Elon Musk is in Your Underwear
February 4, 2025
Elon Musk and the Hypocrisy of the West
Musk’s embrace of far-right politics and Zionism reveals the fractures in Western liberal democracy, where whiteness trumps equality and justice.
Okay, as far as I know Elon Musk is not literally in your underwear, but it seems that he is in your tax, Social Security, and Medicare records. This probably also means that Musk has access to your banking information since tens of millions of people pay their taxes through a bank transfer and get Social Security checks through direct deposit.
This is not some far out conspiracy. Trump and/or Musk forced a long-time career government employee at the Treasury Department to resign because he would not turn over control of the government’s tax and payment system.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with a normal political agenda. David Lebryk, the person they had fired, simply oversaw the sending out of checks and payment of bills as required by the law. There was no issue that Lebryk had acted improperly or had somehow failed at his job. The issue was simply that Musk and his DOGE team wanted direct access to the payment system.
There are two plausible reasons why they might want access to personal information that no prior administration had ever requested, neither of them very good. The first is that Trump intends to break the law and selectively make the payments mandated by Congress.
The point here is that, under the law, the president does not have the discretion to decide which payments they want to make. The president has the option to veto bills that include spending they don’t like, but once spending has been approved and signed into law, they legally must spend it. That is the clear wording of the constitution as affirmed repeatedly by the Supreme Court.
If Trump plans to ignore the law, and possibly even a Supreme Court ruling, then it would be useful to have direct control over the system of payments. This would effectively make him a dictator, he could do whatever he felt like with our tax dollars, with or without Congressional approval.
The other reason why Elon Musk might want control over the system of payments is that it gives him access to an enormous amount of financial information about almost every person in the country. Musk has said that he wants to turn his Twitter social media platform into an all-purpose financial service operation. Having access to detailed information on hundreds of millions of people would give Musk a huge leg up in this effort.
Would Musk use his political ties to Trump to illicitly advance his business operations? Do we really need to ask? Just today, Musk got the brilliant idea of making his platform the exclusive distributor of National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) information about the recent plane crashes. The information is not posted on its website or shared in e-mails with reporters covering the topic.
Taking control of NTSB statements is trivial compared to prying into all of our tax and banking records, but it shows Musk’s contempt for the law and his willingness to nefariously use government information to enrich himself. Let’s just stick to the facts as we know them. Elon Musk now has access to a vast trove of personal information that can be used to enrich himself and he shows zero concern about the laws that would stop him.
So is Musk in our underwear as we speak? Use your own judgment.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
February 3, 2025
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
It is on. Elon is burrowing into a hostile takeover of the US government, regulations, and economy.
He is clearly quite used to getting everything he wants by any devious means or blatant powerplay. Donald Trump is turning out to be just a minor buffoon at Elon’s service, a pliable, if blustering, Muskateer.
Elon bought him and he’s now using him in many ways:
· Musk demanded access to more than $6 trillion in US government payouts–everything from Grandma’s Social Security check and all her personal information to Medicare payments, government contracts, and literally tens of thousands of financial functions affecting every single American. Trump’s indentured squad had to fire a few key folks to clear the way, but now, in the name of efficiency, it’s all there for Musk.
· Musk’s team have denied officials at the United States Office of Personnel Management access to the workings of OPM and have instead installed themselves in those offices, moving luxury sofa beds into the DC offices on upper floors, offices with panoramic views accessible only with security escorts. Some 2.2 million workers are now subject to any treatment, job loss, and even pension loss.
· Remember that federal government building where you went to get much-needed unemployment insurance when the company you worked for laid off skilled workers? Yeah, chances are that building will close and be listed for sale as Musk begins shutting down some of the General Services Administration, putting buildings up for sale and terminating unknown numbers of some 7,500 building leases GSA administers.
This is tantamount to a blitzkrieg on the capacity of the US government to serve the US people and the pushback has begun.
· The Center for Biological Diversity and others have launched notice of lawsuits aimed at the openly self-enriching conflicts of interest in having a billionaire with massive government contracts now in charge of oversight of all those contracts. In stark terms, Musk’s industries that have proven again and again to be bad actors in environmental pollution and yet now increasingly control the regulators. Conflict of interest red flags should be all over the field.
