Monthly Archives: June 2022

Libertarians believe that people should be able to travel freely as long as they are peaceful. We welcome immigrants who come seeking a better life. The vast majority of immigrants are very peaceful and highly productive.

Indeed, the United States is a country of immigrants, of all backgrounds and walks of lifesome families have just been here for more generations than others. Newcomers bring great vitality to our society.

A trulyfree market requires the free movement of people, not justproductsand ideas.

Whether theyare from India or Mexico, whether they have advanced degrees or very little education, immigrants have one great thing in common: they bravely left their familiar surroundings in search of a better life. Many are fleeing extreme poverty and violence and are searching for afree and safe place to try to build their lives.We respect and admire their courage and are proud that they see the United States as a placeof freedom, stability, and prosperity.

Of course, if someone has a record of violence, credible plans for violence, or acts violently, then Libertarianssupport blocking their entry, deporting, and/or prosecuting and imprisoning them, depending on the offense.

Libertarians do not support classifying undocumented immigrants as criminals. Our current immigration system is an embarrassment. People who would like to follow the legal procedures are unable to because these procedures are so complex and expensive and lengthy. If Americanswant immigrants to enter through legal channels, we need to make those channels fair, reasonable, and accessible.

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Immigration | Libertarian Party

When an 82-year-old woman showed up to vote at her polling place in Manalapan today, poll workers turned her away. They said she could not vote as a Republican because shes on the rolls as Libertarian.

But Ann P. Ciaccio wasnt going to be disenfranchised without a fight, so she went to court and asked a judge to allow her to cast her vote.

Records show that Ciaccio registered as a member of the Libertarian Party in August 2020 while applying for identification at the Motor Vehicles Commission.

Ciaccio said she had no recollection of registering as a Libertarian and never intended to affiliate with that party. She testified that she was not seeking to perpetrate any fraud, but rather to protect her right to vote.

Superior Court Judge Mara Zazzali-Hogan allowed Ciaccio to vote by provisional ballot, and finding her testimony to be credible, ordered her provisional ballot to be counted and that her party affiliation revert to her prior registration as a Republican.

The right to vote would be empty indeed if it did not include the right of choice for whom to vote, Zazzali-Hogan said.

In July 2020, more than a month before Ciaccios issue occurred, the state acknowledged that a computer glitch at motor vehicles was responsible for some voters being assigned the wrong party identification.

Minor party registration had increased 2169% between 2016 and 2020.

New Jerseys 2018 Motor Voter law automatically registers any eligible voter conducting a transaction at a state motor vehicle agency, unless they specifically opt-out.

The prompt refers to a screen allows voter to select a party affiliation: Democratic, Republican, Unaffiliated or other. If the choice is other, the voter is taken to a new screen that offers a choice of seven third-party options: Green, Libertarian, N.J. Conservative, Natural Law, Reform, Socialist or U.S. Constitution.

The design flaw is that voters must pick one of those seven parties; there is no way to complete the motor vehicle transaction without doing so.

The now-defunct Natural Law Party, which hasnt run a candidate in New Jersey in 21 years, has seen their voter registration jump from 396 voters in June 2016 to 7,019 in 2020.

Among the voters registered with the Natural Law Party was a New Jersey woman who voted in 13 of 18 Democratic primaries but found that election officials changed her party affiliation in 2018 without her knowledge after a visit to a motor vehicle agency.

The Reform Party of New Jersey was founded in 1995 as a vehicle for Ross Perots independent presidential campaign, has grown from 146 members to 1,987 now, even though the organization disbanded more than 17 years ago.

Records show that a lopsided number of new minor political party registrants have come by way of the Motor Vehicle Commission customer service experience.

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After poll workers turned her away, 82-year-old woman goes to court to get her vote counted - New Jersey Globe | New Jersey Politics

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied review for a case brought by an Oakland couple regarding their owner move-in eviction, in a blow to all landlords who want to legally challenge city requirements regarding tenant buyouts in no-fault evictions.

The real estate lobby and landlords in Bay Area cities that have strict rules about tenant relocation payments were closely watching this case, which dates back to 2018. Landlords Lyndsey and Sharon Ballinger, who were both enlisted in the Air Force when they moved out of their Oakland home in order to be transferred to Washington, D.C. in 2015, came back in late 2018 to find that they could not just politely ask their tenants to leave. They were required under Oakland law to pay $6,582 in relocation expenses to the tenants, which they paid, but they then sued the city over what they considered illegal government seizure of property.

