Philosopher Douglas Giles recently advanced an intriguing hypothesis in “Our World Is a Diasimocracy.” His entire article is a good, tight brief and worth reading in its entirety. And what I will discuss here will all be my own thoughts and claims about that (so don’t blame him for it!). But the gist of his point that I want to build on here is that we don’t live in the political system we think we do. Unlike, say, democracy (“rule of the people”) or oligarchy (“rule of a self-selected few”) or autocracy (“rule of an individual strongman”) or aristocracy (“rule of a self-selected elite social class”), or even (as now in popular use) kleptocracy (“rule of whoever steals the most shit”) or (what most people might mistakenly think we live in now) plutocracy (“rule of the wealthiest”), a diasimocracy is (by iotacism) a rule of the diasêmoi, the famous.
And Giles does not mean this merely because of celebrities becoming political leaders (like Trump, Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Ventura), though in a sense that is a symptom; but rather in the broader sense that would include even Biden, Obama, and Bush: people who gain access to power do not get it by virtue of merit or even the careful consideration of voters, but by simply being famous enough. This does not entail they will be incompetent; rather, it means their competence is not really all that relevant to whether they even have a chance to win a seat of power. The example Giles gives is of social media and just media generally: famous influencers (the most subbed, liked, talked about) are the only meaningful influencers. Not in the sense of having something worthwhile to say (the substantive sense of “meaningful”), but in the sense of actually impacting the masses and hence actual political outcomes (the cynical sense of “meaningful”).
In other words, merit is increasingly sidelined for “fame,” and thus people flock to the ideas, and believe what they are told by, and vote for whoever is “famous” enough. I would say Elon Musk is a good example of this. One might be distracted into thinking his access to power derives from his wealth. But plenty of billionaires would never have a shot at it (they can only machinate in backroom dealing and thus can easily be overruled by those actually in power). And his wealth is clearly not the shared metric. A lot of the Trump administration is populated on a basis of fame rather than competence or wealth.
RFK, Jr, is a perfect example of this. He has literally no competencies. Nor is especially rich (Musk spent twenty times RFK’s entire net worth on the election and that to Musk was mere loose change; and Trump’s election cost ten times even that). Yet RFK, Jr, is famous enough that people who “feel” good about any things he says (since, acting on feelings rather than reason, they can ignore anything bad he says and thus forget it ever happened), that they are excited to see him in power, and take steps to make that happen. That an American President and the U.S. Senate would even consider him for the cabinet illustrates diasimocracy at work. Whereas any other lunatic who said exactly the same things he does no one would ever even give the time of day, much less elect (or appoint, or approve the appointment of), because they are “nobody.” They lack fame.
In a plutocracy we would see this play out as “they lack sufficient wealth” to control anything politically and thus really “be in charge.” But in a diasimocracy it’s “they lack sufficient fame.” So, even if someone is famous, all else being equal, the more famous contender wins—both mass attention, and power. The “all else being equal” does count. So, someone famously hated or feared can’t win power, which is why AOC easily wins power in her district, but would face a hard challenge winning over the whole country (who have been sold a false narrative of her—and, well, are also a bit racist and sexist, let’s be honest). But even if she did it, it won’t have been because of her being right, and being competent, and deserving—it will be because she got famous enough. People will then just emotionally decide whether they “feel” good about her or not, or “feel” better about her than whoever she is running against. But if people feel more or less the same about either, if she is the more famous, she will win. Pit her against Vance, and she outfames him. He’d struggle with the centrist emotionalists he needs to win. Pit her against some Mr. Whosethat and she will have even better odds. This is why elections cost so much now. They are not won by disseminating information (that could be done at a thousandth the cost). They are won by manufacturing fame.
Thus Biden won in 2020 because he was “safe” (he was a boring old-guardsman who made liberals and centrists feel safer than, not just the crazy and erratic Trump, but even “the dangerous” Warren or Sanders), but he could never have won had he not been famously safe. He was “recognizable,” he had a potent “halo effect” from the wildly famous Obama (who would trounce Trump in a third term election), and he had a long history that kept him in political news for decades and thus “familiar” to everyone. That Warren and Sanders had a shot is also due to their being famous, whereas the (then) relatively unfamous Pete Buttigieg and the (still) relatively unfamous (yet super-rich) Michael Bloomberg couldn’t rally even a shot—because they weren’t “famous enough.”
By any objective scoring on merit, Buttigieg probably outranks every one of these people (even if only by a little, though in some cases a lot). But merit is irrelevant. And so is “the careful consideration of voters,” since while maybe a third of voters carefully consider who they vote for, a third isn’t enough to elect anyone. Which means the emotional two thirds of voters decide all elections: people who vote on pure “feelings,” not on any basis of reason or evidence or even the merest of logics. And feelings react to fame. The candidate with the most fame who still makes most voters “feel” safer than their opponent wins every election now. In 2024 the scary black lady toting foreign (and certainly not sufficiently Aryan) blood made too many Americans feel unsafe. She also lacked sufficient fame (Biden’s halo was trifling compared to Obama’s).
Giles links this to “the widespread availability of mass media and online interconnectivity,” i.e. the internet, and not just that, but what the free market has settled it into, which is a computerized system of influence and attention metrics: “likes,” “shares,” “subs,” “ratios,” “engagement rates.” Hence “the economic and political structures that mediate information” now “are themselves mediated by the social gravity of celebrity.” The masses (hence voters but even just the vectors of mass perception generally) “are drawn to those who are famous” and “people assume that if one is famous, that makes one interesting, even fascinating,” and thus, many a voter or rube will assume, correct or good or best at something—someone you can trust.
Which has the effect that Giles accurately describes (as you might from your own experience realized):
If given the choice between reading something written by a celebrity or something written by a noncelebrity, the vast majority of people will read the celebrity’s writing. Not because it is good or contains truths, but because people are drawn in by spectacle and celebrity status. In fact, I suspect that most people will prefer a poorly written article from a celebrity even if they are told there’s a better one written by a nobody.
Note we are speaking in percentages here. “Most” or “vast majority” will not mean everyone, so it might not include you, but you will likely have to admit that most people do act like this (mostly people you will never meet and would be perplexed by, but that’s most people now). And that’s what drives the engines of power today: influence and access are gained by fame, not quality. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ranks as only the fifteenth most liberal member of Congress (or 10th depending on how you count). The first position has five other people tied for it—and odds are, you’ve never heard of any of them, and even you might be hesitant to vote for them; the average zero-information voter, even less so. And those voters are the ones deciding elections now, and thus deciding who rules over us all.
This explains a lot. It explains the rise of mass delusionality, for example. People don’t decide what information sources to consume based on any kind of actual metric of reliability or trustworthiness, but simply based on who is more famous—and in particular, famous within their ideological alignment. Hence, siloing. This explains a key finding in my Vital Primer on Media Literacy. There I had focused on the epistemic failure—people are deciding reliability based on delusional mythologies rather than real measures, circularly presuming any source that disagrees with them is unreliable, and any source that says what they want to hear can be trusted. That’s true (as documented even in the centrist anthology The Poisoning of the American Mind). But I didn’t then realize what Giles is now saying: that this is all a part of diasimocracy. People trust fame. Hence FOX and Newsmax depend on cultivating fame for their pundits; because their nobody newsreaders get less views. And people are not flocking to higher quality conservative content (like The National Review or The Cato Institute), but the more splashy, emotional, fame-grabbing stuff (like FOX News and Twi[X]ter). Only some believe fake news when it comes from a nobody, but most do when someone famous endorses it (by “retweeting” it or equivalent). And so on. That’s how we got “Haitians eating pets.”
Hence Giles expands Aristotle’s axis of political systems, with meritocracy (“rule by the most competent and informed”) and diasimocracy (“rule by the most famous”):
Meritocracy is the positive form in which what information is distributed is based on the skill of the creators and the high quality of content; experts are prized. Diasimocracy is the negative form in which what information is distributed is based on the fame of the creator, regardless of the quality or value of the content; experts are ignored.
The Trump administration is a perfect crystalization of this effect. The same effect has not happened abroad yet, but the trends don’t look good. America is the only true diasimocracy so far. But the disease could spread. And even if Trump gets replaced with someone competent, who realigns our cabinet to a standard of expertise rather than popularity, they will still only have been able to do so if they were famous enough to get elected. If John Stewart ran for president, it’s very unlikely he would lose. Even Taylor Swift would beat Trump or Vance; The Rock outpolls literally every candidate imaginable. I suspect so would Joe Rogan.
We sort of laugh this off. But it’s objectively true, and it means something has fundamentally changed in American voters. When Reagan ran (for California and then the country) he had the advantage of a long political career to establish his bona fides. Had it been Chuck Norris, I am pretty sure he’d have never won either seat. But today (if Norris were young enough to be plausible), I am pretty sure he’d have a shot. The only mitigating factor would be how well he sells it—which is again just another metric of fame. Can he stay famous enough to win after opening his mouth for six months together. It would not be “can he convince voters he has any relevant competency and can be trusted to do anything good at it,” but “can he convince voters he’s a groovy dude.”
