And recalling William E. Simon.
After reading Benjamin Soskis’ interesting and thoughtful assessment earlier this week in The Chronicle of Philanthropy of Elon Musk’s role in the 2024 U.S. election, I began to thumb through a copy of Nixon Treasury Secretary and, later, philanthropy executive William E. Simon’s A Time for Truth. Published in the late 1970s, Simon’s influential book can help us broadly understand some of the foundational thinking that shaped the “right” side of the right vs. left American political/cultural/philanthropic “arms race” usefully referenced by Soskis.
The massive Musk spending lamented by Soskis is mostly purely, straight-up political. It thus doesn’t necessarily subsume charity into politics in the way that so much contemporary giving does and that some bewail—including The Giving Review. Soskis’ consciously charity-protective critique can and should be cross-ideological, and I know it holds.
If accepting the conceptual framework of an ideological “arms-race,” however, Simon’s A Time for Choosing offers a detailed call to the right to fully understand the cultural struggle underway with the left. Referencing Irving Kristol, Simon notes that the right must not see the fight purely in terms of electoral politics, because to do so would ignore some of the other side’s most potent weapons—the big philanthropic foundations, the media, most universities, the agencies and bureaucracies constituting what we would today call the “administrative state,” etc.
Together, these make up what Simon calls America’s dominant and “vocal intellectual superstructure.” As outlined in Simon’s book, the goal of the right in building up its capabilities to fight a war of ideas with that hostile superstructure, including philanthropically, cannot be simply to indefinitely keep up some kind of arms race with the left. Rather, it should be to create what military strategists would call a “correlation of forces” leading to victory for the right over the left.
The right’s goal, according to Simon, must be to build up a counterforce to the left such that what emerges through the cultural clashes between the two sides is “an authentic public dialogue on the problems of our era” that will return the U.S. to “the road to liberty.”
He immediately continues:
This may seem an odd statement to those who are aware of the incessant “controversies” that have roared about our heads. … These controversies, however, have been sterile clashes of opinion in which the issues have never been joined. At the best exchanges have been like hostile ships passing in the night, firing shots across each other’s bows. Never have the basic premises of these controversies been opened up for public inspection. … The function of a [right] counterintelligensia is, above all, to challenge [our] ideological monopoly: to raise the unnamed issues, to ask the unasked questions, to present the missing contexts, and to place a set of very different values and goals on the public agenda.
(Emphasis supplied.)
If Simon were alive today, what would he say about Musk? Impossible to know, but we can use A Time for Truth as a basis on which to guess.
The very hard-nosed Simon was very wary of any businessman who talked up his free-enterprise credentials while taking government money—so he would have some tart things to say about the government contracts held by some of Musk’s companies.
At the same time, it would be hard for Simon to overlook the scale of the blow that Musk struck against the left’s “intellectual superstructure” through his purchase of Twitter/X and his insisting on returning to its “free-speech” roots.
The forum of X, and the proliferation of podcasts and other alternative media, have created spaces beyond the superstructure’s reach, where concerned citizens can, per Simon, raise the unnamed issues, ask the unasked questions, present the missing contexts, etc., for public inspection.
As Soskis notes, the arms race between right and left has been mainly a move of each side taking steps countered by the other. One side mobilizes the Soros billions; the other taps the gushing riches of the Koch interests. One side spawns legions of 501(c)(4)s to match its 501(c)(3)s, which the other copies. One side invests heavily in voter-identification and -mobilization efforts, which the other matches. And so on.
And into this move/countermove dynamic steps Elon Musk. He decides to intervene, as Soskis details, in various ways in the wider struggle to shape the public agenda as framed by Simon. Most notably, Musk dares to not just seize control of one of the other side’s key assets shaping that agenda, X/Twitter, but turns that asset’s capabilities against the superstructure, and opens the road to additional victories.
We do not know the long-term cultural impact of Musk grabbing X. Maybe it will be one day cited as a turning point. Maybe it will just turn out to be complete financial folly. Maybe the left will just counter with its own billionaire-subsidized, scaled-up equivalent of X. The two sides can support competing social-media treehouses. Maybe Musk and his allies don’t have enough money to sustain either this or any necessary, larger countermoves.
To properly understand Musk, we may need to look elsewhere. A Time for Truth is helpful in some ways in contextualizing his role. But as for his motivations, maybe what really explains Musk and his role as a disruptor is an old Barry Goldwater slogan:
“Why Not Victory?”