The Center Has Been Hollowed Out
And Musk and Trump now want to set us against each other. Can we resist the urge to hate?
Most of us have eaten the hollow chocolate bunnies that appear in our lives for various reasons each Spring. They look solid and colorful and make you want to chew off an ear or two upon peeling back the protective foil. Yet, no matter how sturdy those bunnies look sitting on the store shelves or in the kiosk windows, you intuitively also appreciate how fragile they are. Filled with air, the sweet, chocolatey sides have nothing to brace up against, and so with the slightest bit of pressure, they will, without hesitation, cave in on themselves.
Donald Trump’s attempts to hollow out the center have been successful in many ways, but because he is, for many, such a vile and hated figure, there is never a discernible center. People move to and away from Trump like the tide, so that movement constantly expands and shrinks the center. Post-election, the tide had moved toward Trump, so a smaller and more hollow center appeared, strengthening the two sides and making a cave-in less likely.
Since the election, however, Elon Musk has been playing an identical role played by Alfred Hugenberg in 1933 Germany. Hugenberg was one of the wealthiest industrialists of the Weimar era, and if not for him and his backing, Hitler never would have ascended to the Chancellory. After Hitler’s rise to power, Hugenberg acted in the very same way Elon Musk is today. Musk has definitely studied up on this period in history, and I am confident that if a smart journalist asked him what hethinks of Hugenberg, he would find it hard not to smile.
To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen — entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse (The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler).
I often wonder what Musk’s end game is. It is clear that he is obsessed with his wealth. Musk can own almost any tangible object on this Earth. He doesn’t long for a new TV or car like many others. Musk wants to accumulate more wealth — more astronomical numbers. He now has nearly $500 billion, but what does that mean to him? $1, $10, or $500 billion — it’s still an ungodly sum of money, and even for a billionaire, it’s hard to comprehend. What is the next goal? To become the world’s first trillionaire.
However, there is a problem, which is the remnants of America’s democracy. No matter how effed our country is now, thanks to the extreme tilt to the right by modern-day Republicans, all other things being equal, Elon Musk cannot become a trillionaire without there being substantial backlash that would likely end up in his downfall. There are too many people on both sides of the political spectrum who would bridge their differences and join forces to fight against Musk — in other words, the hollow center is not big, and the sides are too sturdy, thus making a complete collapse unlikely.
This is why Musk spends his days and sleep-less, ketamine-filled nights posting lie after lie on his Twitter platform. The psychotic junkie is trying to collapse the sides of the bunny. If he can succeed in throwing the nation into complete, near-civil-war hysteria, then he will have the country by the balls. Elon Musk will quickly become the world’s first trillionaire. Musk’s big, face-eating ego will be stoked — for an hour or so.
As self-proclaimed “economic dictator,” Hugenberg kept pace with Hitler in outraging political opponents and much of the public. He purged ministries. He dismantled workers’ rights. He lowered the wages of his own employees by 10 percent. “The real battle against unemployment lies singularly and alone in reestablishing profitability in economic life,” one of Hugenberg’s newspapers editorialized, arguing that the goal of economic policy should be to rescue “the professions, and those most negatively affected: the merchant middle class.” Hugenberg declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures, canceled debts, and placed tariffs on several widely produced agricultural goods, violating trade agreements and inflating the cost of living. “It just won’t do,” Hitler objected in one cabinet meeting, “that the financial burdens of these rescue measures fall only on the poorest.” Let them suffer awhile, Hugenberg argued. “Then it will be possible to even out the hardships.” The economy fell into chaos. The press dubbed Hugenberg the Konfusionsrat — the “consultant of confusion (The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler).”
Everything we need to know about where Trump, Musk, and Project 25 will take our nation is right before our eyes. History is running a technicolor film of Germany from 1933 until its collapse in 1945. The similarities with Hitler’s dismantling of our democracy are so real and so many that it takes either a genuinely lazy and stupid people not to notice.
Or Americans really want this, and I am the dumbass.