At the level of influence, consider myself: there may be lots of competent historians and philosophers doing what I do, but few read or hear their stuff because they aren’t famous. I’m only microfamous, of course, but the accumulation of my “fame” (a.k.a. fans and reader-base) is what made my work visible, which in turn generated more fame, in a feedback loop. Many people ask me how they can make a living doing what I do, and I have to explain that I don’t think they can. The only way to do that is to have a large enough market to sustain you—which, yes, can be built on a reputation for quality and value, but there is no way to just “start” with one of those. You have to build it. And mine was built by a series of lucky accidents that can’t be replicated (the media-space is now too large and oversaturated to build attention the way I did). But even building a rep for quality is just another way of building “fame” in the sense Giles means; and it’s not as successful (hence why I am microfamous while crank intellectuals get megafamous). The same thing happens when people argue that Bart Ehrman is right and I’m wrong about something because he is “more famous” than me (he makes more money, holds a prestigious position, sells more books, etc.). The entire “Argument from Prestige” which poisons a lot of biblical studies today is a reflection of diasimocracy. “He who has a more prestigious publisher is more likely correct.” That’s diasimocracy. Because prestige is just another version of fame.
And when this creeps across the entirety of society, it simply becomes our de facto government. Even though “technically” we are a representative democracy, “actually” those with real power (those most people will actually listen to and do the bidding of and thus who will control politicians—or, eventually, become one) are the famous. They need not be famous for something trivial (an actor, a news reader, an influencer, an idle celebrity). They can be famous for something pertinent. Obama had built and Booker is building fame solely as a statesman; likewise Buttigieg, who didn’t have the fame in 2020 that he has built since. And his fame is partly built on his competence, but it’s still mostly built on his being good at selling and explaining it. He is a successful influencer. He just happens to also be really competent, but as the examples of Musk and RFK, Jr., and Trump and Hegseth and even Cruz or Green, prove, competence need not have anything to do with it. Buttigieg is competent. But that he still needs fame to get access to levers of power is why we are in a diasimocracy. That’s the distinction.
Giles delineates the problem like this:
Under the power of the corporate media, diasimocracy is a means of dominance and control that restricts information and who has access to it. The corporate media exploits the human vulnerability to be fooled by the bandwagon fallacy, and the rule by the media benefits not the common interest but the interests of the celebrities and the corporate gatekeepers.
The mass media is an information space ruled by celebrity. Those who try to get noticed in the mass media through merit are all but shut out. You can say that media corporations are motivated by money, as is the nature of corporate capitalism, but ask yourself what is driving the revenue that media corporations want to grab. That would be the rule by celebrities. The information space is a celebrity economy, and the corporations are simply exploiting that.
The same could be said of “non” corporate media (just look at YouTube economics). The monetization effect is the same. As Giles notes, this pressures influencers to “lie, cheat, and steal for a bit of fame without regard to truth, integrity, or who they harm.” The race for click-bait, controversy, pandering, hyperbolic headlines, speed over research, and skirting the truth with exaggeration and oversimplification, gets very close to the dark side; and by then it’s too easy to step on over—because there are mostly only rewards for doing so.
This is the same effect in politics: fame is the currency of political success; and fame has to be engineered or stoked, which entails great expense; which requires mega-rich investors; which is why corporations are in every politician’s pocket: the system simply requires them to be. But at the bottom of all this is the mere fact of fame as the currency. Buttigieg has prospects not because he is good at every pertinent job (he is). He has prospects because he is witty and well-spoken. Likewise AOC and Sanders. And Hegseth and Green. Yes, informed people see Hegseth and Green as incompetent jokes who have a permanent foot in their mouth. But that’s to confuse competence with fame. Their kind of stupid sells. It gets clicks and hurrahs. It gets them fame. That’s why Hegseth even has his job (he was literally a celebrity), and why Green keeps hers (she’s “popular,” in the market she needs to be: the 14th district of Georgia). That’s why we have crazy people running our government. It’s diasimocracy.
I think this is important to acknowledge. You (as I) may have long had thoughts in this direction, musing on the impertinent necessity, and inordinate utility, of “being famous” in any quest for power or influence. But Giles has given it a name and situated it in the framework of political philosophy. It’s not just some incidental oddity of modern life. It’s a genuine sea change in our entire de facto system of government. The U.S. Constitution does not say anything about fame deciding who gets to make legislation or sign executive orders or control top-level government functions, or even who gets to “be heard” in the marketplace of ideas and thus have any effect on it. Yet by strictly following U.S. Constitution, we have created exactly that system. I have tens of thousands of readers, which is a lot compared to the average person, and it gives me reach and influence the average person cannot easily attain; but that’s a pittance compared to who actually drives our national zeitgeist and thus policy—that’s reserved for those with millions of readers; and even they can be eclipsed in influence and power by those read or heard by tens of millions. And since people vote based on how they feel about you, not what’s true about you, it’s that “fame” that decides who has power.
And this ties into my earlier revelation That Luck Matters More Than Talent. Giles correctly diagnoses our system as a race toward mediocrity. But that’s also how I found our “free market” economic system. “Fame” matters more than talent is just another iteration of luck. But just as our “free market” system actually rewards the mediocre, not the talented (contrary to widespread belief that competition drives excellence, by itself it actually doesn’t), so does our constitutionally “free market” system of electing people to power. It starts with sources of information, which delude the public, who choose to follow “popular” information distributors rather than reliable ones, and thus act on false information and emotion when voting; and it ends with actual celebrities running everything, who are predominately mediocre at the actual jobs they thus get, people with no or minimal competence at legislating or running a department of government, much less the presidency. This is why almost all our leaders are so mediocre. It’s the same system as I diagnosed for the economy.
Even when people blame centrists for electing the milquetoast Biden over candidates more competent (and better for the country) like Warren or Sanders (or even Buttigieg), they are blaming diasimocracy. Yes, Sanders was very famous. But he wasn’t as famous. Sanders commands a passionate following—in a minority of the voting population (and not always for rationally commendable reasons). But Biden “appealed” to more voters, because he was “more familiar” to them, which is another way of saying “more popular,” which is another way of saying “more famous.” We don’t think of Biden in terms of being “a bigger celebrity” than Sanders because he’s boring and doesn’t appeal “as much” to Sanders fans; but he appeals enough to enough Sanders fans (obviously: they elected him) and also to non-Sanders fans (the mainstream centrists whose votes ultimately won Biden both the primary and presidency). Arithmetically, that’s “more famous.” A + B is always more than A. Hence fame does not mean simply “degree of enthusiasm,” but “the number of people who know and like or trust you.” Biden ruled the world’s only remaining superpower for four years for no other reason than that. And that’s what I believe Giles means by diasimocracy. It’s certainly what I mean by it.
So the conclusion here is not that we live in an explicitly constitutional “Rule of the Famous” (as if our Constitution read like the bylaws to American Idol, complete with singing contest), any more than anyone lives in an explicit “Rule of the Kleptocrats.” Pre-Putin Russia simply was a kleptocracy, by default of its actual operations, and not according to the Russian Constitution (which anyone who reads it can immediately recognize as absolute bullshit that barely describes any real thing about that nation’s government). And Russia is now an autocracy, yet still that’s not “written down” anywhere, least of all in its constitution (whose political value is less than toilet paper by now). Like Russia, which just evolved into an unofficial kleptocracy and thence an equally-unofficial autocracy, America has just “evolved” into a “de facto” system of government that is a diasimocracy. It, too, could evolve hence into an autocracy (given Trump’s contradictory messaging about a third term, and the Republican Party’s continuing efforts to dismantle our system of elections). But even if it doesn’t, I do not see any immediate path out of our nation simply trenching further into being a diasimocracy. I have no solutions or advice about that. But we do need to acknowledge it before we can come up with any.
Excellent article, and I agree. The next question then seems to be, how much of the diasimocratic phenomenon is organic and evolving through a natural social awareness mutation in a hybrid entertainment-information overload environment, versus to what degree it’s intentionally seeded, encouraged, or in other ways propagated by any particular group(s) or force(s) from behind the scenes, to some unseen end (presumably involving power, etc)?
There is no evidence of it being a master plan.
Powered interests (corporations, moguls, interest groups, even ones who don’t advertise they exist like the Neoconfederates) exploit and leverage what is happening, but they did not plan decades in advance to make it happen. They are simply reacting to what happened. And I think a lot has to do with the fact that no one anticipated the internet and the metrics and effects it would create.
As an example, FOX News did intentionally try to engineer a delusional mass of voters that Big Oil could control (and started trying to do that shortly before the internet swamped them), and Televangelism did the same (e.g. the John Hagee model) for more purely ideological goals (mainly white male supremacism), and one can locate other examples. But their model was not to field famous candidates, or to create fame as the metric, but rather to alter reality in voters’ minds so they would pick the qualified candidates that supported the aims of these cabals.
Their model was still based on selecting qualified candidates. That’s why the model was strained but not broken by George W. Bush: he was pushing the limits of a credibly competent candidate, but he still fit into it, just barely. 2016 was the turning point when the likes of FOX and Hagee lost control of their monster. They wanted one of the traditional candidates who completed a fitting cursus honorum (notice every viable Republican candidate was at least minimally competent in the sense that they had real, and long, political careers, they weren’t randos or mere celebrities). But Trump took over.
