"L'Etat, c'est moi" - updated

"In 1609, James I lectured the English people on his rights and responsibilities as king. It was his duty to “make and unmake” them, he said. Kings have the “power of raising and casting down, of life and of death; judges over all their subjects, and in all causes.”

Not even the “general laws” of Parliament constrained him. The king stands “above” all human-made law. Indeed, it is his prerogative to “interpret” and to suspend such laws “upon causes only known to him.” He could also create new laws to whatever end he desired. The king, as James declared, is “accountable to none but God only.” He is the law speaking.

To enforce his personal rule of law, James could censor speech, the press, legal treatises, and the theater. He could imprison anyone, at any time, for any reason. And though the common law prohibited torture, James could use the rack, dungeon, and Skevington’s irons to get his way.

James also controlled a vast system of favoritism. Earldoms and knighthoods, positions in the state and church and universities, licenses to collect taxes or live in a particular house: all were his to grant. James could create offices as he saw fit. To win a vote in Parliament, James sometimes simply established new peerages. He minted licenses to do business and bestowed monopolies to manufacture or import cloth, tin, wine, even playing cards.

The quid pro quo was simple. In exchange for any such “patent” of “power or profit,” the beneficiary was to return funds and favors. After all, what the king could grant he could take away. In 1603, James imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh and stripped him of most of his titles and properties. Some he gave to his own favorite, Robert Carr. Later, James gave many of Carr’s titles to a newer favorite, George Villiers, whom he named Duke of Buckingham.

Thus James sat on his throne, the center of a solar system in which every individual orbited around him, or as satellites of his satellites, a vast Cartesian mechanism propelled by venality and obsequiousness, reaching from the most magnificent of courtiers and intellectuals to the poorest of tenants in the remotest of shires.

Most historians do not believe that Louis XIV ever said, “L’État, c’est moi.” But even if apocryphal, this saying distills the idea of absolute monarchy in the days of James and France’s Sun King. Not that we need look four centuries back to understand how such absolutism works. Hitler, Stalin, Mao—each shaped the perception, thoughts, and truths of an entire people. So too Putin and Xi today.

For the first time since the founding, Americans find themselves debating much this same threat, of unfettered prerogative in the hands of a single man. It was Donald Trump’s success in teaching the Republican Party to scrape and grovel that first raised the specter of an authoritarian presidency. But it was the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision granting Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for most of his official actions as president that put flesh to the fear. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor summed up in her dissent: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

These are the opening paragraphs of an article in the current issue of Harper's.  The longread continues at the link.  Even if Harris wins the election, the American people need to consider how to put more constraints on the powers of the executive (and the federal government).  I may add a few more excerpts after I watch today's football games, but I don't want to infringe on intellectual propery rights too much.  The embedded image is my own composite created from various found images.

Addendum:  One difficulty in excerpting from longreads is that the excerpt may not fully represent the content of the article in toto.  As I read further yesterday, I noticed the emphasis changing from the power of the executive to the power of the megacorporations:

It is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple that today enjoy the power to create and destroy, to censor and punish, to “make and unmake” who they will. It is these corporations that—even as we fear consolidation of power in the public state—have erected a private state over us. They who have disrupted almost every economic and political balance in the Republic. They who have amassed the power to shape and determine how we speak to one another and share news and information. Even how we think, dream, and perceive our place in the world.

These are the absolute sovereigns of our age, the masters in the middle of us all...

Most maddening is that so many people who clearly view themselves as liberal champions—ranging from Kagan to former president Barack Obama—remain under the sway of an antidemocratic, pro-monopoly ideology dating to 1981, in the early days of the Reagan presidency. In America today, we face the most wide-ranging set of threats to liberal democracy since the founding. Gravest of all: liberals’ apparent ignorance of our own history. Hence our blindness both to the full nature of the threat posed by Google and its peers—and to the tools at hand to master it...

The issue is not mainly that these corporations surveil you, not mainly that they intrude on your privacy. Not mainly even that they wield great political power.

Rather, it is precisely the issue that came before the court in Moody v. NetChoice: these corporations’ unique capacities to manipulate every person and company that depends on them, individually...

But starting in 2004, coffers full of cash and tradable stock after the company’s IPO, Google’s executives went on a takeover binge. They bought YouTube, Android, DeepMind, ITA Software, Boston Dynamics, Waze, Nest, Looker, and Fitbit, as well as the foundational components of Google Docs, Google Cloud, and Waymo, along with more than two hundred and fifty other companies to date. Of all these purchases, perhaps the smartest was the 2007 deal to acquire DoubleClick, which gave Google direct control over one of the internet’s dominant ad platforms and its networks.

Google executives present their corporation as a great innovator. But their genius has rarely consisted of much more than buying other people’s ideas and assembling them into a vast maze of online corridors designed to enclose as much of our digital lives as possible. ..

Thanks to this spree, one or another of Google’s platforms today stands between you and your parents, between you and your children, and between you and your friends. Between you and your doctor, your druggist, and your therapist. Between you and your mayor and your representative in Congress and your president. You and your co-workers and professors. You and your car, electricity, and airlines. You and your movies and sports. ..

This gives the corporation arbitrary power over almost every small business. Google can steer customers toward, or away from, any particular author, photographer, or musician. Any restaurant, hair salon, bike shop, or plumber...

The Constitution, in this light, is the greatest anti-monopoly document in history, a blueprint for an intricate structure of walls and dikes designed to enable people to prevent any ultimate concentration of power in any one office, corporation, church, clique, or person...

And there's more content to follow.  I have a suspicion that before I reach the end I will detect the odor of musk.

As always, I encourage readers to go to the source article entitled The Antitrust Revolution: Liberal democracy's last stand against Big Tech.  If my previous link was behind a paywall for you, to to this new, archived version.