I feel like there's a word game being played here, roughly, "Everyone's advocating a policy, so everyone's being equally political."
The limits of that claim get obvious if we talked about state-mandated religion. Three potential stances might be:
- Pro-Church: "Everyone must become Catholic; tithes will get taken out of paychecks with other taxes; people get fined for missing church."
- Anti-Church: "Religion is banned; there's an excise tax on Church donations and we'll pass regulations to prevent services from happening."
- Small Government: "Why should the government care? Let people do whatever; this shouldn't be up for a vote."
All 3 of those stances are, in some sense, political. They're political positions. However, I feel like there's a big difference between the first two things and the third; in the first two, my private life gets constrained. Maybe I don't mind if I'm going (/not going) to church already. But, in the first two cases, I'm clearly losing some freedom that I'd already have today.
When I read the NPR Article I'm seeing the title: "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy" and I find myself looking for a satisfying answer to what, precisely, does the the Nerd Reich wants to mandate / prohibit me from doing in my actual day-to-day life?.
The "Anti-Democratic" is true, I guess, in the sense that "Why is the government even involved in this?" is an anti-democracy stance, but not in the (much more relevant if we're throwing around words like "Fascism") sense of imposing rules on people that unpopular with the population and prevent people from doing (/not doing) things they'd otherwise want to do.
The word games continue:
By 2023, Srinivasan had updated his idea to a new political strategy by which something called the gray tribe, which he defined as the tech people in politics, who were a rising force in U.S. politics - the CEOs, the founders, the billionaires - would form this tech gray tribe, and this gray tribe would partner with the red tribe - the Republicans - to basically oust and purge the blue tribe - the Democrats - from the city of San Francisco.
In this case there's a double-meaning of "Oust and Purge." Is the proposal to "oust" democrats in the sense that Democratic Voters would be compelled to move outside of city limits and take up residence in Cupertino? If so, that's a bold and fresh proposal, but probably pretty hard to pull off.
Or is this a "Purge" in the sense of convincing a majority of the voting population to vote for someone other than the incumbents -- who'd still be allowed to live in the city, just without the authority to pass regulations? That's much less bold, and not especially "Anti-Democratic" except in-as-far as we call one party the "Democratic Party" and they'd no longer have power.
When we combine the two ideas: It's undemocratic to try to convince people to vote for Republicans (so the Democrats can't regulate you) AND it's undemocratic to try to create a new city somewhere else (so the Democrats can't regulate you) we're left with just "It's Democracy when my side wins; everything else is Fascism."
Speaking just for myself & generalizing a bit too casually: a key difference is that the billionaires are content to leave me alone.
If NPR staffers run the government, I'd get taxed a bunch (boo), get more diversity trainings and scolding PSAs from NGOs (boo!), and see more of society's decisions being made via the kind of theatrical protests that theater kids are good at and I find distasteful.
If Musk/Bezos/Zuck run the government, I them to blow a bunch of investor cash on tech projects, take control of a city / town/ slice of Hawaii to run as fiefdoms, and maybe be a demanding jerk of a boss to the people who work for them.
The actual theater kid offer amounts to "give us a path to have power over everything in society so, among our many other projects, we can stop Musk/Bezos/Zuck from blowing investors cash and running their local towns like a fiefdom."
I already don't live in Hawaii or Starbase and so the upside isn't there and the downside is pretty bad. So I don't want the theater kids in power, which ends up looking like me "supporting" Zuck / Bezos / Musk despite those 3 not really being politically aligned.
More options
Context Copy link