A bunch of toddler oligarchs are, temporarily, riding high

Paul Krugman set loose from the NYT onto Substack is a delight. He's got our oligarchs' numbers.

... ask yourself: What’s the point of being rich?

Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires. ...

... many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”

... So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration.... What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.

Of course, Trump’s victory won’t do anything to restore the adulation [the tech bros] miss..., so I can confidently predict that Andreesen and others in his set will keep on whining — that there will be so much whining that we’ll get sick of whining. Actually I already am.

... for sheer cringe value nothing matches Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about “masculine energy.”

Here I must insert an aside (gift) from NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie. 

We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys.

Krugman goes on:

... they are defined by their wealth and nothing more, which I believe explains their submission to Trump. Trump would probably be able to damage their businesses if they didn’t bend the knee, but that would still leave them immensely wealthy, just possibly no longer among the wealthiest men on the planet.

The problem for them is that their status as the richest of the rich is, in ego terms, all they have left, which leaves them far more vulnerable than they would be if they were just run-of-the-mill billionaires. 

Empty, ignorant men doing ignorant things. What a time!

How to come out of a punch drunk moment

Erudite Partner is out with a new essay for this moment, here available, among many outlets, from Professor Juan Cole's Informed Comment. 

Half of us got kicked in our heads and guts by the re-election of Donnie the dimwitted and his merry band of cowards and grifters. We're going to have to figure out how to live through and beyond this unmitigated disaster for the American republic.

Survival and hope will depend on learning to see and live in the gaps ...

Finding Hope in the Negative Spaces of the Trump Era

... What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

Go read it all.  

For myself, I'm coming out of the numbed phase and reconnecting with appropriate rage at the injustice, cruelty, greed and foolishness that characterize what appears to be on offer from the new regime. Let's figure out how to kick these dopes where it hurts -- in their bank accounts and in their over-valued balls (figuratively of course).

More on John Adams: oligarchy and wealth-envy in a republic

New Republic staff writer Timothy Noah has some further reflections on the second President. John Adams argued that oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy, might overpower the system the Founders had wrought. It's interesting to consider this in the light of Lindsay Chervinsky's exploration of Adams' presidency.

Democracy Is No Bulwark Against Oligarchy

The hard lesson of 2024 is that liberals spent too much time fretting that Donald Trump would subvert democracy if he lost and not enough that Trump would win a free and fair election. We can argue about the reason why voters elected Trump—inflation, transgender hysteria, Joe Biden staying too long in the race—but we can’t pretend that those who cast their vote for Trump didn’t know they were choosing oligarchy...

... 2024 may be the first election in American history in which a majority of United States voters specifically chose oligarchy. This is terra incognita, but it turns out to be a problem to which our second president, John Adams, gave considerable thought.

None of the Founders fretted as much about oligarchy as Adams; he was writing about its dangers as early as 1766, and in 1785 he urged that the Pennsylvania Constitution permit sufficient payment to its legislators to allow ordinary people to serve, lest “an Aristocracy or oligarchy of the rich will be formed.” Six years after he ended his presidency (the weakest part of his legacy), Adams wrote that “the Creed of my whole Life” had been that “No simple Form of Government, can possibly secure Men against the Violences of Power. Simple Monarchy will soon mould itself into Despotism, Aristocracy will soon commence an Oligarchy, and Democracy, will soon degenerate into an Anarchy.”

... [Sociologist] C. Wright Mills identified Adams as a more incisive critic of the power elite than Thorstein Veblen, and Judith Shklar and John Patrick Diggins voiced similar opinions. In the 2016 book John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville, a Yale-trained historian and co-founder of the grassroots group Reclaim Idaho, takes this argument further. “In his letters, essays, and treatises,” Mayville writes, “Adams explored in subtle detail what might be called soft oligarchy—the disproportionate power that accrues to wealth on account of widespread sympathy for the rich.” Adams did not judge this attraction benign, but neither did he believe it could be wished away.

