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Is Mark Zuckerberg’s libertarian rebrand too little too late?
He’s got the curls. The chain. The threads. And now, increasingly branded an enemy by the movements on the left and right alike, Zuck has come out (in rather premeditated fashion) as a libertarian. Will it finally allow him to slip the noose of bad press, dissident suspicion, and persecution at the hands of the regime that still blames him for Trump’s victory in 2016?Stranger things have happened, but there are pitfalls. Long the refuge of people too cool to be conservative and too intelligent to be liberal — and those who hoped to be seen that way — libertarianism began a long leftward drift in the Obama years, leading skeptics to slap resultant squishes with the unflattering neologisms “libertarian” and “libertarian.” Once lauded as the youthful face of the new American golden age of social media-powered global uplift, someone seen as a probable presidential candidate himself, the buzzsaw of the early Trump years led to what I continue to believe was a decision by top Democrats and the Deep State left to punish him for 2016 until he broke.Part of the reason for the liberty-forward movement’s retreat into “personal preferences” (read: sexual kinks) was the sheer defeat of the conservative movement in the wake of the George W. Bush administration’s disastrous turn toward neoconservatism. But another factor at work was the aging out of the so-called paleolibertarians, typically cantankerous and decidedly uncool intellectuals who warned that abandoning the political insights of the Anti-Federalists and Southern Agrarians would lead to the collapse of the Republic into an ever more post-American empire. Today, in the face of bitter experience, the reputation of paleolibertarianism has been rehabilitated. Its most charismatic and articulate exponent, Pat Buchanan, inspires admiration in relatively young men on the right who consider his traditional piety, anti-imperialism, and fight against the Bush wing of the party well ahead of the curve we find ourselves on today. The affable but strident Buchanan made “the culture war” a household concept; his friendliness with literary renegades on the freedom-loving left like Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer held out the dazzling prospect of a national political realignment that never really materialized until Donald Trump brought RFK Jr. onstage a few weeks ago. Tech bro politics
ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 17: Mark Zuckerberg is seen at UFC 298 at Honda Center on February 17, 2024 in Anaheim, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)But in the meantime, another phenomenon altogether has reshaped the libertarian brand and identity: the rise of the tech bro. Often diametrically opposed to the anti-progressive Buchananite agenda, the tech bro has gravitated toward the idea that the republican form of government guaranteed by the Constitution has been more or less obsolesced by circumstances, replaced by a kind of plebiscitarian democracy that stands in the way of the vast scientific and mechanical transformations that make growth possible and life worth living. For the average tech bro, both conservatism and communism converge on an irrational and ultimately self-destructive fetish with the status quo; the state, whatever its ideological fashion, is at best a tool of leverage — never to be trusted for spiritual authority but presumed guilty of scheming to hoard power, control money, and punish divergent or revolutionary thought and action. All told, as one ex-Big Techer recently told me, tech bro libertarianism is “a very different breed” from that of the movement’s official Beltway representatives in the Cato Institute and elsewhere, which have proven almost totally unable to seize and wield political power in Washington. On the other hand, the kind of libertarianism Zuck wants to be associated with has some liabilities of its own. Enemies on the left focus on what they see as the brand’s twin evils of anti-democratic anti-statism while critics on the right identify it with “right-leaning pederast[s], crypto gamblers and all sorts of junkies,” as one X pseud put it, concluding that “if the suit fits, let him wear it.” Fair or unfair as all the grumbling may be, the clearest clue to the future of Zuckertarianism is probably Zuck’s singular personal experience itself. Once lauded as the youthful face of the new American golden age of social media-powered global uplift, someone seen as a probable presidential candidate himself, the buzzsaw of the early Trump years led to what I continue to believe was a decision by top Democrats and the Deep State left to punish him for 2016 until he broke. To me, at least, it’s just difficult to look at Zuck’s experience over the past eight years — the Frances Haugen op against Facebook, which helped force Zuck to pivot prematurely into the hugely lame and undercooked metaverse, even unto rebranding his company Meta; at the annihilation of Facebook’s news feed and support for political content; at the extraction of massive Zuckerbucks to “fortify” the 2020 election; and at the continuing federal antitrust lawsuit against Facebook for acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram, despite the Obama administration having rubber-stamped just about every merger and acquisition that crossed its regulatory desk — and not see a coordinated effort to torment the Zuck until he broke. Well, try as they might, that didn’t happen. Somewhat like Trump, Zuck looks better than his pre-persecution self, and on the inside, it’s not difficult to sense the marks of trial and tribulation. He has gotten out from under the branding burden of Facebook and the metaverse, and he’s got a loooooooong natural life ahead of him.His renaissance seemed natural until he let slip the engineered character of it all, leading at least some techworld people to roast him for it. But he has the juice to take the hit and keep on trucking — a rare quality in this moment, one that money still can’t always buy. There’s not really been anyone quite like Zuck. But his vertiginous ups and downs are familiar to any student of more or less great men, and, if anything, his out-and-proud libertarianism probably signals most of all that an ideological commitment to taking in stride whatever laughs and arrows come his way, come what may.
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