Monday, July 7, 2025

Business and Politics Are Not the Same, But the America Party Seems to Think They Are - Cynical Publius

 

by Cynical Publius
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Elon Musk’s “America Party” may aim to fix politics with engineering precision—but in the messy world of democracy, third parties tend to short-circuit their own ideals.

 

As America watched President Trump sign his “Big Beautiful Bill” into law on Independence Day 2025, his erstwhile soulmate, Elon Musk, had other ideas. Offended by the prospect of the “BBB” adding to our national debt, and perhaps offended that many of his DOGE cuts could not be incorporated into the BBB thanks to the arcane rules of Congress on budgetary matters, Musk decided his best move was to announce the formation of his latest endeavor, the “America Party.” Assuming this is not one massive Elon troll job (which it might be, as the man has an epic sense of humor), I believe this is a tragic mistake, both for Musk and for America.

Let me begin by saying I greatly admire Elon Musk. He is one of the greatest Americans ever, a titan of industry, and free enterprise on par with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Musk has transformed reality and stood conventional wisdom on its head in so many areas: electric vehiclesInternet access, space travel, social media, and, soon, neurological disorders. But like Icarus flying too close to the sun, even great men have their failures. Thomas Edison once bet his fortune on an “electric pen,” and Henry Ford, despite his business acumen, was a spectacular failure as a politician. I submit that Musk’s foray into politics (beyond the America-saving help he gave Donald Trump in 2024) is destined for similar ignominy, both because of the historic failure of American third parties and because of the blind spot so many otherwise successful tech entrepreneurs have about how politics and human emotion work.

Now, I freely admit that I am a lesser man than Musk. Few of us will ever reach his level of extraordinary greatness, and least of all me, a pseudonymous Internet rando writing on X and American Greatness.

So you may ask, who the heck am I to opine on what Elon Musk does?

Well, I may not be especially great, but I do possess a unique background that may give greater insight into a new political party, the federal budget, and Elon Musk than most people possess.

The biggest part of my professional career was as a U.S. Army officer, and that career culminated in a Pentagon position where I was running a $17.1 billion budget item, and that position sent me scurrying often to Capitol Hill in my best Class A uniform to meet with Congressional staffers, where I learned that what Americans vote for and what their tax dollars get spent on are usually not the same thing. War is hell, but so are American budgetary politics, a lesson I learned with great angst and unhappiness, and a lesson that Elon Musk seems to have not yet learned.

More importantly, after retiring from the Army, I got the bright idea to become a lawyer, and for fifteen years now, I have been practicing as a Silicon Valley start-up/venture capital/mergers & acquisitions attorney. My client base consists almost exclusively of companies and venture capital firms run by wannabe Elons: engineers and scientists who get the entrepreneurial bug and want to turn their brilliance into dollars.

Thus, I consider myself an expert on the mentality of the average Silicon Valley boss, and I can say this with certainty—people with that background tend to routinely and almost exclusively engage in binary thinking: 1/0, yes/no, true/false.

They are hardwired this way.

Such tech business leaders constantly seek perfect, unambiguous knowledge and solutions. They have a very difficult time dealing with the messy realities of things like law, politics, social issues, and emotion, where ambiguities are the norm, words can have multiple meanings, and an absolutely, objectively correct answer is impossible to ascertain. I cannot count the number of times I have had to counsel an engineer or scientist on the unpredictability of legal outcomes. They want perfect yes/no answers, and they become intensely frustrated when none are forthcoming.

When confronted with such situations, people with such backgrounds feel the deep, visceral need to create a new set of circumstances where the ambiguity can be eliminated. I believe that is what Musk has done by creating the America Party. He wants to transform American political reality, as he has done for space travel and so many other areas, so he decided a new party will eliminate ambiguity and best achieve his absolute goals. However, I believe in this instance, his experiences and mindset are working against him.

