Kings of Capital
The pathological personalization of power is at the core of the far Right’s rise.
Alberto Toscano
On New Year’s Day, just hours after a man rammed his car into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans — killing 14 and injuring many others — images began circulating online of another attack: a Tesla Cybertruck parked in front of the lobby of the Las Vegas Trump Hotel, engulfed in flames.
At first, the blast was interpreted as an attack on MAGA: a vehicle produced by right-wing centibillionaire Elon Musk, blown up in front of a hotel bearing the name of the president-elect. But far from targeting Donald Trump or his top fundraiser, the explosion — carried out by Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger in a plan hatched with the aid of ChatGPT — was a tribute, a 21st-century votive offering to the idea of sovereign men. In a “manifesto” emailed to a retired Army intelligence officer, Livelsberger wrote, “Consider this last sunset of ’24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the [sic] Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.”
Livelsberger seemingly imagined his act as kickstarting a purge of un-American leaders and the rebirth of American virility — a fever dream of powerful men purifying the state, liberating men like himself in the process. Such a vision might be extreme, but it’s no longer unusual. Across right-wing culture, we witness an angry reassertion of masculinity that cuts across and connects the domestic and the national.
But we are not dealing with mere reactionary nostalgia. These patriarchal fantasies reflect concrete political and economic transformations that any progressive challenge to authoritarianism must confront. One is the erosion of any degree of public control over capital and markets. The other is the unchecked growth of a national security state in which executive power rules by decree, bypasses the legislative branch and repeatedly suspends civil liberties.
Within this order, the rule of finance and the rule of force are almost invariably embodied in belligerent and narcissistic forms of masculinity: powerful men who claim unique abilities to lift the nation out of a crisis — i.e., Trump’s “American carnage” — that is presented as simultaneously affecting gender, culture, the economy and the state.
Do we have the vocabulary to name and analyze this kind of power, which respects no boundaries between the political and the economic? Do we risk being mesmerized by the lucre and the trolling, distracting us from the deeper social realities that have given rise to these capitalist autocrats? Beyond the horror and ridicule, what is to be done with these supersized 21st-century sovereigns? And how are we to gauge the social and geopolitical effects of a form of power that originates not in impersonal market mechanisms or state bureaucracies, but the whims of a very few men?
Return Of The King
On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, and more than 15 months into Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, a long-awaited cease-fire went into effect. Transparently timed to burnish Trump’s brand as a dealmaker, the agreement was reportedly orchestrated by the 47th president’s new Middle East envoy, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, exerting Sopranos-style persuasion: ignoring the insistence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s office that the prime minister doesn’t hold meetings on the Sabbath, then wagging his finger in Netanyahu’s face, allegedly warning, “Don’t fuck this up.”
The substance of the cease-fire remains uncertain — its announcement was punctuated by more attacks on Palestinian civilians, many fear it’s a prelude to annexing parts of the West Bank and Trump and Netanyahu have suggested an effective ethnic cleansing by moving Gazans to Egypt or other countries. But it was nonetheless a PR win for Trump, underscoring his claim to be a man who gets things done, even before assuming office.
Once sworn in, Trump hastened to reinforce that image, announcing in his inauguration speech a raft of executive orders: declaring a baseless “energy emergency,” rescinding government recognition of trans people, withdrawing from the World Health Organization and pardoning more than 1,500 people involved in the January 6 riots.
Trump’s first term was notoriously hobbled by his administration’s weaknesses and inefficacies — its chaotic management, internal squabbling and failure to fully dominate the Republican Party. The Right’s recognition of these deficiencies motivated the Heritage Foundation’s voluminous agenda for a second Trump term, Project 2025; they would not squander their chance again.
In the plan’s section on the president’s office and powers, Russell Vought, the right-wing strategist and self-described Christian nationalist who was again picked to direct the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), detailed coming institutional transformations to wrest power from civil servants (“the woke and weaponized bureaucracy”) and weaken the administrative state. Declaring an “existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power … to the American people,” Vought called for “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” (At the end of Trump’s first full week in office, he directed the OMB to suspend all federal grants and loans, testifying to the extent of this executive overreach, but public backlash and legal challenges prompted the administration to withdraw the order within days.)
