Understanding the US Coup d'Etat: Pt 1-Brooke Harrington on the Broligarchy
First of a two-part series on the factions behind the Trump presidency essential for understanding the current crisis in the US.
If you’re thinking the actions of the Trump administration, especially the tariffs, are insanely destructive, know that there is a method to the madness. I cannot recommend highly enough the work of Brooke Harrington, a sociologist who has been studying the super rich for almost two decades. This is a very difficult group to gain entry to for study. She did so by training to be a wealth manager, gaining access, as she puts it, through the servants’ entrance.
She calls the tech billionaires who are bankrolling and directing much of the Trump agenda the “broligarchy.” What’s different about this authoritarian regime, compared with past ones that sought to increase the power of their nation, is that the broligarchy wants to destroy the nation state. They want the super rich to run the world. Harrington points out that new technologies facilitate this.
She defines the broligarchy as:
6:18 male billionaires, primarily in the high-tech and financial services sector, who have a very distinct political agenda that combines elements of libertarianism, and of a sort of adolescent sci-fi fantasy world, in which they're always the the natural-born rulers entitled to govern the rest of us, through a series of corporate contracts, rather than hassling with messy things like democracy.
22:19 [U]ndermining the power of the US, and the nation state in general, seems to be really important goal of theirs… a book called The Sovereign Individual (1997)1, where a lot of these ideas are laid out, was a sort of semi- apocalyptic book that looked at the future in the 21st century. And it predicted the collapse of nation states and the rise of digital currencies. And the book is very, very important to people like Peter Thiel.
And if the nation becomes a crumbling ruin, with cratering health and education levels, or roads and bridges falling to pieces, then what of it? In the short term, broligarchs can adapt to local anarchy, as the ultrarich of Brazil and Mexico have done, using helicopters to commute a few blocks to work, or to ferry their children to school, high above the crime-ridden streets where their fellow citizens must struggle to survive as best they can. In the long term, when their adaptations cease to protect them, they can retreat to luxury underground bunkers—complete with bowling alleys!—or even to outer space.
She calls them the broligarchy, in part because:
10:29 [T]his ideology very explicitly excludes women from public life. And it's not just speculation on my part. People like Peter Thiel, Marc Andresson, and, of course, Elon Musk, have been very public and open in speeches and manifestos they've published, saying the role of women is to stay home and make more babies for us to propagate our superior genes. JD Vance… would just be like a 40-year-old tech bro if it weren't for the support of Peter Thiel… Over the years, Peter Thiel kind of essentially created the JD Vance that we know.
16:52 [T]hey will probably go a long way in pushing women out of public life, especially if they succeed in doing away with the Department of Education. Anyone who has a child who has any sort of learning disability, any kind of disability at all, the Department of Education is the part of the government that requires public schools to accommodate those kids. And if there's no more Department of Education, no more accommodations. They're expensive. So what happens to those kids? They're probably going to go home, into the care of their mothers, who will have to quit their jobs to take care of them, and that, I'm sure, suits the broligarchs just fine.
Harrington says the broligarchy wants to replace the USD with crypto.
17:56 [T]he US government is already the biggest holder of crypto in the world. I think it owns a bitcoin reserve valued at roughly five billion. But the broligarchs want the federal government to really go all in on crypto; either to make crypto a competitor to the US dollar, or to supplant the US dollar, which would have seismic consequences for the entire world. Right now the US dollar is still dominant but the crypto bros, the broligarchy; they want to shift that balance towards crypto which is great for them because they're all holding gigantic crypto wallets. This will force the US government essentially to to cash them out and to validate this investment that they've made but for the rest of us…
[Y]ou know what? I don't want to end up like the poor Argentinians, after their peso was devalued. If you remember those images from 20 years ago, of middle class Argentinians dumpster diving because they couldn't afford food… [N]obody wants that… I'm still of working age… [W]hat happens to the millions of Americans who aren't of working age; whose life savings are still in US Dollars?
[O]ne thing that's been very concerning, and sort of shocking to me, is the degree to which no one is telling Americans what crypto is really about, even as it becomes obvious that crypto is largely a scam that's being used for crimes. And Americans have lost billions and billions of dollars to crypto scammers.
Both Harrington’s article in the Atlantic, and her interview with Framelab are compelling and essential for understanding the ongoing coup in the United States. Her latest book is Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism. I have ordered it, but probably won’t get the chance to read it until my road trip in a couple of weeks.
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Rees-Mogg, William and James Dales Davidson. The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. Touchstone: New York, 1997.
Sharp, perceptive analysis, as ever. By some extraordinary coincidence I am recording a radio programme with Brooke later this week!
Excellent, if distressing, post.