Libertarian activists nationwide, and real estate interests, saw this as a good case to run up the chain in the hopes of invalidating pro-tenant laws like this, the likes of which have been on the books in San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose, and Los Angeles for years but Oakland's law only took effect in 2018. The libertarian-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation took on the case.

In 2019, a federal judge ruled against the Ballingers, saying that the "[Oakland] City Councils legislative purpose, to promote community stability and help tenants avoid displacement and high moving costs, was a legitimate one."

They appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit, which ruled against them in February. "The Ballingers voluntarily chose to lease their property and to evict under the ordinance conduct that required them to pay the relocation fee," wrote Trump-appointed Judge Ryan Nelson in the 3-0 ruling. Nelson further wrote that the Oakland ordinance was not an illegal government seizure of money or property, but was a standard "regulation of the landlord-tenant relationship," which the Supreme Court had consistently upheld. Cities are permitted to charge taxes and fees to property owners for various reasons, including for things like hazardous waste cleanup.

And as the Chronicle reports, the Supreme Court has essentially concurred, though without any written decision or evidence of dissent.

The Pacific Legals Foundation has tried to set this up as a conflict between two hard-working members of the military and their former tenants, who were apparently tech workers.

"The Ballingers are disappointed that the court failed to recognize that the Oakland law forcing them to pay their software industry tenants $6,500 before they could re-occupy their own home, in accordance with the terms of lease executed before the law was even enacted, is unconstitutional," the foundation said in a comment after the Ninth Circuit ruling four months ago.

But tenants' rights advocates argue that such laws are necessary especially in places like the Bay Area with extremely high rents.

Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker said, in response to the Supreme Court's denial, that "the modest relocation assistance landlords must provide to tenants who are displaced, by no fault of their own, in an owner move-in eviction, provides critical support for those facing unanticipated moving expenses and other relocation costs," and can help tenants avoid homelessness. Parker previously has cited the fact that many displaced tenants lose the rent-control protection they may have had for years, and they face a rental market with exorbitantly higher rents than they were paying, leading to potential displacement out of their community altogether.

J. David Breemer of the Pacific Legal Foundation said in a statement, per the Chronicle, that the Ballingers are disappointed but they hope the Supreme Court, in a future case, "will ultimately agree that rental owners are entitled to real constitutional protection when government requires them to pay off tenants before moving back into their own home."

Previously: Oakland Landlords Lose Case Over Paying Tenants $6,500 To Leave

Photo: Ian Hutchinson

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Supreme Court Rejects Oakland Couple's Case Opposing Tenant Payouts, In Win For Tenants' Rights - SFist

In his 1963 book The Deadlock of Democracy, political historian James MacGregor Burns offered anovel suggestion. Then as now, most academics agreed that Americas party system was an unusually stable one. Ever since the Civil War era, when the election of Abraham Lincoln helped to consolidate the dominance of two major political parties, Republicans and Democrats had ruled with relatively little outside contestation. But Burns saw things differently. America did not have two political parties, he argued, butfour.

In Burnss formulation, each of the major parties was split into two branchesa congressional wing and a presidential wingand there could be significant tensions between the two. Today, the specific division that Burns highlighted has been largely forgotten by history. But his approach of surveying American politics by dividing it up into factions more nuanced than Democrat and Republican has been much more resilient. For example, in 2021, author and journalist George Packer published abook arguing that the nations politics are not driven by division between two groupsliberals and conservativesbut rather by conflict between four tribes: alibertarian Free America, anationalistic Real America, atechnocratic Smart America, and aprogressive-minded JustAmerica.

In creating such aclassification, Packer stands in acrowded field. Since Burnss time, aplethora of columnists and commentators have followed in the historians footsteps, dividing the electorate into rival blocs and asking the provocative question: What if America did not have two political parties, but three? Or four? Or six? What if this were not ahypothetical scenario, but rather areflection of our currentreality?