· When, some two weeks ago, Musk gave his infamous Nazi salute, the reactions were swift and categorical. Author Rivera Sun, for example, said, “Take that Nazi salute seriously. Last time, 70 million people died.” She called for nonviolent people power in the streets.
· Some of the lawsuits assert that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is itself illegal under various laws such as the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
· While Democrats in office have criticized Musk, few Republicans are doing so–yet. In Europe, however, more political leadership is speaking out against Musk’s stated support for the neo-Nazi AfD party. While the leaders of Italy and Hungary are pro-Musk, leadership in Norway, Germany, France, and Spain have denounced much of what Musk is doing globally.
· More and more independent citizen groups are beginning to formally oppose the most egregious of Musk’s actions and words. When Musk posted that Germans should move past any guilt about the European Holocaust, for example, reactions were swift.
When Germany rolled over Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and other countries in the 1939-1940 offensive, many lost hope, seeing the ferocious Nazi military as unstoppable.
Then the world united and stopped it.
We can stop Musk too, but this time with what William James (echoed by Jimmy Carter some 66 years later) called the “moral equivalent of war.” Nonviolent civil resistance, with a synthesis of the inside game (politics) and the outside game (“street heat”), holds the most promise. More regular folks need to start observing and then observers need to start taking action.
Watergate led to Nixon’s downfall. ElonGate is a harbinger of defeat for Musk and Trump.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Tom H. Hastings
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs and certificates at Portland State University, his views, however, are not those of any institution, Senior Editor, PeaceVoice and on occasion an expert witness for the defense of civil resisters in court.
It is on. Elon is burrowing into a hostile takeover of the US government, regulations, and economy.
He is clearly quite used to getting everything he wants by any devious means or blatant powerplay. Donald Trump is turning out to be just a minor buffoon at Elon’s service, a pliable, if blustering, Muskateer.
Elon bought him and he’s now using him in many ways:
· Musk demanded access to more than $6 trillion in US government payouts–everything from Grandma’s Social Security check and all her personal information to Medicare payments, government contracts, and literally tens of thousands of financial functions affecting every single American. Trump’s indentured squad had to fire a few key folks to clear the way, but now, in the name of efficiency, it’s all there for Musk.
· Musk’s team have denied officials at the United States Office of Personnel Management access to the workings of OPM and have instead installed themselves in those offices, moving luxury sofa beds into the DC offices on upper floors, offices with panoramic views accessible only with security escorts. Some 2.2 million workers are now subject to any treatment, job loss, and even pension loss.
· Remember that federal government building where you went to get much-needed unemployment insurance when the company you worked for laid off skilled workers? Yeah, chances are that building will close and be listed for sale as Musk begins shutting down some of the General Services Administration, putting buildings up for sale and terminating unknown numbers of some 7,500 building leases GSA administers.
This is tantamount to a blitzkrieg on the capacity of the US government to serve the US people and the pushback has begun.
· The Center for Biological Diversity and others have launched notice of lawsuits aimed at the openly self-enriching conflicts of interest in having a billionaire with massive government contracts now in charge of oversight of all those contracts. In stark terms, Musk’s industries that have proven again and again to be bad actors in environmental pollution and yet now increasingly control the regulators. Conflict of interest red flags should be all over the field.
· When, some two weeks ago, Musk gave his infamous Nazi salute, the reactions were swift and categorical. Author Rivera Sun, for example, said, “Take that Nazi salute seriously. Last time, 70 million people died.” She called for nonviolent people power in the streets.
· Some of the lawsuits assert that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is itself illegal under various laws such as the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
· While Democrats in office have criticized Musk, few Republicans are doing so–yet. In Europe, however, more political leadership is speaking out against Musk’s stated support for the neo-Nazi AfD party. While the leaders of Italy and Hungary are pro-Musk, leadership in Norway, Germany, France, and Spain have denounced much of what Musk is doing globally.
· More and more independent citizen groups are beginning to formally oppose the most egregious of Musk’s actions and words. When Musk posted that Germans should move past any guilt about the European Holocaust, for example, reactions were swift.
