Best of 2022: Who Is Elon Musk?

In posting a few highlights from The Tracinski Letter’s output in 2022, I’ve been pairing an article published only in the newsletter with a link to an article of mine that was published elsewhere (though often based on or inspired by comments first made in the newsletter).

This time, given its more immediate relevance, I’m giving the main title to the outside article.

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Who Is Elon Musk?

In May, while he was still wavering on whether or not he was going to buy Twitter, I wrote an overview for Discourse of the erratic career and character of Elon Musk.

I focused on the odd combination of significant achievement and a relentless and often unscrupulous need for attention.

I long ago speculated that in the popular imagination, Musk is “a greenwashed Ayn Rand hero.”… Some of the elements of an Ayn Rand story are there: the maverick engineer who starts a visionary new enterprise, sets out to do what everyone else dismisses as impossible and proves all the doubters wrong. Except that this was “greenwashed,” given a gloss of environmental virtue by way of electric cars and solar panels. (Never mind the carbon footprint of a SpaceX rocket launch.) Musk was an Ayn Rand hero, but by using his powers to curb global warming, became the one swashbuckling industrialist enlightened “progressives” could acceptably cheer.

Yet there is something that’s doesn’t quite work in this comparison: Musk’s clear penchant for seeking public attention and notoriety. Ayn Rand’s heroes are supremely indifferent to public opinion and the views of others. One of the protagonists of Atlas Shrugged declares, “I never had any wish to be talked about.” I don’t think Musk could plausibly make that claim. When the hero of The Fountainhead is confronted by one of his critics who dares him—“Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish” —he responds, “But I don’t think of you.” That would be a sick burn, except that he sincerely means it.

Given the opportunity to reply to his critics, Musk is more likely to launch into a Twitter rant. He is always stirring up a controversy, whether it’s taking potshots at Tesla short-sellers or making libelous insinuations against a British expat cave diver in Thailand out of petty spite. If anything, Musk is more like an Ayn Rand hero as rewritten by Tom Wolfe, which better captures the carnival barker aspect of his personality….

Both in his reporting and in his fiction—and it’s hard to tell the difference between the two—Wolfe loved to depict flamboyant characters goaded by an obsession with status and attention. Elon Musk is a character straight out of that mold.

Read the whole thing.

In The Tracinski Letter, I added one more observation,

The only thing I would add, for this audience, is that if Elon Musk is like an Ayn Rand character, he is more like a character from The Fountainhead than from Atlas Shrugged. In Atlas, her theme pushed her to sort her characters a little more uniformly. Those who built successful businesses are generally of the consistently first-handed mold of her main heroes, while the cronyists and parasites—the ones who get rich through government favors—are a bunch of whining, manipulative second-handers.

In The Fountainhead, by contrast, because her theme is more about art than commerce, she is free to give us characters like Gail Wynand—geniuses at business who are sent off the rails by the psychological and philosophical mess inside their heads. As the career of Elon Musk indicates, that is probably the more realistic of the two approaches.

All of this has become much clearer since then, as Elon Musk has completed his purchase of Twitter, engaged in a chaotic and random overhaul of the platform, lost vast amounts of his personal wealth, and become a third-rate conservative troll. I’ll have more to say about this spectacle in the new year, but it’s like a cautionary tale about the neurotic need for public attention—which is very much in the mold of an Ayn Rand novel.

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This approach to Musk and the one below, in which I analyzed the short-lived trucker protest in February in Canada, is one that always gets me a lot of heat from otherwise sympathetic readers. It is natural to want Musk to be a crusader against the “woke mind virus” and for free speech, even if he has no clear concept of what it is. And it is natural to want the trucker protest to be a spontaneous popular uprising for freedom and not just a small gathering of confused anti-vaxers. Sometimes it my thankless job to deliver the bad news that reality doesn’t match up to what we hope it would be.

But I consider this to be one of the selling points of The Tracinski Letter. It is very easy to go out and find the expected takes from the expected people, to find writers who will repeat and reinforce the prevailing right- or left-wing narrative. But I always give it to you straight, analyzing the facts as clearly and carefully as I can.

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Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

I don’t usually find myself called upon to write about Canadian politics because—well, there’s a story about some media types years ago who had a contest to see who could come up with the world’s most boring headline. The winner was “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” (Personally, I think it should have been “Surprises Unlikely in Indiana.”) The land of “Peace, Order, and Good Government” does not often shake the world.

But now the right-leaning media in the US is obsessed with a protest in which a group of Canadian truckers has essentially occupied or blockaded Parliament Hill in Ottawa and for the better part of a week blocked traffic over one of the biggest border crossings to the United States. They have since blocked several other crossings.