Whether we like it or not, Americas established two-party order shows little sign of being replaced in the near future. But it can still be valuable to examine how the voting blocs that exist in U.S. politics might align if we were in, say, Germany, Spain or New Zealand. Instead of simply classifying voters as Democrats or Republicans and treating the identity of these parties as static, we can examine the shifting factions that have contentiously vied for control within each party. This way of looking at political factions is more than an interesting thought experiment. For organizers, it can allow for better strategic decision-making, yielding new insights into influencing other groups, building coalitionsand winning realpower.

Breaking down multi-partyAmerica

Of the many efforts to divide the American body politic into groupings thatin another contextmight be cohesive enough to function as independent political parties, perhaps the most long-standing has been that of the Pew Research Center. Since 1987, Pew has gathered survey data and released areport approximately every five years that seeks to look at internal divisions within both the Republican and Democratic coalitions. The original report, written in the waning days of the Cold War, said that, In 1987, the conventional labels of liberal and conservative are about as relevant as the words Whig and Federalist. The report argued that these expressions have not only lost much of their traditional meaning, they do not even remotely come close to defining the nature of American publicopinion.

To more actively characterize the divisions among the U.S. public, Pews researchers identified nine basic values and orientations that served to motivate voters and divide people into groups. These were: religious faith, tolerance, social justice, militant anti-Communism, alienation (or the belief that the American system does not work for oneself), American exceptionalism, financial pressure, attitudes towards government, and attitudes towards corporations. Ask someone about these issues, the surveys logic went, and you could find their true politicaltribe.

Over the years, the cleavages highlighted in Pews political typologies have shifted somewhatfear of Soviet Communism, for example, has been supplanted by concerns about immigration as adriver of political behavior. But the overall approach of breaking the American public into subgroups based on their attitudes toward key issues has remained constant over eight reports spanning more than three decades. Others have also joined Pew in creating like-minded typologiesamong the more detailed of which are from the right-leaning Virginia-based think tank Echelon Insights and progressive political scientist Lee Drutman.

So how do Republicans and Democrats breakdown?

With regard to those on the right wing of the political spectrum, the very first Pew report contended that The Republican Party has two distinct groups: the Enterprisers, whose more traditional form of Republicanism is driven by free enterprise economic concerns, and the Moralists, an equally large, less affluent and more populist group driven by moral issues and Militant anti-communism. Thirty-five years later, such adivision may still be valid. At the same time, Drutman, alecturer at Johns Hopkins University and asenior fellow at New America, has offered some updates for the current political climate. He believes that, if operating in amulti-party system, Republicans would probably split into three: acenter-right Reform Conservative Party (think Marco Rubio), aconsistently conservative Christian Republican Party (think Cruz), and apopulist-nationalist America First Party (think Trump). He also allows that Maybe asmall Libertarian Party would win someseats.

Pews recent surveys further draw out some of the fault lines. The most business-minded Republicans, which in 2017 Pew called New Era Enterprisers, demand aggressive tax cuts and deregulation, but they may be open to immigration and tolerant when it comes to same-sex marriage. They are relatively cosmopolitan and largely internationalist, supportive of government efforts to advance corporate-led globalization. These well-off conservatives stand in contrast with another group, dubbed the Populist Right in the 2021 survey, which is most likely to find its ranks based in rural areas. Its members are rabidly anti-immigrant, show significant resentment toward banks and corporate elites, and rail against free trade treaties. Athird group, Faith and Flag Conservatives are older and overwhelmingly Christian. Diverging from the populists, they generally view the U.S. economic system as fair. Instead, they are driven by the culture war. Seeing themselves in an electoral battle against abortionists, homosexuals, and radical feminists, they have never met a Dont Say Gay bill they didntlike.

The fact that New Era Enterprisers, the Populist Right, and Faith and Flag Conservatives have been able to hold together within the Republican Party coalition is remarkableand sometimes tenuous. The Tea Partys challenges to incumbents they dubbed RINOs, or Republican in name only, illustrates that the coexistence has not always been peaceful. As for points of unity, Pew noted in 2021 that the factions are fairly aligned in beliefs about race: the groups consistently rebut the idea that white people benefit from advantages in society that Black people dont have and largely contend that increased public attention to the history of slavery and racism in America isnegative.

