Hot Take Addendum

Fleshing Out Corporatocracy

This started out as an edit to the original post, but of course grew long enough to justify its own. Enjoy!

The old mercantilist model was “feudalism establishes mercantile monopolies”, which was decently competitive in an un-globalized world ripe for colonialism and imperialism. The old liberal model — from classical liberalism to neoliberalism — was “liberal democracy protects free market capitalism”, which was enough to defeat everything from slaveocracy (US Civil War) to monarchy (French Revolution, 1820s, 1848, 1860s, WWI) to fascism (WWII) and communism (Cold War).

Today, China is clearly experimenting with something that can roughly be called “iteratively subsidized totalitarian state capitalism”. A totalitarian state controls all businesses, even ostensibly private ones, and upon deciding the next direction of development, unleashes a few rounds of massive subsidies, which then get pulled back to clear the market of weak entrants, leaving a set of national champions that can then be folded, tamed and leashed, back into a national industrial economy. That’s at least the idea; we’ve still got a couple hundred more years of history to see if it works.

Russia… is still just a gas station with nukes. I’d expect that some post-Putin leader will eventually lead one of Russia’s every-century-or-so great modernization efforts, where they’ll steal parts of China’s model, keep some stupidly anachronistic Russian institutions that lead the inevitable equally-boneheaded backlash, and then borrow whatever’s currently working from America and Europe.

What does that leave the West with? Well, Europe is trying to see if the extremely regulated “social democratic” version of liberal democracy can produce enough security and stability to be successful. At the moment, though, it mostly seems like they’re turning themselves into Tolkein-ish High Elves: beautiful and artful, but stagnant and unable to respond to threats.

America… may be in the opening stages of an evolution into our own version of corporatocracy. But I don’t know if it’s reduceable into any kind of pat stereotype or scheme just yet!

What we do know is this:

• We’ve twice now elected a billionaire con man, who is currently shredding the Constitution so that he can remake the state into a personal engine of corruption.

• This billionaire was backed and/or enabled, willingly and reluctantly, by several of the other leading billionaires of the country.

• Historically, this sort of thing has led to fascism. And indeed it could this time! Unlike in the 20th century, though, an American fascist government would be somewhat protected by the two great oceans from any interventions into any military invasions of its neighbors.
  
  On the other hand, though, Trump hasn’t demonstrated Hitler’s willingness to actually invade our neighbors — even setting aside all the fog of uncertainty he intentionally creates, that fog mostly seems intended to leverage trade negotiations, not annexations. And Vance, as a corporate stooge himself, is not likely to embrace adventurism to Trump’s extent; any adventurism would most likely follow the 20th century form of hegemonial colonialism, where we mostly avoid keeping boots on the ground in favor of simply wielding our hegemonic power over our neighbors.

• Even if we did have a period of fascism, it would probably follow the past fascist blueprint of following constitutionalism. The courts would let the fascists do what they want “legally”; the fascists would hold elections. In my estimation, we’d actually resemble Chile or Argentina more than Hungary or Uganda.
  
  The upshot of this is, I’d expect an American illiberal democracy to actually be more competitive than any illiberal democracy we’ve ever seen — perhaps only Mexico might compare. Swing voters are fickle, and the instability introduced by Trump’s extreme executive aggrandizement could easily lead to cycle of backlashes playing out with billionaires contesting economic and cultural power back and forth, consolidating corporate control with each swing.
  
  Proof point: Anyone who thinks Zuck isn’t supremely annoyed with Elon’s victory lap right now, and scheming to himself, “I could do this WAY better than that pudgy addict”, is a fool.

• In the meantime, corporations would be consolidating their power. Your employer already defines a LOT more of your life than the government does; expect this to continue. For instance, abortion may be illegal in Texas, but your employer may give you paid leave and other assistance to get one out of state. What does it look like if that trend continues? Do we eventually get a SCOTUS ruling that every company is free to grant its employees an indirect right to an abortion? Does that turn into a direct right, and then a right of corporations to grant those rights or not?
  
  Right now, amidst the national housing crisis, your employer’s locations often define which cities are available to you. I, for instance, could try to relocate to Arizona, San Diego, Chicago, or Portland — not seamlessly, but nevertheless easier than getting another job. If I wanted to move to Seattle or Tampa, I’d have to find a new job! In a sense, these options resemble our health insurers’ famous “networks” of providers.

Ultimately, I think that American corporatocracy ends up looking a lot more freewheeling than its competitors. The anchorweight is that regardless of how much power any given corporation can consolidate, our deeply-entrenched academy is always coming up with new tech that disrupts and displaces the old. The most enduring characteristic of American culture is that we all believe in the wild-eyed delusion that we are just “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, which drives us to try and be the one in a million who actually wins that game.

Thus, American corporatocracy would revolve around a state defined by (1) executive authority wielded in favor of the winners of the previous major tech disruption, (2) highly cyclical as a result, giving us the same “winnowing out” feature that the Chinese are aiming for, but through the mechanism of frequent bubbles and crashes, (3) growingly defined by state-level policies — including those on abortion rights, YIMBY/NIMBY permitting, and countless others — that attract corporations willing to establish national networks of benefits and rights, such that (4) “citizenship” grows to be defined by one’s employer.