The Populist Capitalist
History's Last Man?
I was walking around the city and I saw a magazine stand. Forbes Magazine—big picture of Dana White on the cover, with the headline: Populist Capitalist.
This really seems like the true End of History, the true Last Man—like, I can’t imagine anything happening after the rise of the “populist capitalist.”
There’s a lot of confusion about Nietzsche’s concept of the Last Man, but it’s easier to understand in its relation to the end of history—the event that goes along with it.
Simply put: History ends when the Last Man is produced.
Can there be a man produced after the populist capitalist? Who comes after that? It is the perfection of the End of History—the full realization, at last, of History’s Last Man.
The precise phrasing—Populist Capitalist—feels significant too, in how it is about a man who is a capitalist, but in a populist way. This is not about a populist who uses capitalism—that would be the Capitalist Populist—it is about a capitalist who uses populism.
Also significant—the article/story is not some Economist-style neoliberal technocrat bullshit article about populist capitalism, as some rising sociopolitical tendency. The time for that is over—history has now ended. Now it is about the Last Man who has been produced by the End of History—the Populist Capitalist. His time has come, he is here.
The details and actual contents of the Forbes article don’t matter—it’s bullshit for emptyheaded finance bros—but the pure phrase of Populist Capitalist, paired with Dana White’s picture, looking confidently evil, feels significant.
This look—confident in an evil way—seems like an appropriate expression for the Last Man to have. The Last Man is the product of history ending—a figure of profound, terminal decline—the downward arrow of historical progress, finally coming all the way down to earth, and manifesting in a human type. The person produced by that will be satisfied with himself—not in spite of his lowness, but because of it. Things cannot possibly get bad enough, or go low enough—the downwardness just makes the Last Man stronger. He can absorb all of it, thrive in it—that’s his special power…the Last Man is confident because he knows he will get stronger as things continue to get worse…
What else defines History’s Last Man, the Populist Capitalist?
A capitalist who is able to use a popular medium—like engaging with social media/influencers, podcasters, etc.—ipso facto becomes populist.
The medium is the message. This has always been true, since McLuhan said it—and it still is now: certain media are more populist than others; and using the various media of populism, social media/podcasting etc—is where the idea that capitalists like Trump, Musk, Dana White, etc are somehow populists, comes from. Simply from the fact that they are using populist media, their message—of basically brutish capitalism—somehow becomes “populist.”
The populist capitalist is a type of person that the system can easily produce, infinitely—they can just keep feeding their elites into the populist media, and then the capitalist becomes a populist. And once a capitalist is a populist, politics is over—and that is the End of History…