Are we seeing a coup in America? It looks like it. The strangest thing is that the world doesn’t seem to recognize it.
A billionaire and felon was elected as president of the United States. That’s a weird timeline but okay, we can work with it. There are checks and balances built into the American system to counter this. What nobody anticipated was the overwhelming assault on American institutions that nobody was able to stop.
Elon Musk and his cronies have been infiltrating instruments of American government that are notoriously apolitical and provide the infrastructure that lets the American government function. He’s not going after the institutions that make headlines or are flashy: his targets aren’t congress, the treasury department or the US military.
Instead he’s focusing his efforts, his energy and his resources on the flow of American money to American interests that go below the radar. He’s focusing on the systems which funnel money to social security recipients, the systems which handle pell grants and give out scholarships and the systems which give lifesaving aid to poor people across the world.
To Musk and his supporters, these are all organs of a state which is corrupt. Musk sees the American state as inherently corrupt and dishonest. To his supporters, he is a crusader who is walking in the light.
He might be but he’s doing it without any authority, any mandate and nobody to stop him. A private citizen has carte blanche access to the deepest recesses of the American government’s innards. No oversight exists and he answers to no one.
Bangladesh had a huge problem of corruption and this is exactly how it started: a group of very motivated men were granted access to the inner levers of power, without oversight or accountability. What transpired was the extreme politicization of state organs which had otherwise remained apolitical in a very dysfunctional country. We are still figuring out how much they stole, how much they corrupted the system and how to fix it all.
America is in the initial stages of this coup. It isn’t happening with guns, it isn’t happening with explosions but it is definitely happening. As the safeguards which are supposed to protect the system fail, it is going to take a huge effort to loosen the grip of Elon and his friends and to undo the damage they are inflicting.
