Anne Althouse details in Autarchy Inc. how authoritarians are coordinating internationally to undermine democracy and support each other. The world is becoming increasingly polarized between haves and have-nots, between exploitative elites and the unwashed masses.
Does Pete see himself as Aragorn? Aragorn, after all is a king, preordained to rule and unite Gondor, to usher in an era of righteousness and prosperity.
And yet, Aragorn is still, at root, a king. A chosen one. Ordained to rule by blood, thanks to an ancestor being the biggest, meanest, and most cunning thug in the land.
America fought a war to escape the fickle rule of such inbred aristocrats, yet Thiel and his broligarch gang (and their Wormtongue, Yarvin) openly yearn for a stunted world of moh monarchs.
Which makes one wonder: If Thiel sees himself as the hero of LOTR, who does he see as the villain, in the role of Sauron?
Nancy Pelosi? Socialized medicine? Unions? Welfare? Public education? Vaccines? Rule of law? The modified free enterprise system?
It’s shocking how quickly corporate America has knuckled under to Trump’s regime, with Jimmy Kimmel being the latest casualty. Trump is taking tips from the likes of Victor Orban, Erdogan, Putin, and Modi as he silences media critics and shoves American democracy into an early grave.
As Jon Stewart said, comedians are the banana peels in the coal mine.
The USA has always been a collection of contradictions. But despite all its flaws, it has always aspired towards noble ideals, and been the greatest, brightest hope for democracy.
Perhaps the worst thing of all, and the most alarming for Western democracy, is that political assassination is making a comeback. Assassination is completely antithetical to democratic society, where peaceful power transition through debate and voting sidesteps the internecine violence that afflicts authoritarian societies.
Democracy isn't perfect, extremists are always trying to destabilize it, shift it towards the extremes. Arguably it's not a spectrum but a loop (as many have argued), with freedom on one side, and authoritarianism on the other, and you can get to either by turning left or right and going far enough.
And while it's true that Tolkien himself yearned for a quieter, feudal age, sans factories and industrialized warfare, would he really be on the side of the broligarchs, were he with us today?
Criticisms of monarchy aside, bottomless greed and an endless appetite for power and domination sounds a lot less like Aragorn, and much more like the eponymous Lord of the Rings.
Democracy is not incompatible with freedom, Mr. Thiel: autocracy is.
