Donald Trump’s isolationist tendencies may have blended with, perhaps even been hijacked by, a more exotic form of isolationism, rooted in a century-old, technology-idolizing, U.S.-Canadian movement called “technocracy,” of which Elon Musk’s grandfather was a co-founder.
Musk plainly has his own blend of libertarianism, serial natalism of the compound-building sort, and brazen tech-mogul opportunism, but it’s hard to escape the suspicion that some elements of technocracy in the narrow, movement-oriented sense made it from maternal grandfather Joshua Haldeman to grandson Elon (presumably via Elon’s weirdly hot, 77-year-old, sometimes South Africa-dwelling fashion model mom Maye Musk, whose son, you may recall, was apparently named after a character in a novel by ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun—don’t pretend this doesn’t all fit together), and then via recent politics and shared psychological inclinations perhaps to Trump.
Taken on its own, Trump’s desire to oust immigrants, retake the Panama Canal, rename the Gulf of Mexico, and seize Greenland from poor innocent Denmark sounds like a random to-do list from the middle school daydreams of a would-be world-conqueror, perhaps whipped up as he gazed, without too much philosophical sophistication or pretension, upon a nearby wall map of North America.
That could be all there is to it. Or Trump might share the obsessions of some of his younger followers with the New Right’s ethno-state ideas and the strategic analyses on unofficial Russian military blogs (I doubt the young people these days are getting many of their highfalutin notions about medieval Hungarian warlords and such from actual books—it’s blogs, memes, or just goddam videogames, I’d guess).
But if Trump finds in Musk someone who shares his odd desire to avoid both globalism and true government decentralization by the in-between method of fostering continent-sized superstates, Trump might well glom onto the technocratic streak in Musk’s thinking as a ready rationale, even if it’s a bit obscure and foreign. If it’s also a little autocratic and undemocratic, well, Trump can work with that.
The technocracy movement, to its credit, was an attempt, in the pivotal early decades of the 20th century, to avoid the flaws of socialism, fascism, and capitalism alike but fell into the trap that so many sci-fi authors, modernist architects, and other would-be social engineers did throughout that century: thinking that far-ranging social engineering would be possible if only the correct super-geniuses and the necessary scientific data could be marshaled in pursuit of the plan.
Step one: secure a vast, resource-rich, defensible chunk of land, such as a politically unified continent. That’s where North America, all of it, comes in. Declare it a scientifically-managed “technate.”
Next, start managing resources less on the basis of customer or voter preferences and more on the basis of thermodynamics itself, imagined to be discernible by those science experts you’ve recruited and put in charge of everything—and even translatable into thermodynamics-based currency, which sounds oddly familiar in these crypto-obsessed days. You can practically see the technocrats’ modernist, Buck Rogers-character capes now. And recall that while young Elon was growing up likely hearing echoes of this idea at home, that home was moving around (with Maye Musk) between Canada and South Africa.
In reality, only prices negotiated between free individuals can determine what things are worth to whom and thus how resources are best used. There’s no more a perfectly scientifically-reasonable or thermodynamically-efficient use of goods than there is, say, “a fair price in the eyes of God” without determination by the market.
Still, a man torn between countries and ultimately settling in the U.S. might be especially inclined to like the idea of a political philosophy spanning—and planning—the whole continent but eschewing world government or domination by the U.N. Owning and selling fleets of super-science trucks that look like ugly South African patrol vehicles is just the icing on the international cake, or perhaps I should say the maple syrup on the Canadian pancake stack (with a side of South African zebra sausages).
People of all political stripes have at some point known the temptation to give up on the usual political conflicts and turn everything over to the technical experts. But recall the terrible things wrought by various solutions that at one point or another were touted as purely scientific and thus safely removed from the realm of human foibles: Marxism, social engineering, eugenics, mechanized war (including nukes), draconian climate-regulating plans, electronic surveillance, biological-ambiguity-exaggerating trans claims, overblown Covid lockdown hype, and so on. Now, perhaps, watch what a combination of natalists, computer programmers, and Martian explorer robots will yield. They can plan and dream all they like, but let’s hope they keep doing it with their own (considerable) money.
And speaking of money, instead of dreaming up sci-fi futures on behalf of the whole population, how about government advisors stick to the fiscally-sound business of budget-cutting, maybe by some old-fashioned method like closing a few Cabinet-level agencies? Shutting half of the Department of Education ain’t a bad start. I’d prefer Musk and Trump stick to things like that and let the resources of the continent fend for themselves, or rather let the resources do what their individual buyers and sellers please.
Maybe it’s silly to think something as ideologically orthogonal as technocracy has any influence on this administration’s nominally-Republican thinking, but we’ve seen other awkward ideological overlays occur in politics: There’s often religion lurking where you didn’t at first see it but also ethnic grievances, nationalist allegiances, or pure moral relativism. Why not think technocracy has been added to the mix, especially at a time when it jibes with Silicon Valley machinations? (Trump’s uncle was the heir to Nikola Tesla’s intellectual papers to boot, so joining forces with a man churning out fleets of cars named after that science visionary might sweeten the deal, ideologically.)
This wouldn’t be all that strange. After all, people still revere H.G. Wells (I just saw the 1964 remake of the tragically lost 1919 movie based on his novel The First Men in the Moon) and George Bernard Shaw, and they were both Progressives (or Fabians) of the sort who dreamt of a future in which government would wisely guide everything from economic production to mate selection. A slight tinge of that dangerous sci-fi faith in highbrow planning (combined with Jules Verne-style professorial eccentricity) remained a half century later in the know-it-all lecturing by the Doctor on the sci-fi show Doctor Who—but luckily, as one of his foes put it back in the 1970s, the Doctor is given to “libertarian causes.”
Would that we all were, instinctively siding with the rebels and not the high-tech establishment, much as I love Buck Rogers, Tom Swift, and Jonny Quest.
Socialists, fascists, pushy engineers, and bossy real estate developers alike are susceptible to wanting to cram the unruly world (including us) into their own rigid plans. We must resist them all, even when they are disguised as liberators, enlighteners, or talented machinesmiths. If we don’t, the jackboot that descends upon us won’t taste any sweeter just because it’s worn by a robot that was produced with profitable crypto-investments and spat out by a 3D printer.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