With regard to the political left, the Democratic coalition contains divisions of its own. When asked ahead of the 2020 presidential primaries about the prospect of former Vice President Joe Biden winning the Democratic Party nomination, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) memorably groaned. Oh God, she remarked to New York magazine, In any other country, Joe Biden and Iwould not be in the same party, but in America, weare.

A variety of political analysts have backed Ocasio-Cortezs sentiment. In a2019 studyentitled What if the U.S. Were aMulti-Party Democracy?Echelon Insights imagined the Democrats splitting into three distinct groups in aEuropean-style party system, with its members divided between the Acela, Green, and Labor parties. The neoliberal Acela Party would be oriented toward business-aligned centrists. In the studys words, it would aim to Advance social progress including womens rights and LGBTQ rights, work with other countries through free trade and diplomacy, cut the deficit, and reform capitalism with sensibleregulation.

Progressives on the left end of the Democratic coalition would hardly find this to be an attractive platform. Instead, Echelon predicted that they would join a Green Party led by Ocasio-Cortez and other members of The Squad. This party would seek to pass aGreen New Deal to build acarbon-free economy with jobs for all, break up big corporations, end systemic inequality, and promote social and economicjustice.

Between these two poles would fall most traditional Democrats. Echelon envisioned that abloc of people possibly more than twice as large as each of the other groupings might join aEuropean-style Labor Party. This party would put the middle class first, pass universal health insurance, strengthen labor unions, and raise taxes on the wealthy to support programs for those less welloff.

Members of the hypothetical Acela, Labor, and Green parties might actually agree in their diagnosis of many problems, and yet disagree on the solutions. Pew argues that, within the Democratic coalition, intensity of belief is often more important than cleavages based around issueswith mainstream liberals being content with modest reforms and younger radicals believing that much more drastic change is needed. In amulti-party system, this dynamic might force these parties to work in coalition, even as they remain at odds about what specific actions the state shouldtake.

The value of understandingfactions

Not all attempts to think about the United States as having amulti-party system are driven by the same motives. While some political observers are merely launching what if? conversations, other advocates are pushing for America to fundamentally revise its election lawsan improbable goal given the strong incentive the two dominant parties have to maintain theirnear-monopolies.

So, if we accept that electoral structures are unlikely to significantly transform anytime soon, why is it useful to look at various efforts to think of America as amulti-party system?

First, it allows us to better understand what the Democratic and Republican parties actually are. Instead of seeing the two major parties as ideologically well-defined groups with stable sets of beliefs, we can view them as fractiouscoalitions.

Various legal structures, electoral rules and political norms have created asituation in the United States in which forming new parties is difficult. Those outsider parties that do form tend to have limited success. Therefore, competing groups often instead seek influence within the dominant parties, which end up being big-tent entities that try to keep many constituencies together under the same roof. Inside the tent, factions make uncomfortable truces in order to create majorities that can hand them ashare ofpower.

While political conflict in Europe often is expressed in arguments between different parties, in the United States, we are just as likely to see tensions playing out as arguments within the major parties. The Democrats and Republicans contain subgroups that rise and fall over time, and with their ascent or decline, these factions change the demographics and ideologies of the parties. Winning power requires thinking about how your faction can become dominant. As organizer Alexandra Flores-Quilty put it in arecent report for Momentum, Political parties are not monoliths. They are open terrains of conflict andstruggle.

At several key junctures in the past centuryincluding during the New Deal, and the emergence of the religious right in the 1970s and 80swhat it has meant to be aRepublican or Democrat has fundamentally altered. Attention to rising and falling factions allow for insight into how major realignments happen within mainstreampolitics.

Thinking about America in amulti-party context can be useful particularly for those on the political left. The landscape of political blocs illustrates how, even if the left had its own party that was more ideologically coherent than the Democrats, it would still have to deal with the problems of interacting with otherfactions.

Disgusted with both Democrats and Republicans, advocates of third parties often promote afresh party infrastructure as apanacea. But the creation of anew party does not solve every political problemit only introduces new sets of problems that then must be resolved. Because groups of people with different beliefs will not simply disappear, even those pursuing athird-party strategy must be attentive to fault lines within the electorate. They will need to consider which factions can be peeled off from the existing parties, and what narratives they might use to unite disparate groups. When the traditional parties try to win back their members by co-opting some of the third partys issues and exploiting divisions in their ranks, they will need to find ways torespond.

