On 4 January, that thoughtful analyst on CNN Fareed Zakaria wrote that “everywhere you look the left is in ruins. Of the 27 countries of the European Union only a handful have left-of-centre parties leading government coalitions. The primary left-of-centre party in the European Parliament now has just 136 seats in a 720-seat chamber.”
This trend extends far beyond the exclusive domain of the EU. Donald Trump poses a manifest threat to the core framework of US democracy. India’s Modi, Argentina’s Milei, Israel’s Netanyahu have little regard for the substance of political democracy while South Korea lurches from crisis to crisis.
To be sure growing income inequality, technological change that crushes the employment prospects for a vast population of unskilled workers and many skilled workers, waves of immigration that have overwhelmed the capacity of countries to absorb them and the concomitant perception that this poses an existential threat to citizens save for the elite, provide reasons for the increasing threats posed to liberal and social democratic politics.
And then there is social media that expands the reach of extreme views.
Added to this mix of causes which have ensured that liberal and social democratic models of government are under such significant retreat is the recent phenomenon of state capture by oligarchs of the West. In an instructive article in the 8 January Financial Times, Edward Luce has drawn attention to the role played by Elon Musk. He writes that, “America did not elect Elon Musk. Yet he is acting as Donald Trump’s de facto co-president.”
Widening ambitions
Not content with throwing truckloads of money into the Trump election campaign, Musk is now supporting the far-right Alternative for Germany, calling for an end to the Labour government in Britain and pledging significant financial support for a Nigel Farage-vacated Reform Party.
As Luce observes, history offers no precedent for this Trump/Musk presidency. Yes, America had robber barons – the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, but they never acted as co-presidents running foreign policy.
Compared with Musk, even JP Morgan’s wealth of about $49-billion (in current terms) or Henry Ford’s ($200-billion in current terms), who enthused about fascism, pales into insignificance compared with that of “onse Elon”. Musk’s silence on Ukraine, Russia and China compared with his enthusiastic embrace of the extreme right wing in other parts of the world speaks volumes.
In his campaign to have the Starmer government fall, Musk has now latched on to a series of appalling cases involving the child grooming of victims of gangs of men of mostly British-Pakistani origin. These go back some two decades and most of the failure to protect these vulnerable children took place while the Tories were in power. As Michelle Goldberg noted in a 6 January New York Times article, “Musk is using a genuine atrocity to pursue his campaigns against both Starmer, with whom he has a long-running feud over the regulation of social media, and against mass immigration.”
The legitimate horror that the grooming story has elicited should not mean that Musk’s demagoguery should be praised or indeed excused. He has accused the UK’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, a long-time activist against domestic violence, of being “a rape genocide apologist” in that she refused to commission a national inquiry preferring that the inquiry be a local one, in the areas where these horrific crimes took place. Whether that is the correct decision is one matter; that it does not justify the Musk outbursts is an entirely different issue.
Motives
And if there is any doubt about Musk’s motives, his silence on the fate of children in Ukraine and Gaza says it all. The sharp point is that Musk poses a serious threat to the defence of democracy.
His enormous wealth which will doubtless increase exponentially by way of his part capture of the US state and hence the financial benefits that will flow to his companies, will allow him in this age of social media to undermine deliberative politics. The implosion of media that used to provide a reasonably accurate reflection of the news and its context only adds to the threat to the future of the democratic model.
South Africa may be off the Musk focus, but that alone is cold comfort. The turn to the right or other forms of populism across the globe will doubtless act as an added incentive to the anti-constitutionalists – particularly the MK party – to exploit the problems of inequality, poverty, immigration and tepid economic growth to pursue their agenda.
While Musk’s focus is on Europe and the UK, his use of social media coupled with the diminished role of traditional media is a case study of how to undermine the guardrails of democracy. In many countries, including South Africa, the poverty of party politics and the palpable lack of confidence that the public has in the political system adds to the challenge.
Arguably, we need to look to a resilient civil society which may provide the defence. DM