Trump’s interpretation of the Constitution dispenses with such niceties. As he infamously declared in a 2019 Turning Point USA speech, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want.”
More succinctly still, Elon Musk, speaking from his perch atop a newly created federal agency, marked Trump’s inauguration by proclaiming, “Return of the King.”
Great Men Unmaking History
In the early 20th century, the term “Caesarism” took hold on both the Left and Right to describe the emergence of authoritarianism in technologically advanced mass democracies.
To Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci — analyzing, from inside Mussolini’s prisons, the defeat of the workers’ movement and the emergence of fascism — modern caesars presented themselves as providential arbiters above the fray of conflict, simultaneously tribunes for the forgotten worker and allies to regulation-weary capitalists. They came in multiple guises — from presidents and prime ministers to leaders of industry — and could be found in regimes from parliamentary democracies to open dictatorships. At the heart of their appeal was an ability to act as agents of a sort of revolutionary stasis, overhauling political forms while retaining class rule.
German conservative Oswald Spengler saw Caesarism as an inevitable (and welcome) tendency written into the cycles of history. Spengler prophesied that, as Western civilization’s dynamism waned — with mass media and the power of finance undermining political authority — individual men unrestrained by ideological commitments and wielding unprecedented personal political power would come to dominate society.
Scanning the global political landscape, we can see not just the increasing prominence of reactionary and authoritarian politics, but the profusion of self-proclaimed men of destiny — a whole bestiary of 21st-century caesars. The past few months alone have provided many examples of the pathologies of personalized power, of sovereignty vested in profoundly fallible, malign and sometimes farcical individuals.
In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol has been impeached, arrested and indicted after instigating a brief coup he justified by claiming a communist “fifth column” was acting on behalf of North Korea.
In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has deferred a reckoning over his abiding unpopularity — for his antidemocratic maneuvers, corruption and, above all, the security failures of October 7 — by spearheading a campaign of genocide and regional destabilization.
Elsewhere, strongmen abide. In their embrace of turbocapitalism, demagoguery and repression, Presidents Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador are darlings of the Trumpian Right. In India, the “world’s largest democracy,” Narendra Modi continues to implement an ethnocratic neoliberal authoritarianism with fascistic characteristics. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s autocracy persists through the brutal bloodletting of the war on Ukraine and periodic forecasts of instability. The collapse of the Syrian dictatorship has been regarded as one of the crowning achievements of a rival caesar, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after two decades at the summit of Turkish politics.
For his part, in the lead-up to the inauguration, Trump floated the prospect of hostile takeovers of Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada — leaving unclear whether these would be purchases, mergers or violent seizures. Trump has not relented on this expansionism since taking office, as evidenced by reports of his late January phone call with the Danish prime minister, in which Trump demanded Denmark allow the United States to appropriate the autonomous Arctic island.
As the late radical historian Mike Davis wrote, reflecting on what he called “the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’” in his final essay: “Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands.”
Crisis and Authority
All of the leaders listed above combine public shows of masculinity with the scapegoating of their enemies and claims to be providential figures who will save the nation from crisis. But while much of the planet suffers under this plague of (often enfeebled) strongmen, they are also the products of markedly different contexts.
Sociologist Cihan Tuğal has shown that, while Modi, Erdoğan and former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte all shared a masculinist right-wing politics of nationalist redemption, their class alliances, political movements and economic visions reveal varied forms of authoritarian capitalist rule. They might all, superficially, be strongmen, but Duterte’s rape jokes, Modi’s celibacy and Erdoğan’s cultivated image of virile fatherhood are as distinct as the authoritarian projects they embody, which Tugal defines as “hegemonic autocracy in Turkey, ethnic autocracy in India and oligarchic autocracy in the Philippines.”
