I’ll give Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt that he was just sending heartfelt sentiments and a wave to that crowd, not doing a fascist salute that he failed to repress like the Nazi-turned-U.S.-scientist in director Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. But I find it harder to believe Musk’s claim on his site X that he didn’t know until this week that a real-life Nazi/NASA rocket scientist—Wernher von Braun, one of the inspirations for the Strangelove character—wrote a novel that inspired Elon’s own first name.
Back in the mid-20th century, post-WWII, Von Braun wrote a book-length technical description of hypothetical Mars colonization accompanied by a fictional account of how Project Mars might play out—and in it dubbed the imagined ruler of the planet the Elon, a Hebrew word (ironically) meaning roughly a leader or crazy maverick.
Musk’s dad, Errol Musk, claimed in an interview that (unlike the overwhelming majority of human beings) he was well aware of the Von Braun character when he named his son Elon and that he liked it in part because his own grandfather’s middle name had also been Elon. Oddly prophetic, regardless of who exactly knew what when. Name is destiny indeed.
I worry less about Musk or Trump becoming outright fascists than about some of their fans, even some who claim to be libertarians or anarchists, deciding that fascism is somehow the next logical step in the general pro-technology, capitalist direction that Musk and Trump seem to be steering American politics. On X, when some users said in reaction to Musk’s alleged fascist hand gesture that they wouldn’t trust a fascist to lead us to Mars, the disturbing comeback from some X users who fancied themselves defenders of Musk was to say: Oh, yeah, ever heard of Wernher von Braun? With defenders like that, Musk doesn’t need enemies.
Telling people about the successes in rocketry made possible by bringing German scientists over after (and frankly in some cases during) the war in Operation Paperclip can teach them history, maybe even teach them rocket science, but it can’t reassure people who are keen to avoid handing Mars to authoritarians. Not a snappy comeback at all.
I’m reminded of the time a friend of mine told a group of Armenians he sympathized with them in part because of Hitler’s callous dismissal of the Armenian genocide, to which one of the Armenians, offended, told my friend, “That is not true! Hitler had great respect for Armenian people!” Again, not the comeback I would’ve anticipated. (And just one of several very odd interactions I’ve had at Iggy’s Karaoke Bar over the years.)
In any case, we inherit a society with some fascist technical know-how—but is that society technically fascist? I grow less interested in giving firm yes or no answers to questions like that as I age. I’m developing neo-Nuance sympathies, you might say.
But if it’s fair to say that China is nowadays more fascist than Marxist, and I think it is, we may at least have to conclude that the U.S. is rocketing, so to speak, in the direction of fascism. We don’t know if government-funded colonists will be walking atop Olympus Mons anytime soon, but that whole corporate/government half-trillion-dollar mega-A.I. project hastily announced a few days ago, the ominously (and very unoriginally) named Stargate Project, is basically an effort to play catch-up with China’s versatile new DeepSeek A.I. project.
That’s troubling if the A.I. race makes us more passive not just about lavish government spending and incestuous corporate oligarchies but perhaps about mimicking Chinese communist habits like baking the censorship protocols right into the programming on which the world of tomorrow is supposed to be built. (Online critics claim DeepSeek won’t answer questions about the massacre of anti-government protestors in Tiananmen Square, for example. But perhaps the Chinese leaning far enough in the “open source” direction will inadvertently end censorship and centralization once and for all. Tech evolution has produced weirder outcomes.)
Whether it’s tech visions, budgeting, or snazzy uniform designs, though, I don’t want the world to become a place where the only retort people can think of to socialist technocratic control is nationalistic chest-thumping accompanied by essentially the same programs (much the way you could get late-20th-century conservatives to embrace most liberal programs by slapping the word “family” onto them, as with the oily Christian Coalition activist Ralph Reed encouraging a government-mandated “family wage”).
Worse, the “bipartisan” consensus may inevitably become that we should borrow some centralized planning ideas from the communists and some belligerent national pride from the hyper-patriots of 21st-century America. A little bit “nationalist,” as so many of the former conservatives say these days, and a little bit “socialist,” as so many Salon-type journalists and academics unashamedly say now. “National-socialist” shouldn’t be the meeting place for bipartisan consensus 80 years after the Allies supposedly won the war.
Biden was already making plans to roll out the Stargate Project before Trump won the election, too, so don’t kid yourself that this is a problem arising on just one wing of politics. A.I., more than a little like “central intelligence” in the espionage sense, chugs along largely indifferent to which party is nominally in charge. Indeed, investor Marc Andreessen warned back in May that a government-allied consortium of big A.I. producers was being planned that would make it all but impossible for small businesses and true entrepreneurs to function in that area of tech. He even said he was voting for Trump to stop this mad scheme of Biden’s. Fat lot of good that partisan feint appears to have done him.
This is the 130-year-old Progressive dream fulfilled, regardless of the political party that brings it to you: big corporations and big government and big science all blended together, with a now-literal political machine at the center.
Back in the middle of Trump’s first term, one of Musk’s babymamas, Grimes, also tried to warn us.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