When Germany rolled over Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and other countries in the 1939-1940 offensive, many lost hope, seeing the ferocious Nazi military as unstoppable.
Then the world united and stopped it.
We can stop Musk too, but this time with what William James (echoed by Jimmy Carter some 66 years later) called the “moral equivalent of war.” Nonviolent civil resistance, with a synthesis of the inside game (politics) and the outside game (“street heat”), holds the most promise. More regular folks need to start observing and then observers need to start taking action.
Watergate led to Nixon’s downfall. ElonGate is a harbinger of defeat for Musk and Trump.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Tom H. Hastings
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs and certificates at Portland State University, his views, however, are not those of any institution, Senior Editor, PeaceVoice and on occasion an expert witness for the defense of civil resisters in court.
Elon Musk and the Hypocrisy of the West
Musk’s embrace of far-right politics and Zionism reveals the fractures in Western liberal democracy, where whiteness trumps equality and justice.
February 3, 2025
Source: Africa is a Country
Screenshot via PBS of Elon Musk appearing to give a Nazi salute.
When Elon Musk marked Donald Trump’s inauguration with what seemed very much like a Nazi salute and was defended by a lobby that claimed to fight anti-Jewish racism, he and his defenders confirmed the death of two illusions. The first illusion is the belief that Zionism, the ideology that prompted the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza, is about protecting Jews from racists.
The organization that rushed to Musk’s defense is the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded to fight racism against Jews but has become a strident enforcer for the Israeli state. It claimed that he had simply made “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.”
No one can, of course, prove that Musk meant to give a Nazi salute. But US Nazis seemed to recognize the gesture immediately, and it was close enough to one to convince many people that this was what he was doing. Organizations that fight anti-Jewish racism do not usually give the benefit of the doubt to gestures that appear to be Nazi salutes. Nor was it outlandish to see it as a Nazi salute, given the views he has expressed of late.
Not only is Musk loudly cheering the German AfD, which is teeming with Nazi sympathizers, and endorsing the British Muslim-baiter Tommy Robinson, whose racism is so extreme Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform Party will not have anything to do with him, but Musk has also endorsed the racist claim that Jews encourage people outside the West to immigrate to white-run countries in order to supplant whites.
So, an organization that is meant to be fighting prejudice against Jews has no problem with a man who echoes anti-Jewish racism. The reason is not obscure: Like just about all white supremacists today, he is a firm supporter of the Israeli state.
The ADL’s response may seem bizarre, but it is not new. Nor is it an outlier—the Israeli state and its allies have been cozying up to right-wing white supremacists who make excuses for Nazism for years. One way in which the state cements the relationship is to invite them to Yad Vashem, the official Israeli memorial to the victims of the Nazi genocide. They spend a while there very publicly pretending to be horrified. Musk has partly maintained the tradition: After agreeing that Jews were white-anting the white race, he went off to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where he expressed the required dismay.
Why do a state and an ideology which claim to protect Jews, and white supremacists with a soft spot for Nazism, find each other so appealing? Because Zionism and the state it created have never been about protecting Jews—their purpose is to make Jews white and Western.
The Jews who founded the ideology and the state were all European. They were reacting to a centuries-old reality: Jews were in Europe but not were not European in the eyes of its elites. As my book Good Jew, Bad Jew shows, they desperately wanted to be European. Since the nation-state was then all the rage in Europe, they believed that the best way to become European was to establish a state.
This worked—but not because Europe’s elites believed that founding a state made Jews better at being white. The attraction of the state they founded was that it was outside Europe, and so an outpost of Europeanness in the Orient: West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, described the Israeli state as the “fortress of the West.”
As bigotry directed at Muslims became a more pronounced feature of European prejudice, the state became even more appealing to white supremacists, because most of the people of the Orient it has dispossessed and is dominating are Muslim. It is, therefore, on the front line of white supremacy’s war on everyone else.
This explains the role that anti-Semitism now plays in Europe and North America (whose elite is of Europe even if it has not lived there for centuries). Anti-Semitism used to mean anti-Jewish racism. Today, it means hostility to or criticism of the power of the West. Because “anti-Semitic” now means “not Western enough,” Jews are anti-Semites if they believe Palestinians are people entitled to safety and rights. Racists who believe the Jews are plotting to destroy the white race or who say the Nazis are really not as bad as we are told are not anti-Semites, because they endorse the Israeli state, their role model for white supremacy.
