Democracy's New Operating System: A Mother-Daughter Story

My daughter asked why a "bad guy" could be president again. That's when I saw it: the broligarchs are not just coding America's autocracy tech stack—they are perfecting its distribution engine.

"Mom, how could Trump really become President considering all the bad stuff he's done?"

My twelve-year-old daughter's question hung in the air one night over dinner, cutting through the fog of polls and punditry that had clouded my own thinking. Like many Americans, I'd grown numb in the last few weeks to the daily churn of headlines: another indictment, another conspiracy theory, another billionaire me-ist broligarch endorsement. But there was something about her simple question that forced me to step back and really look at what we've normalized.

The Machine We’ve Built

The answer isn't just about one man's actions, no matter how unprecedented. It's about something far more unsettling: the emergence of a new kind of power structure in American life, one that combines old cultural fears with new technological machinery in ways that our democratic institutions were never designed to handle.

Consider what we've accepted as routine: A former president found liable for sexual abuse continues to lead in primary polls. A tech billionaire who controls humanity's largest communications platform openly funds voter-targeting operations. Foreign governments deploy AI-generated content to millions of Americans through social media networks owned by these same billionaires. Each of these would be remarkable in isolation. Together, they represent something unprecedented in American democracy—a perfect storm of private power, technological manipulation, and cultural division.

The Perfect Storm

To understand how we got here, we need to look at what systems theorists call "emergent threats"—dangers that arise not from any single source but from the interaction of multiple forces. Think of it like a hurricane meeting a wildfire. Each is dangerous alone, but together they create conditions neither could produce independently.

The Cultural Code Base

The foundation of this threat is cultural. As political scientist George Monbiot has observed, American society has increasingly embraced what he calls "extrinsic values"—status, wealth, power—over community and collective good. "The American dream," he writes, "has become a dream of acquiring wealth, spending it conspicuously, and escaping the constraints of other people's needs and demands."

This shift hasn't just changed how we relate to each other; it's changed how we relate to truth itself. When a society prioritizes individual success over collective welfare, it becomes more susceptible to what Timothy Snyder calls "post-truth"—a condition where shared facts give way to competing narratives, each serving different power interests.

The Broligarch Blueprint

Enter a class of men in tech who I describe as me-ists and others call broligarchs. They're not just taking sides in this cultural war; they're building its infrastructure. Take Elon Musk's empire as an example. Through various companies, he now controls how people move (Tesla, SpaceX), how they communicate (X/Twitter, Starlink, and new to the scene XAI - of course!), and increasingly, how money moves. This isn't just wealth concentration—it's the privatization of what are effectively public utilities.

The numbers tell part of the story: The top 1% now owns more than the bottom 90% (Source: Princeton Economics). Trust in institutions has dropped 20% since 2019 (Source: Pew). Another term often used in a September report by Pew Research Center—aptly titled “Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics”—was “exhausted.” Almost two-thirds of participants said they were mostly or always exhausted with politics. But the numbers miss the qualitative shift: We're seeing the emergence of what I call "privatized authoritarianism"—where the machinery of social control isn't owned by the state but by a handful of private citizens.

Running the Program

Recent Microsoft threat reports (<read this!) reveal how foreign actors exploit this new landscape. They don't need to hack voting machines or recruit agents. They can simply create mirror-image websites targeting both left and right, deploy AI-generated content, and let the algorithms do the rest. The system's own incentives—engagement equals profit—take care of the distribution.

This is where my daughter's question becomes particularly poignant. She wasn't asking about policy positions or political strategy. She was asking about basic accountability—why the normal rules of consequence don't seem to apply anymore.

The Profit Logic

The answer lies in how these different forces—cultural division, technological control, and foreign manipulation—reinforce each other. When tech platforms reduce content moderation, foreign actors create fake journalist accounts, which target existing fears about institutions, which algorithms then amplify to millions within hours. Each layer makes the others more effective.

