The hero of the Ayn Rand novel I’m struggling with presently, Atlas Shrugged (see https://bernardjporter.com/2025/01/30/ayn-rand/), is a railroad magnate. The hero of the one I abandoned a few years ago, The Fountainhead, was a builder.
Déjà vu? The two men dominating America (and the world) today can be seen as these two heroes’ modern equivalents. One is a technocrat, developing new ways both of communicating and of travelling (to the planets); the other is a real estate developer. They’re both very rich. Beyond this, both of them represent the highest – possibly the last – stage of global capitalism; as did the fictional ‘Howard Roark’ and ‘Hank Rearden’ in Ayn Rand’s time. Post-revolutionary Russia (Rand’s birthplace) is of course following a similar path; which is what makes Putin such a natural ally for Trump. And this is roughly the path predicted by Karl Marx all those years ago. Doesn’t this describe the essence of the situation we’re in today?
Trump’s obscene plan to turf out the Palestinians and turn poor Gaza into a luxury ‘Riviera’ resort for the rich could not have come from the mind of anyone but a modern property capitalist. The way that what is called ‘populism’ has played into the hands of this new plutocracy undermines – if it doesn’t destroy – any hope that Marx’s favoured solution, a rebellion of the ‘people’ against the plutocrats, will come about any time soon.
I’m still not very far into Atlas Shrugged – it really is a very cold and boring novel – so I don’t yet know how it ends. But I guess not well, from my wokeish liberal point of view.
Porter’s Pensées 
Capitalism certainly has a lot to do with the current Trump-Musk regime. What’s even more worrying is that it might morph into a nakedly illiberal form.
A while back Acemoglu and Robinson claimed that the sustained rise of the West was the result of its “inclusive institutions”, including the rule of law. Now in the past few days we have had both Elon Musk and JD Vance targeting judges with hostile comments, all because the judicial branch is doing its job of limiting the power of the executive to within its legal limits. It sounds as though they would prefer a tame judiciary; meanwhile Trump tries to bend the Justice Department to his will.
Of course, Acemoglu and Robinson never claimed that all capitalists are proponents of liberal institutions. Even so, Musk, Vance and Trump are threatening to cross an important line.
I’m reminded of a sardonic comment by the historian Robert Ross about the Transvaal before the South African War. It was roundly charged with corruption, not least by mining capitalists, who nevertheless engaged in paying bribes. The problem, Ross said, was not that the Transvaal was too corrupt, but that it wasn’t corrupt enough to be completely bought out by the capitalists.
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