Musk's acquisition of Twitter to impact the rule of the US elite

Author: Yan Yi

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter reflects a struggle within the elite that rules the United States. In the two weeks since the news broke, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other pro-establishment-controlled mouthpiece media have repeatedly launched a great criticism of the harm of the so-called democratic system from all angles, and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and other big capitalists who are closely associated with the Democratic Party and have media platforms have taken turns to warn that Tesla's relationship with China has also been listed as a potential crime.

According to an article published by News Week on May 2, Ellen K. Pao, the former CEO of the American forum site "Reddit", published an article in the Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, calling on the government to regulate Twitter acquisitions and prevent the wealthy from controlling communication channels. The AMERICAN news website "Axios" said that Musk is "becoming more and more like a movie villain." These remarks are not so much a cry of media people and cultural people as a cover for the struggle between elites. Throughout Western history, elite rule has been the constant norm, as the Italian sociologist Robert Michels called the "iron law of oligarchy." In organizations, the "elite" tend to use their skills, resources, and powers to distinguish themselves from the general population, and this dynamic model also applies to democratic societies composed of the public. The elite may be at odds with a political party's democratic mission, but paradoxically, democratic politics will not work without the elite having the means, time, and capacity to oversee the day-to-day functioning of democratic institutions. Therefore, elite rule is inevitable, but the public can take action to protect itself from the dangers of oligarchy, and the realistic way is for the elite to counter the elite.

The reaction of the American elite to Musk's acquisition of Twitter at this stage is similar to the reaction of the former British to the colonial lords of the North American continent, with the former demanding that the latter pay attention to his status and the way he speaks. Power struggles between elites jeopardize freedom of speech and thought as the incumbent ruling class comes together to keep the latecomers out of the way and dominate the narrative with the help of media allies, distorting the up-and-coming threats to the existing state of affairs as a threat to the masses. In this way, the power challenges of the latecomers to the current rulers evolved into a public crisis.

It is noteworthy that the term "democracy" used by the current ruling elite refers only to the established political order, that is, extreme oligarchy, rather than an idealized system of public participation. Media platforms such as Twitter, which align the energy and attention of the population with the interests of the current ruling elite through selective pushes, are no longer just a private enterprise, but a tool for controlling information. For a regime that maintains its lies through content censorship, controlling access to information is critical to centralizing power.

(Image source: NetEase News Network)

Twitter has banned some users under various pretexts because it has published content that violates the principles of the current elite ruling class to control the minds of the people. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also announced the creation of a "Disinformation Governance Board" after Musk bought Twitter, focusing on cracking down on so-called "misinformation and disinformation," another way the U.S. regime controls information channels in the face of potential threats. At the end of the article, the people who are dissatisfied with the current ruling elite in the United States may not be able to escape the existence of the elite class, but the people can at least stand with those who are more in line with their interests, help the latter cut off the power chain of the current ruling class, and carefully craft a political order that is more suitable for the American people.

The main reasons why Musk's acquisition of Twitter has caused an uproar in the United States are: First, judging from Twitter's small profitability and lagging product innovation ability, all parties are not concerned about a commercial acquisition, but a symbolic political event; the opposing parties are not fighting for a company, but control of the public opinion field. Behind this scramble is the broader context of the American public's confrontation with the elite that has long controlled the state apparatus. It is particularly noteworthy that the establishment is so aggressive that it cannot use the army of public opinion under its control to block the acquisition, and the majority of the public is on the opposite side of the elite on this issue, believing that it is safer for Musk to control the online media platform than for politicians to control, which reveals the depth and breadth of the confrontation between the two sides. Clearly, the questioning of the legitimacy of the power of the American elite comes not only from the public, but also from capital within and behind the scenes. Under the existing System in the United States, public revolt against elites must be represented by new elite groups and must be endorsed by the capital that manipulates elites. With this in mind, the simultaneous emergence of public discontent, elite representation and capital opinions further increases the likelihood of major change. Another thing that is just as symbolic as Musk's acquisition of Twitter is that James David Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and a new generation of anti-establishment representatives, won the Republican primary in the Ohio U.S. Senate on May 4. If he is successfully elected in the midterm elections at the end of this year, the political future will be unlimited.

Secondly, the Twitter acquisition case shows the paradox that the current elite of the United States is caught in from one side. When the entire world is experiencing major changes unprecedented in a century, the United States, which is in a period of relative decline, is also facing huge internal changes. Since Trump's election as president in 2016, the spectrum of domestic politics in the United States has changed dramatically, with various forces rearranging and combining. As the two parties took turns to govern on behalf of different capital forces and the difficulty of controlling state power, the two party-building factions quickly merged after Biden came to power. They have reneged on their commitment to solve the domestic problems of the United States through change, using media control to suppress different voices on the one hand, and on the other hand, they have jointly chosen the old scheme of "internal and external treatment", that is, they try to spill domestic contradictions into international relations and solve domestic problems by creating world wars and global financial crises. As a result, sullivan and Blinken and other liberal interventionists from the Democratic Party quickly merged with the neoconservatives who launched the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict broke out. But the establishment also faces two difficulties, one is that the rise of social media has made it more difficult to suppress public opinion, especially in a state of weak governance and polarized concepts, left-wing progressives and right-wing conservatives have a very solid group of supporters; second, the changes in the world pattern have led to the consequences of contradictions and external introductions becoming more uncontrollable, especially after the decline in US power, the suppression and containment of China, Russia and other emerging economies will bring greater side effects to the United States itself. To address these difficulties, the establishment has had to wager more and take out-of-specification and self-defeating behaviors to achieve their goals, such as Trump's social media bans and unprecedented financial sanctions against Russia. But these moves raise deeper problems, namely the breakdown of rules. Compared with Biden, Trump, who chooses to believe in the algorithms of social media platforms, and Putin, who believes that SWIFT is neutral, are more like a well-behaved party. The paradox of the U.S. authorities in maintaining their rule is that the so-called rules-based order must be restructured at home and abroad through actions that undermine existing rules. But the problem is that their legitimacy is conferred by these rules, which leads the public to feel threatened by the empowering power it previously had and, more importantly, the monopoly capital that controls American politics feels threatened. Therefore, Musk's proposal to acquire Twitter after the Russian-Ukrainian conflict may not be a whim, as a spokesman for the launch of capital, this move does not only represent his personal preferences. The freedom of speech that Musk demands has both the superficial implication of regaining basic rights for the public, and essentially the need for capital to reclaim the right to define freedom of speech, and then to reclaim the control of public opinion that the current elite thinks it can use at will. Of course, the capital forces behind American politics are also complex, and the interests of various capitals are not completely consistent, which has led to the current controversy and struggle, and the Biden administration does not dare to directly veto the acquisition, and can only be restrained through the so-called "Disinformation Governance Committee", which will only further exacerbate the contradictions.

Finally, the Twitter acquisition also indicates that a new round of shock waves is brewing in the field of Internet governance, that is, a more complex environment of public opinion governance under the trend of change and technological innovation. Internet media platforms are not only content platforms for discussing the legality of governance, but also an interpretation of the legitimacy of governance. The struggle for control of public opinion in the United States is mainly internal, ostensibly a struggle between the current elite and the public, but essentially a struggle between different elite groups controlled by capital, and the interests of the public and capital are fundamentally inconsistent.

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