The advantage of indignation is it leaves you with a clear conscience, without any form of further analysis. The words spoken by Elon Musk at the “Unite the Kingdom” rally organised by far-right activist Tommy Robinson this month sparked widespread outrage among politicians. Downing Street condemned the tech boss for using “dangerous and inflammatory” language, after he told the crowd that “violence is coming” and “you either fight back or you die”. The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has appealed to other political forces to “put party politics aside” and join him in condemning Musk’s call for a dissolution of parliament. Even Peter Kyle, the business minister who had distinguished himself for his unapologetic submission to tech bosses, adopted the attitude of the betrayed spouse, judging that Musk’s comments were “slightly incomprehensible” and “totally inappropriate”.
Yet the Tesla boss’s conduct is anything but incomprehensible, and anyone who thought his words — and his unwavering support for far-right movements around the world, from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Germany’s AfD — were due to the eccentricities of a South African-born billionaire would be making a huge mistake. The truth is that Musk’s approach reveals something more fundamental, which goes far beyond the preferences of a single, albeit extremely powerful, tech oligarch.
Until recently, economic elites, financiers, entrepreneurs and managers of large companies relied on a political class of technocrats — or aspiring technocrats — from the right and left, moderate, reasonable, more or less indistinguishable from each other, who governed their countries on the basis of liberal democratic principles, in accordance with market rules, sometimes tempered by social considerations. That was the Davos consensus. A place where politics was reduced to a competition between PowerPoint slides, and the most transgressive thing you could do was wear a black turtleneck instead of a light blue shirt at cocktail hour.