Questions of coalitions also remain. Athird party might have the advantage of amore disciplined and principled ideological identity, but purity only goes so far: European parties must constantly consider what groups they are willing to join in alliances with, and which they would never join. They must decide whether they might be willing to serve as apartner in agoverning coalition led by others, or whether they want to stay on the outside. If they do opt to go inside, they must consider what gains it allows them to secure, and what it costs them in terms of principles and their political appeal. As a2020 headline in the Irish Times observed, Serving in coalition government can be bad for junior partners health. On the other hand, being perpetually excluded from power altogether can lead aparty to lose followers and to grow ever more insular andirrelevant.

These considerations do not pertain only to hypothetical party coalitions. Many observers have contended that, within the current Democratic Party coalition, progressives can be seen as ajunior partner in just such agovernment. Those who would ultimately like to see this faction form its own party, as well as those seeking to make it adominant force within abigger Democratic tent, must deal with many of the same strategicquestions.

In 2019, Waleed Shahid, aspokesperson for Justice Democrats, agroup that backs progressive Democratic primary challenges, told Politico, There is going to be awar within the party. We are going to lean into it. Nearly adecade before, Tea Party advocates sought to reshape the Republican Party with RINO hunts that took down figures as prominent as former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (RVa.). In each case, the insurgents in question might have more easily created new parties under adifferent political system. But in America, these factional battles have played out under the cover of what might look from the outside like aplacid and stable two-partyorder.

In this respect, the type of thinking encouraged by James MacGregor Burns nearly 60years ago has grown in importance not only for those who want to understand the rifts driving American politicsbut also those who seek to make the most of the opportunities theypresent.

Research assistance provided by CelestePepitone-Nahas.

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What If America Had Six Political Parties? - In These Times

WAUSAU Open state Senate seats will dominate local elections in the Marathon County area this fall.

Decisions by Republican state Senate incumbents Kathy Bernierand Jerry Petrowskito not seek reelection will set up primary elections on Aug. 9.

Three Republicans will compete to replace Bernier in the 23rd Senate District. The winner of the primary will also win the seat in November because no Democrat filed to run for the seat.

Meanwhile, the winner of a three-way Republican primary to replacePetrowski in the 29th Senate District will face Democrat Robert Look.

Here are the races for the Marathon County area.An (*) indicates a race that will require a primary; (i) denotes the incumbent.

Incumbent Kathy Bernier, R-Chippewa Falls, is not seeking reelection.

Republicans*: Brian Westrate, Fall Creek; Sandra Scholz, Chippewa Falls; Jesse James, Altoona

Challengers: None

Incumbent Jerry Petrowski, R-Stettin, is not seeking reelection.

Republicans*: Brent Jacobson, Mosinee; Jon Kaiser, Ladysmith; Cory Tomczyk, Mosinee

Democratic: Robert Look, Rothschild

Republican: Calvin Callahan (i), Tomahawk

Independent:Todd Frederick, Merrill

Republican: Donna M. Rozar (i), Marshfield

Democratic:Lisa Boero, Marshfield

Republican: Pat Snyder (i), Schofield

Democratic: Kristin Conway, Schofield

Republican: John Spiros (i), Marshfield

Challengers: None

Republicans: James W. Edming (i), Glen Flora; Michael Bub, Medford

Democratic:Elizabeth Riley, Hayward

Libertarian: Wade A. Mueller, Athens, still pending state approval

Independent, Libertarian: Tom Rasmussen, Medford, still pending state approval

Republicans*: Kelly Schremp (i), Benjamin Seidlerand Pam Van Ooyen.

Incumbent Sheriff Scott Parks is not seeking reelection. Parks endorsed his chief deputy, Chad Billeb, in announcing his decision last summer.

Republican: Chad Billeb

Challengers: None

MORE NEWS: New plans for the Wausau Center mall site include apartments, restaurants and small retail

MORE NEWS: Wausau Streetwise: A Taste of Manila sells West Side Tasty Treat building, Cobblestone Hotel breaks ground in Mosinee

Contact reporter Alan Hovorka at 715-345-2252 or ahovorka@gannett.com.Follow him on Twitter at @ajhovorka.

