And Just Like That, the Price of Eggs Rose and Democracy Fell
The United States is steps away from following a worldwide pattern as a new world axis emerges.
To state what may be obvious to some of you, we are in the twilight of democracy. But it didn’t start with the price of eggs. It’s been a long oligarchical process that, believe it or not, is not only about the United States. The United States isn’t even at the forefront of it all.
To truly understand why democracy is in free fall, we must do that history thing, so grab a coffee (throw a little vodka in it if you need to), and let’s take a quick ride through recent world history.
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote a TL;DR essay (even longer than this!) for political nerds called The End of History?.1 In it, he declared the death of authoritarianism and the emergence of a permanent, uplifting radiance across the Earth from the immeasurable and glorious light of democracy, which, he said, was shining so brightly that even shaky autocratic governments bossing around developing nations would be unable to shade themselves.
Oops. Sorry, Francis. Welcome to 2025.
Since 1989, two major developments have reawakened history from the Fukuyama slumber: Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in Russia beginning in 2012, and the rise of Xi Jinping as President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013.
Combined, the two countries consist of about 18% of the world’s landmass and, coincidentally, population. Their influence reaches much further. For example, together, Russia and China are Africa’s new colonialists, each scrambling to extract as much as they can out of the mega continent and its people.
More than that, of course, Russia has an oversized influence on how oil is distributed, and China has an oversized influence on how everything else is distributed.
After Trump’s most unfortunate recent electoral victory, Russians did a victory lap. In response to the election, one of Putin’s political advisers, Putin whisperer and far-right provocateur Aleksandr Dugin, wrote on Elon Musk’s propaganda machine:
“Globalists have lost their final combat.”2
Dugin is among a growing cadre of Russian and Chinese political influencers who insist that fascist authoritarianism is a perfectly fine and legitimate form of government and are eager for the U.S. to partake of its fruit. Many politicians in both countries no longer pretend that their governments are democratic.3 Sometimes, they’ll try to soften their tone by explaining that authoritarianism is merely a way station of sorts to something better (Checks notes: Peter Thiel also says this)4. But first, they point out, we must get the unwashed masses bathed and neutered.
This is not all that different than when Elon Musk says that when the oligarchs take charge and slash government spending, there will be pain, but it will be pain Trump’s misguided voters should gladly embrace as part of a greater cleanse (Checks notes again: They did not knowingly sign up for this).
In my novel, MagicLand, the oligarchs use their domination of technology and money to kill the 99% of us because it turns out that it’s just too much work to deal with such nasty side effects of gross inequity as massive refugee migrations. Each year, this seems like less than fiction than the year before.
Ren Yi, an influential Chinese blogger, wrote that the Trump victory ushered the United States into what amounts to a “techno-authoritarian-conservative alliance.”5
There is a significant opinion brewing among Russian and Chinese political thought leaders (in other words, oligarchs) that war with the United States is not inevitable for the simple reason that the United States is poised to join a new authoritarian axis of world powers under the kind and welcoming tutelage of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. How many of us here in America have difficulty imagining Trump holding hands with the two in the middle while Musk leaps into the air in front of all three like a cheerleading techno-idiot?
This axis is already in view, many in Russia and China say. Putin and Xi have been clubbing around for a long time. They know that Trump, as one of the stupidest power brokers ever to walk the planet, is gullible and corrupt enough to join them. They have both established themselves as presidents for life, although in different ways. Trump would love to do the same, if only to remain out of prison.
Putin began his career as a former KGB agent who was disgusted by the fall of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union, which at that time included Ukraine and Borat’s6 home country, Kazakstan, within its boundaries, dissolved into several countries, ranging from the mother country Russia to Moldova and other tiny places.
Putin’s been pissed ever since, and would love to, at the least, regain some of the USSR’s original surrounding territory.
His annoyance has increased as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) has expanded to touch Russian borders.
NATO, of which America is a participant, is a treaty between various European countries and the United States under which an attack on one is considered an attack on all.
To understand Putin’s rage, it might help to think how American politicians would react to Mexico joining a similar alliance led by Russia or China:
Putin’s rise to power was legitimate enough. Shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was sort of hand-picked by a very drunk Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, but he won a subsequent presidential election fair and square. The problem, though, was that Russia was a bit of a mess in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Rich oligarchs quickly took over key industrial groups faster than you can say, “Gazprom,”7 shortly after the country decided to abandon communism.
Putin quickly went to work.
