- The un-elected Elon Musk seems to be running the country this week;
- How the Drone Panic reveals a need to believe, in *something*.
So not only is our incipient administration authoritarian, it’s authoritarian and being run by an oligarch!
NY Times, 19 Dec 2024: Elon Musk Flexes His Political Strength as Government Shutdown Looms, subtitled “The world’s richest man led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it.”
Wielding the social media platform he purchased for $44 billion in 2022, Mr. Musk detonated a rhetorical nuclear bomb in the middle of government shutdown negotiations on Capitol Hill.
In more than 150 separate posts on X, starting before dawn on Wednesday, Mr. Musk demanded that Republicans back away from a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. He vowed political retribution against anyone voting for the sprawling bill backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called Mr. Musk on Wednesday to ask that he stop posting about the bill.
So let’s see now, Republicans have already rolled over to show their bellies to Trump — or “obeying in advance,” as outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray did by resigning early, and as Timothy Snyder warned people not to do under a tyrannical government, in his book — now we have them kowtowing to the unelected Elon Musk, who happens to be the world’s richest man, and buddy with Donald Trump, at least for now. Trump doesn’t take office for another month, but Musk is pulling the strings to determine what kind of budget agreement Congress will reach. With the implied threat that anyone who doesn’t comply will face “primarying” by political opponents financed by Musk! Is this what the US has come to?
Somehow, just this afternoon, a budget agreement was reached anyway. I haven’t read the details.
The Atlantic, Charles Sykes, 19 Dec 2024: The GOP Is Treating Musk Like He’s in Charge, subtitled “This week, the world’s richest person solidified his influence over American politics.”
Robert Reich, 20 Dec 2024: The American oligarchy is back, and it’s out of control, subtitled “It’s the third time in the nation’s history that a small group of hyper-wealthy people have gained political power over the rest of us. Here’s what we must do.”
(What were the first two times? First: “Many of the men who founded America were slaveholding white oligarchs.” Second: “A century later a new American oligarchy emerged comprised of men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. It was called the Gilded Age.”)
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Oh, and this:
Salon, Nicholas Liu, 20 Dec 2024: Elon Musk throws his support behind Germany’s extremist far-right, subtitled “Alternative for Germany (AfD) is performing strongly in polls leading up to a Feb. 2025 election”
It’s become a cliche to compare Trump to Hitler, but how much more evidence do we need to see the affinity between Trump and his pals and the extreme xenophobic right of Hitler’s regime, that demonized outsiders and talked constantly of returning to a glorious past by expelling the vermin from society?
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Once more about the drones, because this phenomenon reveals more about human psychology.
Slate, Molly Olmstead, 20 Dec 2024: Close Encounters of the Drone Kind, subtitled “Why so many Americans think space aliens are flying over New Jersey.”
(Note that Slate categorizes this piece as “Faith-Based.”) One point that occurred to me as I read this piece is that politicians aren’t allowed to be smarter or more savvy than their constituents; they can’t come out say these are all just airplanes or mistakes of some kind. They’d be voted out of office. Still,
Sensing the rising public interest, lawmakers have gotten in on the discourse as well: Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, for example, posted a video of distant lights—which seem to just be the constellation Orion—and complained that the federal government was not taking drone sightings seriously enough. “The American people deserve answers and action now,” he wrote. New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew boldly speculated that they could be from an Iranian “mothership.” Donald Trump referenced the drones in a crude joke about the former governor of New Jersey.
The only realm of speculation politicians are staying away from? Extraterrestrials.
But more and more citizens *are* talking about it.
According to Christopher Bader, a sociology professor at Chapman University who has polled Americans on their belief in the paranormal, some 35 percent of Americans believe that aliens have visited the Earth in modern times, and about a quarter of the population believes that at least some UFO sightings are extraterrestrial in origin. That number is well above where it was a couple of decades ago: A 1996 poll from Newsweek found only 20 percent of Americans were inclined to believe in alien UFOs; a Baylor religion survey in 2005 similarly found only 24 percent of people did. And Bader’s data isn’t an outlier: A Pew survey from 2021 found that more than 50 percent of people polled believed that “UFOs reported by people in the military are likely evidence of intelligent life outside Earth.”
That trend is not just about aliens. Overall, Americans are coming to embrace the paranormal in a multitude of ways. Bader’s polling found that a majority of Americans believe in hauntings—a 16-point increase from 2005—and belief in psychic powers, while still relatively low, has roughly doubled in the past 15 years or so. These beliefs, he said, have been slowly but steadily growing.
And here’s the key psychological point:
As Bader sees it, one of the main reasons behind the general American embrace of the strange and paranormal is the long-running and steady decline of religious institutions. Churches, he said, can often serve as a kind of dampener on paranormal beliefs: Part of the role of a denomination is to lay out a particular creed. That creed may be supernatural—God, after all, is beyond the realm of scientific proof—but institutional religious doctrine does not usually include any mentions of space aliens.
Now that fewer and fewer people attend religious services, “it’s common in surveys to find someone who says, ‘I believe Jesus is the one and only son of God, and also my house is haunted, and there might be a Bigfoot,’ ” Bader said. “People didn’t use to believe all those things. Churches would say, ‘Here is the correct package of supernatural beliefs you’re allowed to hold.’ ”
This was the key point, IIRC, in a book I read some years ago by Nicholas Humphrey, Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation. Note the subtitle. (I have the hardcover, but this link for the trade paperback shows the subtitle better.) As science has eroded the plausibility of traditional religious beliefs, people search for something else to fill that “god-shaped hole” in the mind, as some speak of it. And so they turn to the supernatural. No matter how implausible those beliefs are, given science; but they don’t know science.
Another key sociological point:
There’s a common misconception, he said, that Americans are becoming godless secularists; the reality, instead, is that Americans are leaving organized religion in droves but remaining believers, in some way or another. Many Americans who abandon their parents’ old denominations still pray, still believe in an afterlife, still believe in something beyond the physical world. Actual atheism remains quite rare—atheists are only about 5 percent of the population, according to Pew survey data. And committed atheists tend to be pretty skeptical when it comes to paranormal matters. But the vast middle category of spiritual or casually religious Americans are much more open.
But many of the “New Jersey drone speculators” are just paranoid. With examples of comments from MAGA crazies. Concluding:
What does it all add up to? The American response to unexplained aerial phenomena is clarifying—not about what’s in the sky, but for who we are: mistrustful people, lovers of the paranormal, eclectic in our beliefs, and trigger-happy (in word if not in deed). The New Jersey drone mystery may or may not get a clear explanation. But it has already told us something important about ourselves.