They did not expect or want this and were not ready for it. It blindsided them. They quickly (and in a panic) pivoted to try and regain control of Trump (that’s why they “advised” his way into a semi-competent cabinet that kept him “in check” and focused on the cabal’s goals). But they eventually lost, and had no recourse than to subserve Trump, and just hope for the best (they’ve figured out some tricks, like, e.g., Trump tends to back whatever policy decision someone has advised him to most recently, as long as they are suitably groveling and frame it in some way that appeals to his ego; that strategy is now also breaking down, e.g., they’ve lost control of Trump’s obsession with tariffs, and have struggled to steer him off of it).
So what we see is a diasimocracy arose sometime between 2000 and 2016, and the cabals were still “playing the game” as if it were a democracy (where ideology and beliefs dictate elections and thus policy, rather than popularity and feelings), until they realized they had to retool their operations toward the now locked-in diasimocracy. So they are now all-in on the fame metric, and less concerned about controlling ideology and “facts” than popularity and “feels.”
This is why true conservatives have left the movement: it lacks an ideology or even a coherent platform, and they came for those things, not this shit. The problem is that this amounts to maybe, at best, 2% of all conservatives. So, their intellectual integrity did not buy us much. But we’re happy to have them all the same.
In counter to the concept of “diasimocracy”, one might argue, “If this is true, then Taylor Swift would be president.” However, some people are so rich and famous, they do not need the attention of politics to further their ambitions, and probably see politics as a path to destruction. So, being famous does not necessarily set one’s future towards politics, but fame is a solid boost.
That’s correct. But I think you are confusing two different things.
Diasimocracy does not say the famous “will become” our leaders. It says that (predominately) our leaders “will come from” the famous.
Just as in a plutocracy, a plutocrat can bow out of political decision-making (and for exactly the same reasons you list for the famous), but only plutocrats will control political decision-making. That some don’t pursue it does not change the fact that only their category of people can pursue it (with rare exceptions).
And thus, when people vote, unlike a democracy where people choose the best leader, the people choose the most popular leader (prestige and fame hence overrule competence and values and even political intentions). That they choose from those who self-select to be considered does not change that.
Out of curiosity and on a hunch, I posed the following question to the AI, Perplexity Pro in “research” mode, and got back the following answer.
Q. Please comment on the following essay by Richard Carrier, We Might Be Living in a Diasimocracy, https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/34471 . Is diasimocracy distinct from democracy, or an explanation of how it words psychologically and sociologically?
Entire response:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/please-comment-on-the-followin-fTNTEnc7SM654jbWkE2hvQ
Conclusion only:
Conclusion
Rather than representing a distinct system of governance, diasimocracy appears to function as an explanatory framework for understanding how psychological and sociological factors shape the actual operation of democratic systems. It describes the gap between democratic ideals and democratic practice in contemporary media-saturated societies.
The concept highlights how fame has become the determining factor in political success, suggesting that modern democracies – particularly the United States – have evolved into systems where celebrity status outweighs competence or policy expertise. While this represents a significant deviation from traditional democratic theory, it describes an evolution within democratic systems rather than a completely separate form of government.
This analysis invites us to reconsider how we evaluate democratic health and function, and suggests that addressing the challenges of modern democracy may require confronting the psychological and social dynamics that enable fame to translate so effectively into political power. As Carrier concludes, acknowledging this reality is a necessary first step: “we do need to acknowledge it before we can come up with any [solutions].”
Note that Giles just invented this new analysis. AI is relying on existing mainstream thought (AI just trains on past data). It therefore will “interpret” something new in light of past thought, rather than understand new thought.
The innovation Giles is introducing (and this illustrates why AI can never replace his or my job) is that what the AI is saying is wrong—the traditional models it is aping are wrong.
We need to take diasimocracy seriously as an actually distinct form of government, because if we keep acting like we have a democracy (circa 1980 or even 1880) when in fact we do not, we will continue to misunderstand everything that is happening, and make the wrong choices in reacting to and dealing with it.
It is certainly true that diasimocracy has a democratic element, but it is still as distinct from democracy as monarchy is from autocracy: both are single-person rule, but a monarchy works differently than an autocracy. Likewise diasimocracy and democracy both operate on shared democratic principles, but a diasimocracy works differently than a simple democracy. And that is why it needs to be recognized and understood on its own terms.
i disagree of this new term. to me, what always has existed in the so called democratic countries is an indirect plutocratic oligarchy, which now, with trump and friends, has evolve in a direct one. i also think that philosophers should be more responsible and serious and study science before inventing their concepts. from a engineer and scientist, the classical philosopher has become an inventor of concepts (as deleuze honest and cynically admits)or a literate, confusing the mind of many people with the genuine desire of understanding reality and adding noise to the intellectual world. the same happened with terms like: social darwinism, gender ideology, cultural marxism, racial racism and so on…neuroethology and evolutionary psychology give us better bases in order to explain our individual and social behavior.
That you are wrong is the revelation that Giles has hit upon and that I am explaining.
To mistake our system as plutocracy is to miss who actually is running things and how they get chosen to.
It’s like your conflating plutocracy and ologarchy. Those are not the same system, and the differences matter. It does not matter that they overlap in incidental features (oligarchs tend to be rich, plutocrats are few in number), because what makes those systems work differently is what distinguishes them (oligarchs aren’t chosen on a mere basis of wealth, and they limit access even to new money, whereas plutocracy allows anyone into power who income-qualifies and does not restrict their number).
You must not get distracted by trivial universals like “wealth buys influence” or “political machines gatekeep their upper ranks,” because those are true of all political systems, and consequently don’t distinguish one system from another. I gave examples in my article of how the difference between what you contradictorily call “indirect plutocratic oligarchy” (i.e. “so called democracy”), per the Reagan era and the centuries before, and what’s happening now. And more examples come up in comments here (for example, see this comment).
It’s important that you be able to tell the difference, because you cannot control or react competently to the system if you don’t understand it. If you think it’s just all about money and machine politics, you are like the general fighting last century’s war: you have everything wrong, and will make all the wrong decisions as to what to do about it.
Yeah, so it’s really important to get right what has changed since Trumpism (or, more accurately, slightly before).
The 2008 recession really helped to hammer home the lack of trust Americans have had in normative institutions since Watergate. There’s now kids who have spent their entire lives in the decimation of the post-2008 world and are just about to graduate from high school. Obama’s election made race super salient and caused the racial gap to become partisan. (This is demonstrable, you can check it, it’s well-demonstrated by polls). And polarization is at an all-time high for the modern era. (Again, all demonstrable).
People like Gilens recognized that the oligarch/plutocrat perspective of American politics always had some pretty serious caveats: empirically, unions actually still have a lot of power, for example, just nothing compared to corporate abilities to craft policy.
But, as with all fascists, Trump changed that. There’s all sorts of irrational bullshit that now hurts elite interests that they have to tolerate because their attack dogs got out of hand.
Watch Cabaret (again if you have). Watch Alexander’s response to the Nazis. He thought the elites could control them. They’re repeating the same mistake. The Christofascists are now out of hand enough. The Jacksonians are overwhelming the Hamiltonians. It’s a meaningful change.
democracy (it´s false substitute) was never based on capacity or expertise. propaganda and, more significantly, hierarchical instincts have leaded the masses to follow alpha males, whatever are their conditions of fame, mental health or knowledge. the diasimocracy does not work as an explanation, mainly because those leaders are not the ones that in fact govern the countries, but just who show the face for the masses may be identified with.
That’s all false.
We used to delimit access to power to minimal competency (see my example in comments, but my Reagan vs. Bush vs. Trump example in the article illustrates the same point).
All political systems have things like “propaganda” so that does not distinguish any system from another.
And there is no such thing as “alpha males.” That’s mythology. But assuming you mean something more realistic, like patriarchal cultural norms affecting who gets access to power, that is again possible in every political system, and so it does not distinguish any. It is therefore of some use in understanding some things (like why so few women get access to power, and why so many fewer once did: see last week’s article, which was on exactly this), but it isn’t the complete picture. And if you focus only on one part of the picture, you will completely fail to react correctly to the whole picture.
Yeah, so this is nonsense. It feels nice and cynical and contrarian but it’s bullshit.
Look at every President before Trump. They all went through an institutional process, gained conventional expertise, showed up to debates with actual positions (even if they lied about those positions and were disingenuous). They didn’t publish something like the absolute joke that Trump did in 2024 with ALL CAPS PRINCIPLES and no citations.
We used to have a system of technocracy. Yes, that system had a very narrow idea of merit and occurred within implicit racist, classist, etc. norms. But it still valued things like information, competence, truth, etc. That’s how you could have some of the only media outlets actually commenting on Watergate and Vietnam (yes, far after the peace movements had started; yes, from a purely technocratic tactical perspective and not a moral one; blah blah blah I’ve read Manufacturing Consent too).
After Nixon, this quite consciously changed . Folks like Ailes and Murdoch actually went out of their way to make sure that they would create an entire alternate ecosystem. This came at the cost, by the way, of instrumental rationality for elites. Business elites tried to keep their own little spaces, like The Economist and the Wall Street Journal, separate, but now even those are demonized. I just got told by a pissed off MAGA-ite that The Economist, CATO and Forbes are all “RINO”. They literally only listen to the cult propaganda. This is different from how it was from the 1950s to the 1990s. Talk radio, Reagan deregulation, etc. is all part of this.
