The Private Nations Doctrine: Why Sovereignty Belongs to Citizens, Not Billionaire Technocrats

THESE BILLIONAIRES ARE MORE LIKE NATIONS THAN CITIZENS

There is a tendency in American political life to assume that the greatest threat to liberty arises when the state grows too strong. A century and a half of conservative thought, from Hayek through Goldwater through Reagan, was built on that suspicion — and not without reason. The twentieth century supplied no shortage of tyrants in uniform. But ideas have half-lives, and the world which produced that conservative reflex has vanished. The greatest encroachments on the sovereignty of the American citizen no longer originate in the White House, or Congress, or even the alphabet soup of administrative agencies. They originate in Silicon Valley server farms, philanthropic foundations in Manhattan, and transnational NGO archipelagos operating under the polite euphemism of “civil society.”

The American system assumes that power, to be dangerous, must be formal. This assumption is now wrong.

The men who exercise the greatest influence over political speech, cultural norms, electoral inputs, and information flows are not presidents or senators. They are technocrats and financiers who do not stand for office, do not answer to the public, and cannot be impeached. That they are applauded as “innovators” or “philanthropists” only adds farce to the tragedy. For what they operate are not businesses in the nineteenth-century sense, nor even conglomerates in the twentieth-century sense, but private governance structures that increasingly resemble micro-sovereigns. They possess their own territories (digital platforms, cloud zones, moderator networks), their own intelligence agencies (data surveillance and sentiment analytics), their own propaganda ministries (feeds, algorithms, content filters), their own foreign ministries (NGOs, foundations, and “impact investment” funds), and, in some cases, their own militaries (satellites and drones operating in conflict zones).

When Elon Musk decides whether the Ukrainian military may have access to Starlink over Crimea, he is making a decision that is geopolitical in nature, not commercial. When George Soros funds district attorneys who refuse to prosecute crime, or bankrolls legal activist networks that undermine immigration enforcement, he is not participating in philanthropy but in jurisdictional warfare. When Mark Zuckerberg coordinates with intelligence officials and agencies to suppress political news stories during a presidential election, the effect is indistinguishable from censorship by a Ministry of Information—except that it occurs beyond the reach of constitutional law.

We are encountering a new species of power, one the Founders anticipated only dimly. They built a constitutional machinery to restrain governmental tyranny — but no machinery to restrain private tyranny that behaves like government. The presumption of the Founding era was that private power, derived from commerce, would disperse naturally. That presumption held in a world of farms, merchants, and small enterprises. It does not hold in a world where a handful of men can silence entire nations with a keystroke, surveil populations at scale, influence elections by algorithmic curation, or flood jurisdictions with activists, prosecutors, and NGOs who rewrite social contracts from the bottom up.

If one seeks historical analogy, the closest may not be mid-century American corporations, but rather the British East India Company or the great merchant families of Renaissance Italy — hybrid institutions that were not merely economic actors but sovereigns in their own right. John Company fielded armies, minted currency, collected taxes, and toppled regimes. The Medici and Fugger banking houses financed kings, mediated diplomacy, and shaped the fate of states. The difference is that the modern equivalents do not require muskets or galleys; they have platforms, data centers, and tax-exempt foundations.

And yet, our legal and political frameworks remain frozen in the old assumptions. We treat Zuckerberg as a businessman, Musk as an innovator, Soros as a philanthropist, and the sprawling NGO complex as merely “civil society.” The result is a kind of constitutional blindness. When private power suppresses political speech, the courts shrug, because the First Amendment constrains only the state. When private platforms conduct warrantless surveillance of citizens and share it with intelligence agencies, civil libertarians are told that no rights have been violated, because the Fourth Amendment is not implicated. When NGOs funded by billionaires or foreign regimes reshape local law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion, no alarms ring, because no statute prohibits private money from governing public policy. No one quite knows where to file the complaint, because the institution doing the governing is not recognized as a governor.

This is how self-government erodes: not by the arrival of an army in the streets, but by the outsourcing of sovereignty to private actors who were never meant to possess it.

Critics will point out that these men are not dictators. They are not seizing office. They are not jailing opponents. And yet the power to control information, to distort incentives, to suppress narratives, to manufacture consent, to decide which crimes shall be prosecuted and which shall be tolerated — these are regime powers. They determine what the citizen may see, what he may say, and what he may expect from the institutions that are supposed to protect him. Power exercised informally can be more potent than power exercised formally, because it denies the public a clear antagonist.

The Left has made its peace with this arrangement. It discovered, sometime between the Obama and Biden years, that private sovereignty could accomplish what public sovereignty could not. A bureaucracy that is formally constrained from policing speech can do so through platforms. A party that cannot directly criminalize dissent can do so by delegating to NGOs, prosecutors, and activists. A campaign that would be forbidden from censoring an opponent’s message can achieve that censorship when Silicon Valley politely calls it “content moderation.” Progressive politics has always been adept at building “non-state states.” What is new is the scale of the private partnerships.

The Right has been slower to recognize the shift. Too many conservatives still operate from muscle memory, convinced that the enemy is socialism. But socialism is not the threat. State ownership of factories is not the threat. The threat is a post-political aristocracy that governs through code, capital, and the courtesies of philanthropy. If conservatives persist in fighting the last war, they will lose the current one by default.

The appropriate response is not envy, nor confiscation, nor ham-fisted regulation that punishes success. It is a reassertion of republican principle: sovereignty belongs to citizens. Elections are not theater. The public square is not a private toy. Surveillance is not a commodity. Law is not an NGO-driven experiment. The state cannot outsource its way around the Constitution.

What, then, must be done?

First, Congress must criminalize public–private collusion that targets political speech or electoral outcomes. If a government official cannot directly order a media outlet to suppress a story, he should not be permitted to accomplish the same via email to a content moderator.

Second, platforms that function as public squares must be treated as such when they coordinate with the state. The law already knows how to define state action; it must simply apply that logic to the digital age.

Third, the use of private data infrastructures for warrantless surveillance must be forbidden outright. Delegated tyranny is still tyranny.

Fourth, the NGO-financial complex that has become the Left’s shadow government must be forced into daylight. Foreign funding must be disclosed. Tax exemptions must be conditioned on neutrality in elections and law enforcement. Entities that function as political actors must be regulated as such.

Fifth, antitrust must be revived not as an economic cudgel but as a political safeguard. Private sovereignty is most dangerous where it is consolidated.

Finally, conservatives must build their own parallel institutions rather than merely lamenting the capture of existing ones. A republic requires counterweights. It always has.

This is not a call for revolution. It is a call for restoration. The Founders did not design a system in which the citizen begs for dignity from billionaires. They designed a system in which the citizen rules through his vote, through his voice, and through the law.

If America continues to outsource sovereignty to private nations, it will wake one day to discover that elections still occur but matter little, that speech still exists but persuades no one, and that freedom still survives but only as sentiment. A free people cannot tolerate a regime in which a handful of men, accountable to no citizen, decide which facts are permitted to exist.

The question before us is therefore simple: shall we be governed by institutions we did not elect? If the answer is no, then the work begins not with slogans, but with law. For in a republic, sovereignty does not drift — it is taken back.

Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils, nor, I think, will the human race. PLATO