Over the next decade, he overturned Russia’s fledgling post-Soviet democracy by eviscerating the media and eliminating potential opponents. For example, Putin’s latest victim, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who railed against corruption in Russia, was poisoned in Germany with Novichok, one of the world’s deadliest nerve agents. Novichok blocks neurotransmitters that send impulses to muscles, allowing them to, well, do things. It causes wheezing, excessive sweating, convulsions, involuntary vomiting, urination and defecation, and difficulty breathing before it kills you.8
Somehow, Navalny survived, voluntarily returned to Russia vowing to fight on, and was promptly dumped into a Russian gulag in Siberia, where he died.
Putin’s term as president is full of such escapades. He also shuttered one media outlet after another. What was once a lively media landscape of interesting Russian news sources quickly became a flatland of Putin mouthpieces. He employed all manner of intimidation to accomplish this end, from threatening and/or killing journalists to simply shutting down media outlets he didn’t like.
Meanwhile, Xi, in China, was fortunate enough to have a slightly more established infrastructure from which he could build authoritarian power. The Chinese Communist Party, which is now communist in name only, has never held free elections. Its founder, Mao Zedong, considered human life expendable for the greater good of amassing power.
Mao gained power through a civil war during World War Two. While U.S. forces were busy pacifying a defeated Japan, Mao was busy eliminating Chinese civilians. His People's Liberation Army laid siege to the city of Changchun in 1948 so that he could defeat the forces of China’s government led by Chiang Kai-shek.
While Japan was licking its wounds from the horrific attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the latter of which saw around 180,000 people die in nine seconds, 160,000 civilians in Changchun died as a result of starvation during Mao’s five-month siege.9 History has recorded this event as, “What? Oh, wow, we forgot about that.”
Eventually, Chiang Kai-shek, after a few additional painful defeats, fled to Taiwan, where he established a rogue government. This, in turn, has created a permanent source of tension between the U.S. and China. China wants to absorb the island into its republic, and the U.S., which relies on Taiwan’s microchip industry to the point that losing it would devastate the American economy, would rather it didn’t.
Mao enacted a variety of pogroms designed to maintain power. For example, in a move that would delight almost any American renter these days, he enacted a policy to publicly execute at least one landlord in every village, which resulted in 1-5 million deaths, depending on which source you check out.10 That’s a lot of landlords.
Mao, ever modest, himself claimed only about 700,000 deaths as a result of his efforts.
His pogroms weren’t limited to those with power over others, though. Mao managed to kill as many as 30 million impoverished Chinese through his Great Leap Forward, which was an attempt to convert agricultural work into industrial labor such as steel production.11
China was and is a populous nation, so there were too many Chinese for Mao to kill before he died, which allows us to fast forward many years, where we find Deng Xiaoping, who ruled China from 1978 to 1989. Deng famously opened China to capitalism, helping to create a system of capitalism some call “state capitalism,” which is an economy directed by the state that favors some industries over others.12
As a result, China is now the largest car manufacturer in the world, leads the world in shipbuilding, and has entered the aviation industry as it tests its first passenger airliner to compete with Boeing and Airbus.13
Deng opened his nation to trade with the United States, Japan, and Europe, but not its political system. China’s political system is a closed system where a small cadre of Chinese Communist Party leaders choose a new leader when the current leader ages to the point where they are no longer effective or when Communist Party leaders just feel like making a change.
Before Xi, though, leadership succession was typically a messy political affair in a loud, smoky room. Xi has mastered the system to such a degree that the Communist Party eventually agreed that he will be president for life, meaning someone will have to kill him if they grow tired of him.
So now we have authoritarian figures who would like to remain in power until they’re six feet under in charge of two of the three superpowers, with a third figure, though no more than a toddler in mind and spirit, hankering to join the party. And, contrary to what the corporate media, which nourishes the concept of impending war to sell advertising, tells you, the two established authoritarians began writing their party invitations to Trump in 2016. They have about as much interest in direct war with the U.S. as Canada does.
And why would they? Xi knows perfectly well that if he launches an attack to regain Taiwan, Musk and Trump will shrug their shoulders and merely ask, “What’s in it for me?” Xi has waited patiently for this moment. He’s not going to wreck the world economy and leave the world a radioactive cesspool after all this work.
Just as they took different roads to power, Putin and Xi are each taking separate roads toward welcoming the U.S. to this new axis of power.
I call it good cop/bad cop diplomacy.
