Gavin Newsom’s American Dystopia

‘President Gavin Newsom met today in Carmel, California with the representatives of the “Ten” – a consortium of giant tech and finance firms who control most of America’s business assets. Facing a challenge from front-running New York senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is pushing for a radical redistribution of wealth and property, Newsom has struck a deal with the oligarchs. He has imposed a universal basic income to head off a mounting populist revolt.

Some have called it a second Magna Carta – an accommodation between state and oligarchy. Others see the outlines of a new feudalism, or a technocratic fascism, rather than anything resembling liberal democracy.’

Implausible? Hardly. At a time when a handful of firms now dominate industries from tech to entertainment and media, and incomes for all but the wealthy are stagnating or falling, ever fewer see the system as working for them. According to Edelman, a strong majority in 22 countries now believe capitalism does more harm than good.

In the US, rising inequality and fear of downward mobility are fuelling support for state expansion and redistribution. Most under-40s favour socialism. Worse for the oligarchs, a majority of young people also favour limiting higher incomes. A new radical politics is incubating in cities like Oakland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles and, most obviously, New York – its likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a self-described ‘democratic socialist’.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could accelerate this trend, cutting even white-collar and graduate employment while boosting the profits, as well as the market share, of a handful of giant firms. Like Mickey Mouse, as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, techies have unleashed forces that threaten many in their own class of educated professionals. Some 82 per cent of millennials believe AI will damage their careers. The displacement could soon reach 30 per cent of the workforce. Skilled professionals in finance, media and the arts could be undercut as AI trains itself on their past work. As one Marxist writer put it, no power on Earth is more fearsome than ‘the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs’.