Musk has declared sarcastically that he is accused of being both a Zionist and a Nazi as if it was impossible to be both. But Nazis—or at least the politicians and parties who endorse their racism—are today the most enthusiastic Zionists in the world. Whatever they think of Jews, a militarized ethnic state that beats up on Muslims ticks all their boxes.
The second illusion whose death Musk and Trump are burying is the brand of democracy that has reigned since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
No longer fixated on defeating communism, Western elites set about remaking the world—and their own countries—in their image. They did this by avidly promoting a view of what democracy is and how it should function, which was virtually unchallenged for two decades but is now collapsing.
It has two features. The first feature is Western cultural arrogance, which assumes that the form of democracy practiced in the West is the only authentic brand on offer. To be “really” democratic is, therefore, to be Western.
Western academics invented an entire cottage industry that tracked “democratic consolidation” across the globe. Stripped of its academic finery, its task was to figure out whether new democracies outside the West were becoming Western. Governments and donor agencies quickly joined the quest and baked it into their strategies.
The second feature insists—often as much in what it does not say as what it does—that democracy is a system in which everyone can vote and speak and associate as long as no one challenges the elites who hold power in the economy and society.
Democracy, it was assumed, was a system in which citizens limited the power of governments. Because corporations, or powerful professional associations, were run by citizens, their power was no problem, even if it decided the fate of millions of people. The rich and powerful outside government were victims, not perpetrators.
In one sense, the elites who framed democracy in this way had no double standards: They expected the democracies of the West to accept this version as well as those everywhere else. And it is against this that Western countries who are now electing illiberal right-wing governments are reacting.
Because Western democracies were meant to be Western (and white), the presence of growing numbers of people from other parts of the world in the West worried the elites. Academics fretted that “social cohesion” would be threatened unless Africans, Asians, and Arabs spoke and acted—and thought—as Western power holders do.
Since this assumed that people who were not Western were a problem, it is no surprise that public debates in these countries began framing immigrants as a threat, triggering a wave of bigotry that fuels the Western right.
Because democracies were supposed to leave private power alone, parties that once reined in the rich and powerful on behalf of the vast majority now concentrated on trying to be friendlier to businesses than their traditional opponents were. And so the power of the few grew, and that of the many shrank. Millions now believe that democracy offers them nothing, because in this version, that is what it offers them.
This is why Western liberal democracy is now in crisis. But while it is fashionable to insist that the crisis is that millions are turning to the right because they reject democracy, reality is more complicated. The West’s flight from liberalism is a story of the collapse of its supposed center, not of the people’s shift to the right.
After Musk gave his salute, Trump was inaugurated. Although he was responsible for an insurrection against the US Constitution and did not attempt during the campaign to hide his plan to shred what remains of liberal democracy in that country, Democratic former presidents and elected representatives attended in large numbers and the media treated the event—and everything else to do with Trump—as though he was a centrist committed to constitutional government.
This highlighted the key feature of the rise of the illiberal right—the degree to which it has been helped along by the elites who run Western societies. Not that long ago, any Western public figure who gave anything vaguely resembling a Nazi salute would be shunned across the spectrum. Now, the man who did it will take up a job in the new government. The media will treat this as entirely normal, and the Democratic Party will restrict itself to grumbling.
Ironically, the only aspect of Trump’s inauguration that showed the old model was not entirely dead was the presence of the unaccountable heads of the biggest tech companies, who were no doubt there to exercise the citizenship rights this view of democracy gives them.
The normalization of the right, which Musk’s gesture underlines, has been evident for years in the embrace by mainstream parties of racist immigration policies and their willingness to absorb the hard right into the political center. The hard right is acceptable in Europe and North America largely because the politicians and the media of the supposedly liberal mainstream made it acceptable.
This is not surprising if we recall the two core principles of liberal democracy over the past few decades. First, being Western is more important than being democratic. And, second, because protecting private power is vital, the hard right is more acceptable than those who want private power to recognize the needs and views of the majority.
