Spec No 3, 13.02

Elon/Trump coup?: a too-long essay, Lucille at the ABC, Vale Jules Feiffer, Sam Kerr's bagpipe music

Spec, issue 3

Spec comes out every Thursday morning haha. It is Thursday morning somewhere.

0. Thanks!

1. Boers in Space: On Musk and Trump’s Unfolding Coup, part i

2. Palate Cleanser: Lucille Booth, ABC Chair

3 Boers in Space: On Musk and Trump’s Unfolding Coup, part ii

4. Obituary: Jules Feiffer

5. Poem of the Week: On the Prosecution of Sam Kerr

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Issue 3!

Just a brief note of thanks to subscribers, as we charge boldly into the future. And apologies to those I haven’t been able to thank personally yet, for full year etc subscriptions, I will. And I am very grateful. To thank you for your support, this week’s centrepiece is an essay which is too long by any measure, and some lo-fi graphics

GR

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Boers In Space! On Musk and Trump’s Unfolding Coup, part i

Lenin’s remark that nothing happens or decades, then decades happen in weeks, is (over) used, without its accompanying line: ‘my head is spinning, I can’t keep up!’ Whatever we expected the second Trump administration to be, it is something more and other. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that we consoled ourselves with the prospect that it would largely be a repeat of the first, with an out-of-depth distracted President, heading a divided Cabinet utterly beyond his control it, or his desire to.

Now it has become clear that whichever inner group is in charge, they are co-ordinated and purposeful, in their pursuit of a radical re-ordering of the world, in a way that will deliver the dominance of a tech-capital elite within the US, and total, renewed world dominance of that transformed US. Those who want such dominance have overlapping desires for transcendental purpose.

The techies want to get past the barriers than not only regulation but also the market itself puts in the way of the technological transformation of the species, and they see the US as a vehicle for that. The America Firsters of the Heritage Foundation and others see technology as part of the US’s special skills, but they don’t fetishise it in the same way. Humanity will always be much as it is for them; hence the US, to protect itself, and as the ‘last best’ hope of man, must dominate the world. The hand of God is at work in its rise to dominance, as part of the orderly management of human affairs. Both side coincide in that belief that America in general has this transcendental role, but what stands in its way is America in particular.

Killing the soft power state

The first proximate target is thus the enormous liberal state, and its extension of both intelligence and soft power over the decades. This has led to confusions on the left as to how to respond. Thus the attack on USAID has both dismantled a vast apparatus of propagandistic US soft power across the world, soft power that the US and global left has spent decades documenting and exposing. But the winding up of USAID has also destroyed thousands of medical, education, housing and health programmes, with, as one aid co-ordinator has said people being literally ‘hauled out of operating rooms, mid-operation’. Deaths and damage will be substantial.

The mission of such soft power was not merely to get people to like the USA more (or hate it less), it was to get places to be a little more like the US, with initiatives ranging from funds to establish baseball leagues, to LGBTQ initiatives. Everyone on the progressive and left side has had different reasons for going soft on parts of the programme. Centrist and right liberals excuse the Americanisation of reality, the left has excused the extension of socially progressive-radical thought. Each would have extracted one side of the programme, and everyone would have kept the direct aid. Elon Musk and his DOGE team have ripped the whole thing out.

Their contempt for the soft power aspects of such programmes is not because they do not want America to dominate. That’s where they diverge from the new left, who have dreamed of such audacious acts for decades, and others that Team Elon/Trump have done - appointing a ‘deep state’ sceptic as head of Intelligence, making a key critic of the poisonous US food business, head of Food and Drugs, filleting the FBI. There is some degree of envy that the left got stuck with the role of power, moderation and the acceptance of stagnation, while the right got to be the Bolsheviks, and tear the joint apart.

The great liberal-conservative switcheroo

But there is also an unwelcome recognition on the left that we have gone past the Bolshevik moment, and had necessarily become structural conservatives of the world order. That came as early as 1945, with Hiroshima, and the realisation that the Bolsheviks supreme virtue - audacity - now required limits. Audacity, and the attempt to spark world revolution, was in service to humanity. Once the background to audacity became lethal itself - the possibility, from about 1956 onwards of ending the human species - it was the left who had to become the responsible party.

