Old Conservatives Remain Mystified By The Tech Oligarchs
The old guard of the conservative movement fail to understand the danger posed by the tech oligarchs
Recently a member of the old guard named Trevor Grant Thomas penned an essay entitled “ Big Tech And Capitalism” wherein a rundown was given of the dual founding of Amazon and Facebook by the reptilian technocrats Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg respectively. It was quite tedious but not without its rewards in the form of some rather revealing quotes. One of these gems went as follows “Thus, if conservatism seeks to conserve anything, it is capitalism”. This pitiful call for free market über alles perfectly encapsulates the intellectual sterility of the old guard of the conservative movement.
From the faithless internationalist plutocrats who buy and sell slave labor by the millions in the lands of the Orient to alienated two-bit hustlers in our urban cities our entire culture has been led astray by devilish dreams of avarice. The “conservative” solution to this corrosive materialism is apparently to double and triple down upon “capitalism” — as if a mere system for arranging economic production could bring about the moral renewal of the American people.
The crippling effects that the love of gold has upon men is attested to in many of our civilization’s founding documents. One of the most well-known of these sagely maxims is contained in the biblical verse 1 Tim. 6:10 (“For the love of money is the root of all evil…”). The replacement of the good with the profitable leads to the moral degeneration of the individual in particular and of nations in general. It is especially dangerous to republics like our own, who more than any other species of government depend so heavily upon the moral virtue of the mass citizenry.
At the end of the article in question the author finally throws his hands up in frustration by stating:
Thus, we again see that — after having employed and personally benefited from the forces of capitalism, and thus, conservatism — Big Tech leftists have hypocritically decided that what worked for them is simply not for everyone else.
The specific reason why conservatives of his sort are unable to square the circle and wrap their head around why the tech oligarchs are blood enemies of conservatives “despite the fact that conservatism is the political philosophy that embraces, promotes, and protects capitalism in America” is a result of their overall inability to understand the new Left. They are overmatched and out of season.
The elemental fact that they fail to grasp is that the tech oligarchs are corporatists in the classical sense of the world. Not only do they not seek a sort of rugged individual capitalistic existence outside of the State, but they do not seek after even mere cronyism like the industrial “robber barons” of old. In a similar fashion to the “banksters” of Wall Street (our very own self-appointed priests of Mammon) they seek to transcend mere cronyism and fuse themselves into the very apparatus of the ruling class.
The tech oligarchs have made themselves indispensable to the ruling class both as ultra-loyal financiers and as the self-deputized thought police of the Internet. Mr. Bezos himself let his mask slip in public a few years ago by overtly purchasing the media organ The Washington Post — with predictable editorial results. This very year his ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, showered $1.7 billion dollars (from her divorce settlement with Mr. Bezos) upon leftist cultural revolutionists and other affiliated organizations. But please do go on with the fluff pieces and devil’s advocacy.
If one can be allowed to use the flashy but illustrative metaphors arising from the cinema then one can describe the old Left as a T-800 — clunky, predictable and brutish with a barely concealed endoskeleton constructed entirely of steely malignancy. The new Left is a T-1000 — smooth, unpredictable and able to take the shape of a variety of seemingly dissimilar political constituencies (e.g. a debauched Wall Streeter, a “hate America” protestor, a hipsterfied “programmer bro” or even an alabaster faced bourgeois “soccer mom”).
The old guard who had so much trouble facing the original incarnation of the Left do not stand a chance against this new Gramscian version. Conservatives must evolve to meet this new threat. Tired and hollow calls for “tax cuts “and “freedom” will not abate the socio-political curb stomping of the conservative movement by this new Left. Trumpism alone keeps open the possibility for this much needed evolution by allowing us to reimagine conservatism (chiefly by bringing back to the forefront those ideas that were strategically muted during the days of “fusionism”.)
Currently only the terror of President Trump keeps the Republican equivocators and go-along-to-get-along conservatives from immediately coming to a debased modus vivendi with the new Left. A Trump re-election in 2020 will give the breathing room required to allow the Trumpian project to be able to reach the point where it can stand on its own intellectual edifice instead of immediately toppling over the moment Trump is no longer able to personally support it.
