The One Thing Democrats Won’t Call Elon Musk: Un-American

Elon Musk is an unprecedented force in the 2024 American election. The wealthiest man on Earth, he’s purchased a dominant global media platform and steered it far to the right. He’s pumped out conspiracy theories to his 200 million followers. He’s conversed secretly with Vladimir Putin while doing business with China’s brutal government. And he’s spent untold millions in the hopes of electing Donald Trump. If he succeeds, Musk says, he’ll join the administration and reshape federal agencies to his liking.

Plainly, America’s most influential immigrant is working for sweeping change to our national institutions. Just this week, Musk sparked new outrage by endorsing a social media post saying Trump’s deportation plans and budget cuts would tank the stock market. He also told a town hall audience that people should prepare for “temporary hardship” on the way to prosperity under a radically transformed economic order.

Democrats and liberals have responded with all the familiar refrains from the blue-state hymnal: They’ve called him an authoritarian, a bigot, a greedy plutocrat — even, in the memorable words of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, “a dipshit.”

But at least some Democrats think they may be pulling their biggest punch: That the Apartheid-era South Africa-born billionaire is an outsider messing with America’s homeland.

In a year where nationalism is front and center in politics, it would be a potent heartland refrain: This ingrate owes his fortune to the United States and this is how he rewards us: by constantly lambasting our culture on social media, chit-chatting with our enemies and lecturing us about how we need to be less woke — sorta like that doomed regime he grew up under. How dare he try to change America?

Musk’s antagonists, for the most part, won’t go there — an omission that says a lot about the political culture of today’s Washington.

“The Democratic Party writ large has become uncomfortable speaking in the language of nationalism,” said Ruy Teixeira, the political scientist who predicted the Obama coalition but has become disaffected from the party’s increasingly white-collar, college-educated vibe. “It seems like a little bit of political malpractice. There’s potential political advantage, but they can’t act on it because of this reticence.”

“Why don’t they do it? It’s hard to imagine,” said Hank Sheinkopf, the New York-based veteran Democratic consultant. “The reality is that Democrats fight sitzkrieg and Republicans fight blitzkrieg.” Where vulgar nativism is concerned, he told me, the fear in Democratic circles is that “it’s untoward to say those kinds of things. This is about the Democratic zeitgeist versus the Republican zeitgeist. The purity is ridiculous.”

If Musk were an immigrant lefty who threw himself into politics, he wouldn’t be so lucky.

Just ask George Soros. Soros’ foreign roots are front and center in the hideously ugly backlash against his philanthropic funding of liberal groups. Or ask Rep. Ilhan Omar, the second-most influential African immigrant in American politics and a longtime recipient of go-back-where-you-came-from nastiness. “She’s telling us how to run our country,” Trump said of the stridently progressive Somali-born Minnesota lawmaker during his last campaign. “How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing?”

“If [Musk] were supporting Harris, the Republicans would be very quick to brand him as this internationalist who’s not American and has no voice that should be acceptable,” said Steve Jarding, a longtime Democratic consultant. “Democrats don’t do that. Truth is, we shouldn’t do that. And yet in politics sometimes, you have to play by their rules.”

“I think it’s valid to say that there’s a certain discomfort among some Democrats with nationalism, but there’s not really with patriotism,” said James Carville, the legendary strategist behind Bill Clinton’s first presidential victory. “What is the U.S.? Is it a plot of ground or is it an idea? Is it blood and soil or is it something else? I think that’s the distinction that people make.”

It’s a distinction that makes liberals good at the inclusive, wrap-yourself-in-the-flag version of patriotism — but not so keen on the exclusionary variety of the same thing, where some antagonist is declared to be not one of us.

Yet if Democrats were going to abandon that purity, Musk makes an ideal target.

If Trump wins, it will be a great irony of his comeback: The most incendiary voice in his America-first campaign belongs to someone who has led an almost impossibly cosmopolitan life. Musk is an immigrant, an Ivy Leaguer, a fan of obscure political philosophies, a guy whose supply chains and satellite deals extend to America’s shadiest foreign rivals, a tech tycoon eager to move beyond the stolid American dollar, a social media obsessive who regularly says terrible things about American culture, leadership and demography.

To have a child of the Apartheid era scold Americans about being too woke is a bit like having an immigrant from North Korea declare that American capitalism is out of control, or watching a deep-pocketed newcomer from Saudi Arabia fund candidates who say America has too much religious freedom. Maybe it’s true! But in the hands of a clever political strategist, his origins might disqualify him as a spokesperson for the cause.

In blue America, however, a lot of people have trouble raising a stink about birthplace, even when it involves the left’s least favorite country of all time. (Same goes for his fellow far-right benefactors Peter Thiel and David Sacks, who also spent formative years in the land of Apartheid.)

Of course, Trump himself also leads a life that’s pretty different from a lot of his core supporters. But he’s a recognizably American archetype, someone who lives the way a lot of folks might if they had his money. Musk, on the other hand, is way outside the cultural mainstream. It’s notable that progressives will caricature him as a Bond villain, but not indulge the ugly jingoist reflex to call him an alien outsider.

How to take on Musk is not just a campaign-season question, either. Whether his candidate wins or loses, he’ll be a major player in America’s debates for years to come.

This week, some Democrats have at least tiptoed up to discussing Musk’s foreign roots thanks to a Washington Post report that Musk had worked illegally while in the U.S. on a student visa. “He was violating the law,” President Joe Biden said. “And he’s talking about all these illegals coming our way?”

“He lied his way into citizenship and now he’s attacking us,” Carville exclaimed when we spoke. (On X, Musk insisted that he had been permitted to work.)

Still, the Democratic criticism more or less stopped at calling Musk a hypocrite, since he’s become a huge critic of illegal immigration and pushed out a stream of conspiracy theories. Few have suggested that his alleged violations en route to citizenship make the billionaire a less than legitimate actor in American democracy.

Maybe that’s to their credit. Democrats claim to oppose the politics of delegitimization, and people ought to practice what they preach.

That’s just not the way a lot of political strategists see it. “Running for office is so much different than governing,” Jarding said. “When you run for office, you’re on an island, and to get to the elected position, you have to swim through a lagoon filled with sewage. It’s ugly and distasteful, but you’ve got to get elected.”

“Democrats don’t really speak nationalism,” he said. “And they don’t to their detriment.”

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