This has been especially so as the right became the audacious and destructive party. Decades of liberal-conservatism yielded to the ecstatic pleasures of neoliberalism, and the privatisation and marketisation of everything. It was the right, or one part of it, which now became gleefully punk about the impact of their measures. Some of this was utopian, the triumph of the most messianic strands of classical liberalism /libertarianism, as contained in Mises, Rothbard, Rand and others. (Other parts of it were nihilistic).

So while twentieth century revolutionaries had only one goal - revolution at all costs - the post-war left (not merely liberalism) have become system managers. State and economic management is Rawlsian, and was tilted towards forestalling fascism, violent Islamism etc (helluva job!), what ha d been a radical movement against alienating industrialism had become the abstract management of climate change, and so on. None of this could be helped, because all was true. Humanity will go off a cliff if biosphere and atmosphere are not restored, and the right that denies it are just sulky children.

Technology, capital, state, the great consolidation

Writers of history in the future, if any of those things will exist, will see what we are living through as a process of consolidation of technology, state and capital, with little precedent. Elon Musk was already emerging as a different type of tech titan - with rockets, tunnelling machines, vehicles and brain implants - who has left his fellow tech super rich far behind. Zuckerburg and Brin have remained nerds who mistake information for reality and Bezos is just a tycoon for whom tech was merely a means to a superyacht and a trophy wife.

Musk’s formation in this respect, was overdetermined af. His grandfather was a pillar of the ‘technocracy’ movement, which swept the US and Canada - remembered through relics of the period such as CH Douglas’s ‘social credit’ movement, and Burnham’s ‘Managerial Revolution’ - many of whose proponents had passed briefly through Bolshevism, and agreed with HG Wells that what was required was ‘liberal [ie progressive] fascism’, to get stuff done. Growing up in South Africa, rather than post-histoire California, Musk was in a society in which brutal real struggle to make history was constitutive of everyday life.

Interval

Palate cleanser: On the ABC

But Have You Ever Seen Them In The Same Room Together?

Lucille Bluth, Arrested Development

Ita Buttrose, ABC, celebrity witness

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Part Two: On Musk and Trump’s Unfolding Coup

Technocracy

Musk’s world vision now aligns with Trump’s ,or dominates and dictates it. Even the details seem Muskian. Fusion of Canada and the US was a technocratic cause. Purchase of Greenland? The federation of Newfoundland (then a UK dominion and colony) as a US 49th state, was a cause of the time, and for the same reason: control of the Atlantic. Technocracy was rationally anti-democratic, seeing the US as an EU-style superstate, which could help lift the private sector free of Commonwealth class politics and regulation.

Musk, having created an all-purpose business empire, has now gained access to the US state’s inner workings, to remodel it with the speed of tech, leaving democratic processes struggling to catch up. It is reasonable to call this a coup. It takes, as ‘American’, one part of the US heritage - the audacity and exceptionalism of its revolution, as then codified in the singular feature of the Presidency - and uses it to disdain the other side, enlightenment notions of deliberation and interpretation, as codified in Congress and the Supreme Court.

This is setting the USA up for a struggle that goes to the very constitution of the US. The prometheans in the tech-MAGA alliance under Trump, have done so much that is possibly, very likely, unconstitutional, that they have simply made things like accessing the whole US social security system ‘a fact on the ground’. The acts challenge the Supreme Court to stop them, even if they are declared unconstitutional.

Hacking the Court

This moment has often been spoken of in regard to Andrew Jackson, the first ‘modern’ US President, applying the full audacity to westward expansion, national building, and destruction of native americans. Restrained from this by the court in 1837, Jackson is said to have defied, saying ‘the court has made their decision, now let them enforce it’. The cause was violent ethnic cleansing of the Chrerokee; in fact Jackson honoured the court, simply using the slow communications of the 1830s to allow it to happen. The story has always been a myth warning of the gaps in the Constitution. But the moment is mythologised is here now.