The Framers of the Constitution, Mayville argues, believed in checks and balances among various government institutions, but they did not consider any need to balance the power of government against the power of wealthy private citizens. Adams thought otherwise. “The rich, the well-born, and the able,” Adams wrote in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–8), “acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.” ...

Adams may have been naïve about the possibility that a rich sociopath like Trump might eventually come to power, but in Mayville’s view, [Adams's intellectual nemesis Thomas] Jefferson was just as naïve to believe that oligarchy would wither and die if government would only deny it power.

Mayville summarizes Jefferson’s view as “Old World aristocracies would be replaced in the republican age by new natural aristocracies of virtue and talent.” To a great extent that eventually happened, aided in the twentieth century first by the spread of publicly funded high schools where attendance was mandatory and, at midcentury, by the spread of higher education.

Why do rich people exert so much influence? Money is the obvious answer, and Adams acknowledged its power. But in The Discourses on Davila (1790) he emphasized another, more psychological explanation. There is, Adams wrote, a universal desire “to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected, by the people about [us], and within [our] knowledge.” In short: We all live to show off.

This is why Mills compared Adams to Veblen; one might also compare Adams to the journalist Tom Wolfe, the preeminent chronicler of social status in the late twentieth century. Granted, among idealistic college students, associating oneself with the wretched of the earth yields greater status, but for most of the rest of us associating oneself with the rich is what gets the job done.

... During his first presidential term, Trump showed that he could transgress beyond our wildest dreams—flout the woke hall monitors, lie with abandon, defy the law—and get away with it all because he was rich. Even the many Trump voters who pulled the lever for him in 2024 while disapproving of his personal behavior tend to envy the man.

Trump Envy isn’t the only political force out there; that explains why he lost in 2020. But it’s turned out to be shockingly powerful. The United States grew more oligarchical over the past half-century, with the rich accumulating ever-greater power over politics. But Trump represents a quantum leap—supercharged oligarchy not in spite of the public will but because of it. Which makes ours a John Adams sort of moment. 

This was as bleak an electoral outcome as the country has ever seen, and democracy wasn’t the victim. It was the cause.

Superficially, it is easy to think that Jefferson, a plantation- and enslaved persons-owning grandee even if perpetually over his head in debt, would be the advocate for oligarchy. To our eyes, he was an oligarch. But it was the New England lawyer, considered a boring institution builder, who saw more vividly the danger to the republic from wealthy men.

It is still likely in our power to choose, belatedly, against fully substituting the rule of the rich for stumbling, progressive democracy. Do we want to?

How long will they ride hide?

Welcome to our latest Gilded Age. The Trump regime implants its oligarchs. 

 

As of December 6, the plutocrats are being put in place. Does the wider society have the imagination and boldness to unseat them? 

The next installment of the American adventure ... A corrupt oligarchy is not stable; things could get worse or better. Here we go.

We needed some good news ...

Today we learn that The Onion has acquired the defunct hate site Infowars, formerly the property of conspiracy monger Alex Jones. Jones was forced into a court ordered fire sale after Sandy Hook parents won a massive judgement for his lies about their murdered children. 

The sale and acquisition led the San Francisco Chronicle to highlight that the new owner is Jeff Lawson. He's the kind of successful entrepreneur who used to make the city an interesting place before many members of the current generation of tech-bros burned out on ketamine and rightwing fantasies, seeking to use their power to play at politics.

The Onion, and now Infowars, are primarily owned by San Francisco tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson, who is known locally for donating to efforts to fight homelessness and publicly defending the city.

While many of San Francisco’s tech leaders have fled the city in recent years or criticized its troubling street conditions, Lawson has been a notable exception.

The Twilio founder has garnered attention for philanthropic donations to fight homelessness and provide assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April his high-flying tech career took an unexpected turn, as he led a group that bought the fabled Onion website for an undisclosed price, pledging to invest in its growth.

... In 2018, as San Francisco residents debated a business tax to fight homelessness, Lawson publicly supported the  effort, and announced that Twilio was donating $1 million to local homelessness programs. 