Seriously, read how Chomsky is talking about things these days. He’s not pretending that the Republicans are not shriekingly irrational in a worrying new way.
And as I pointed out in my comment, if you actually start looking at the supposedly hidden powers, they’re not so hidden these days. People like the Sacklers don’t remain anonymous for that much longer. There’s just too much media covering too much content that then gets out into the ecosystem. Everyone from /pol nutters to John Oliver will create a currency of information about these systems.
Social media has just changed too much. I too am skeptical of blaming everything on social media, but at this point we have a full generation of people who use that to absorb news, form opinions, and engage with each other and it has created this idea of authenticity and presentation. (Listen to the Behind the Bastards on Oprah, it’s a really salient analysis). That really has changed things. People are more likely to take fucking flat Earth seriously now because they were at the periphery of those arguments. Pseudoscience has truly entrenched itself and now has mainstream attention. The post-truth era is really quite distinct from how things were.
so, i guess that invention is superficial and unnecessary…
As I just explained in comments (here and here and e.g. here), you’ve missed the point. And that is precisely our point: we’ve all been missing the point until now.
Giles is opening our eyes. When you eventually understand his point (and my article aims to help you to, likewise all the comments here), then you will realize why it is in fact a substantial point and definitely necessary to understand.
I stopped reading here: “So, someone famously hated or feared can’t win power” as your theory predicts that Trump could not have won in 2024.
I think you are failing at arithmetic here.
Trump was not hated and feared by more people than loved him—that’s why he won. Someone predominately hated and feared can’t win.
This is explicitly explained in the article, so maybe pay more attention when reading it next time.
The republicans represent the interests of american based trans-national and national companies, and the democrats represent the interests of multinational companies.The republicans support tariffs particularly against china, oppose immigration and oppose decreasing oil and gas use. The democrats in general support free trade, neoliberalism and are less anti-immigration compared to republicans. As here are some of the top corporate donors for trump’s campaign
https://www.newsweek.com/american-businesses-supporting-donating-donald-trump-list-2027957
Elon musk(obviously): 290 $million Timothy mellon(Helped create guilford transportation industries an american based rail company, which was rebranded to Pan am railways which merged with several other companies to form CSX transportation)
trump-list-2027957, Adelson clinic for drug abuse treatment and research(American National corporation owned by miriam adelson): $106 million
Linda McMahon: $16 million
Hendricks holding co: $15.8 million (Operates in canada and america)
Bigelow Aerospace: $14.1 miilion (American national company)
Cantor Fitsgerald: $11 million (multinational corporation)
ABC supply: $11 million (mostly operated in america with a few locations in canada)
Uline: 10$million ( 2 operation locations in canada and 2 in mexica, rest of them are in america
Top corporate donors for harris’ campaign:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/walmart-boeing-microsoft-and-more-donald-trump-and-kamala-harris-top-donor-contributions-as-of-sept-2024-revealed-101727154503103-amp.html
https://www.followthemoney.org/entity-details?eid=21642
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/google-donors-kamala-harris-trump-19792792.php
Alphabet: $1.5 million(Multinational tech corporation)
Microsoft $700k(Multinational tech corporation
Brown and brown $300k(Multinational corporation)
Apple: 250k$(Multinational tech corporation)
Oracle: 220k(Multinational tech company)
Nvidia: $170k(Multinational tech corporation)
Boeing:$140k(Multinational aerospace company
Wells fargo: $170k (multinational finance company)
Since the wealthiest billionaires own multinational corporations there are donations from billionaires to the democrats: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/10/30/kamala-harris-has-more-billionaires-prominently-backing-her-than-trump-bezos-and-griffin-weigh-in-updated/
This isn’t really a relevant comment here, the data presented does not relate to anything being discussed, and your statements are over-simplifications that don’t seem to address the reality (e.g. “Republicans” do not support the Trump tariff regime even against China; they support a far more modest tariff schedule).
My point is that wealth still plays a larger role in politics than fame. Because of its economic system most of the most powerful positions in american society are outside of the government, being in the leadership of a private company or think thank like microsoft, boeing, amazon, enron, facebook lockheed martin, the heritage foundation, alphabet the cato institute, etc. will give you more power than being a congressman and because of globalization this influence extends internationally. The bulk of american political power is still held by lobbyists, think thanks, rich families and billion dollar corporations. Also one of the examples you give of someone chosen because of fame is rfk, but he was appointed not voted in he only got 0.4% of the popular votes in the actual election he wasn’t even that well known before running for president.
As measured how?
I gave several examples of wealth failing to buy real power (neither Bloomberg nor Musk could ever get elected to any office). They have to wield soft power because that’s all they have. The fact that the Koch Brothers could not stop Trump winning the Presidency twice (and thus had to hold their nose and stuff their cups and endure it) illustrates that the plutocrats have lost control. You can’t buy elections anymore. You can only buy the elected.
That’s why this is a diasimocracy and not a plutocracy.
That does not mean wealth has “no” power. It means that it does not specifically have that power. It is stuck having to get its way through machination rather than simply directly wielding power (as a legislator, judge, or president).
You can think of it like this:
The wealthy have power in every political system. But what they have to do to make things happen (and how hard or unreliable that is) is what differs from system to system. How the wealthy get what they want in an autocracy (think: Russia) is different from what they have to do to get what they want in a democracy (think: Reagan era) and even that is different from what they have to do to get what they want in a diasimocracy (as witnessed by how they have had to change the game under Trump).
So when we talk about “what system of government” we have, we are not talking about what kinds of things can give someone influence in that system (like wealth), but what different kinds of things they have to do to use that system to get what they want. The system is different, even if the influence of the wealthy is not.
-:-
(And this is just as true, BTW, in Communist states, as they do not, contra propaganda, eliminate the existence of wealthy people, they merely delineate differently how one becomes wealthy and thus who gets to be wealthy; and Communist economic systems can manifest in every kind of political system, e.g. Marx himself described a communist democracy; it was Lenin, and then Stalin, who turned it into an autocracy; and despite the way media reports on Xi Jinping, China is actually still an oligarchy—Xi Jinping is not in the same position Putin enjoys.)
Yes, the investor theory remains true. The difference is that the Dems now have a substantial movement of authentic populists who are actually pushing against oligarch bullshit (and they always were more pragmatic on this issue: the New Deal came from this same kind of perspective and this same base) whereas the Republicans are open advocates for oligarchy.
But 2024 should show you that this analysis isn’t as complete as it used to be. Harris actually had a really good war chest and some pretty good organization on the ground. But Trump is a household name. The money advantage increasingly needs to be about fame. And people like Sanders actually have a huge amount of trust even among conservatives (yes, even as they shriek about him, they’re not that rational but the polls continue to bear this out).
The Dems are actually focusing too much on your kind of thinking, of getting some pet billionaires and just thinking about a traditional electoral campaign, and the metagame has shifted entirely.
Also, your analysis ignores that elites often bend the knee to fascists out of moral turpitude, fear and stupidity. Hence Silicon Valley signaling to Trump. So these guys will donate to Dems in one cycle and then suck up to the Republican fascists if they win. A lot of these institutions donate to both sides. It’s pure cynical political calculus. But that won’t actually help the Dems.
Indeed. Which brings us to my remarks above and below.
It is a gratuitous insult to Trump voters (I voted for Jill Stein in the last election) to claim they voted for him because he was famous. Trump ran as an antiwar candidate in 2016, 2020, and 2024. During the lockdown, I watched a number of his rallies. In every single one of them, he decried America’s waste of blood and treasure in war. Every single time, his antiwar comments were met with loud applause.
In 2016, he was the only Republican candidate who dared criticize this nation’s bloody foreign policy.
Polls show that Trump voters in 2024 were concerned about 1. Immigration and 2. Our nation’s no-end, no-win wars.
Remember that American wars are fought disproportionately by the working class (Kriner and Shen.) Maybe working-class voters chose Trump not because he was famous but because they believed their children in the military had a lower chance of dying under Trump.
In fact, in Trump’s first term, we had the lowest combat death rate in 40 years–since Jimmy Carter.
Beause Trump’s antiwar stance is not well-known–mainstream media rarely mention it–it is easy to conclude that his voters chose him on the basis of his fame, or because of racism, and not because they want fewer people to be killed.
Voting not to kill people is not racist. It is not stupid. It is not a result of being hoodwinked by fame. It is a rational choice.
(Yes, I know, Trump is backtracking on his antiwar stance. But judging by Trump’s words and his actions in his first term, voters had good reasons to believe that he would be less warlike president in his second term than many other candidates. )
Yeah. That’s all bullshit, though. And always was. That’s the point.
People believed these things. But they aren’t true. So the reason they believe them is fame translates to reliability: people believe Trump’s lies because he is famous and they like him. They are not assessing whether he is telling the truth or reliable based on actual evidence of those things. This is the entire thing that has changed and thus sets us squarely in the age of diasimocracy.
You are a diasimocratist: you “like” him so you “believe” him, even though five minutes on Google would refute every single belief you have about him. Fame (popularity, likability, “feels”) has replaced all real concern for evidence of competence, honesty, stability, values, and reliability.
