Is Mark Zuckerberg right to change content moderation policies and end DEI? I mean, I’m fairly sympathetic to what he says he wants to do, but really that’s the wrong question. And it’s a question that progressives need to stop caring about. The better question is why a single individual has this much power over our speech commons. And a further question is what Zuckerberg wants from our government.

In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg described the ‘existential’ threat to his company, which was the antitrust suit filed against him by the Trump administration. That case goes to trial in 2025, if Trump chooses to continue with it. If. There are many other policy goals that Zuckerberg has, and none of them have to do with controls over speech.

So forgive me for being cynical, but Mark Zuckerberg’s real goals are (1) an end to the Federal Trade Commission antitrust suit against the firm (2) to eliminate the consent decree that bans the targeting of children and (3) the legalization of mass copyright violations for AI training models (4) eliminating regulatory scrutiny of Facebook’s payments business by the CFPB and (5) warding off the threat that Congress will regulate the social networking firm over kids privacy. (6) U.S. government aid in preventing foreign governments from regulating the company’s platforms.

There are more legal problems for Zuckerberg, including holdover litigation from Cambridge Analytica, potential insider trading claims, and Section 230 liability over addiction. But let’s be clear, these are all a result of this one guy having far too much power because we’ve chosen a regulatory framework to allow that. Over the last eight years, slowly but surely, that framework has been changing. Zuckerberg can see that, and he’s doing his best to make sure he stays in control.

The path for Democrats is pretty clear, it’s got to become a political organization dedicated to fighting big money. There is no avoiding the oligarch problem anymore. For years, certain progressives felt they could balance the interests of big business with a certain vision of equality, and that’s what the calls for content moderation and DEI were about. They never made sense, they never delivered any real political equality. They were about telling oligarchs to do what we want.

But the truth is, oligarchy and democracy just cannot coexist.