Putin, the bad cop, has launched direct attacks on the American electoral system, and a failed Blitzkrieg against the breadbasket of Southeast Europe, Ukraine. Xi, on the other hand, rubs the American belly with soft statements like this letter read by China’s Ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, to the 2024 Gala Dinner of the U.S.-China Business Council on December 11, shortly after the 2024 election:
President Xi pointed out that the China-U.S. relationship is one of the most important relationships in the world. It concerns not only the immediate interests of the Chinese and American peoples, but also the future of and destiny of the entire humanity. Both countries stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation. We should choose dialogue over confrontation, and win-win cooperation over zero-sum games. China is prepared to stay in communication with the United States to expand cooperation, manage differences, continue exploring the right way for the two countries to get along with each other in the new era, and realize long-term, peaceful coexistence on this planet to the benefit of the two countries and the world at large.
President Xi stressed that economic and trade relations are an important part of China-U.S. relations. The interests of our two countries are closely intertwined, and the room for cooperation is infinitely vast. The two sides should properly handle differences through equal-footed consultation, and make the pie of cooperation bigger based on our complementary advantages. The success of one side should be an opportunity rather than a challenge for the other, and one’s achievement should help rather than hinder the development of the other.14
Many pundits might interpret such rhetoric as Xi bowing before Trump, as if Xi is part of the Republican sycophantic criminal enterprise. That’s not what this is. Xi is heavily influenced by the aforementioned authoritarian whisperers who now dominate Chinese political thinking. He’ll continue stroking America’s ego, especially if the U.S. continues on its current path, while occasionally mixing in vague threats about Taiwan and trade for the sake of a small, lively group of Chinese Realpolitik foreign policy hawks.
However, Xi’s main interest, presumably above even helping create a new axis of evil, is mercantilism. In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon wanted China to join the world’s economic system. They did, and then some.
Trump may or may not impose tariffs on China. If he does, China will object, then simply redirect its massive state capitalism infrastructure accordingly. This is a country that can build a thousand-mile superhighway in about thirty seconds. Tariffs aren’t going to change that.
Xi may be all about mercantilism, but he’s suppressed dissent like an all-star authoritarian. You can’t step outside in a Chinese urban area without being tracked closely by government technology. These days, even Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, once one of the world’s most respected newspapers, treads carefully.
One of Xi’s authoritarianism whisperers is Xiao Gongqin, who recently received a significant write-up in The New Yorker magazine (referenced earlier).
Xiao sees the migration of the American voter to Trumpism as a rejection of Democratic identity politics, which he says resembles some of the liberal tendencies of early Chinese communism. Yes, these voters are concerned about the price of eggs, so the thinking goes, but what they really object to is the promotion of three types of bathroom gender signage.
Most readers of this Substack will sigh and roll their eyes at such claims, but we’re seeing a rapid advance of this claim in the Democratic Party, too. The old guard of the Democratic Party is fighting tenaciously to remain in power and is itself most likely indifferent to the plight of trans kids.
Their chief interest is the same as the oligarchs they claim to oppose, guys like Musk and Peter Thiel.
Consider the recent tussle between Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over leadership of the House Oversight Committee. AOC wanted the job, but Pelosi didn’t want her to have the job. Pelosi won.
AOC joked when Trump urged her on Truth Social to try again, “Damn, you know it’s bad when even Trump is feeling bad for me.”15
AOC was being gracious. The reason she lost was that Pelosi has a net worth of more than a quarter billion dollars ($273.78 million),16 much of this through a very bubbly stock portfolio stuffed with oligarchy.
AOC, on the other hand, has no stock portfolio, and a low net worth (moneywise — but in the way it counts, her net worth far surpasses most congress critters).
Money wins every time. As Speaker of the House, Pelosi was a legislative maestro, which has deservedly won her much appreciation in many quarters, but she’s also firmly entrenched in the American oligarchy.
Consider, too, Biden’s refusal to go hard after Trump, and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to watch from the sidelines as Trump romped through Garland’s embarrassing attempts to bring Trump to justice. After Biden leaves office, Garland will return home to a lifestyle unimaginable for most Americans. His incentive to take down Trump in a world of oligarchs was as close to zero as can be.
The same holds with just about everything. Many Democratic politicians scream about the Federalist Society’s various bribes to the Supreme Court, but these folks all run in the same circles and clink champagne glasses together at black-tie Georgetown soirées.