After Musk announced the creation of his new party, I spent some time on X sharing my above thoughts and was roundly roasted by many people with similar backgrounds as Musk. The engineers and scientists came at me: “We deal with complexity all the time; you are so wrong.” But complexity is not ambiguity. When unraveling complex systems, the goal is to achieve the “right” answer—the answer that lets the rocket launch, or the program provide correct outputs, or the medical device save lives. Politics is not like that. There is no “right answer” in politics; there is only the compromise position that best allows you to at least partially achieve your goals while not getting thrown out of office. People like Musk despise this sort of uncertainty, and they seek to establish certainty where none is possible.

Thus, the America Party.

I will not spend too much time addressing the folly of third parties in American politics. Absent a transformational issue like slavery, third parties in the United States have never succeeded. Teddy Roosevelt, Gus Hall, George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader accomplished nothing other than to help ensure that the candidate most opposed to their positions achieved office. While the Constitution does not explicitly favor a two-party system, the Electoral College, the Seventeenth Amendment, and the pervasive nature of American winner-take-all elections tend to doom any third party to irrelevance, an irrelevance that best serves the interests of the members of the two-party system least like the third party.

Musk has hung his hat on the idea that the national debt is unsustainable (and it is, but it is not solvable in the perfect manner Musk desires). He is completely unwilling to consider the idea that the BBB, with its elimination of illegal Democrat voters seeking the largesse of the American taxpayer, is a capital investment in the American people designed specifically to eliminate the deficit over time via growth in the incomes of American citizens.

Musk instead seeks the immediate, perfect answer: spending cuts in the current year that will eradicate the debt and the deficit. Mathematically this seems possible, and such mathematics appeal to the engineer in him, but he fails to understand that politically such an instant solution is utterly impossible and will accomplish nothing other than to turn America over to Democrats who care not even a little bit about the national debt and instead see that onerous debt as an essential component in achieving the America-destroying Cloward-Piven Strategy that will one day put the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into high office.

If you are one of those opponents of the “uniparty” who see Musk’s third-party efforts as supporting your longing for fundamental change, consider that his central issue of minimizing the debt will serve only to draw away GOP voters. Democrat voters care almost exclusively about entitlement spending, and a reduction in the national debt is anathema to this ideal. The America Party will serve only to draw away MAGA voters from the GOP and will provide Democrats with the marginal advantage they need to rule America’s downfall into a neo-Marxist hellhole.

I understand that Musk has stated the America Party will serve only to target certain senatorial and congressional districts in 2028. I hear this, and I know it will ultimately prove to be untrue. Political parties transcend their founders, and if the targeted state/district approach is successful, do you doubt for a moment that the America Party will set its 2032 sights on the presidency? Hello, President AOC.

The thing that disturbs me most is that Musk seemed to once understand that political transformation must occur inside the existing parties. When Barack Obama sought to “fundamentally transform” America, he successfully did so inside the Democrat Party (i.e., Obamacare, pervasive DEI), and when Donald Trump sought to do the same, he did so by taking over the GOP.

Elon, please think about this. Fundamental change is incremental; the BBB is incremental change, and you can work toward your goals best by eliminating squishy GOP senators and congresspeople inside the constructs of the Republican Party. Let’s eliminate the RINOs from Congress. Once we have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate and an untouchable majority in the House, true fundamental transformation—and elimination of the national debt—becomes possible.

Isn’t this a better solution than handing the House, the Senate, and the presidency to spendthrift Democrats? Surely your precision engineer’s brain can see this? I deeply hope so.

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Cynical Publius is the nom de plume of a retired U.S. Army colonel and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is now a practicing corporate law attorney. You can follow Cynical Publius on X at @CynicalPublius.

 

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/07/business-and-politics-are-not-the-same-but-the-america-party-seems-to-think-they-are/

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Democrats got too crazy so they were smacked down. Now the Republicans are getting too crazy and it's time for them to get smackdown in 2026 It's the only way to keep these people in line.

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