Silicon Valley shows how it can be a willing, able servant of the one-party state.
Silicon Valley shows how it can be a willing, able servant of the one-party state.
I n 2002, historian and constitutional-law professor Philip Bobbitt published one of the most important history books ever written, The Shield of Achilles. Weaving together constitutional and military history, it charts the rise and fall of history’s major constitutional orders — from the princely states and kingdoms of early modern Europe to the nation-state we know today.
Constitutional and military history are not commonly thought of as related, but their relation is fundamental. As Bobbitt shows, what determines the success of a particular constitutional order during any period of history is its potential military power. It was no accident that Napoleon rose through the ranks of a popular conscript army based on ruthless meritocracy. The system was the reason why the armies of the French Revolution defeated every coalition of kingdoms arrayed against it until its armies could fight no more. Two-hundred years later, democracy emerged victorious from the century of total war for the simple reason that its comparatively limitless military power guaranteed victory no matter how dire the starting position.
As happens to every constitutional order sooner or later, the epoch of the nation-state is now ending, Bobbitt warns. It is destined to give way to a new epoch, that of the market state. Bobbitt predicts that this new constitutional order will succeed because its transnational networks will increasingly provide — and protect — the goods and services for which we traditionally looked to the state. And the institutions of the “market state” do not merely sideline those traditionally associated with the nation-state, they systematically weaken them. This is particularly glaring in the case of Big Tech and its new mass media.
I will admit that the full importance of many passages in Shield of Achilles escaped me when I first read the book a decade ago. Looking back, many of these have proved chillingly prescient. Here is one:
More than any other development it is the increased influence of the news media that has delegitimated the State, largely through its ability to disrupt the history of the State, that process of self-portrayal that unites strategy and law and forms the basis for legitimacy. . . .
Whatever the individual aspirations of its reporters and editors, the ideology of media journalism is the ideology of consumerism, presentism, competition, hyperbole (characteristics evoked in its readers and watchers) — as well as skepticism, envy, and contempt (the reactions it rains on government officials). No State that bases its legitimacy on claims of continuity with tradition, that requires citizen self-sacrifice, that depends on a consensus of respect, can prosper for very long in such an environment. It must either change so as to become less vulnerable to such assaults, or resort to repression. Some nation-states do the latter; the liberal democracies, whose claims to ensure civil liberties are as much a part of their reason for being as any other functions, cannot do this. At best they can manipulate information and resort to deception, thus poisoning the history on which they themselves must ultimately depend.
Thus Bobbitt foresaw not just the existential challenge that emerging mass media — including now a corporate oligarchy of social-media and web-search tech giants — would pose to the nation-state, but also that the democratic nation-state would be particularly vulnerable compared with dictatorships. This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the hopes inspired by the Arab Spring and similar movements around the world.
The media represent only one of the ways the nation-state is now threatened. As a constitutional order it is increasingly unable to provide its most basis service — security:
In summary, no nation-state can assure its citizens safety from weapons of mass destruction; no nation-state can, by obeying its own national laws (including its international treaties) be assured that its leaders will not be arraigned as criminals or its behavior be used as a legal justification for international coercion; no nation-state can effectively control its own economic life or its own currency; no nation-state can protect its culture and way of life from the depiction and presentation of images and ideas, however foreign or offensive; no nation-state can protect its society from transnational perils, such as ozone depletion, global warming, and infectious epidemics. And yet guaranteeing national security, civil peace through law, economic development and stability, international tranquility and equality, were the principal tasks of the nation-state.
In this light, the convictions of many Trump voters may be seen as a cry to save America as a nation-state, a nation-state that is withering under assaults from all directions, and which has already lost a perhaps-fatal degree of popular legitimacy. Indeed, the 1619 Project and its fellow travelers can be justly seen as an attempt to inter the legitimacy of the democratic nation-state once and for all. Isn’t the nation-state a racist construct? And isn’t fighting it demanded by the prime directive of anti-racism?
Yet in the midst of these challenges, there is one nation-state that appears increasingly equal to the task, at least for the moment. Of all the world’s major states, it has emerged as the proudest and most triumphant exponent of that classically European concept, established in the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648, namely, the absolute sovereignty of the political state. And that state is China.
China’s Communists never had much use for the Soviets’ original pretensions to international solidarity of the working class. Mao Zedong’s vision was nationalism in purified form. His concept arose from the political monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party, but he viciously subordinated the party. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, rose from that weakened party and skillfully subordinated the People’s Liberation Army. What is now emerging is a powerfully consolidated one-party state, in which all institutions and all citizens and even the party itself are subordinated to the nation-state and its supreme leaders.
