It’s never a good bet
Well, this is eye-catching from Jeet Heer:
“In other words, a significant portion of America’s economic elite are either autocrats, cowards, or so single-mindedly rapacious that they are indifferent to the survival of democracy.”
Heer begins:
While Donald Trump’s felony conviction for falsifying business documents is hurting him with independent voters, it has only increased his popularity with a demographic cohort that is much smaller in number—but still has an outsize role to play in election outcomes: the super-rich. Axios reports that a Morning Consult poll shows that 49 percent of independent voters think Trump should drop out of the presidential race because he is a felon. This strong negative result is already in evidence in polls showing that Trump’s persistent lead over rival Joe Biden has shrunk and the presidential race is now dead even.
But this bad news for Trump, the BBC reports, has been countered by another development: “Ultra-wealthy Republican donors are rallying behind former US President Donald Trump following his historic trial and criminal conviction.” Indeed, for some tycoons, Trump’s courtroom troubles are reasons for supporting him. For Shaun Maguire, a partner in the powerful Silicon Valley firm Sequoia Capital, Trump’s long list of indictments was a “radicalizing event.”
“Bluntly, that’s part of why I’m supporting him,” Maguire wrote in a long post on X (formerly known as Twitter) announcing a $300,000 donation to Trump’s campaign. “I believe our justice system is being weaponized against him.” Aside from Maguire, the BBC lists other extremely wealthy Trump supporters, including casino owner Miriam Adelson, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, fracking pioneer Harold Hamm, and Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman. Some of these moguls, notably Schwarzman, had previously been critical of Trump for his instigation of an attack on the Capitol as part of scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. But in recent months, they and other members of the 1 percent have decided to put their money on Trump. As a result, Joe Biden’s once formidable financial lead over Donald Trump is rapidly shrinking. In the month of April—for the first time in this election cycle—Trump started raking in more money than Biden.
In response to the rich rallying to Trump, The Economist published a polemic by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman arguing that investors should realize that Trump’s return to the White House would undermine the rule of law, an essential prerequisite for capitalist health. Hoffman acknowledges the “lamentable” reality “that a growing number of America’s corporate and financial leaders are opening their wallets for Donald Trump.”
Here’s some of what Hoffman wrote:
He and his ideological allies have been quite explicit: upon regaining power, they intend to corrupt the legal system to use the state against political opponents. Some American elites support this autocratic agenda because in such a Trumpist regime they expect to be the new oligarchs. Others fear that opposing Mr. Trump will bring retaliation, so seek safety by pledging loyalty.
Most conventionally, of course, there is the simple siren promise of a second Trump term’s lower corporate-tax rates and softer regulatory enforcement.
That’s right. They hate paying the cost of the civilization that made their businesses rich so much that they’ll bet on an autocrat who would make the country unsafe for doing business. (Do they teach basic logic in business schools or just wealth maximization?)
But, ooooh, we could be the new oligarchs! Like Russia’s oligarchs. Think of the money to be made selling defenestration insurance! (We ourselves will never need that, of course.)
Heer suggests that Hoffman’s warnings are lost on Trump’s wealthy supporters because “they are as inherently autocratic as Trump himself.”
Stay with me.
Marley’s ghost carried the chains he unknowingly forged in his life. Seems to me we rarely recognize the traditions and habits of mind passed down for so many generations that they’re almost genetic. Patriarchy for one. Race animosity is another. When friends insist on labeling economic harms a product of late-stage capitalism or neoliberal policies, I wince. Those views are too 20th-century. I’d look further back, Much further.
It’s why readers may be tired of me branding flag-draped MAGAs royalists, not colonists. Some habits of mind, some personality types even, run deeper than modern economic analysis. Caste runs deeper. (India banning it didn’t make it go away.) And antisemitism. It took Russia barely a decade from the fall of the USSR to revert to being a nation of oligarchs and peasants, not unlike what it had been before the October Revolution.
What we see today is feudalism trying to reassert itself. It did not vanish with the Magna Carta and The Enlightenment. It just went underground for a few centuries. It was present in the “Cotton is King” days under slavery in the South. It popped up again for a time during the Gilded Age before Progressive Era reforms. It’s been trying to crawl out from under its rock ever since FDR.
Our 21st century plutocrats were only waiting, biding their time.
Arguing for economic populism, Heer concludes, “Trump-loving plutocrats are a threat to democracy, and there is political capital to be reaped by highlighting that fact and promising to rein in their outsize economic power.”
Joe Biden warns, “It’s never ever a good bet to bet against America.” Look where these guys are placing bets and call them out for it. For what they’re doing. For who they really are.
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