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Wausau election roundup: 23rd and 29th state Senate seats up for grabs this fall - Wausau Daily Herald

Elon Musk at the opening ceremony of a new Tesla Gigafactory for electric cars in Gruenheide, Germany, March 22, 2022. Photo: Patrick Pleul/Reuters

Elon Musk styles himself as a character out of science fiction, posing as an ingenious inventor who will send a crewed mission to Mars by 2029 or imagining himself as Isaac Asimovs Hari Seldon, a farseeing visionary planning ahead centuries to protect the human species from existential threats. Even his geeky humour seems inspired by his love for Douglas Adamss Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

But while he may take inspiration from science fiction, as Jill Lepore has observed, hes a bad reader of the genre. He idolises Kim Stanley Robinson and Iain M. Banks while ignoring their socialist politics, and he overlooks major speculative traditions such as feminist and Afrofuturist science fiction. Like many Silicon Valley CEOs, he primarily sees science fiction as a repository of cool inventions waiting to be created.

Musk engages with most science fiction in a superficial manner, but he is a careful reader of one author: Robert A. Heinlein. He named Heinleins The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress from 1966 as one of his favourite novels. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a libertarian classic second only to Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged in its propaganda value for neoliberal capitalism. It inspired the creation of the Heinlein Prize for Accomplishments in Commercial Space Activities, which Musk won in 2011. (Jeff Bezos is another recent winner.)

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress popularised the motto Theres no such thing as a free lunch, often used by defenders of capitalism and opponents of progressive taxation and social programmes. Its about a lunar colony that frees itself, via advanced and cleverly applied technology, from the resource-sucking parasitism of Earth and its welfare dependents. In this instance, it appears that Musk correctly caught the authors drift.

No such thing as a free lunch

Heinlein filled his fiction with loudmouthed men who claim to be accomplished polymaths. They boss everyone around, make decisions on a whim and ignore advice regardless of the consequences. In other words, they act just like the CEO of Tesla, Inc. Likewise, Musk often attracts investors through publicity stunts rather than proven science and engineering, a self-marketing strategy that puts him, as Colby Cosh has pointed out, in the same dubious company as Heinleins space entrepreneur D.D. Harriman in his story The Man Who Sold The Moon.

But Heinlein wasnt in the business of criticising free-market capitalism far from it. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress depicts a Moon colony forced by the centralised Lunar Authority to ship food to Earth where it goes to feed starving people in places like India. The lunar citizens, or Loonies, revolt against the state monopoly and establish a society characterised by free markets and minimal government. The Loonies welcome the Malthusian catastrophe that will follow their withdrawal of nutritional assistance from Earth because they believe population collapse will ultimately make the welfare dependents down there more efficient people and better fed in the long run.

In addition to basic libertarianism, the novel promotes what Evgeny Morozov would call technological solutionism, the belief that every social or political problem can be solved with the right technical fix. This ideologys roots go back to the 1930s technocracy movement, which, as Lepore points out, numbered Musks grandfather among its adherents. Musk has taken up this legacy, promoting the electric car as the solution to climate change. In Musks view, private innovation rather than state intervention or activist politics will save the world.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress follows the same mindset. Although the Loonies advocate libertarian principles we learn that the most basic human right is the right to bargain in a free marketplace these prove secondary to the practical problem that Earth is draining Lunas water and other resources at a rate they predict will result in mass starvation on the Moon.

Their solution to this problem touts itself as equally scientific. In the book we learn that an insurrectionary group is no different from an electric motor: it must be designed by experts with function in mind. The Loonies revolutionary conspiracy decides that revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organisation and, above all, on communications.

Acting on this principle, one of the co-conspirators, Mannie the computer technician, designs their clandestine cell system like a computer diagram or neural network, mapping out how information will flow between revolutionists. They determine the best way of organising a cadre not through democratic deliberation or practical experience but through cybernetic principles.

Mannies disinterest in the messy business of political persuasion is a strength, not a weakness, because it allows him to see people as mere nodes in the network. Indeed, Mannys narration throughout the novel uses engineering terms to describe human beings and social interactions. He describes one woman as [s]elf-correcting, like a machine with proper negative feedback. Mannie, who boasts a cyborg arm, treats others as mechanisms in need of tinkering. Musks brain-machine interface company, Neuralink, attempts to operationalise this idea.

