What makes Silicon Valley novel — or perhaps a throwback to Standard Oil and the railroads — is the homology between its companies’ internal culture of predation, sexual and otherwise, and the swashbuckling illegality of their public maneuvers. For all the hoopla over their parental leave and benefits, Valley companies extract punishing hours from their workers, whose salaries they keep artificially low by ensuring they can’t shift jobs. In the world at large, they gain monopoly power by busting regulations, flouting antitrust laws, and buying politicians. Despite the microdistinctions people like to make between the two, bad Uber and good Lyft are united in these practices. From the outset, both intended to undermine the rules that regulate transportation, and both have succeeded.

The personal loathsomeness of Kalanick obscures the broader trends that made his company possible. The cult of the CEO has constrained the imagination of the press. Is Uber's culture too damaged to change? Will it lose out to Lyft? Stories like these place too much emphasis on how a single individual shapes an organization. Sexual harassment and discrimination pervade Silicon Valley like fog. [...]

The political strategy behind ride-sharing lies in pitting the figure of the consumer against the figure of the citizen. As the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has argued, the explosion of consumer choices in the 1960s and ’70s didn’t only affect the kinds of products people owned. It affected the way those people regarded government services and public utilities, which began to seem shabby compared with the vibrant world of consumer goods. A public service like mass transit came to seem less like a community necessity and more like one choice among many. Dissatisfied with goods formerly subject to collective provision, such as buses, the affluent ceased to pay for them, supporting private options even when public ones remained.

Behind all this lurks the specter of the self-driving car--the emblem of a paradise in which all transportation, everywhere, is replaced by software that regulates, with serene efficiency, the motion of an entire civilization.. This is the vision that animates every regulatory collapse, every public-transportation failure, every taxi driver's lost livelihood. For the consumer, the system is already automated: you press a button, a car shows up, you emerge at your destination. It is, in the jargon of the Valley, "frictionless".

Eventually, they say, it will all be worth it. It doesn't seem to matter that these advances are far in the future or may never take place. Meanwhile, an actually existing concept--affordable mass transit--is being lost.

The idea that surveillance itself has a potentially radicalizing effect is distasteful to politicians, but it is not at all new. It is a version of what criminologists call "labeling theory," the idea that rather than reforming criminals, the stigma of the penal system can encourage further deviant behavior. [...]

Correa's success was rooted in his administration’s model of commodity-dependent left populism. The model goes by different names. Officially, it is “socialism of the 21st century” or “post-neoliberalism.” Indigenous and environmental activists call it extractivism. Correa’s political opponents, right and left, refer to it as correísmo. Since 1972, when a nationalist military regime made newly discovered oil fields the center of its economic policy, Ecuador has been a petrostate: the revenues generated by oil extraction and export, undertaken by both state-owned and foreign companies, are the primary source of state income. Reliance on a small basket of exports is the prevailing economic model across the region, a paradigm with roots in colonial and independence-era patterns of dependence.

Trump also upends the delicate relationship on the right between elite and mass, privilege and populism. Conservatism is an elitist movement of the masses, an effort to create a new-old regime that, in one way or another, makes privilege popular. Sometimes conservatism has multiplied the ranks of privilege, creating ever-finer gradations between the worse off and the worst off. Sometimes it has simplified those ranks into two: the white and black races of the white-supremacist imagination. Sometimes it has offshored society’s inequalities, seeing in the people of an imperial state a unified rank of superiors, “a kind of nobility among nations,” in Arendt’s words, subjugating less civilized peoples abroad. And sometimes it has turned elites into victims, encouraging the masses to see their abjection reflected in the higher misery of those above them.

[...] Without a genuine enemy to tutor it, the right has allowed the long-standing fissures of the conservative movement to deepen and expand.

That absent tutelage is most visibly embodied in Trump, whose whims are as unlettered as his mind is untaught. Trump is a window onto the dissolution of the conservative whole, a whole that can allow itself to collapse because it has achieved so much. Battling its way to hegemony in the second half of the 20th century, the American right would never have chosen a Trump — not because it was more intelligent and virtuous or less racist and violent, but because it was disciplined by its task of destroying the left. With that left now destroyed, the foot soldiers of the right wing think to themselves: We’ve had conservative Republican presidents. We have a conservative Republican Congress. Why haven’t they delivered on the promises they’ve made for so long? Why haven’t they made us great again? Why not Trump? The more established voices in the party, many of whom opposed Trump in the primaries (though not with the focus and energy the right used to possess), think to themselves: What’s the worst that can happen in a general election? Another Clinton in the White House? She’ll not do much to disrupt our tax and regulatory regime. Why not Trump? Unlike Nixon, Reagan, or even Bush, who managed to invoke the threat of the left — whether as present reality or recent memory — to bring the factions of the right in line, Trump tweeted his way to the nomination because no one could bring any of the factions in line. Truth be told, none of them needed to. There was no threatening left waiting in the wings to dispossess them of their privileges. Once Trump secured the nomination, the party elders figured: What the hell, let’s roll the dice.

[...] In his objection to people who oppose casinos, Trump says there’s only one difference between gambling and investing: “the players” in the New York Stock Exchange “dress in blue pinstripe suits and carry leather briefcases.” Bets are a way to make money; casinos are just another market. Such statements, which collapse profit into profiteering, used to be taboo among the ruling classes. “No man of spirit will consent to remain poor if he believes his betters to have gained their goods by lucky gambling,” Keynes warned. “The business man is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relations to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to Society.” Any suggestion to the contrary would “strike a blow at capitalism,” destroying “the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards.” Trump’s genius is to recognize the truth of Keynes’s dictum yet ignore its dictates, knowing full well there is no revolution in the offing. The more likely consequence is that people will want to know Trump’s secrets. Or elect him President.

[...] politics has assumed an economistic guise. As Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism is, among other things, the conquest of political argument by economic reason. The dominant rationale for public policy is not drawn from political philosophy but economics: choice, efficiency, competition, exchange. In 1975, Jimmy Carter helped launch the neoliberal turn in American politics by campaigning on the claim, “I ran the Georgia government as well as almost any corporate structure in this country is run.” Four decades later, managing a firm no longer provides a standard of leadership. It is the substance of leadership.