The two illusions are linked. Both show the dangers of confusing Westernness with democracy, a system in which every adult has a share in the decisions that affect them, not one in which some people are always assumed to be better than others and power can do as it pleases to people as long as governments do not wield it.
Right now, the twin illusions’ collapse has empowered a right-wing view of democracy that values freedom for a few, bondage for the rest. For real democrats, the core question is whether and how a version of democracy that really values equality may begin to emerge.
Screenshot via PBS of Elon Musk appearing to give a Nazi salute.
When Elon Musk marked Donald Trump’s inauguration with what seemed very much like a Nazi salute and was defended by a lobby that claimed to fight anti-Jewish racism, he and his defenders confirmed the death of two illusions. The first illusion is the belief that Zionism, the ideology that prompted the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza, is about protecting Jews from racists.
The organization that rushed to Musk’s defense is the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded to fight racism against Jews but has become a strident enforcer for the Israeli state. It claimed that he had simply made “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.”
No one can, of course, prove that Musk meant to give a Nazi salute. But US Nazis seemed to recognize the gesture immediately, and it was close enough to one to convince many people that this was what he was doing. Organizations that fight anti-Jewish racism do not usually give the benefit of the doubt to gestures that appear to be Nazi salutes. Nor was it outlandish to see it as a Nazi salute, given the views he has expressed of late.
Not only is Musk loudly cheering the German AfD, which is teeming with Nazi sympathizers, and endorsing the British Muslim-baiter Tommy Robinson, whose racism is so extreme Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform Party will not have anything to do with him, but Musk has also endorsed the racist claim that Jews encourage people outside the West to immigrate to white-run countries in order to supplant whites.
So, an organization that is meant to be fighting prejudice against Jews has no problem with a man who echoes anti-Jewish racism. The reason is not obscure: Like just about all white supremacists today, he is a firm supporter of the Israeli state.
The ADL’s response may seem bizarre, but it is not new. Nor is it an outlier—the Israeli state and its allies have been cozying up to right-wing white supremacists who make excuses for Nazism for years. One way in which the state cements the relationship is to invite them to Yad Vashem, the official Israeli memorial to the victims of the Nazi genocide. They spend a while there very publicly pretending to be horrified. Musk has partly maintained the tradition: After agreeing that Jews were white-anting the white race, he went off to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where he expressed the required dismay.
Why do a state and an ideology which claim to protect Jews, and white supremacists with a soft spot for Nazism, find each other so appealing? Because Zionism and the state it created have never been about protecting Jews—their purpose is to make Jews white and Western.
The Jews who founded the ideology and the state were all European. They were reacting to a centuries-old reality: Jews were in Europe but not were not European in the eyes of its elites. As my book Good Jew, Bad Jew shows, they desperately wanted to be European. Since the nation-state was then all the rage in Europe, they believed that the best way to become European was to establish a state.
This worked—but not because Europe’s elites believed that founding a state made Jews better at being white. The attraction of the state they founded was that it was outside Europe, and so an outpost of Europeanness in the Orient: West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, described the Israeli state as the “fortress of the West.”
As bigotry directed at Muslims became a more pronounced feature of European prejudice, the state became even more appealing to white supremacists, because most of the people of the Orient it has dispossessed and is dominating are Muslim. It is, therefore, on the front line of white supremacy’s war on everyone else.
This explains the role that anti-Semitism now plays in Europe and North America (whose elite is of Europe even if it has not lived there for centuries). Anti-Semitism used to mean anti-Jewish racism. Today, it means hostility to or criticism of the power of the West. Because “anti-Semitic” now means “not Western enough,” Jews are anti-Semites if they believe Palestinians are people entitled to safety and rights. Racists who believe the Jews are plotting to destroy the white race or who say the Nazis are really not as bad as we are told are not anti-Semites, because they endorse the Israeli state, their role model for white supremacy.
Musk has declared sarcastically that he is accused of being both a Zionist and a Nazi as if it was impossible to be both. But Nazis—or at least the politicians and parties who endorse their racism—are today the most enthusiastic Zionists in the world. Whatever they think of Jews, a militarized ethnic state that beats up on Muslims ticks all their boxes.