Somebody called this “Trucker CHAZ”—you do remember CHAZ, don’t you?—but it doesn’t have quite the same combination of starry-eyed utopianism and thuggish lawlessness. In terms of the form of protest, this is a little more like “Occupy Wall Street” but for conservatives. The fact that the American right is singing its praises but thought the other guys were the end of civilization should cause us to investigate the phenomenon a little more carefully—particularly since Canadian Conservatives just two years ago attempted to pass a law targeting exactly this same behavior, but only when other people did it.

I get the reason for the excitement among conservatives. There is an enduring allure to populism. Everyone wants to style themselves as being on the side of “the people,” and more to the point, everyone likes to be on the winning side. When we see a large group of people gathering together to express a lot of anger against the powers that be, it is tempting to project upon them them the cause you would like them to be fighting for.

So I dug into the Canadian protests to see what they’re actually all about. It seemed to me at first that this was just a convoy of anti-vaxers. Then I found an article in Bari Weiss’s contrarian blog, “Common Sense,” written by a journalist who has been interviewing the protesters. Rupa Subramanya promises to tell us “What the Truckers Want,” and toward the beginning, she offers this promising line:

Ostensibly, the truckers are against a new rule mandating that, when they re-enter Canada from the United States, they have to be vaccinated. But that’s not really it. The mandate is a moot point: The Americans have a similar requirement, and, anyway, “the vast majority” of Canadian truckers, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, are vaccinated. (The CTA represents about 4,500 truckers nationwide.)

So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.

So it’s not really about being against the vaccine! But then, er, what is that last part doing there, about how the protesters are mad at “Big Pharma”? What have the drug companies ever done to them, other than to develop the vaccine?

It turns out that is exactly what they have done to earn the protesters’ ire. At this rally that is supposedly not really about the vaccine, what did the first person Subramanya interviewed have to say about their cause?

Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores.

OK, maybe the second person will be different.

Peter, 28, a long-haul trucker from Ontario, told me that a divide had opened up all across the country…. He refused to get vaccinated, he said, because the whole thing had been so politicized, and you couldn’t be sure who to trust.

How about the third?

Theo, 24, felt the same way. He wasn’t a trucker—he used to work at a major accounting firm and now works another big company—but he was angry, like the truckers were. “They treated me like a second-class citizen,” he said, referring to his old firm. He explained that he’d refused to get vaccinated.

The fourth:

Mackenzie, 24, from Ottawa, works as a bartender at a popular downtown restaurant near Parliament. She had covid, got better, and believes it’s her choice not to get the vaccine. She isn’t an anti-vaxxer. She’s been vaccinated for other things. But covid wasn’t the same as malaria or the flu. 

The fifth?

Chris, a 40-year-old trucker from Toronto, said that he’d gotten vaccinated so he could keep his job, but that his participation in the protest had torn his family apart. “My father has spat in my face and disowned me as his son. Told me I’m not worth the family name because I will not vaccinate my children,” he said.

We’ve got a good pattern going here, so you know what’s going to happen with the sixth and final protester Subramanya interviewed.

Matt Sim, 43, who immigrated to Canada from South Korea, is director of operations of an IT start-up in Toronto and came to Ottawa with his wife to join the protests. He’d had Covid, and then he’d recovered, and he was skeptical of all the hysteria surrounding the vaccines. His family, back home in Korea, had lived through the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and that had made him skeptical of the media, the government, and powerful people in general.

So in this article telling us that the protests are about more than the vaccine, the central complaint of every single person interviewed is…the vaccine. I have rarely seen such a complete mismatch between what an article tells you it’s going say and what it actually ends up saying. (Still, nobody will top Ta-Nehisi Coates’s celebrated “The Case for Reparations,” which never discusses the case for reparations.)

If we look elsewhere this is generally confirmed. A friend told me I was all wrong about the truckers and directed my attention to a video in which one of the more reputable protest organizers, B.J. Dichter, tells Jordan Peterson what the truckers want. The only two demands are to end the vaccine mandate and to stop requiring an app used to expedite border crossings and to enforce the mandate. So the protest is about the vaccine.

The truckers’ case against vaccine mandates may or may not have merit—more on that below—but it’s important to realize that this is their cause. Whatever larger dissatisfactions Canadians may have or ought to have with their current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, that is not the central motivation of this protest. And whatever worthy cause you wish the truckers would protest for is also irrelevant, because that’s not why they are there.

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Now let’s take a look at how the truckers are generally addressing the vaccine issue. Note the detail in a lot of these narrative—and this is a repeating theme—where one of them says that they have been vaccinated against other diseases, they merely refused to be vaccinated against this one. That is not the defense they think it is. It means that they have no objection to vaccine mandates as such. They just believe that this particular vaccine is somehow different from all others and not to be trusted.

