Atlas Shrugs again: How Donald Trump and tech titans are restoring cult of the individual

The plot of Atlas Shrugged sees the leading entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and engineers of America remove themselves from the American state to set up an alternative free-market nation in a secret valley. They are in rebellion against what they see as a lazy and morally corrupt “welfare America”. They say they are “stopping the motor of the world” by denying the US its finest brains and the source of so many of its achievements.

In the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s views chimed with the idea of rational self-interest. In a 1989 magazine interview she said: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

The shorthand for all this is “big state bad, small state good”. Society is not a collective enterprise but the sum of the parts of individuals looking to their own best interests. From this, by some mysterious alchemy, a more affluent and stable world is meant to arise.

Capitalism red in tooth and claw

Right now, in America the world imagined by Ayn Rand is coming to pass. Donald Trump is the epitome of capitalist individualism, where only winning matters, where all endeavours are seen as deals and where threats of war or tariffs or sackings are the new weapons of state administration and international relations.

The president has fired all 17 independent chairs of the main regulatory bodies in the US. It is said Trump aims to replace them with his own favoured people. They are unlikely to stand in the way of his dream of capitalism red in tooth and claw.

Trump spoke of President William McKinley in his inaugural speech. McKinley’s time in office, at the end of the 19th century, was marked by protectionism to favour US interests, rising prosperity, foreign wars fought by America on its doorstep and the US taking control of Hawaii, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

His time saw America build huge corporations; vast fortunes were made by their creators. They would come to be known as the “Robber Barons”, men with enormous political influence, which they exercised to grow their empires and wealth. President Franklin Roosevelt gained the lasting hatred of big business when he passed laws during the Great Depression of the 1930s to reduce their reach and power.

New titans bestride the world

Now the titans of American business are back at the centre of power: Tesla boss Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google, Tim Cook of Apple and a raft of less famous tech-sector billionaires, along with their super-rich colleagues from banking, oil, food and media.

These people control much of the global internet and much of how the modern world communicates and trades across borders. It is reasonable to speculate that these already powerful and staggeringly wealthy individuals see, in their closeness to Trump, routes to personal profit and the ability to shape the political and economic direction of America and the world.

Unlike in Atlas Shrugged, there is no need for America’s contemporary giants of science, technology and entrepreneurship to set up a rival state in a secret valley. They are firmly part of the new establishment. Indeed, Musk is not only part of the establishment, but also of Trump’s administration, with a top job involving cutting the size and cost of the state.

The tech bros, along with the ‘Make America Great Again’ leadership, Christian nationalists, economic fundamentalists and zealot libertarians are all now Washington insiders. They hold the door to a new world order, a world where international organisations like the United Nations, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, European Union and Nato are to be subservient to American will.

An equal share

After the Second World War, global tensions focussed on the superpower stand-off that became the Cold War. It was seen in simple terms as freedom and capitalism vs oppression and state collectivism.

Western Europe was convinced that the origins of the great conflicts of the 20th century had their roots in the disputes between capital and labour, consumer and producer, and the competition between states for trade, technology and territory. Europe found a different way.

It created the European Economic Community (now the EU) as a means of seeking compromises between competing interests and competing states. A form of political cooperation designed to temper power wherever it lies and to deliver a more equal share of the economic cake across society.

Corporate power in the US has been revitalised by Trump and the cult of the individual reenergised by economic and Christian fundamentalists at the heart of his electoral coalition.

We are seeing the beginnings of a new global philosophy that threatens to set class against class and state against state. It will happily try to roll over the Scottish idea of the commonweel, the European model of social democracy and the shared sovereignty basis of the European Union.

Liberal democracy, the idea of a caring, responsible and enabling state is unfashionable and has lost much of its lustre. If we want it to live and flourish, its leaders must find ways of making the future brighter for young people than at present.

Leaders in every chamber, from Holyrood to Westminster, from Brussels to every capital of free Europe must come to the aid of liberal democracy. A cry of hope must be heard, and it must be heard soon.

Martin Roche had a career in international public relations and is a writer. He sits on the executive committee of the European Movement in Scotland.