Musk’s dangerous, exaggerated conflation of social media and democracy

It’s been apparent for some time that Elon Musk and Donald Trump align on more than politics. Each has a, let’s say, robust sense of his own importance and an apparent need for others to recognize that importance. Both have a large fan base happy to offer that recognition. And both have a view of the world that is often untainted by what the world actually is. It’s fair to assume that the alliance that currently exists between the two is fragile, with any slight misalignment of how each wants to deploy his power leading to its rupture. But for now, it exists and it just scored its first political victory: submarining a compromise spending resolution on Capitol Hill. Musk and his allies quickly hailed the collapse of the agreement as a manifestation of the will of the American public. Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy agreed with the sentiment, saying, “We the People won,” he wrote. “That’s how America is supposed to work.” It isn’t, actually. As Republicans long liked to remind people, America is a republic in which citizens elect representatives to make decisions about how the country should be run. We don’t subject everything to a national plebiscite. More importantly, though, X (and social media in general) is not in any robust sense “the people.”