The lesson here is that, contrary to the anti-authoritarian arguments advanced by many liberals, we are never actually confronted with generic authoritarianism or cookiecutter fascist strongmen, but with singular figures of personalized power who leverage their individual biographies to take advantage of crises, inserting themselves as arbiters, fixers, men of the hour.
One commonality, however, is that their disruptive emergence has typically been enabled by decisions to increase the privileges and abuse of executive authority.
Trump’s 2019 declaration that Article II means he can do whatever he wants, while hardly nuanced constitutional interpretation, was effectively certified by the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States, which decreed that presidential immunity from prosecution covers all of a president’s official acts — including efforts to overturn an election. But even before the justices’ determination, the halo of impunity has hovered over the presidency for decades.
In his book State of Exception, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, having noted the history of U.S. rule by emergency decree from Presidents Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and beyond, argued that President George W. Bush crossed a critical threshold when he used his prerogative as commander in chief to dispatch the “illegal combatants” indefinitely detained at Guantánamo into a juridical no-man’s land. The Bush II years also saw the ascendancy of the “unitary executive theory,” a radical neoconservative interpretation of the Constitution that claims the president holds sole authority over the executive branch.
But it wasn’t just Bush. President Barack Obama’s enthusiastic embrace of a drone assassination program further solidified the link between executive power and the global projection of unchecked imperial sovereignty under the pretext of national security. President Joe Biden’s administration was happy to bypass Congress through emergency determinations to expedite the transfer of weapons that Israel has used to make Gaza unlivable.
What we can learn from these bipartisan examples is that the recurrence of Caesarism is not due to some atavistic compulsion, driving us inexorably into the arms of “great men.” Rather, as Spengler and Gramsci registered, it has to do with the relationship between individual rule and crisis— including political, economic and military crisis, but above all the protracted and systemic crisis of modern mass capitalist democracies.
That is, the entrenchment of emergency executive rule as a permanent form of governance is a necessary precursor to the emergence of authoritarian rulers. The frameworks in which modern caesars rise are not throwbacks to feudalism, absolute monarchies or ancient Rome, but are, above all, the product of the momentous 20th-century expansion of vast and complex states, which have used military, economic and public health emergencies as a seemingly unassailable rationale for consolidating executive power.
But that rationale has now been adopted far more broadly by the contemporary far Right, as its leaders claim that unchecked executive power is necessary to shrink the administrative state and free the individual.
It just so happens that some of these individuals — the ones who count — are richer than multiple countries combined.
The CEOs Who Would Be King
As Trump embraces the notion of an imperial presidency, his own primacy has been cast into doubt by the rise of another model of exorbitant individual power: Elon Musk. In mid-December 2024, in what many critics interpreted as an effort to secure his own business interests in China, Musk pressured Congress to abandon its hard-won bipartisan budget agreement through frantic posting on X, threatening retaliation against any Republican representatives not toeing his line. By the end of the month, Musk leveraged his clout amid an intra-MAGA spat over the scope of immigration crackdowns — should just farmworkers and delivery drivers face mass deportation, or Silicon Valley’s software engineers too? — effectively marginalizing the national-populist line identified with former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon and leading liberal antagonists to needle Trump with talk of “President Musk.”
Musk’s power doesn’t stop with U.S. domestic politics. Having cultivated a friendship with Italian “post-fascist” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Musk quickly moved on to spreading a racist moral panic about sexual violence in Britain and investing his political and media capital in boosting Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party — recently telling an AfD audience that Germans should stop feeling guilty and embrace national pride instead of a “multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” Coming in the wake of Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration rally, this signals a move beyond trolling and toward the programmatic embrace of a white nationalist politics.
Far from an anomaly, Musk’s elevation — if not yet to king, at least to kingmaker — resonates with the prophecies and wishes of far-right intellectuals.
In Spengler’s early 20th-century vision of Caesarism, he suggested that some caesars might rise from the ranks of capital rather than the political class. Spengler’s crowning example was the imperialist mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, who consolidated the racist rule of extractive capital in Southern Africa while gaining global stature as a philanthropist. That Musk, rightwing megadonor Peter Thiel and fellow venture capitalist-turned-Trump donor David Sacks all have deep roots in the world that Rhodes made is no coincidence.