The Chinese state is full of contradictions, and its failures are many. But it appears to be succeeding now partly because of an astonishing fact: It is in many ways more flexible and adaptable to the Internet Age than the very democracies that invented the Internet. After the power of mass media very nearly felled the regime at Tiananmen Square, the regime moved rapidly to consolidate its comparative advantages in the new strategic environment.
Following Deng Xiaoping’s admonition to keep a low profile while gathering strength, the Chinese government quickly found ways to give people most of the benefits of mass media while limiting the potential threat to its dictatorship — through the very means of censorship, intelligence-gathering, and propaganda that the new media have made possible.
The Chinese government routinely shuts down websites that host content it doesn’t like, without explanation, leaving managers to wonder what the offending content may have been, and leading them to censor themselves both prospectively and retrospectively. Its cyber capabilities are second only to the United States if at all, and it is a rapacious gatherer of surveillance intelligence, both at home and abroad. And its propaganda strategy, from the “50 cent army” that gets paid pennies to flood social platforms with feel-good pablum to the sophisticated media operations of the regime itself, is to shape both news and commentary to suit itself. In all these things, Big Tech has bent over backwards to show that it can be an effective pillar of the one-party state.
Big Tech has adjusted to its global market by developing a global business model. It has discovered how to operate — to the extent it is allowed — in both China and the United States simultaneously. And in both countries it has bought into what amounts to a protection racket.
To win the favor of Chinese authorities, Big Tech companies happily censor themselves — and the rest of us — even in the United States. They routinely remove or suppress content that the Chinese Communist Party deems offensive anywhere in the world.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the most likely and serious threat to Big Tech’s bottom line are the Democrats, the party of taxation, regulation, and routine spasms of anti-corporate outrage (directed only at American corporations). But Big Tech has managed to prove particularly useful to them, censoring damaging news and suppressing critical commentary (even by individuals sharing content only within their own families), such as the New York Post’s still-unrefuted Hunter Biden story. They do so on the basis that such content misinforms or incites, but they systematically allow and even amplify the most imbecilic conspiracy theories about Republicans (such as the Russia-Trump collusion hoax, or any Michael Moore theory picked at random) without regard to truth or the potential for violence.
Alas, here at home the similarities with Big Tech’s role in China run deeper still. The evolution of America’s political institutions toward a one-party state has been underway for a long time, particularly since the New Deal. Most progressives start with noble intentions — fighting inequality and racism, giving effect to the impulses of the democratic majority, protecting “rights” of every description. Alas, the progressive program necessarily entails government powers that are far beyond those that were actually enumerated in the original Constitution.
Think about the progressives’ core commitments: national majority rule at the expense of states and communities; the subordination of economic and property rights to whatever notion of social justice happens to command a transient majority; the manipulation of courts to take issues of self-government out of the realm of legislation entirely and make the progressive position permanent under a new umbrella of judicially discovered “rights”; and now the project to seize control of information, of the news, and of the Truth itself, which has gone so far as to propose a new analog to the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984 without the least hint of embarrassment.
And notice something else: The expansion and centralization of government power, supposedly justified by a democratic commitment to dismantling counter-majoritarian restraints, has come pari passu with the erosion of self-government, of community autonomy, and — most ironically — of individual choice.
Now come the Big Tech social-media platforms, launched two decades ago by Bill Clinton’s vision of unfettered invention, to demonstrate that they can be pillars of the one-party state and enforcers of its fetters. They have shown, in keeping with their global business model, that they can perform that function in the United States just as faithfully as in China. Indeed, their absorption of much of the public square, which is now subject to their completely arbitrary regulation, accountable to nobody, is the best example of Bobbitt’s “market state.”
In his 2009 book Terror and Consent, Bobbitt argues that the emerging-market states will be based either on consent or on terror, and the key question is whether there is a strong rule of law. “Weak laws . . . can induce states of consent to become states of terror because, in the absence of legal rules, force is the only option remaining that offers safety.”
Perhaps the question now on people’s minds — whether to regulate Big Tech in accordance with limits traditionally applied to governments — is not the crucial question. Perhaps the most crucial question is whether Big Tech will honestly embrace clear and neutral rules for its regulation of the public square, which nobody can seriously believe to be the case today, or whether instead it will become a pillar of the one-party state and its arbitrary power, on its way to becoming a dystopic market state of the future.