And yes, even your belief about the Carter thing is false. Biden-Harris had the fewest combat deaths, not Trump.
You are believing lies. So, why?
As for being a diasimocratist, I find that amusing as I have voted for Jill Stein, who is FAR less well-known than Trump, Biden, or Harris, three times.
The fact remains that Trump was the first president in forty years to NOT involve the US in a new war.
Perhaps it is true that Biden-Harris had lower combat deaths than Trump, but I was referring to the time period between Carter’s term and Trump’s first term, not to what came later.
Also facts:
Biden was calling for boots on the ground in Iraq for three years before the 911 attacks and voted for the authorization to use military force in 2002.
Clinton voted for the AUMF, too. She had the audacity to say her vote for the AUMF was a vote for peace because the AUMF would, she hoped, push Saddam Hussein to negotiate. However, she revealed herself to be a liar when she voted against the Levin Amendment to tie the use of force to Saddam’s level of cooperation.
BOTH Biden and Clinton had access to classified documents showing the WMD claims used to justify the war were bogus. Yet they voted for it anyway.
Biden might not have been president when the Iraq War started but by his advocacy of it, his stacking committee hearings with pro-war witnesses, and voting for it, he is complicit in thousands of US deaths and at least 180,000 Iraqi deaths according to the Cost of War project.
My point is not that Trump is a good guy. He isn’t. My point is that Trump voters, especially those with children in the military, may have been voting for self-interest and not because Trump was famous.
And yet your reasons for voting are based on your perception of a person’s likability and not on any valid reasoning. Stein was famous to you. She wasn’t famous to enough people to win. Winners need widespread fame. That’s diasimocracy. Basing someone’s fit for office on how much you like them rather than on any actual true facts about them (as in, their actual competence, honesty, or suitability) is being a diasimocratist. Hence that people would believe Trump is good for military lives is diasimocracy: it’s blatantly false. But people believe it because they like him. That’s the only way to get elected now. Telling the truth won’t cut it.
All your irrelevant wingeing now about other candidates just illustrates this. You keep repeating myths or irrelevancies based on whether you like or dislike someone. You do not seem actually engaged with investigating factual reality much less voting based on it.
That’s the problem. The rest of America (or at least most of it) is acting like you. And we need that to stop.
Jessica:
Did you vote for Stein in 2024 after she was unable to call Putin a war criminal?
If so, Carrier has you pegged.
Jessica: Listen to what anyone says about the guy. “He’s successful. He’ll turn this country around”. “He’s a straight talker”. His existing brand let him have that reputation to trade on. The Apprentice let him cosplay as a successful guy who dunked on celebrities and gave them honest feedback. It was bullshit, but that image remains popular among his base even after extensive disproof.
You think the bona fide cult around him, with people saying quite clearly that they would trust him over Jesus himself, was just because he was “anti-war”? Then why aren’t they Stein supporters, or Johnson supporters? Johnson in 2016 got shit for not knowing much about ongoing stuff in Syria and elsewhere precisely because he didn’t want America involved and didn’t even pay attention.
No, Trump’s appeal is because, for decades, he cultivated a reputation that is perfectly attuned to American folk communities. Vicious misogynist, racist (yes, his racism preceded his very first words in his campaign), symbol of capitalist success in a particular gaudy way, “tough” guy.
At best, maybe some people chose Trump among Republicans even though they could have voted for Clinton (who was really not that much of a warmonger – remember, she was Secretary of State, not Defense), or Johnson, or written-in Sanders, or Johnson. But they apparently had enough party loyalty to just vote for the Republican. And, of course, other candidates at the time were perfectly capable to throw Dubbya under the bus. https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/21/politics/2016-gop-iraq-ground-forces/index.html
Okay, let’s say that he had some “anti-war” reputation because he was able to dunk on Jeb for being Dubbya’s brother. If his popularity was due to that, then it would have evaporated when we heard about his opinions on Libya, on him actually being pro-Iraq War, on him talking about how he’d just rob a country, and, then, of course, in his Presidency when he backed Israel and had even more drone strikes than Obama. But none of that happened. And now his supposedly “anti-war” base is following him to massive military spending and potentially annexing Canada and Greenland by force, to say nothing of the Houthis.
No, what’s actually going on is that he’s “anti-war” in the sense that he’s a vicious isolationist who doesn’t care about the world and lots of Americans are viciously selfish. They’re Jacksonian: America should avoid entanglements except for when it “needs to” (read: it benefits America or it’s for some stupid idea of national honor) and then it should win decisively. It’s all about muscularity. They didn’t dislike the Iraq War. They disliked that we lost. Hence him not meaningfully pulling out of Afghanistan.
That’s how he still has his base after we saw that he wasn’t actually meaningfully anti-war for years . Anyone who actually cared about being anti-war would never have voted Republican, but even if they did, they wouldn’t after 2016. Pulling out of the Iran peace deal, his saber-rattling with numerous countries, him not actually meaningfully cutting American entanglements, his slavish devotion to bombing Palestinians, etc. would have turned them off. But it didn’t.
So this isn’t a good theory. And it’s also objectively not what’s happening. https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/commentary/trumps-foreign-policy-what-expect-maga-20 describes his appeal and it’s not that he’s a peacenik.
Being this charitable to folks who put zero priority on someone being a vicious racist, authoritarian, incompetent, misogynist, tool of Christian fundies, etc. as if all of those were bugs and not features is just comical. I have exactly one MAGA friend who ever mentions that he’s an isolationist, and even he was not happy with a lot of the things I’ve pointed out… meaning that the tiebreaker was, well, the transphobia, racism and Christian fundie nonsense. And on Quora I get MAGA questions all the time, and they’re virtually without exception about MS-13, white genocide, and all sorts of Nazi shit. This is a Nazi movement. Accept it .
Trump publicly supported the First Gulf War, the Iraq War and the Afghanistan war when they happened. His later anti-war stance was a political move, and although he didn’t start new wars, he continued the ones already underway and increased the number of drone strikes. And of course now he is supportive of the Gaza war and the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Gazans to create a resort, is bombing Yemen and threatening direct widescale military action against Iran.
These are direct quotes:
Iraq War (2002)
Date: September 11, 2002
Source: Howard Stern Show
Quote:
Afghanistan War (2001)
Date: October 2001
Source: NBC’s Dateline interview
Quote:
First Gulf War (1991)
Date: January 1991
Source: Playboy Interview
Quote:
Islam: To be totally fair to Jessica, I’m assuming, a fortiori, that she knows that and her position would be that these Republicans could have just been deluded and not known any of that, and just trusted modern Trump. And I do know some MAGA friends who still say that they think Trump is an isolationist against all the evidence. And they point to things like him betraying Ukraine as evidence of how much he cares about peace.
(And you picked some of the nicest quotes. His comments about only helping when he can take land or resources are especially vile).
The problem in my mind is both assuming that all these people were single-issue voters (which still means that they chose to vote for a bigot, idiot, and monster out of their isolationism, which still says something about their character – but lots of liberals and leftists bend over backwards to try to not have to accuse bigots of being bigots) and, of course, extending them that charity after 2016. Single-issue voters actually change their minds based on that single issue. Gun voters check candidates’ stance on gun issues. So it’s a nonsense excuse.
And, of course, isolationism is not virtuous to begin with.
To conflate that with “peacemaking” is delusional (or, in some cases, simply dishonest). Peacemaking requires action not apathy (something Trump himself declared in his own election platform, so he understands the concept).
Trump can also be both isolationist and a warmonger. His reasons for disliking foreign wars is their lack of utility for his vainglorious and avaricious character, not a desire for peace. He is content to contemplate invading Greenland, Panama, and even Canada, if it would work out for him. And he would be content to financially support Putin’s and Israel’s wars (and ever other war on the planet: he’d leave Bosnian rape camps be, gloat over a Rwandan genocide, let China murder millions of Taiwanese) if it didn’t risk a strike to his vanity (either by simply making him unpopular or it producing no benefit in money, wealth, or glory that he can boast of on his tombstone).
It’s telling that he, himself, didn’t give a shit about the escalating India-Pakistan war until Vance obliquely reminded Trump that both nations had nuclear weapons (a fact I bet Trump did not know until that moment) compelling him to get involved (albeit trivially and ineffectually), simply because a nuclear war on his watch would “look bad” (again vanity, not concern).
Had they not had nukes, he’d let that war ravage the entire region and kill millions. Because he is not interested in peace. Only profit. And he doesn’t think there is anything there to materially care about (he’s also wrong about that, but it is what he believes—that these are just a couple of useless shithole countries populated by disposable subraces—as we now know from his granting visas to unskilled white nationalists in South Africa while trying to pull visas for skilled Indian professionals).
I totally agree that isolationism is not virtuous. I just tried for the sake of argument to take Jessica’s position for granted that “war = bad” and then prove to her that he was supportive of the wars she referenced (which she may have already known as Fred said).
These three wars are themselves a mixed bag of course and I do think that, in general, some of the US wars and military interventions were totally justified and led to better outcomes (some were even morally obligatory in any sensible moral framework) and some were justified but carried out horribly incompetently and of course some were pure evil.
Oh indeed, I think your point was spot on, Islam. And this one as well.