More recently, the reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin has set forth his own vision of the capitalist as sovereign. In a 2021 podcast interview with Michael Anton, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute (a MAGA think tank) and now Trump’s director of policy planning, Yarvin talked at length about the need for an “American caesar,” suggesting that — constitutional ineligibility notwithstanding — the South Africa-born Musk might fit the bill.
Yarvin, best known for his proposals to “retire all government employees” and replace democratic rule with autocracy, claimed, in a recent interview with the New York Times, that governmental authority should be vested in a modern neoliberal kingship, run by a CEO. Such a form of “personal monarchy,” Yarvin continued, has been written into the institutional DNA of the United States ever since FDR responded to the emergency of the Great Depression by running “the New Deal like a start-up.”
That’s a bold claim to make about a country whose founding document defines itself against a prince it calls a tyrant, not to mention an inversion of FDR’s transformative use of executive orders to regulate the relationship between capital and labor. The utopia Yarvin envisions would instead wield that power to enable an untrammeled dictatorship of capital.
But no matter how ahistorical, Yarvin’s vision is no longer fringe. Venture capitalist and Trump advisor Marc Andreessen has echoed his talk about a monarchical presidency, and Vice President JD Vance has broadly cited Yarvin as an ideological influence.
For now, while the world’s wealthiest men are increasingly comfortable with wielding influence on the global stage, they are still reliant on executive power. Contrary to the views of some commentators, this does not mean that figures like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who, in October, blocked the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris) or Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg (who recently dropped Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking policies, to align with a right-wing version of free speech) are “bending the knee” by aligning with MAGA.
These Big Tech masters of the universe aren’t just shapers of global opinion and governance; they are also global government contractors who hold unprecedented power over public communication and digital infrastructure vital for trade, security and war. Their actions are dictated by the recognition that, especially in a fracturing multipolar world wracked by trade wars and instability, their monopoly power depends on the state as deregulator and contractor, while their profit-driven anti-worker animus — fighting unionization and treating “low-performing” employees as disposable — is best served by a political agenda that mobilizes widespread economic discontent all the better to entrench inequality.
A Time of Monsters
Where Spengler saw Caesarism as an inevitable tendency written into the cycles of political history, Gramsci diagnosed it as a transitional phenomenon: the hallmark of an unstable equilibrium in which neither progressive nor reactionary forces could come out on top. It was, he wrote, a symptom of the precarious interregnum between traditional bourgeois rule and a possible socialist future— as “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born” — that he famously called “the time of monsters.”
Ironically, when comparing Apple and Google to the colonial British East India Company in the foreword to the recent book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts (originally subtitled “Burning Down Washington To Save America”), Vance neatly names what we’re faced with: “a monstrous hybrid of public and private power.” A glance at the guests of honor at Trump’s inauguration — including Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, as well as the CEOs of Apple, Google and TikTok — quickly punctures Vance’s claim that the Right is the antidote to “hybrid power.” Rather, today’s Right seems to be building the apotheosis of such power — a real time of monsters.
But Gramsci also argued that, while the rule of modern caesars might last for decades, their voluble mix of conservatism and revolutionism — a revolution of the status quo, changing everything so that nothing fundamental will change — could never provide enduring solutions to underlying social ills. For Gramsci, that required the emergence of a mass political party, resolving crises through wholesale social transformation. That revolutionary path seems very distant today. But that’s no reason to tolerate today’s “personal monarchs.”
The traditions of the Left tell it that despots and kings are to be deposed, but also that kingship is worth abolishing, especially in its contemporary forms — of government by executive decree, always justified by crises real or imagined. But merely challenging executive power is toothless unless it confronts the dictatorial and personalized power of capital as well.
As the far Right normalizes both forms of monarchical power, the Left must remember an old truth: that social justice is not possible without leveling the colossal accumulation of wealth and power that make a mockery of the idea that we live in democracies.
ALBERTO TOSCANO teaches at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. He recently published Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso) and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull).