What's particularly insidious about this system is how it turns Silicon Valley's original promises inside out. "Information wants to be free" becomes information wants to be controlled. "Connect the world" becomes divide communities. "Don't be evil" becomes ethics are optional.

The incentives driving this transformation are clear and concrete. Certain tech billionaires (not all) seek regulatory protection (blocking wealth taxes, preventing AI oversight), government access (federal contracts, defense deals), and market dominance (platform monopolies, data harvesting rights). As one tech leader told me recently, "We're not building tools anymore. We're building power structures."

Debugging Democracy

So what do we do? The solution has to match the problem's scale and complexity.

At the individual level, we need better information hygiene—using tools like AllSides.com to compare news coverage, supporting local journalism, and participating in cross-partisan dialogue groups like Braver Angels.

At the systemic level, we need new frameworks for regulating private power, protecting democratic infrastructure, and rebuilding civic institutions. We also need new framers. Today's regulatory theater features career politicians attempting to referee a game they've never played. Instead, imagine a Congress where serving isn't a lifetime career but a civic rotation: including but not limited to citizens that have to live within and operationalize the laws. This has to include technology leaders, engineering leaders, and operational experts stepping away from private sector roles for 4-8 year terms. Not as lobbyists or advisors, but as actual lawmakers. People who have built and scaled systems, who understand both the promise and perils of technology, who can write regulations that are both protective and pragmatic. Without this fundamental shift in who makes and enforces our rules, we'll continue getting what we have now: regulations that sound good in committee rooms but fail in server rooms.

A Mother's Code Review

To fix what we have, we need to see the problem clearly. When my daughter asked her question, she wasn't just asking about political facts—she was asking about moral math. How do we weigh private power against public good? Individual success against collective welfare? Technological efficiency against democratic resilience?

These aren't just political questions. They're questions about what kind of society we want to build and what values we want to prevail. They're questions that deserve better answers than we're currently giving our children.

As I searched for words to explain to my daughter how a man found liable for sexual abuse, criminally indicted for attempting to overthrow an election, and caught on tape pressuring officials to "find" votes could become president again, I realized something: the machinery enabling his return may be new, but our moral choice remains ancient.

The broligarchs who built this 2024 machine for autocracy copied humanity's oldest playbook—our willingness to trade freedom for convenience—they've simply perfected its distribution, transforming our phones into delivery systems for voluntary servitude. Just as Roman emperors once pacified their citizens with bread and circuses—free food and spectacles in exchange for democratic rights—today's digital oligarchs offer us endless feeds and frictionless living. But here's the cruel twist: we're not just the audience in this spectacle, we're the funders. Every Tesla we drive, every tweet we post—we're paying for our own pacification. Musk doesn't just get our attention with his digital circus; he gets $75 million to fund Trump's campaign from the profits of our purchases. The other me-ist broligarchs follow the same playbook: turn consumerism, particularly convenience, into political power. We've created a perfect feedback loop of our own diminishment: our continued pursuit of the goods and services they provide fuels their pursuit of power, which they use to offer us more convenience (fast news, fuel-efficient cars, rockets, trains, cryptocurrency, social networks), which we reward with more funding. The tail isn't just wagging the dog—we've built a perpetual motion machine of democratic decline, powered by our own everyday choices.

Our kids are watching this transaction unfold. They see how technology shapes our world, how convenience can quietly compromise our values. As we tell them stories about democracy's heroes—suffragettes who demanded the vote, civil rights marchers who faced down fire hoses, democracy activists who stood before tanks—we must also show them how to navigate this new landscape where democratic participation requires more conscious choice and potentially forgoing the goods and services of known allies of autocracy. The tools of social control may have evolved from bread and circuses in Roman times to algorithms and engagement metrics today, but the fundamental question remains: how do we balance the genuine benefits of innovation with the preservation of democratic values? The next generation does not just deserve better answers—they deserve our thoughtful example of how to embrace progress while protecting democracy.

Our children are watching how we code democracy's next update.