America’s dance with oligarchy is nothing new. It’s happened before. But this time, the implications of a full transformation are more serious than ever because of the potential of a new alliance fostered by the other two superpowers.17
The truth is, despite the torrent of misinformation being poured upon the country, that “free enterprise” is as extinct as the buffalo. Monopoly control and domination has become virtually all-embracing. The real rulers of our country are neither “rugged individuals” nor “self-made men” nor anything that remotely resembles the mythology so elaborately created by Wall Street’s hucksters. They are dynasties — plutocratic dynasties of parasitic families who have generation by generation grown fantastically richer at the expense of the American people. They are the Rockefeller, the Morgans, the Mellons, the du Ponts, the Vanderbilts, the Guggenheims, the Fords, the Gianninis & Company.
That quote is from an article titled The Reigning Oligarchy, written in 1949 for a Trotskyite organization called The Fourth International.18
But replace a few words, and you’ll find that it is a template of sorts for thousands of modern-day Substacks.
The angst expressed in that article was born from the dominance of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as far back as the late 1800s. There have been brief attempts to change the direction of oligarch control in the United States, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s brief trustbusting regime, but FDR’s New Deal was not one of those.
FDR focused on raising the standard of living for poor people, but oligarchs flourished. He needed them to wage war.
American oligarchy, like the one in Russia, doesn’t care all that much who is in power as long as the oligarchy controls the levers. Like all groups of humans, they sometimes have different opinions. Some of them prefer Trump, some prefer Democrats, but none of them are willing to cede control to the people who are flopping around in the fields and warehouses hoping for a tiny slice of what’s left of the pie.
Now that Trump has managed to snag 78 million votes, mostly thanks to Elon Musk and his band of idiot young male fanbois, a substantial segment of Democrats beholden to the oligarchy have succumbed to the likelihood of an authoritarian government,19 and have pivoted to figuring out how they can settle in for the ride.
Peter Thiel, Musk, and their fellow tech bros did what they aimed to do: They countered the female vote, despite the incredible appeal of Kamala Harris, who was not the socialist Republicans made her out to be but was as centrist as can be. They gathered their troops and leveraged Musk’s 200 million Twitter followers like a myopic, craven Band of Brothers, and smacked women right in the face.
And, just like that, the United States is now a far-right nation like China and Russia, unless Biden performs a late Christmas miracle and arrests Trump while giving the middle finger to the Supreme Court’s wacko presidential immunity ruling.
Wait. It gets worse. The world’s far-right momentum isn’t limited to the three superpowers.
Many European countries, often thanks to meddling from Putin’s Russia, are experiencing a far-right electoral resurgence.
For example, in Germany, the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), won a state election in Thuringia, which is a state in what used to be Soviet-controlled East Germany. Voters in eastern Germany have pursued right-wing politics in recent years as immigration has gained traction as an issue.
The vote favored the right-wing party over a party that already leaned rightist, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The AfD gained about 33% of the vote. The CDU received 24% of the vote. This isn’t too much different than Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, which, despite what Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger tell us, has been a brutish, libertarian, theocratic force for more than forty years.
Germany’s neighboring state of Saxony nearly suffered a similar calamity. The CDU squeaked by with about 31.7%, of the vote to AfD’s 31%.
The AfD gained popularity in 2015 during a massive influx of refugees, mostly from Syria. The party began blaring the horns of Islamaphobia, and the East German hordes responded with open arms.
You might not be surprised to learn that Elon Musk recently added his two apartheid cents to German politics in a tweet that declared strong support for the AfD in future German elections.20
Romania has experienced enough Russian interference that its top court recently canceled an election (must be nice).
In France, far-rightist Marine Le Pen has been on the verge of gaining power for several years and has never been closer than she is now after France’s latest elections.
The Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Croatia, and The Czech Republic all have far-right parties taking major stakes in Parliament. Hungary is led by Trump pal Viktor Orban, whose goal in life is to chase every immigrant out of Hungary with torches and has won a strange allegiance from the hardline American CPAC conference, which is a festival for Christo-Nationalist hate groups.
All in all, it’s not unreasonable to despair that the world is in worse shape than it was in 1939.
If there’s any hope at all, it may lie with the Trump/Musk bromance. The chances of a cohesive, lasting Trump/Musk alliance that can bring the authoritarian philosophers in Russia and China their dream of a new authoritarian axis are about zero.
More likely is a war for the ages between Musk and Trump. Musk is already being called the “real” or shadow U.S. president. This won’t sit well with Trump, who dines on other people’s egos while satisfying his prodigious appetite for hate. But he hasn’t encountered a figure like Musk, who can match Trump’s ego tweet for tweet, post for post, lie for lie, and disinformation campaign for disinformation campaign.
