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In the era that I studied when I was still part of the academic world, one recurrent topic was that of “over-mighty subjects.” This was more a reality of the 15th and 16th centuries, just before my period, the eras of the Yorkists and Lancastrians and the Tudors. But the fear hung over the British Isles and thus over their American colonies well into the 17th and 18th centuries. The term referred to subjects of the Crown who were themselves so powerful that they threatened the sovereign power of the Crown itself. They might command more wealth, hold castles and walled cities. They might command retinues that verged on private armies notwithstanding their notional obedience to the King. (The problem resurfaced in the late 18th century in the different, commercialized form of the British East Indian Company, which used its geyser of cash to quite effectively corrupt the House of Commons.) In the U.S. we have no sovereign; or, more specifically, we have no sovereign head of state. But there is a sovereign, the American people. This architectonic fact of the American order is written into every document that undergirds the Republic, from the founding charters to the simplest phrasings that permeate judicial proceedings where prosecutors appear in court representing “the people.”
The American people are the sovereign. And here we see how this same hoary issue has resurfaced, with Elon Musk but not only Musk, that old problem of the over-mighty subject. Quite simply, one man is so powerful, with such a vastness of wealth, with a tight grip over critical technologies and with a dominating ownership of one of the world’s largest communications platforms that he similarly threatens the power of the sovereign itself, in this case, the American people. His power is so great, concentrated in one single, deeply erratic and rapacious individual, that it threatens the ability of the American people to be sovereign and thus free.
More critical observers have challenged the idea that there is such a thing as “the American people” or “the people” in the more generic sense in which the concept is invoked in American civic discourse. To those critics it is at best an aspirational fiction. But we don’t need to get into that debate to recognize the basic point. Some people can become so powerful that they challenge our individual ability to be free, to have the imperfect though real protection of the law, to remain unmastered by a single individual who is still at least notionally our equal. In the present crisis, it’s Donald Trump, a legitimately if misguidedly elected President, who is licensing Musk’s wilding spree through the federal government. If and when he chooses to shut this down, he can. But it’s clear that even Trump isn’t able to manage Musk in the way he abuses and brutalizes the other toadies who crowd around him. Musk is clearly driving this train, with Trump perhaps excited by the pain and anguish he’s creating, but still at best only okaying things after the fact. Trump has an on/off switch. But that’s it. And costs of flipping the switch to off are great, even for Donald Trump.
As public opinion has turned decisively against Musk, if not yet Trump, we’ve seen his megalomania grow totally untethered. He now routinely accuses critics of crimes, demands their imprisonment. Yesterday he called Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) a “traitor” for having the temerity to show up in Ukraine while Musk is trying his best to, in his phrase, put that country into the wood chipper. Lots of people mouth off on Twitter, of course. But Musk isn’t anyone. He’s got everyone in the federal government scared of him, running on a short leash and needing to do whatever they can to appease him. He speaks with the power if not the authority of the state.
But the issue is not only Elon Musk. It’s a general problem that isn’t going anywhere. It’s the reductio ad absurdum of the economic inequality debate, when levels of super power get concentrated in the hands of a single monomaniacal individual.