Also read: Elon Musk Thinks Neuralink Could Merge Humans With AI Neuroscience Says Wait

For Mannie and his co-conspirators, democratic input from the revolutions mass base is noise that can only interfere with the signals transmitted from the elite leadership outward to their interconnected web of subordinates. Even when it comes time to establish a constitution for the Luna Free State, the conspirators use clever procedural tricks to do an end run around everyone in the congress who is not a member of their clique. Smart individuals always win out over mass democracy in Heinleins fiction and thats a good thing.

The novel takes solutionism to the extreme when Mannie enlists the help of a sentient supercomputer named Mike to lead the overthrow of Earths colonial government on Luna. Anticipating the exuberance of the dot-com era, Heinlein suggests that a computer can foment change better than any movement or organisation. Mikes revolutionary tactics reflect the novels obsession with communications: much of the book is devoted to the conspiracys attempts to shift public opinion against the Lunar Authority and sow confusion among the governments ranks through hacking and media campaigns.

Like the keyboard warriors of our present moment the hyperonline Musk among them Heinleins revolutionary elite hope to change society by manipulating information.

When revolutionary war breaks out, Mikes technical superiority emerges as the deciding factor. Using electromagnetic catapults, the supercomputer hurls rocks at Earth that impact with the force of atomic explosions. The Federated Nations of Earth are forced to grant their lunar colonies independence after this calculated show of force. In the end, the Loonies achieve political emancipation thanks to a gadget.

Markets and machines

These ideas would later feed into what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron call the Californian ideology, a combination of techno-utopianism and economic libertarianism espoused by digital artisans such as software engineers working in Silicon Valley. As Barbrook and Cameron note, the Californian ideologys evangelists in the 1990s tended to be science-fiction fans who loved Heinlein and fancied themselves countercultural rebels bringing about a golden age of freedom by building the electronic marketplace. They believed that once unleashed from physical as well as governmental constraints, the free market would produce new technologies to address every possible problem or need.

Even more fundamentally, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress reflects a prevailing dogma that promotes cybernetics as the key to understanding the universe. Under this belief system, everything from markets to ecosystems appear as information processors operating based on feedback mechanisms. Like a thermostat, they respond to changing circumstances without conscious human control. Because the economy is a self-regulating system too complex for anyone to understand let alone steer, the Californian ideologists suggest, it should be insulated from democratic interference by a global legal order developed by neoliberal experts.

Musk has immersed himself in this ideology since his involvement with PayPal in the 1990s, and so it makes sense that he would be drawn to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Hes so mired in this way of thinking that he entertains the idea that all of reality is a computer simulation. In many ways, Musk models himself on Mannie the computer technician, the wisecracking rebel who only wants the government to get out of his way so he can make things work.

When Musk encounters traffic congestion, he doesnt see it as a failure of urban planning or a problem following from underinvestment in mass transit. Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to build a hyperloop. His solution to everything is an invention developed and marketed by rogue geniuses in the private sector. His faith in technofixes is so great that he imagines machines as potential overlords waiting to take over. There is more than a hint of Mike in his fear of an impending robot apocalypse.

Even his efforts to acquire Twitter and strip it of content restrictions seem to be motivated by the same ideology. Fred Turner argues that Musks opposition to content moderation stems from a belief that information wants to be free. When speech counts as data rather than dialogue, it becomes impossible to see why hate speech might be harmful.

Musks belief system rules out the idea that society is riven by antagonisms, least of all class struggle. He will always see problems like climate disaster as purely technical rather than derived from the profit-seeking behavior of the corporations ruining the planet. If science fiction reveals the contradictions of capitalism and encourages us to imagine alternatives, then Musks sci-fi persona is a cheap imitation. As a libertarian and a technocrat, the best he can do is fantasise about handing the revolution over to the machines.

Jordan S. Carroll is a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Puget Sound. He is the author of Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford 2021), and he is currently working on a book on race, science fiction and the alt-right.

This article was first published by Jacobin and has been republished here with permission.

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Why Understanding This '60s Sci-Fi Novel Is Key To Understanding Elon Musk The Wire Science - The Wire Science