“There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.” — Theodore Roosevelt.
 

TO THE incurious, 26th Republican president Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt is an unlikely example of a “social justice warrior.” His wealthy background, somewhat contrived hyper-masculine, rambunctious persona, political allegiance, hunting fetish, military adventures in Cuba, and occasionally bombastic style would tend to pigeonhole Roosevelt as a rock-ribbed Conservative.
 
But this is only a part of Roosevelt’s story; he possessed a keen sense of what he saw as the essential fairness of the US — the country as it should and was meant to be. As president (1901-09), Roosevelt, with some success, cracked down on the Gilded Age excesses of the super-rich families bent on exploiting the country for their own gain. These included the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Harrimans, Huntingtons, DuPonts, Hearst and Astor clans.
 
Roosevelt’s Square Deal domestic programme instituted 44 antitrust suits against big business, mandated safer conditions for miners, passed the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act (creating the FDA), eliminated the “spoils system” in federal hiring, broke up railroad monopolies, regulated the US’s biggest oil company and 146 indictments were brought against a bribery ring involving Oregon’s public forests, resulting in the conviction and imprisonment of a sitting US senator, fellow Republican senator John Hipple Mitchell.

Roosevelt fired the Oregon DA for not aggressively pursuing the case, something many feel Joe Biden should have done with his prim Attorney General Merrick Garland.
 
Roosevelt also established national parks, forests, and monuments to preserve US natural resources and fostered education, public works and measures against price gouging. All eminently sensible and all areas where the incoming Donald Trump-Elon Musk presidency is seeking either to roll back or undo completely.
 
Eventually, Roosevelt grew tired of his fellow Republicans, and post-presidency, set up the Progressive Party (nicknamed the Bull Moose party), which, if he had lived longer, may have supplanted either the GOP — or indeed the Democrats, then led by the racist Woodrow Wilson.
 
“The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many poor.” — Mark Twain.
 
Will a similar, eventual counter-reaction work against the likes of Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Patrick Soon-Shiong and others? Or have any guard rails against oligarchs in the US long since disappeared?

Whatever the largely unacknowledged economic benefits of the Biden administration, the outgoing Potus proved singularly useless in curbing the behaviour of his billionaire “over-mighty” subjects — and of course that of Trump himself.
 
Here in Britain, Sir Keir Starmer has been advised by some to ignore Musk, in the naive belief that the gadfly South African will either find some new object of his peevish interest (entirely possible) or eventually be given the bum’s rush by Trump, angered by his Doge co-director’s dominance of the airwaves and reduction of “the Donald” to the status of subservient sidekick (again, possible).
 
But events over the last few days appear to have ignited a reaction against Musk before he, to quote 1987’s Predator, digs himself into British politics deeper than “an Alabama tick.”

Musk’s call to replace supplicant Nigel Farage as leader of Reform UK sparked blowback even among the billionaire’s sycophants here, while his repellent grooming gang-related attacks on Jess Philips and Starmer have led to the PM discovering a semblance of backbone.
 
Without naming Musk directly, Starmer correctly stated, “Those who are cheerleading Tommy Robinson aren’t interested in justice. They’re supporting a man who went to prison for nearly collapsing a grooming case, a gang grooming case.

“These are people trying to get some kind of vicarious thrill from street violence that people like Tommy Robinson promote. Jess Phillips has done 1,000 times more than they’ve even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career.”

Whether this actually will translate into concrete measures, such as the prevention of Musk pumping $100 million into Reform, is another matter, as it’s probably better to “get your retaliation in first,” to quote Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, or Rugby’s Willie John McBride and Carwyn James.

Lib Dem leader Ed Davey showed rare (for him) eloquence when he weighed in: “People have had enough of Elon Musk interfering with our country’s democracy when he clearly knows nothing about Britain. It’s time to summon the US ambassador to ask why an incoming US official is suggesting the British government should be overthrown.”

Now of course Davey will find himself at the receiving end of a Musk vitriol attack, that is, once he’s been told who the party leader is.
 
“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.” — Theodore Roosevelt.