Remake the government to make the executive almost all of it, replace government services with private ones, and then dismantle the complex alliances and interconnections with smaller client states. These are thrown over, and direct relations with the major authoritarian players - Russia, India - takes over. The object is to steer the world through US direct dominance, not client alliances or soft power, and to fuse that dominance to species advancement (though Trump himself cares little for that). This sees US world leadership as de facto permanent, lasting for centuries, and the struggle with China as epoch defining.

Iron Man!

With Musk, three different discourses come together. The Mars adventure, and the resources built to do it, is a sort of Bolshevik-prometheanism as its purest. It was after all, the most promethean Bolshevik, Alexander Bogdanov - blood transfusion pioneer, rival leader to Lenin, a proponent of humanist ‘God-Building’, by Bolsheviks, to inspire the masses - who first tied Martian colonisation with human transcendence, in his science fiction novel Red Star. This has now been Americanised (in his crackpot 2012 campaign, Newt Gingrich, a student of Alvin Toffler’s, suggested that moon colonisation would be on the agenda for the US and ‘when there are 60,000 of them, the can apply for statehood’. I saw him say this - in a Brazilian-themed steak house in Myrtle Beach, a South Carolina resort town favoured by bikies. He won that primary).

But there are deeper currents. Why Musk’s particular focus on ‘species survival’ by planetary colonisation? It is not merely the ‘solutionism’ of the tech bros, or the childish heroic projection of the vast amount of sci-fi such people consume. Musk has rolled over the race anxiety - of white disappearance - of his South African boyhood, into an acceptable form. The third part is the subsumption of state and social functions to technocratic control in the interests of efficiency.

Most likely, the re-orienting to dominance and deals with great powers will run into difficulty, as alliances respond. The Trump triumph represents many things but it is above all the return of a simple positivism in human affairs, the idea that everything else is an inert object. Doubly so for domestic policy and systems. Musk’s favourite book (also that of the veteran Melbourne tech-maoist Albert Langer) is Hitchiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, a four volume story of everything always goes wrong. The strong suspicion is not that such people don’t get that; they don’t care. The hunger for a transcendence that tech cannot deliver is implanted in the culture now. Bogdanov’s ‘God-Building’ has occurred with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, dominating adult imagination after drama had faded with the collapse of the great adventure of the 20th century, social revolution.

A Republic, if you can keep it

Is the US in a coup? It is in the early stages of it. The crunch point will come when some of these attempts to restrain Musk and DOGE hit the Supreme Court, are possibly upheld, and possibly resisted. History is happening is weeks not decades, no-one can keep up, the globe and everyone’s head is spinning.

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Obituary

Jules Feiffer 1929 - 2025

I feel really conflicted about my sadness at the death of Jules Feiffer

I mean he was 95! He had a great life! Thousands of amazing cartoons, plays and movies like Carnal Knowledge, The Phantom Tollbooth illustrations, lived in New York in its great days….

I wanted to be him! All my early comedy sketches were Feifferesque couples agonising about their relationship! I was 16!

But, I mean, intellectually, do I respect him? That whole 50s schtick, anxiety, psychoanalysis, self-scrutiny, Eisenhower, arch liberalism…I don't really believe any of it as an intellectual framework. Do I value him because the whole approach has, due to time, become self-parodic? Do I thus dishonour him?

Sigh

I'm going to have talk about this with my analyst

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Poem of the Week

By Kim Serca

On the Prosecution of Sam Kerr

(apologies to Louis McNiece, ‘Bagpipe Music’)

It's not go the Sam Kerr

it's no go for Pakis

You've got to be a LEGEND!,

to throw up in a taxi

It's no go the larrakin,

there’ll be no misbehaviour

Unless you’re an accused rapist

senior AFL player

It’s no go the anti-woke,

it's no go the barrackers

All the tabloids want is a chance

To doubt your ‘character’

The pressure rises hour by hour, the pressure never stops

You’ll always be the suspect when yr dealing with the cops

It doesn’t matter what you win

with all of your ability

You’ll never get more

than a scoreless draw

Against white fragility

KS

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Till next week