In July 2024, the Republican Party in the United States selected the young libertarian J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate. Vance, who became a senator from Ohio the previous year, was promoted by the influential Israeli lobby AIPAC and his billionaire friends in Silicon Valley’s tech corporations. Not coincidentally, the thinker who shapes Vance’s rhetoric is Curtis Yarvin, a blogger and proponent of the “Dark Enlightenment,” which argues that democracies are failed experiments and that the idea of equality is perverse. This echoes the psychopathy of Ayn Rand, admired by conservatives in the 20th century, who claimed that selfishness is altruism and solidarity a crime.

This new libertarian movement explicitly advocates for a dictatorship of tech corporations, “merit-based,” whereby the rest (the new oppressed) must obey for their own good and prosperity. Haven’t you noticed that the libertarians in Latin America always talk about growth, yet nothing grows except violence and poverty? Essentially, it’s about stripping political freedom from the lower classes and ensuring the unlimited freedom of corporate CEOs. Yarvin and his wave of post-capitalist influencers argue for the destruction of American democracy. Since they come from the tech sector, they think in those terms: they believe a violent reset is necessary, changing not just the software but the hardware of society.

My critique has been consistent for a quarter of a century: the problem is not democracy, but the façade of democracy. True democracy has been destroyed or aborted by the lobbies and corporations that have bought and sold elections for centuries, from the East India Company, founded in 1600, to the privatizers and modern giants like Microsoft, CrowdStrike, BlackRock, Lockheed Martin… As the mastermind of propaganda Edward Bernays wrote a century ago, keeping the population ignorant of how power functions is the best way to manage a democracy. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” And years later: “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.”

At a rally with J.D. Vance, shortly after he was promoted to vice-presidential candidate, Ohio state senator George Lang suggested that if Trump lost the election, a civil war would be necessary to save the country. He added humorously that their side would win with groups like “Bikers for Trump.” This bravado is typical of drunken threats soon to be knocked out by a soberer opponent, a geopolitical metaphor current with the same arguments used by Southern slaveholders of the 19th century to reject the “immoral” idea of freeing slaves, an attack on their sacred right to “private property.”

In Moscas en la telaraña (Flies in the web: History of the commercialization of existence and its means), we analyze the continuity of two alternating elements in power structures over different periods and social systems, illustrated during the Middle Ages by centralized systems and noble systems, or in economic terms, monopolies and oligopolies. Adam Smith, a liberal Enlightenment thinker, defined “imperfect competition,” accepting basic equality as a social virtue where competition rewards individual merit without destroying that initial equality, without privileges like being born into a rich family or an imperial country. These 18th-century ideas, crystallized by naivety, were never resolved but progressively worsened by the cumulative nature of capitalist power, leading ironically to its antithesis: authoritarianism.

Through this model of inverse progression, the maturation of one system leads to its downfall and replacement by its opposite through continuities of power and privilege. For instance, feudalism transitioned into liberalism (feudal lords became capitalist lords), demanding “freedom of action” from centralized power while seeking the repressive and colonial power of their armies. This is the reason for postmodern liberals’ love for police and military strength, euphemistically labeled “protection of one individual against another.”

This system emerged as “liberal democracies.” Like ancient Athens, democrats had slaves and colonies dominated by dictatorships but presented themselves (to slaves and colonies) as models of progress, prosperity, and freedom. Southern slaveholders justified their position in the democratic press and congresses as champions of law, order, and freedom—the law, the order, and the freedom of the free race.

The utopian extreme of Enlightenment philosophers was what we imagine as democracy, never fully developed but exemplified in the modern era by liberal democracies with representative congresses. This was always limited by liberal power, concentrated in capital accumulation. The corporate dictatorship ideas from J.D. Vance and Curtis Yarvin, similar to the libertarian Tea Party, will likely reach the colonies. By then, figures like President Javier Milei in Argentina or other Latin American countries will have transformed into open supporters of corporate dictatorships, embracing new colonialist regimes “to address the failures of democracies.”

However, whether this repetitive process will wear itself out is uncertain. I suspect and hope that a popular wave in the 2030s or 2040s will eventually end the dictatorship of feudal lords and their functional vassals.

Jorge Majfud