Techno‑Feudal Elite Are Attempting to Build a Twenty‑First‑Century Fascist State

Hacker News · Feb 28, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Introduction: Fascism at the End of Industrial Civilization This essay argues that the United States is drifting toward a distinctly twenty‑first‑century form of fascism driven not by mass parties in brownshirts, but by an oligarchic techno‑feudal elite. Neoliberal capitalism has hollowed out democratic institutions and concentrated power in a transnational “authoritarian international” of billionaires, security chiefs, and political fixers who monetize state power while shielding one another from accountability. At the same time, Big Tech platforms have become neo‑feudal estates that extract rent from our data and behavior, weaponize disinformation, and provide the surveillance backbone of an emerging global police state. Drawing on the work of Robert Reich, William I. Robinson, Yanis Varoufakis, and others, alongside historian Heather Cox Richardson’s detailed account of Trump‑era patronage, whistleblower suppression, and DHS/ICE mega‑detention plans, the essay contends that America is rapidly constructing a system of concentration‑camp infrastructure and paramilitary policing designed to manage “surplus” populations and political dissent. Elite impunity, entrenched through national‑security exceptionalism, legal immunities, and revolving‑door careers, means that those directing lawless violence face virtually no consequences. Elections still happen, courts still sit, newspapers still publish, but substantive power is increasingly exercised by unelected oligarchs, tech lords, and security bureaucracies. This authoritarian drift cannot be separated from the broader crisis of industrial civilization. Ecological overshoot, climate chaos, resource constraints, and structural economic stagnation have undermined the promise of endless growth on which liberal democracy once rested. Rather than using the remnants of industrial wealth to democratize a just transition, ruling elites are hardening borders, expanding carceral infrastructure, and building a security regime to contain “surplus” humanity in a world of shrinking energy and material throughput. America’s oligarchic techno‑feudal fascism is thus not an anomaly, but one plausible endgame of industrial civilization: a stratified order of gated enclaves above and camps and precarity below, designed to preserve elite power as the old industrial world comes apart. I. From liberal promise to oligarchic capture The American republic was founded on a promise that power would be divided, constrained, and answerable: a written constitution, separated branches, periodic elections, and a Bill of Rights that set bright lines even the sovereign could not cross. That promise was always compromised by slavery, settler colonialism, and gendered exclusion, but it retained real, if uneven, force as a normative horizon. What has shifted over the past half‑century is not simply the familiar gap between creed and practice, but the underlying structure of the system itself: the center of gravity has moved from public institutions toward a private oligarchy whose wealth and leverage allow it to function as a parallel sovereign. The neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 1980s marked the decisive inflection point. Deregulation, financial liberalization, the crushing of organized labor, and the privatization of public goods redistributed power and income upward on a historic scale. Trade liberalization and capital mobility allowed corporations and investors to pit governments and workers against one another, extracting subsidies and tax concessions under the permanent threat of capital flight. At the same time, Supreme Court decisions eroded limits on political spending, redefining “speech” as something that could be purchased in unlimited quantities by those with the means. The result, as Robert Reich notes, has been the consolidation of an American oligarchy that “paved the road to fascism” by ensuring that public policy reflects donor preferences far more consistently than popular majorities. In issue after issue, such as taxation, labor law, healthcare, and environmental regulation, there is a clear skew: the wealthy get what they want more often than not, while broadly popular but redistributive policies routinely die in committee or are gutted beyond recognition. This is not a conspiracy in the melodramatic sense; it is how the wiring of the system now works. William Robinson’s analysis of “twenty‑first‑century fascism” sharpens the point. Global capitalism in its current form generates chronic crises: overproduction, under‑consumption, ecological breakdown, and a growing population that capital cannot profitably employ. Under such conditions, democratic politics becomes dangerous for elites, because electorates might choose structural reforms such as wealth taxes, public ownership, strong unions, and Green New Deal‑style transitions that would curb profits. Faced with this prospect, segments of