I was just making sure we all didn’t lose sight of that side-point. I didn’t want to give the impression of buying into their framing that “isolationism” is identical to “peacemaking,” as that’s also problematic as well as the lie that Trump is a peace guy, or good for the military—which he is so not, which is a third issue we might forget here, as “good for the military” does not consist of “keeping it out of all wars” but a great deal else that Trump fails catastrophically at, making him the worst president for American military families.
Richard: Of course. I am arguing a fortiori for the isolationists. To be fair, as a leftie, I do think that international involvement by states does need to be carefully done and we need to be very skeptical, but even Chomsky has made clear that not only was Vietnam’s intervention against the Khmer Rouge clearly totally justified (no matter their other motives) but also that America not backing the Kurds is cowardly. America as the most powerful nation on the planet that fucked up that planet should be involved in fixing it, just through the mechanisms of international law and cooperation. Isolationism is just another manifestation of the conservative disease, “Fuck y’all, I’ve got mine”.
But, of course, my whole point is that the only remotely respectable “isolationist” position would be something like Johnson and the Libertarians: Not getting involved at all. Not just sending bombs. I’ve spoken to plenty of libertarians and other isolationists who happily agree that, if we’re going to throw bombs, we should at least be fixing the problems we cause and being engaged with others too… they just really, really want everyone to do neither.
It is precisely the perverse combination of isolationism and violence (what rational people call “imperialism”, and indeed the most grotesque, least liberal and most dangerous form of imperialism) that prevents Trump from being someone rational people should support for any kind of peace cause. Oh, and also, his clear corruption and vulnerability to foreign agents. (Like the plane Qatar just gave him that is a $400 million bribe).
And, yes, obviously Greenland and Canada and all that has shown that he is just a naked imperialist, but I’m flashing back to 2016 where you had to be a little more vigilant to see that he was, indeed, as Islam correctly documented, a vicious imperialist who just virtue signaled as a peace guy. Now we are seeing him want military parades for his birthday.
(Another thing we haven’t even brought up: A huge part of Trump’s criticism of the Iraq War was not that it was wrong – in fact I don’t think he ever remotely honestly can condemn atrocities in human terms except maybe Palestinian and Ukrainian “atrocities” and even then with clear disingenuity and rage rather than a sense of the tragedy – but purely about mismanagement. He thought it was being waged stupidly, and he thought so because he was not fucking waging it . So, again, the reasonable conclusion to draw was that Trump was just a lazy coward and cheap bully who didn’t want to actually think about or understand international relations, not a pacifist).
Yeah, I agree with all that. And it really caps the whole series of points here.
Islam: I couldn’t find that Playboy interview. I found the 1990 interview where he was a ghoul but I couldn’t find him directly saying that in 1991.
Fyi, the link in “not always for rationally commendable reasons” is broken.
Thank you! Fixed.
Ugh. An example of something being depressing because it’s so well-argued.;
But I don’t think it’s a complete analysis. It works for American politics in particular and to a lesser extent systems elsewhere, but in terms of power, one has to actually look outside the electoral system. In terms of economic power and its subsequent effective political power, both electoral and non-electoral, kleptocracy and oligarchy are still quite salient. There are powerful families and corporate institutions that have huge impacts on policy but remain essentially unknown. That’s especially true when considering global power. The day-to-day operations of the economy are going to remain with a relatively anonymous power elite for some time.
However, on a long enough timeline, I think that the fame component will increase even further. Already people like the Kochs and the Waltons who tried to be relatively subtle are increasingly known about in the circles that propagate that knowledge. Musk got to be an actual shadow President due to his fame, not just his money. Soros got demonized. The Sacklers are now quite infamous. In a world of social media, even if someone tries to remain private and enact influence, all it takes is for someone else to decide to unmask that (whether because the person someone is trying to influence uses the fact of that influence to reach out to their base or because someone else documents that influence) and then suddenly the behind-the-scenes stuff is in public. Eventually, anyone who wishes to seek power is going to have to realize that the seeking of that power will eventually lead to fame, even if they get policy quietly. And, of course, as the political metagame becomes fame-based, lobbying offers of money become much less salient. “Okay, you can give me ten million. Do you have a signal boosting to add onto that? Do you have followers on social? No? Hmmmmm. I’m not that excited. Ten million isn’t all that much in ad buys”.
And inequality will only make this worse. As the absolute super elite become a smaller and smaller group, they will eventually be household names, even if they don’t want to be. Looking at the top 100 wealthiest people, most of them actually have some cache in at least some subcultures. And, of course, anyone who looks at Trump and Musk is going to want to find a way of getting liked and in public, because it’s a power and wealth multiplier. And someone like Bill Gates who wants to do any charity and have any positivity to their reputation will also need to do this.
What’s nightmarish here is that the idea of transparency, that we would use the existence of knowledge to hold people accountable, got overwhelmed by marketing and subjectivity. Someone getting exposed can get more power by just being willing to accept that attention and engage in spin. If they succeed, all the expose has done is give them fame.
It does put a limit on fascists, because we’ve seen empirically that the fascists actually struggle to get people who can actually connect. DeSantis is a perfect example. He very clearly played from this playbook, deliberately picking big, controversial fights so he got his name out there. But he’s so awkward that he couldn’t parley that into national power. And it does open up opportunities for the left. But it’s still so incredibly dangerous.
Just FYI, I don’t see fascism as a distinct “system” of government, but a style of it. Like patriarchy, it spans many systems. Arguably it can be implemented in every possible political system, so it does not distinguish any. Even democracy simpliciter can be fascist (look what happened to Socrates and the Athenian Empire; and the Roman Republic was fascist even at its most democratic). Even representative constitutional democracy, maybe the least compatible with fascism, is compatible some fascism (look at all American police culture and censorship policy since 1950; remember Stonewall, Ohio State, Ferguson).
Likewise the role of wealth, influence peddling, gatekeeping, machine politicking, etc. These exist (or can exist) in all systems. They don’t distinguish any. For a wealth-power relationship to become plutocracy (and not just a wealth-power relationship) it has to become the primary engine of the system, e.g. if we passed an Amendment (or somehow created a de facto state of affairs) whereby only billionaires could hold any top office in the three branches of government, then we’re in a plutocracy. Or if elections were rigged consistently to just pick candidates chosen by a secret cabal of billionaires (the usual conspiracy theory, but for that to be the case, the evidence would have to match it, and it doesn’t, so that isn’t going on, least of all “by the Jews”), and the cabal set membership to literally anyone who achieved billionaire status (or whatever wealth-target), that would be a plutocracy. Whereas if they did not allow anyone in (or rarely did), and were selected mainly not because of hitting some wealth target but by simply being in a position to form and delimit (or by some gladhanding join) the cabal, it would be an oligarchy and not a plutocracy. And so on.
So we have to distinguish the system of government from its stylistic elements and undergirding machinery. That’s why it matters that the “plutocrats and oligarchs” of America can’t control Trump, but had no choice but to subserve him and hope they can manipulate him from below. They are chasing the winners now, not making them. So they aren’t really in control, no matter how much power they do have, it is not defining how the system operates. It is reacting to how the system operates, and thus using the levers of that system.
And our knowing that gives us a lot of information about how to manipulate or work against the powers that be. “Access comes through fame” is a reality even the plutocrats and oligarchs can’t change (until someone changes the system again).
It obviously depends on the definition of fascism. I’d say that palingenetic ultranationalism with the specific constellations of deep fascist movements end up establishing systems that go so all-in on utterly mindless hierarchy with no counter-balancing elements that they become something like a distinct form of government, hierarchocracy. (This is also why it’s adaptive and idiosyncratic: it’s just tribalism on steroids). Fascist movements and forms, though, definitely can contaminate any form of government. This is actually really critical for people to understand. They think “FASCISM = DICTATOR” and forget that Hitler’s party actually gained power through quasi-legitimate electoral means. So I’d say that a distinguishing feature of end-state fascism is that it becomes completely dissociated from any concept of merit or ideology or philosophy with one glaring exception of the belief in metaphysical supremacy of the “We”. It’s just that a system that falls that far usually ruins itself so quickly with the vicious force of its incompetence that it doesn’t exist long enough to easily analyze.
And I would still argue that they only don’t control the winners electorally. They have a massive amount of ability to dictate policy, both in the narrow sense of politics and the broad sense of the course of institutions, with their direct economic control. That is admittedly combining an economic and a political analysis, and it is definitely a drastic shift that they have to bend the knee to someone who they don’t control.
I think one major thing that is blunting people recognizing how important this change is that Trump himself is an elite… but he’s a very idiosyncratic elite with actually quite limited real non-political power, having been broke quite often (which is an incredible feat for someone with his wealth to have done). It’ll take the election of a fascist who is not independently massively wealthy (or isn’t before he gains political popularity) to really lock in that that has changed. For now, Trump still has far too many personal economic interests to fully do what the hardcore fash want.
I don’t see the value in the term “hierarchocracy.” That simply describes every system other than strict anarchy. So it makes no distinctions. Every system has a hierarchy. The question is how you get into that hierarchy (how it is decided who is where in the hierarchy) and what you are allowed to do with it. Every system can then allow or disallow “fascism” to one degree or another as what’s done with it. But that by itself does not change how one gets in it and what all else one can do in it.