The second illusion whose death Musk and Trump are burying is the brand of democracy that has reigned since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
No longer fixated on defeating communism, Western elites set about remaking the world—and their own countries—in their image. They did this by avidly promoting a view of what democracy is and how it should function, which was virtually unchallenged for two decades but is now collapsing.
It has two features. The first feature is Western cultural arrogance, which assumes that the form of democracy practiced in the West is the only authentic brand on offer. To be “really” democratic is, therefore, to be Western.
Western academics invented an entire cottage industry that tracked “democratic consolidation” across the globe. Stripped of its academic finery, its task was to figure out whether new democracies outside the West were becoming Western. Governments and donor agencies quickly joined the quest and baked it into their strategies.
The second feature insists—often as much in what it does not say as what it does—that democracy is a system in which everyone can vote and speak and associate as long as no one challenges the elites who hold power in the economy and society.
Democracy, it was assumed, was a system in which citizens limited the power of governments. Because corporations, or powerful professional associations, were run by citizens, their power was no problem, even if it decided the fate of millions of people. The rich and powerful outside government were victims, not perpetrators.
In one sense, the elites who framed democracy in this way had no double standards: They expected the democracies of the West to accept this version as well as those everywhere else. And it is against this that Western countries who are now electing illiberal right-wing governments are reacting.
Because Western democracies were meant to be Western (and white), the presence of growing numbers of people from other parts of the world in the West worried the elites. Academics fretted that “social cohesion” would be threatened unless Africans, Asians, and Arabs spoke and acted—and thought—as Western power holders do.
Since this assumed that people who were not Western were a problem, it is no surprise that public debates in these countries began framing immigrants as a threat, triggering a wave of bigotry that fuels the Western right.
Because democracies were supposed to leave private power alone, parties that once reined in the rich and powerful on behalf of the vast majority now concentrated on trying to be friendlier to businesses than their traditional opponents were. And so the power of the few grew, and that of the many shrank. Millions now believe that democracy offers them nothing, because in this version, that is what it offers them.
This is why Western liberal democracy is now in crisis. But while it is fashionable to insist that the crisis is that millions are turning to the right because they reject democracy, reality is more complicated. The West’s flight from liberalism is a story of the collapse of its supposed center, not of the people’s shift to the right.
After Musk gave his salute, Trump was inaugurated. Although he was responsible for an insurrection against the US Constitution and did not attempt during the campaign to hide his plan to shred what remains of liberal democracy in that country, Democratic former presidents and elected representatives attended in large numbers and the media treated the event—and everything else to do with Trump—as though he was a centrist committed to constitutional government.
This highlighted the key feature of the rise of the illiberal right—the degree to which it has been helped along by the elites who run Western societies. Not that long ago, any Western public figure who gave anything vaguely resembling a Nazi salute would be shunned across the spectrum. Now, the man who did it will take up a job in the new government. The media will treat this as entirely normal, and the Democratic Party will restrict itself to grumbling.
Ironically, the only aspect of Trump’s inauguration that showed the old model was not entirely dead was the presence of the unaccountable heads of the biggest tech companies, who were no doubt there to exercise the citizenship rights this view of democracy gives them.
The normalization of the right, which Musk’s gesture underlines, has been evident for years in the embrace by mainstream parties of racist immigration policies and their willingness to absorb the hard right into the political center. The hard right is acceptable in Europe and North America largely because the politicians and the media of the supposedly liberal mainstream made it acceptable.
This is not surprising if we recall the two core principles of liberal democracy over the past few decades. First, being Western is more important than being democratic. And, second, because protecting private power is vital, the hard right is more acceptable than those who want private power to recognize the needs and views of the majority.
The two illusions are linked. Both show the dangers of confusing Westernness with democracy, a system in which every adult has a share in the decisions that affect them, not one in which some people are always assumed to be better than others and power can do as it pleases to people as long as governments do not wield it.
Right now, the twin illusions’ collapse has empowered a right-wing view of democracy that values freedom for a few, bondage for the rest. For real democrats, the core question is whether and how a version of democracy that really values equality may begin to emerge.
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