Why would they believe that? Because they have been listening to crackpots. See a reporter’s description of an event for the protest’s “scientific advisors,” which turns out to be a bunch of cranks (some of them, to be sure, cranks with credentials) declaring that the vaccine is actually more deadly than covid. I hope you already know that this is not remotely true.

This explains why the protesters begin with complaints against vaccine mandates and tend to move on to opposing all measures to mitigate the spread or severity of covid. Take their campaign against ArriveCAN, an app implemented for people crossing the Canadian border, ironically as part of an effort to open up the border after it had been closed to all “non-essential” travel early the pandemic.

See a description of ArriveCAN here. It began as a contract-tracing app for Canadians (and later for American visitors) “to report mandatory travel, contact, and quarantine information when they re-enter the country.” In other words, it’s a straightforward application of basic quarantine powers that all governments have in a pandemic. Later, as the vaccines became available, it was used to allow fully vaccinated Canadians to skip some of the testing and quarantine rules. At first, the app exempted “essential workers,” which included truckers, but eventually they were required to undergo testing and quarantine procedures if they were not vaccinated.

Let’s note in passing the irony of American conservatives embracing a protest against border controls. I guess those are only supposed to be used to keep out Mexicans. But note that what the Canadian truckers oppose is not some kind of Orwellian surveillance state, but the most basic testing and quarantine measures applied in the pandemic.

That reflects the general trend here. A position that starts with opposition to a vaccine that is deemed to be scary because it is new eventually spills over into opposition to quarantine, a basic health policy that has been in use, uncontroversially, for about 700 years.

Similarly, this view tends to spill out from widespread opposition to the new vaccine and begins to encompass opposition to all vaccines, as in a recent poll in the US that indicates growing opposition on the right to public schools mandating any vaccines.

It is possible to adopt a pro-vaccine and anti-mandate position. I’m going to make the case (again) for a particularly grim and unhappy version of that by the end of this article. But this is a sophisticated and nuanced position, and that’s not the mental style of most conservatives these days. Hence, the anti-mandate position tends to collapse into an anti-vax position. From there, it becomes anti-mask, anti-social distancing, anti-quarantine, and pretty much opposed to any anti-pandemic measure.

But this was baked into the event from the beginning, because the original organizer of the event was a fellow named James Bauder, who is a full-on QAnon conspiracy theorist. The rest of the organizers seem to be a mix of right-leaning political activists and cranks.

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If the cause for which the Canadian protesters are fighting is suspect, so are the methods they have been using.

A protest per se should never be illegal, if it simply consists of assembling in a public place in order to express your views. But some protests take the form of civil disobedience. This might include intentionally violating an unjust law in the expectation of being arrested, in order to bring public attention to the injustice and possibly to challenge it in court. Think Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus, or John Scopes teaching evolution in Tennessee. At a more extreme level, civil disobedience takes the form of occupying a space and refusing to move, even erecting barriers and blocking traffic. This is the level which the truckers’ convoy has chosen. They have occupied a neighborhood where somebody else lives and refused to move, while also choking off traffic for days at critical bridges.

Such tactics might be justified and necessary, in response to a certain kind of threat. But that’s a pretty high bar to reach. I mentioned above the CHAZ protests in Seattle, and in looking at what I wrote about that almost two years ago, what jumped out at me was this passage.

This is the paradox of protest in a free society with a representative government. Protests can be an effective means of drawing attention to an agenda and convincing politicians that there is a constituency for it. But when it comes to actually implementing political change, you cannot claim to be doing it on behalf of “the people” without asking them at the ballot box. Yet that is precisely what happens when you empower a gang of “activists” marching in the street to impose your agenda. Seattle already has a city government that represents its citizens. To replace that with a new entity is to replace it with one that is not representative.

How could I not then say the same about this protest?

The principle above applies to the trucker convoy in the most literal sense. James Bauder originally organized the convoy in order to present his terms to the Canadian government in the form of a deeply weird Memorandum of Understanding that reads like a treaty negotiating the surrender of a government to a band of insurgents.

Yet this is not a political movement representing a groundswell of support among the general public. Polling seems to indicate that a solid majority of Canadians are on the other side: pro-mandate and anti-protest. The truckers don’t represent a “silent majority,” not even a silent majority of truckers. One of the perils of populist rhetoric is that it is easy to look at a protest of a few thousand people and conclude that The People have finally arisen, and they are on your side, when you are still a small minority trying to impose your preferred policies.