Hence the difference between fascist autocracy and fascist oligarchy—and even (as the U.S. can be described as for the last century), parafascist democracy or diasimocracy (neither of which has ever been an autocracy nor specifically an oligarchy, for example, and either of which can be far more fascist than America already is, and still not be an autocracy or proper oligarchy).
Fascism is any system that allows persuasion through force, hence any system characterized by the use or threat of force to effect political will (rather than free and peaceful discourse), and thus the (increasing or total) absence of permissible dissent (as I discuss in How Far Left Is Too Left?). Fascism can thus be realized in every political system, no matter how it is organized or how its principals gain their stations or what specific powers they are allowed.
One can then argue that, perhaps, certain systems inevitably devolve into others (there is an entire political science to this, e.g. why three party systems cannot arise or last long in first-past-the-post democracies), but that’s a causal prediction, not a semantic distinction. If diasimocracy inevitably collapses over time into autocracy, that still does not make diasimocracy autocracy. For the difference remains until the one collapses into the other.
And case in point: the fascists have a lot of ways to keep getting their way, but its all machination rather than direct control, and they are too often being stymied (by an ironically only half-cooperative Trump as well as a resisting, and thus evidently just as uncontrollable, judiciary—the recent North Carolina decision being only the latest example) to be correctly identified as “in power.” They have power. They are not in power. The system is resisting their charms. That could break. But until it does, we aren’t there yet.
So what I’m identifying with “hierarchocracy” is that the rule is because of the hierarchy . The hierarchy is not determined by some external factor. It just is. Just like every system has fame but not every system is a diasimocracy, end-stage fascism has rule specifically with a hierarchy and only a hierarchy . Its justification is metaphysical, mythological and arbitrary, facially rather than in a disguised fashion. The degree to which something is specifically becoming especially fascist is the degree to which all existing safeguards, all existing limits on power down the hierarchy, and all existing justifications for the hierarchy disappear. We Are Great. We Are In Charge. No other argument is needed.
Someone asked me off-list “Why then don’t we just ‘make’ the right people famous?” (paraphrasing).
But that’s the problem, though. That can’t really “be done.” Fame (and its extent) is accidental and derives from chance factors no one can control (and that often chance factors can render impossible). The reason campaigns now cost upwards of billions of dollars is that they have to try and “make the right people famous” and it doesn’t really work. It’s wasted money. But investors simply don’t know what else to do. So they try anyway.
The smart corporations don’t do this anymore (the era of “manufactured boy bands” is dead for a reason: you can’t “make” someone famous; people see through it). They react instead: they look around for who is already famous, and back that horse (and maybe try to control them, but that never really works either). Which is why they lose their shirt when their backed horse gets “scandaled out” of the fame market.
So all we can do is react. For example, Buttigieg is lucking out in the fame cycle. And he is competent. That makes him a good contender. But not because we “made” him one. But because he lucked into that niche and so we just have to choose him (or someone like him). AOC fits that niche too.
But so do amateurs like The Rock or Taylor Swift. And there may come a time when we have to back one of them. Simply because it’s a diasimocracy now. So there will be no choice (and everyone who still thinks they do have a choice is simply going to fail and ruin everything because they will be throwing good money after bad: those people still think we live in a democracy).
Hence, for example, I would vote for The Rock or Taylor Swift because I actually do think they’d do better than “Caligula’s Horse” (or the next Donald Mussolini). Johnson has the right moral character to make good decisions about whom to trust as advisors, and Swift is actually a far more skilled businessperson than Trump (like, by miles), so she’d choose good advisors because she knows how those decisions work from the business side. But I would rather elect Al Gore (even now) or Maxine Dexter or Rochelle Robinson (people you may have never heard of but who have the real skills and experience to do the job well, but no one will vote for because they are “nobody”).
Here’s the good thing.
Almost no one is as vile or incompetent as Trump.
The Rock has an ego, but he demonstrably listens to other people. WrestleMania last year was saved because their apparent original plan for The Rock to face Roman Reigns got booed by the fans into oblivion, and instead of ignoring them or even doing a lame last-minute pivot, they worked that into the story, Rock worked heel (it was great, reminding everyone why he was so good in the Attitude Era), and they adjusted. Trump could never do that. I’ve heard that this year’s Mania had some bizarre choices, but from what I’ve seen even they had more to do with The Rock being parsimonious with his appearances and having a perspective on the story that others don’t share (a perspective I actually really liked).
Similarly, Swift demonstrably can surround herself with knowledgeable people.
And both of them can talk about something resembling reality.
If we actually have transitioned where this is a or the critical factor (and I remain skeptical, I think that it’s just a hybrid attention for now, but I definitely will keep an eye on it and it may very well go that direction), we actually will have lots of excellent, rational options. Even Logan Paul and Joe Rogan would be better than Trump. Yes, the danger is that we get someone worse, and yes, this is all nightmarish, but we may have actually hit the bottom.
(That’s also part of why I am a little skeptical. I think Trump’s fame let him trigger fascism, but this is still a fascist movement, and while obviously they are struggling to find a new figurehead, they may eventually be able to. The existing factors for fame are heavily influenced by fascism).
I am ashamed for my country that this low bar is now our dream. But you are right.
And indeed, diasimocracy likely creates a pathway to fascisms (autocracy, oligarchy, or plutocracy are all realistic trendlines here, at the very least), so we are in danger of it now.
I wonder if it’s best to think of Trump as the first diasimocratic President who is also a victim of its processes, not understanding it and being a victim of boomer cable news brain rot. As much as he was clearly always a vicious stupid authoritarian, you can read things like his Central Park Five ad and it comes off like someone who actually vaguely has an idea of the actual events happening around him. (And he almost certainly didn’t write that, but at one point he actually did use ghostwriters and let people like The Apprentice producers sanewash him, so at one point he understood that he needed to do that). I really think FOX destroyed his mind. I think Obama owning him so badly caused him to irrationally double down on the ecosystem he was in rather than realizing that ecosystem had shamed him and prepared him for a fall.
Someone else agrees with you:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/opinion/democrats-need-jerry-springer.html
Well, the NYT Opinion page is not a bastion of reliability these days, so I wouldn’t trust anything it claims Democrats “need” (I don’t know Leon Neyfakh’s politics, but he doesn’t seem a very significant figure as far as DNC policy-making).
Of course, Jerry Springer is dead. That disqualifies him to run. But I assume (I am not giving the NYT money to find out) that the name is being used as some sort of abstract moniker for a “type” of person, in which case the analyst would be seeing the same thing Giles did, he just doesn’t know what to call it or how to analyze it in terms of political philosophy (rather than just essaying an opinion).
I thought it was a funny coincidence that the author identified the same phenomenon, probably without knowing anything about Giles’s work, just a few days after I read your post. It’s not a particularly great article, I don’t necessarily agree with it, and certainly wouldn’t suggest paying for it unless you already have a subscription. For the record, he does not advocate reanimating Jerry Springer’s corpse, but rather considering people like Oprah, Stephen A. Smith, and Mark Cuban (barf to all 3).
Yeah. They would all be bad at it. Unless they did it right (went for a legislative post first, or a state governorship, built experience and chops and a record, and then ran for president). But they all would have a real chance of getting elected regardless, for precisely the reason of what system we are now in (though they aren’t comparable in fame, so any run between all three, Oprah would win unless she lost the white supremacist vote to Cuban, since she is anti-famous in that wing of our population).
One trick you can try to kill their paywall is to just save the HTML. They throttle the speed and then make it fail but if you retry it often works.
The author apparently hosts a podcast or show centered on Springer. It’s not a bad article: It reads a little like fluff but it does recount some of Springer’s more likeable traits. And it recounts the fact that he got poo-pooed by liberals for wanting to run. I find it funny that the article cites the reason why folks didn’t like it, that he “abuse[d] damaged, vulnerable people for his own purpose”. Which I think is a fair criticism. Springer than turned to Air America briefly along with Al Franken, which the article neglects to mention did become a politician and then had to step down in shame, which I think is pretty indicative of the danger of their proposal. They then explain that Springer was considering running in 2017 but didn’t. With no explanation as to why.
“In hindsight, Mr. Springer’s story lends credence to the notion that politics and entertainment have more in common than we like to admit. If nothing else, Democrats must get past their aversion to the unseriousness of celebrity and treat it as a selling point, not a stumbling block. Why not Oprah Winfrey? Or the ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith? Or the “Shark Tank” personality and billionaire Mark Cuban? Just pick someone who’s willing to run, who’s good at his or her job and who lots of people like. Democrats would do well not to let the next Jerry Springer slip away”.
Yeah, pretty similar concept. Written in an article where the headline is actively misleading. Which the newspapers need to stop fucking doing because they know damn well that people won’t fucking read it, they’ll see the headline and share it and call them dumb, which will just pollute discourse and won’t even attract that many more eyeballs.
It’s actually a very bad rendition of the discussions we’ve had here.
Butigeg is awful. He visited israel in 2018 after the idf shot palestinians protesting the usm embassy moving to jerusalem. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/03/after-gaza-slaughter-buttigieg-praised-israeli-security-responses-moving-and. He also went on fox news to call pro-palestinian protestors anti-Semitic https://www.foxnews.com/video/6351598979112
Neither is true.
Please do not be so easily duped by special interest media, especially when they give you the data that shows their framing is false.