The war between the two social media companies that run Twitter and Truth Social could be epic. Hopefully enough to destroy both social media networks and the men behind them.
And hopefully in full view of the American electorate in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
Notes
Thanks for reading! Here are some footnotes:
“The End of History? On JSTOR.” 2024. Jstor.org. https://doi.org/10.2307/24027184.
Dugin promotes the notion that fascism is part of the natural liberal world order and frequently blows such sweet nothings into Putin’s receptive ears. Che, Chang. 2024. “The Father of Chinese Authoritarianism Has a Message for America.” The New Yorker. December 21, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/the-father-of-chinese-authoritarianism-has-a-message-for-america.
In the before times, communist dictatorships would often name themselves, “The People’s Democratic Republic of Transylvania” or what have you before sucking their people dry.
In 2009, Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.” Yes, he believes Appalachia and women have ruined democracy: “The Education of a Libertarian.” 2009. Cato Unbound. April 13, 2009. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/.
“美国史上权力最大的总统（和他的黑色MAGA革命）.” 2024. Archive.md. December 3, 2024. https://archive.md/VHPDE.
You may remember Borat as Rudy Giuliani’s tormentor…
PJSC Gazprom (Russian: Газпром, IPA: [ɡɐsˈprom]) is a Russian majority state-owned multinational energy corporation headquartered in the Lakhta Center in Saint Petersburg.
— Contributors. 2003. “Russian Oil and Gas Company.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. September 17, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazprom.
Coelho, Carlos, and Kristyna Foltynova. 2020. “Everything You Need to Know about Novichok.” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. RFE/RL. 2020. https://www.rferl.org/a/everything-you-need-to-know-about-novichok/30964840.html.
Xuě bái xiě hóng: Guó Gòng Dōngběi dà juézhàn lìshǐ zhēnxiàng (雪白血紅: 國共東北大決戰歷史眞相 White snow red blood: A true history of the KMT-CPC battle for the Northeast) by Tiandi Press
Meisner, Maurice (1999). Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic (Third ed.). Free Press. p. 72. ISBN 0684856352
Yushi, Mao. 2014. “Lessons from China’s Great Famine.” The Cato Journal 34 (3): 483–91. https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA387348115.
These days, American politicians like Joe Biden attempt to mimic this kind of capitalism through something called industrial policy, whereby the federal government encourages such things as solar power and other climate-friendly goodies.
“SCMP.” 2024. South China Morning Post. December 22, 2024. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3291727/chinas-c919-jet-faces-crunch-test-its-network-rapidly-expands.
“Ambassador Xie Feng Read President Xi Jinping’s Congratulatory Letter to the 2024 Gala Dinner of the U.S.-China Business Council（2024-12-12）_Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America.” 2024. China-Embassy.gov.cn. 2024. http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/dshd/202412/t20241219_11505694.htm.
Skinner, Paige. 2024. “Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Damn You Know It’s Bad When Even Trump Is Feeling Bad for Me.’” HuffPost. December 19, 2024. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/aoc-damn-you-know-its-bad-when-even-trump-is-feeling-bad-for-me_n_676354ace4b0f283a8092fd3.
“Congress Live Net Worth Tracker | Quiver Quantitative.” 2020. 2020. https://www.quiverquant.com/congress-live-net-worth/.
Yes, I know it’s a stretch to call Russia a superpower, but until they give up their thousands of long-range nukes, I hope you’ll cut me some slack here.
Wright, John G. 2022. “John G. Wright: The Reigning Oligarchy (1949).” Marxists.org. 2022. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1949/08/oligarchy.htm.
See Fetterman, John:
Sager, Monica. 2024. “Fox Host Apologizes to John Fetterman, Says He’s Now ‘My Favorite Senator.’” Newsweek. December 26, 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/jesse-watters-john-fetterman-nice-list-favorite-senator-2006171.
Jazeera, Al. 2024. “Elon Musk Backs Germany’s Far-Right AfD before Elections.” Al Jazeera. December 20, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/20/elon-musk-backs-germanys-far-right-afd-before-elections.
It's all so depressing... I wasn' aware that Pelosi was THAT rich. Ugh. Great piece with a lot of good-to-know history. :(
It occurs to me that China's authoritarianism probably has more domestic legitimacy than that of Russia or the USA since the country was lately very poor but now 'works' after the fashion of Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, whereas in the contemporary USA, authoritarianism would probably mean doubling down on failure. The USA would be the weakest and most unstable link in the triad (which is otherwise strikingly reminiscent of Orwell's Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania, by the way).