transnational capital begin to see authoritarian solutions as rational: better to hollow out democracy, harden borders, and construct a global police state than to accept serious redistribution. American politics in the early twenty‑first century fits this pattern with unsettling precision. A decaying infrastructure, stagnant wages, ballooning personal debt, militarized policing, and permanent war have produced widespread disillusionment. As faith in institutions erodes, public life is flooded with resentment and nihilism that can be redirected against scapegoats (immigrants, racial minorities, feminists, and queer and trans people) rather than against the oligarchic‑power‑complex that profits from the decay. It is in this vacuum that a figure like Donald Trump thrives: a billionaire demagogue able to channel anger away from the class that actually governs and toward those even more marginalized. The decisive shift from plutocratic dysfunction to fascist danger occurs when oligarchs cease to see constitutional democracy as even instrumentally useful and instead invest in movements openly committed to minority rule. Koch‑style networks, Mercer‑funded operations, and Silicon Valley donors willing to underwrite hard‑right projects are not supporting democracy‑enhancing reforms; they are building the infrastructure for authoritarianism, from voter suppression to ideological media to data‑driven propaganda. The system that emerges is hybrid: elections still occur, courts still sit, newspapers still publish, but substantive power is increasingly concentrated in unelected hands. II. The “authoritarian international” and the shadow world of deals Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s recent analysis captures a formation that much mainstream commentary still struggles to name: a transnational “authoritarian international” in which oligarchs, political operatives, royal families, security chiefs, and organized criminals cooperate to monetize state power while protecting one another from scrutiny. This is not a formal alliance; it is an overlapping ecology of relationships, exclusive vacations, investment vehicles, shell companies, foundations, and intelligence ties, through which information, favors, and money flow.​ The key is that this network is structurally post‑ideological. As Robert Mueller warned in his 2011 description of an emerging “iron triangle” of politicians, businesspeople, and criminals, these actors are not primarily concerned with religion, nationality, or traditional ideology. They will work across confessional and national lines so long as the deals are lucrative and risk is manageably socialized onto others. Saudi royals invest alongside Western hedge funds; Russian oligarchs launder money through London property and American private equity; Israeli and Emirati firms collaborate with U.S. tech companies on surveillance products that are then sold worldwide.​ Within this milieu, the formal distinction between public office and private interest blurs. Richardson’s analysis of Donald Trump’s abrupt reversal on the Gordie Howe International Bridge after a complaint by a billionaire competitor with ties to Jeffrey Epstein—reads less like the exercise of public policy judgment and more like feudal patronage: the sovereign intervenes to protect a favored lord’s toll road. Tiny shifts in regulatory posture or federal support can move billions of dollars; for those accustomed to having the president’s ear, such interventions are simply part of doing business.​​ The same logic governs foreign policy. The Trump‑Kushner axis exemplifies this fusion of public and private. When a whistleblower alleges that the Director of National Intelligence suppressed an intercept involving foreign officials discussing Jared Kushner and sensitive topics like Iran, and when the complaint is then choked off with aggressive redaction and executive privilege, we see the machinery of secrecy misused not to protect the national interest but to shield a member of the family‑cum‑business empire at the center of power. It is as if the state has become a family office with nuclear weapons.​​ Josh Marshall’s phrase “authoritarian international” is apt because it names both the class composition and the political function of this network. The same names recur across far‑right projects: donors and strategists who back nationalist parties in Europe, ultras in Latin America, Modi’s BJP in India, and the MAGA movement in the United States. Their interests are not identical, but they overlap around a shared agenda: weakening labor and environmental protections, undermining independent media and courts, militarizing borders, and securing immunity for themselves and their peers.​ This world is lubricated by blackmail and mutually assured destruction. As Richardson notes, players often seem to hold compromising material on one another, whether in the form of documented sexual abuse, financial crime, or war crimes. This shared vulnerability paradoxically stabilizes the network: as long as everyone has something on everyone else, def