Elon Musk is Really Bad for the Right

An unlikely nemesis

Unlocking this paid article from a few weeks ago because it’s become an essential read in light of Musk’s his threats to start a third party and because the analysis of his motives and impact - that in political terms he’s a needy, conniving idiot who ruins everything - stand up very well.

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To date, the problems I’ve highlighted with Elon Musk have been cultural – namely that it’s bad to have a person with no taste, no sense of humour, and no intellectual curiosity for non-technical matters in charge of a major cultural institution. But as the second Trump term has progressed it has become clear that he represents not just a cultural problem but a political one too - or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the cultural problem has a political dimension.

Musk’s political adventures in America are one thing: Trump has already gained power, and the US has a culture of libertarian anti-government sentiment he can exploit as he attempts to dismantle the state with DOGE. But outside of America, his influence has been uniformly negative for populist/ nationalist/ dissident parties and voters. And with every intervention he makes the development of a more stable and competent right wing politics, that can get elected and hang on to government long enough to address populist concerns, less likely.

The worst aspects of his influence can be summarised by the changes at Twitter. The website previously acted as an incubator of right wing thought by allowing people to develop ideas and then stress test them by bringing them into direct conflict with the political and cultural establishment, in public. This peculiar clash of world views was what gave Twitter its cultural power. Of course, old Twitter also had terrible policies designed to limit the reach of those conversations and punish anyone too successful or incisive at those clashes, and Musk deserves credit for addressing that. But every other change he has made – especially suppressing external links – has made Twitter a less interesting place and taken away that structural value the platform had for the right.

The remaining content on Twitter has been shaped to appeal to his own tastes, and to benefit himself financially and politically; the result has been to make it into a cauldron boiling of zombie boomer-slop which most closely resembles Facebook circa 2014, with the representative poster of the Musk era being someone like Ian Miles Cheong. Twitter is as coarse and obnoxious as it ever was, but without the competing power blocs and underdog energy that made that valuable or interesting.

You can argue about whether these changes are good for the culture, or for the website; or indeed whether they serve a political purpose for the right in a country like America where a version of populism now holds power. But Musk-Twitter’s value as an instrument for helping build an effective political opposition to the excesses of Liberalism outside the US is less than zero. It actively disempowers the instincts (reflection, organisation and coordination out of the spotlight, the willingness to sublimate personal ambition to a larger goal) which are required to do that.

The new Twitter has turbocharged the incentives for people who are good at gaming the system, good at sucking up to Elon, and good at promoting themselves at the expense of larger ideas. Gaining and wielding real power is irrelevant and maybe even an obstacle in this process, since you can rabble-rouse and blackpill and mislead with hysterical negativity regardless of what’s happening at the ballot box. Many of the “right-wing” accounts commenting on the situation in Europe that have prospered (and been promoted) during Musk’s reign thrive on feelings of disempowerment and hopelessness, and would be damaged if anyone did anything about the problems they routinely complain about.

Many of these accounts also succeed by actively misleading the viewer about the situation in individual countries – certainly for Ireland, the accounts promoted by Musk or by Twitter often totally mis-represent basic facts, how bad things are, but also how mainstream populist sentiment is or how likely it is to gain power – conversations around Conor McGregor’s run for President being a great example. All of this funnels time and effort down gaudy dead-ends.

The problem isn’t just with his stewardship of Twitter alone. I’m amazed I have to say this out loud but here we go: we all realise people don’t actually like billionaires, right? This is particularly true when they come carrying notions of reducing rather than expanding state capacity, which do not have the same cultural support in Europe as they do in America. European voters of all partisan stripes felt the sting of austerity and still resent it. Their memory of those events blend into the attitudes about tech billionaires in particular, who are seen as having profited from austerity, lockdown and the general disintegration of society. Tying your political fortune very publicly to this type of oligarch is poison for any political movement.

The Irish street protests around asylum housing are a good example of how all these factors mix together. The protests are about immigration of course, and some of the participants are motivated by the pure joy of public violence. But it’s not wrong to also understand them as an appeal to spend more on public services. Part of the attempt to reframe anti-immigration sentiment in Ireland as being about stretched public services (schools, police, houses, spending on youth services in deprived areas) is just Irish politics retreating to a safe space, but plenty of it is genuine. In Dublin the demand amongst the tech industry for imported cheap labour is often seen as driving up property rents and property availability. On top of all that, Musk has come out in support of H1-B visas in the US meaning he’s actually squishy on the one issue that is absolutely central to all European populists. So no right-wing party in Europe is going to prosper through association with an alien tech billionaire who is making a political name attacking government spending.

Sticking with Ireland, one of the things that has held new nationalist/ populist groups back here is the accusation they are being manipulated by external forces, and that those movements are weirdly disconnected from the style and normal concerns of politics in their home country. The former is not true in my opinion, though the latter probably is, based on the tone-deaf way the recent election campaigns by some of those parties were waged. In either case aligning yourself with someone like Musk or coasting on his largesse means you will be seen as the toady of an interloping outsider seeking to disrupt the political functioning of the country for his own ends. Even if that disruption ultimately pushes the country in a direction they like, the majority of voters will find their sense of national pride rankles at that interference, with Musk seeming like a loudmouth stranger wading into an argument between family members. His actions don’t even come cloaked in the guise of empathy or altruism, which is the approach left-wing oligarchs use when they do this stuff.

Many of the critiques that can be raised at him can also be levelled at Trump or his administration; but Muks holds a specific role as the owner of the one cultural structure that is fully “right-wing” aligned (in theory at least), and as the most powerful agent of the Trump administration that who has never been elected to office. Even if you hate him, Trump is more like a force of nature or a force of history than a normal politician. In America, he has earned the power he holds through his political victories; the unlikeliness of his success and the extent of the obstacles he overcame means he has something more than just a mandate. Even people who hate him sense this, and it accounts in part for how defeated they seem at the minute.

But Musk on the other hand could never have organically attained Trump’s position because he has no personal magnetism, no social instincts and none of Trump’s powerful and infectious indifference to fate – yet he is attempting to exercise the office of someone who does have all those things. The average voter can see that, and his ubiquity irritates the hell out of them. Reshaping the international right in the same way he did with Twitter will only have equally dismal and disastrous results – though of course mostly not for him.