Liberals have a Koch
by digby
Meet your new liberal overlord:
Billionaires get frustrated by Washington ineptitude just like everybody else. The difference is that they can afford to do something about it. Tom Steyer, who founded the San Francisco-based hedge fund Farallon Capital Management and retired last year with an estimated $1.4 billion fortune, is one such fed-up billionaire. Steyer’s particular grievance is the lack of government action to combat global warming. “If you look at the 2012 campaign, climate change was like incest—something you couldn’t talk about in polite company,” he says. “With the current Congress, the chance of any significant energy or climate legislation that would move the ball forward is somewhere around nil—possibly lower.”
So Steyer, 55, a major Democratic contributor, quit Farallon to devote his time and much of his money to changing this reality. In doing so, he’s joined an emerging class of billionaires—including this magazine’s owner, Michael Bloomberg and Facebook (FB) co-founder Mark Zuckerberg—who have forsaken the traditional approach of working through the political parties and instead jumped directly into the fray, putting their reputations and fortunes behind a cause.
Some environmental activists are thrilled. “In a country that’s dominated by billionaires gaming the political system for their narrow self-interest, it’s pretty neat to see a player who’s in it for the common good,” says author and environmentalist Bill McKibben. “He’s not a greedhead.” Many Democrats, McKibben among them, view Steyer as a liberal analogue of the conservative Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of Koch Industries, whose lavish support of free-market causes and political ruthlessness loom large in the liberal imagination.
Let me just say, upfront, that if a billionaire is going to throw his money at a particular cause, I think climate change is the
one to throw it at. It has no constituency in politics and average people are more concerned about putting food on the table today. So, good for him for putting his millions to work in a cause that badly needs some advocacy. We all know that the consequences of doing nothing are catastrophic and somebody besides Al Gore needs to step up.
But on the whole, I just can’t help but mourn for our poor rickety system of democracy to see yet another billionaire jump into the arena and decide for the people what issues are important. I can now easily imagine a time at which we simply choose our billionaires rather than our politicians or parties and pledge our loyalty to “Team Bloomberg” or Team Koch” just like the serfs we are rapidly turning into.
But don’t worry, you have the same right to free speech as they do — and if you can afford to spend billions, you too can buy the television advertisements to compete with what they’re selling. So, it’s all good.
I would just note one thing: this is the only billionaire among our new liege lords who is an unabashed liberal.The rest of the relatives sane ones like the Zuckerberg crowd, Bill Gates and Bloomberg are all just a little bit more murky in their philosophical and ideological fundamentals. They are, at best, market oriented centrists or libertarians even if their chosen “cause” might be considered on the left side of the dial. So, our new “proxy” democracy is highly unlikely to be any more democratic — that is, representative of the people’s priorities — than the one we already have.
And that’s largely because the problem this presents is an old one: institutions. The right wing billionaires play the full political spectrum: they fund causes they believe it, they fund the Republican Party and they fund conservative and libertarian institutions to push their ideology, which they fully and completely embrace. The centrist and liberal millionaires and billionaires not so much. They narrowly choose their issue, whether it’s education or something else and refuse to fund ongoing ideologically based institutions. At this point, that’s tantamount to working for the other side.
As I said, if there’s one discrete issue that I exempt from this complaint it’s climate change which is such a huge challenge with such catastrophic implications that I wouldn’t complain if every liberal with money decided to focus on fighting it. But now that we are seeing the emergence of a new aristocracy dedicated to fighting our battles for us, it would be useful if some of the ones who’ve taken up the liberal standard would build a few ideological political and media institutions to match the right wing’s advantage.
I’m surely grateful for my new liberal liege lord and just hope that he won’t lose interest once he finds that it’s hard to make a difference as so many previous noble liberals have done. I even bow my head to my centrist ally Lord Bloomberg on the gun issue — he’s making a difference. But overall this country is looking less and less like a democracy every day.
Update: I’d forgotten that David Atkins wrote about this liberal billionaire recently as well.
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