This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 9 episode of “Velshi.”
Two hundred and thirty-five years ago, our nation’s first president, George Washington, wrote a letter in response to Catharine Macaulay, an English feminist and historian. Macaulay wrote to Washington to congratulate him on his new role as the first head of the United States.
History hasn’t paid much attention to this letter, but its words are profound and timely. It offers a view of how Washington perceived his new role as president: not as a vehicle for personal power but rather as a duty of stewardship.
His responsibility, as he saw it, was to facilitate a social contract between the governed and their government. Washington understood that every decision he made from that moment forward would be remembered — and possibly emulated — by future American presidents.
He wrote to Macaulay, in part:
In our progress towards political happiness my station is new; and, if I may use the expression, I walk on untrodden ground … There is scarcely any part of my conduct [which] may not hereafter be drawn into precedent … [T]he Government, though not absolutely perfect, is one of the best in the World, I have little doubt. I always believed that an unequivocally free [and] equal Representation of the People in the Legislature; together with an efficient [and] responsible Executive were the great Pillars on which the preservation of American Freedom must depend.
But that’s not quite how we’re doing things right now. Donald Trump has been in office for less than a month and he’s already attempting to cripple the federal bureaucracy and federal agencies that were designed to serve the American people.
Meanwhile, the oligarchy backing him has launched an all-out war against federal workers, a retributive attack on the so-called “deep state,” which, by extension, is an attack on the people those nonpartisan civil servants serve: you and me.
Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire who happens to be both the richest man in the world and the current president’s top campaign donor, and his allies have appeared to have quite literally seized control of the technical and operational infrastructure of our federal government, effectively sidelining Congress, which has the constitutionally mandated power of the purse.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that what this new American oligarchy seeks is to relegate Congress to a largely ceremonial role or, perhaps, no role at all.
In his farewell address, Joe Biden warned of this dangerous new threat, what he called the “tech industrial complex” and how it could break our democracy, what Washington called our “great experiment.”
Biden cautioned that there would be “dangerous consequences” if a “concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people” goes unchecked. But it’s not too late.
Across all 50 states, resistance is taking shape. That’s despite the Trump administration’s attempts to “flood the zone” with a barrage of presidential pronouncements and orders of dubious legal validity, that are, in large part, designed to distract the media and demoralize the population — or at least the part of the population that opposes the damage Trump and the oligarchy are doing to democracy.
America’s judges are holding the line in some cases and people are in the streets, defending the body politic that is currently under siege.
This fight is not new, even in America. Americans have faced grave challenges in the past: slavery, the fight for women’s suffrage and the fights against racist laws and unjust wars. We have never emerged from them perfectly but, usually and ultimately, we have emerged stronger, more inclusive and more democratic.
The Russian opposition leader and democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza knows all too well the dangers of the growing power of the oligarchy and the toxic combination of a tech-industrial complex and an anti-democratic regime. In April 2022, in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kara-Murza appeared on “Velshi” and bravely criticized Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s government. When I asked Kara-Murza whether he was worried about speaking out, he told me: “We all know the price. We all know the cost. But we also know that there are millions of people in Russia who categorically oppose the Putin regime and everything it’s doing … I’m a Russian politician, Russia is my country, Russia is my home and this is where I have to be.” One day later, Kara-Murza was arrested. He spent much of the past two years confined to a small cell in a Siberian penal colony. He survived two poisoning attempts before that, believed to have been retaliation for his advocacy against corrupt Russian elites. Kara-Murza was released from Russian prison last August, in a historic prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia. Today, he suffers from polyneuropathy, a nerve condition that affects his ability to feel his extremities, suspected to have been caused by his poisoning at the hands of the Russians. Like great opposition leaders before him, Kara-Murza’s defining trait is his unwavering sense of duty to his country, at risk to himself and his family. As he explained it to The New York Times in December, “[W]hat moral right do I have to call on my fellow Russian citizens to stand up and resist the dictatorship if I wasn’t prepared to do it myself?” Since his release, Kara-Murza has been tirelessly lobbying Western leaders to take stronger action against Putin while also working to maintain the morale of Russia’s resistance, both at home and abroad. In his latest article for The Washington Post, co-authored with fellow dissident Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian activist and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and Ilya Yashin, who was also imprisoned in Russia, the trio focuses on Big Tech’s moral failure, calling out the industry’s complicity in enabling autocrats worldwide: Every concession to dictators hides a tragedy. In Iran, administrators of opposition media platforms, whose data was handed over to the government, have been executed under the country’s laws. In Russia, tens of millions lost access to uncensored information about Vladimir Putin’s bloody war against Ukraine, leaving them vulnerable to relentless state propaganda … “But do we really have a choice?” corporate lawyers from Western tech companies argue. “To operate in a country, we must follow its laws!” They see no room for debate.
“[The] principle of ‘following local laws, no matter what they are’ provides a convenient excuse. But it’s just that: an excuse and a moral dodge,” the piece continues. “We believe technology can stop being an unwitting accomplice to dictators and an easy tool for oppression.” Amel Ahmed and Allison Detzel contributed.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
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