the US political alliance and the push to dissolve the separation of church and state, though insisting the Treaty of Waitangi is a "sacred document" could be an egg that metamorphoses into a worm in the constitutional bud. Meanwhile, Mammon is enough to be getting on with.
Radical disparities of wealth are not merely unfair, but dangerous. The continuous concentration of wealth does not merely disadvantage some people, it tends to make it progressively more difficult to overcome that disadvantage. You’re stuck with it. You don’t have the means to take advantage of the liberties that the better endowed have access to. Naturally faith in the system that does this to you goes by the board — you are less and less attached to the common interest, principally because there doesn’t appear to be one.
This is undoubtedly that case for many Americans and others around the world who look on helplessly as a few accumulate almost unimaginable wealth and its concomitant power, while shedding responsibility. It’s happening here plainly enough, neatly packaged in David Seymour’s proposed regulations Bill and more broadly embodied in a government with the vision and appetite of Polyphemus.
Inequality of most kinds will never disappear, and we probably wouldn’t like it if it did. But it can and should be mitigated and the various strata of society made more fluid. Or it could be if we had an Opposition with sufficient vision and courage to deal with questions of tax and regulation and forget the fashionable and somewhat self-obsessed sensitivities of the past 20 years. We really do not want to follow Uncle Sam.
— Dr Harry Love is a sometime honorary fellow in classics at the University of Otago.