Of course, a given covid policy is not the right one simply by virtue of having majority support. But in a free society, there is no choice but to eventually resolve such disputes by persuading your fellow citizens and influencing government through the courts or through its actual representative institutions. Despite some feverish claims to the contrary, Canada is not a fascist dictatorship and there is as yet no such thing as “Canadian-Style Tyranny.”

I saw some people who really ought to know better comparing the truckers’ protest to the Boston Tea Party. But the Boston Tea Party took place within the context of a long-standing contest between the American colonies and the British Parliament over a broad and fundamental political issue. It wasn’t about a tax on tea. It was about whether the British Parliament had the authority to impose taxes on the colonies, and more broadly about the colonists’ right to govern themselves.

The better comparison here would be George Washington’s comments on the Whiskey Rebellion. The Western settlers targeted by a tax on Whiskey were widely regarded as having a legitimate grievance. Yet as Washington observed, “if the Laws are to be so trampled upon—with impunity—and a minority (a small one too) is to dictate to the majority there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government; and nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected thereafter; for some other man, or society, may dislike another Law & oppose it with equal propriety until all Laws are prostrate and every one (the strongest I presume) will carve for himself.”

That’s the point of my comparison to the CHAZ protests. The physical occupation of a city center and the blockading of trade routes are neither as serious nor as violent as the Whisky Rebellion. But they constitute the physical harassment and intimidation of the residents of Parliament Hill. Such unusual measures could be justified only if the actual ability of citizens to seek political change by way of their elected representatives is thwarted.

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If we look at the actual cause and motivation of the Canadian truckers—as opposed to the righteous opposition to Big Government that we might wish to impute to them—I think they have an insufficient cause driven by bad ideas and pursued through unjustified means.

As usual, this does not mean that the Canadian government is using appropriate measures against them. It should be possible to clear them from the bridges and the streets using the ordinary operation of the law, impounding cars and trucks for violating ordinary parking and traffic regulations and arresting protesters on ordinary misdemeanor charges for obstructing public thoroughfares and the like. Instead, Justin Trudeau has invoked emergency powers clearly intended for cases of invasion or insurrection. (The last time similar laws were invoked was in response to a Quebec separatist campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassination.)

The police will now be able to seize trucks and other vehicles used in blockades. The measure will formally ban demonstrations that “go beyond lawful protest,” he said, and the government will formally ban blockades in designated areas like border crossings, airports and the city of Ottawa.

Tow-truck operators, who have been reluctant to cooperate with the police, will now be compelled to work with law enforcement agencies to clear Ottawa’s streets and the border crossings at Coutts, Alberta, and Emerson, Manitoba.

This part mostly seems legitimate, though I wonder why one would require an additional formal ban on demonstrations that “go beyond legal protest,” which implies that they are illegal already. From what I can tell, this is an attempt to reverse Canada’s “era of light policing,” in which the government has dealt gingerly with large protests.

But some other emergency measures are more clearly illegitimate, certainly by US standards, particularly this one: “The police will be exchanging information with banks about protesters, and their personal and business accounts may be frozen.” This goes against centuries of common law precedent and may well be rejected by the courts—and it provides the protesters with a far more legitimate grievance than any they brought with them to Ottawa. See a very good, short piece about this by Walter Olson.

Canada needs Peace and Order, but it could also use more Good Government.

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In that slogan, “Peace, Order, and Good Government,” there is something missing. What about “Freedom”? That, I suppose, is the difference between Canada (and other Commonwealth countries) and the United States.

But invoking “freedom” does not justify the rejection of all pandemic powers. There is no right to infect, and some form of quarantine is one of the legitimate powers of government. I am no anti-immigration hawk, but stopping people at the border and requiring them to quarantine if they have a deadly infectious disease—which is what the ArriveCAN app is about—is one of the most basic and oldest border-control powers. It is also a power conservatives have repeatedly invoked as a basis for far more restrictive border controls, so it’s revealing to hear them reject it now.

A vaccine mandate is a thornier issue, because the people who are most in need of being protected from COVID are the very people who are refusing to be vaccinated. We are, for the most part, trying to protect these people from themselves. And there are limits to government power in practice. About a third of the US population is unvaccinated, and we are reaching the point at which a very large number of those people are simply going to be too stubborn to comply, while the vaccinated majority are relatively well protected.

This means that as a practical, political matter, many COVID restrictions are going to fade away. But let’s be clear about what this means. The end of major COVID restrictions will not mean the end of the pandemic….

You can say that people should be left to their own devices, but it’s going to mean a lot of horrible stories like this one about people who regret too late letting their health decisions be distorted by their politics.

As I’ve been saying for a while, we are going to have to accept a Live and Let Dieapproach to the pandemic. But I view this less as a ringing blow for freedom than as a reluctantly accepted tragedy.