🗽⤴ Elon Musk's America Party: Is It Up Wing?
Not as pro-progress as you might expect from the political project of a technology entrepreneur
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,
Admittedly, Elon Musk’s newly announced America Party effort seemingly occupies similar thematic airspace as the techno-solutionist, policy-forward “Up Wing” movement I outline in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist.
But don’t mistake our shared altitude for the same flight path to effective Washington influence.
Like my hypothetical Progress and Prosperity Party (yes, yes, a real-world version would probably need a catchier name to go with its awesome unicorn logo), Musk’s post-DOGE political project is rooted in deep frustration with the performance of America’s two-party system — and the 21st-century nation it has helped shape. Too much debt and government inefficiency; too few nuclear reactors (me), solar farms (him), and space colonies (both of us). It likewise targets the disaffected center, lionizes disruptive innovation, and imagines a spacefaring society and economy powered by artificial intelligence, humanoid robotics, and clean energy.
All great stuff.
Build within, or blast outside?
But while both projects aim to rewire American governance around future-oriented, techno-capitalist thinking, their theories of political power — how to actually get things done — follow distinct playbooks. True, Musk’s instincts echo the Up Wing premise, but only up to a point. Both approaches reject the notion of building a sprawling third party — a fool’s errand, to be blunt — in favor of concentrating our oomph through a disciplined bloc of like-minded lawmakers.
Now comes the divergence. Where my Up Wing vision sees this “time to build” bloc emerging from within America’s existing political structure — imagine a cross-partisan coalition of pro-abundance Democrats and “pro-growth” or “pro-progress” Republicans — Musk seeks to blast his way out of the two-party box. His America Party apparently would run a select squad of its own candidates under a separate red-white-and-blue banner, aiming to act as an independent swing vote from the outside.
The difference is as much philosophical as tactical. Up Wing works with the grain of the existing political order, trying to hack the system from within. Musk wants to stage an exogenous intervention — a bold third-party insurgency designed to disrupt the duopoly outright.
If America’s legacy parties are kind of like NASA and Cape Canaveral, Musk presents the America Party as SpaceX and Starbase — faster, leaner, and launching outside the system. By aiming to capture, say, 8–10 House seats and a couple of Senate ones in 2026, Musk wants to be a kingmaker without building a massive, bureaucratic kingdom.
None of that is far from the Up Wing model’s vision: the emergence — perhaps spurred by the AI race with China — of a meaningful bloc of Red and Blue Unicorns, cross-partisan free thinkers who act as policy linchpins. It would echo the Blue Dog Democrats of the 1990s and 2000s, folks who punched above their weight with a blend of fiscal restraint and national security hawkishness.
Different rockets, different trajectories
Yet as much as I admire the world’s richest man for his business-building and tech-optimism — I’m quoted in Time magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year profile of Musk — I don’t want to downplay the differences here. Up Wing is explicitly cosmopolitan and globalist in orientation. It champions economic openness and urban dynamism as engines of long-run growth. Its vision of progress includes not just massive deregulation but also robust public investment in high-risk, high-reward innovation by dramatically expanding funding for scientific research.
While Musk calls for American AI supremacy and modernizing the US military with AI and robotics, his political meddling has, in practice, given cover to major rollbacks in public science funding. Under the Department of Government Efficiency — a federal streamlining effort Musk helped shape — the Trump administration has proposed slashing budgets at the National Science Foundation and NASA. (While Musk expressed concern about NASA’s science reductions, he has remained largely silent on the NSF cuts.)
This divide underscores a deeper philosophical split. The Up Wing vision is disruptive, sure, but also constructive based on a belief that an abundant, opportunity-filled future require a measure of deliberate investment and coordination, not just deregulation, budget slashing, and entrepreneurial heroics.
Musk’s America Party, by contrast, is more reactive: a guttural response to elite dysfunction, bureaucratic inertia, and governmental overreach. Its animating spirit is not implementing some moonshot agenda, but a revolt against perceived waste-driven debt and cultural “wokeism.” Given Musk’s view that superintelligence may be just around the corner — potentially boosting both economic growth and tax revenue — his concerns seem more cultural than fiscal.
Take, for example, the DOGE attacks on the Social Security Administration, which appeared more focused on sticking it to liberal bureaucrats than enacting serious, widely accepted efficiency reforms.
Musk’s party may never be fully Up Wing (or even happen, let’s be honest, gang). But if it really does become a thing and somehow nudges the Ds and Rs toward policies more supportive of innovation and fiscal discipline, of growth and abundance — and away from stagnation and scarcity — it could play a pivotal role in the next phase of American politics. I’m keeping an open mind about the America Party, for now.
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Micro Reads
▶ Economics
The depopulation bomb - Reason
‘Tariff Man’ Is Back for More ‘Liberation’ - WSJ Opinion
▶ Business
Tesla’s real struggles have only just begun - The Verge
Linda Yaccarino steps down as CEO of X - Semafor
▶ Policy/Politics
This is how a nuclear attack on the U.S. might unfold - Wapo Opinion
Tyler Cowen: Why Won’t Socialism Die? - Free Press
▶ AI/Digital
Microsoft, OpenAI, and a US Teachers’ Union Are Hatching a Plan to ‘Bring AI into the Classroom’ - Wired
▶ Biotech/Health
▶ Clean Energy/Climate
Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car - NYT Opinion
The Last Words of a Dying Glacier - NYT Opinion
A Fossil-Fuel Boom in the Americas - WSJ Opinion
Republicans and Democrats Finally Agree on Nuclear. It’s the Industry That’s the Problem. - Politico
Balcony solar is all the rage in Germany. Why not in the US? - Canary Media
▶ Robotics/Drones/AVs
▶ Space/Transportation
▶ Up Wing/Down Wing
The Impossible Calculator - Asterisk
When We Started to Become Americans - WSJ Opinion
▶ Substacks/Newsletters
Gerontocracy is everywhere - Slow Boring
Against "Brain Damage" - One Useful Thing
How Much Will AI Increase Productivity? - Conversable Economist
New Anti-Aging Evidence For Estrogen - Ground Truths
Soooo he basically wants to do Yang’s Forward party but with more shitposting?
Cuz Yang did the whole “win enough centrist seats to become a kingmaker” idea first, and just got yelled at by shrill partisans and various centrists who didn’t bother trying to understand his pitch.
Have you considered the libertarian way to do science? Essentially, no public funding.
I think there's strong reasons why this could be better than what we have:
- No locking up of smart students/researchers in unproductive roles
- Allows a new, decentralized science to emerge in its place, which would be smaller and more efficient, but likely more ambitious
- Removes a lot of unmeritocratic people and ideas from power that are unhealthy for society
If you think this would be a better world, then shrinking the size of public science today could be positive for society and coherent with the Up Wing philosophy.