Fact-check them.
For example, your first link misframes what Buttigieg said and meant and its nuances. The reality is easily ascertained with five minutes on Google (please remember and learn The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and master A Vital Primer on Media Literacy and A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research):
Does Pete Buttigieg Support Israel? (gives a nuanced account with detailed evidence)
Democrat Buttigieg Warns He Would Cut Israel Aid over West Bank Annexation (gives a contrary perspective from a counter-biased source)
After Gaza slaughter, Buttigieg Praised Israeli Security Responses (gives the full contextual quotes of Buttigieg from 2018, which are more nuanced and not about what source falsely implies)
In 2018 Buttigieg was commenting on an actual rocket attack on Israel from Iranian partisans in Syria that he witnessed, and the effectiveness of the IDF in its defensive actions preventing loss of life. He was not commenting on the entire state of the war, or even any actions in Gaza at all (much less anything to do with October 7 and the current Gaza War, which hadn’t happened yet—that was five years and an entire global pandemic later).
As for your second link, I must assume you didn’t actually watch it and are just sharing a link someone lied to you about. Because it doesn’t show what you claim. It shows exactly the opposite.
The host asked Buttigieg if he was against antisemitism and he answered yes “but we have to make a distinction between what is legitimate free speech and protest and debate,” and what is “actually” antisemitism (and he gives an example of both: he says the Palestinians have a valid grievance to be heard; and then he says that is not the same thing as physically attacking a Jewish student, which was not a description of “the pro-palestinian protestors” but isolated antisemitic attacks on Jews, and he is correct).
Please stop being duped into emotionally appealing false narratives. Please, please, please make an effort to ground your beliefs in actual reality, in the actual facts as they actually are, and not a fake framing that distorts everything. That is the disease destroying our country. Please make an effort to cure yourself of it. We need you to do that. We need everyone to do that.
All I said in regards to the first link was that he visited israel after the massacre of protestors which is true it’s even confirmed in the mondoweiss article you give. I was wrong about the fox news interview
Dayavar, you are falling for false framing. Buttigieg was not commenting on the Gaza attack.
Let me repeat that:
Buttigieg was not commenting on the Gaza attack.
So it does not matter that there was one before his comment. He was not talking about it. So you cannot use his quote as referring to it.
This is how you have been duped. You need to be on your guard against this kind of manipulation. Because. Wow. Look how well they controlled you with it.
Dayavar: Being this feckless after you’ve been corrected shows that you’ve put your ego over the issue you are acting like you care about, the Palestinians.
If really all you meant was “Pete visited Israel after a massacre”, with no more context for what the visit was and when it was planned and what happened on it and what was said, then you knowingly said fucking nothing. I hope to God your position is not actually that people should cancel any diplomatic visit to a country after that country committed a human rights violation (or, more accurately, an alleged human rights violation, not because I think Israel didn’t actually do that because I am absolutely sure they did but because at the time you cannot always be sure of the current state of ongoing events), no matter if they intend to actually make that an issue in their diplomacy and push the topic, or use the time on the ground to investigate and see the situation unfolding and its impact, or anything else.
This is just you not liking Pete Buttigieg, for whatever reason (valid or not), and being unable to sort that feeling out from actually assessing his conduct. I’m not the biggest fan of Pete, I find him likeable enough but he just still feels far too toothless for me and there’s a sort of lameness to his presentation that doesn’t work for me personally (since we’re talking about fame – his actual policy has been pretty good, I just read an article about his successes as transportation secretary that was pretty solid, though again firmly within Democratic establishment success), but I can see right through this.
Indeed, now that you’ve read what Pete said about anti-Semitism, you actually should be much higher on him. There are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who are not even trying to fight this battle or, worse, actively making it worse. Schumer literally argued that we should stop assuming that Trump is an anti-Semite despite all the Nazi shit but that it’s totally okay to assume that about pro-Palestinian protesters as Steve Shives documented. There are lots of people who are doing the “Do you condemn Hamas” and “Do you think Israel has a right to exist” games at the moment among Democrats. Pete actually had the courage to explain precisely the very real point: That there are Nazis who hate Israel but also people who have problems with Israeli policy and don’t hate or fear Jews or Israel. I don’t even hate Netanyahu because I don’t hate anyone, though he is morally contemptible.
More importantly than Richard’s correction:
Let’s say he had done everything you documented. Merely visiting Israel after a massacre is not actually evidence of support; in fact, without context it could have been criticism.
This still puts him markedly to the left of the Dems . You definitely did not document him actually, say, having inveterate IDF support, or being unable to criticize Israel, or unable to call for a ceasefire. So you failed to actually demonstrate that he would not be worth voting for, as an alternative to, you know, the fucking fascist we have in charge who is being puppeted by Christian evangelicals who are literally trying to foment the apocalypse.
Fred makes a good point, too.
That’s several levels in analysis down, but the defect of always seeking the “perfect” candidate rather than incremental improvement over time (the “better” candidate; then a slightly “better” one next time; and so on) is a guarantee of always failing to get what you want (you guarantee things don’t change or even get worse), because that’s failing the Trolley Problem. Only incremental change is possible. Those who don’t realize that become the victims of diasimocracy—and thus give us Trump for president, who ruins their every dream and trashes their every goal. It’s like shooting yourself in the face.
But to bring this back around to the topic of diasimocracy: because fame wins elections now (it’s a “popularity contest” and not a contest of ideas or competency), anyone who sells unqualified radical change loses fame (they become “infamous” instead and thus can’t get elected). So to even have a chance at your ideas getting into office, you have to find candidates who know how to walk the rhetorical line so as to not create a “scandal,” and even though they believe in radical change, they are pragmatic enough to openly admit they can’t achieve it and can only produce partial change in that direction. In other words, you can’t “scare off voters” and expect to get elected.
Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez have tried different ways of doing that on this issue, to mixed success (and smart Palestinians know this). But no one doubts they believe war crimes have happened there and that Israel needs to GTFO Gaza and the far-right-lock on Israel’s government needs to go away. But what they could accomplish (and thus what they can promise) as president is a different question. They would both block arms to Israel until an actual two-state agreement was finalized if congress would let them, but congress almost certainly won’t. And they know that. The question is: do you know that.
Or are you just going to go around in an emotional rage bitching about politicians not being irrational mirror-images of you.
One of those behaviors is useful. The other is not.
You have to understand how reality works before you are qualified to criticize it.
Yep!
Let’s repeat that for the cheap seats.
Any Democratic politician who promises, categorically, that they will end the war in Gaza and get Israel under control is lying to you .
That should be their agenda , but they cannot promise that, because it depends on the cooperation of, at least, the Israelis, and in actual reality at least some Palestinians and Republicans.
Now, under the modern ethos of the President doing whatever he wants no matter Congressional rules, a President who was okay with using tools Republicans have left could unilaterally change policy and wait for Congress and the courts to force the issue. But even if we’re all okay with that (and I’m conceptually fine with it but we do need to have a plan to deescalate and get the Constitution working again), that still does not actually guarantee ending the war or getting rid of Netanyahu or anything else.
Great article Dr. Carrier. I was not familiar with this concept but have had vaguely similar inuitions about the irrationality of our political culture. I suspect that an aspect of a solution to the diasimocracy problem is the proliferation of critical thinking skills, which you have long advocated for. This phenomenon must be pulled out by its roots that take hold in the minds of voters whose identities are heavily informed by their partisan affiliations. Media framing surely exploits the vulnerability of the average citizen to tribalist groupthink. Manifestations of which include reactive devaluation and the bandwagon fallacy. This is all the more reason to become reflective about what information we decide to trust and why. An engaged introsepcetion about one’s own biases seems like a key part of collectively extricating ourselves from the snares of diasimocracy. Perhaps these are banal and cliched observations, but they seem important nonetheless. Anyway, thanks for bringing attention to this notion and shedding more light on it.
So critical thinking skills can only solve part of the problem. They could go toward fixing the heuristic that Giles identifies wherein folks use trust as a shorthand and want to read the famous thing more than the non-famous thing. But
1) If that only takes over partially, then even the critical thinking people have to use fame as a shorthand for others in conversation (so in my responses on Quora I frequently need to defend folks like Sanders or AoC or what not and use their versions of arguments because as much as I can shame someone engaging with me to read someone more obscure they often just won’t)
2) Even if that fix takes deep root, our current social media-based culture will mean that the availability of the perspectives of those who take the time to keep their fame will just choke out other availability (so things like Google’s AI overview routinely just take the most popular rendition of an idea rather than the best of it)
And, of course, people need to be convinced through their critical thinking to abandon respecting fame and the idea of the famous being around as a virtue . There’s what I call a Roganite perspective on the world post-Watergate, that because conventional systems failed us, everyone should just make whatever shit up and we can treat it like it’s all equal a priori. (The pretense is that we’ll then sort out what works, but in reality what happens is that people just find their tribes to settle into). Boxing had serious issues of corruption and inflated records? Toss out the idea that people should actually face the demonstrable best and let Jake Paul cherrypick his combatants and still pretend that he’s legitimately good. Critical thinking skills on its own won’t change those values and perceptions.
In any case, implementing critical thinking education are going to be challenging until we can blunt those influences.
Good points.