A year later, the Lawsons signed the “Giving Pledge,” the initiative backed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage wealthy businessmen and women to donate their fortunes to charity.

That same year, he and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff donated to an effort to bring a homeless shelter to the Embarcadero. 

Two years later, he publicly defended the city as tech entrepreneurs who were fleeing to other cities heaped abuse on it.

“This is the time when we should be thinking about, 'How do we give back? How do we help take care of our communities and the people around us who may not be faring as well? '” he told the Chronicle.

As we drift into Trump's kleptocratic revival of the late 19th century Gilded Age, it's nice to learn that, now as then, some of our robber barons attempt to make themselves somewhat useful to the City.

Going to be a rough season for democracy and rule of law

So why did Donald Trump hold a modern day Nazi hate rally in New York City, imitating the German-American Bund's 1939 pro-Hitler shindig?

Because he knows in his devious heart that he is going to lose the election on November 5.

Let me repeat that:

Trump held his hate rally because he knows in his devious heart that he is going to lose the election on November 5.

If Trump were working on the assumption he'd win the vote, he'd be barnstorming the states where the election is contested. He wouldn't be putting on a show in New York City, a place that not only despises him, but even worse, ignores him.

For the Trumpists, Election Day is just the beginning. We can expect violent disruptions where they can pull them off -- possibly to prevent (some people from) voting, almost certainly during the counting. MAGA folks will do outlandish things we haven't thought of yet, and it won't be good.

But in all the battleground states except Georgia and Nevada, Democrats hold executive power; in the other two, government has been responsibly run. Meanwhile Joe Biden is still in the White House. It will be hard for MAGA to overthrow a free election using the power of the state.

We'll certainly go on to a litigation stage. Will corrupt courts try to turn a free and fair election that goes for Kamala Harris into a Trump victory? Probably not -- though we have plenty of evidence suggesting  not to trust John Roberts and the Supremes. Might they decide that the divine right of presidential appointees trumps the electorate? Roberts likes a bit of monarchy as he showed us in the immunity decision. Still, it would probably have to be very close to let them pull that off.

The current MAGA majority in the House of Representatives will come up with quasi-legal stunts to put a losing Trump in office; it's going to take legal grit to hold that off.

Supposing Harris is still on track to be inaugurated, will there be violence then? I think Merrick Garland's overcautious Justice Department may have done us a solid on this: people are still going to jail for the last time they stormed the capital, reducing the number of hardcore crazies who are willing to take the risk of another go at a half-assed insurrection. And this time, the forces of order will be ready.

And that's only what I can see and imagine from my distant perch on the Left Coast. 

• • •

I can't believe that I am saying this, but what lies ahead makes me glad that our candidate is a prosecutor who has seen degenerates like Trump and his sycophants before. We give her a chance by giving her as large an electoral win as possible. That's up to the people of these disunited States.

• • •

And then we push her to cut oligarchs like Musk and Bezos down to size. That, too, will not be easy.

Dying in Darkness

I had to do it. Jeff Bezos' cowardly veto of his newspaper's endorsement of Harris-Walz was too much. How could I have any confidence in an institution devoted to covering Washington after seeing its leadership  run for cover (ineptly) at the approach of an aspiring fascist?

Historical experience suggests this won't shield Bezos unless he is more directly willing to lick Trump's ample ass; oligarchs lose under fascism. See also Mikhail Khodorkovsky who played footsie with Vladimir Putin to protect his oil wealth but lost it all and ended up in a gulag.

As media observer Nancy Gibbs writes: 

[The Post's] “Democracy dies in darkness” motto now moans like an epitaph. ...

Time for a "left love child"

Tarso Ramos, executive director of the essential think tank Political Research Associates, proposes a left response to the Donald Trump phenomenon which we would all do well to internalize.

Beyond Trump: Disrupt, Defuse, Compete
... the racism that once helped to build the White middle class has for decades been strategically redeployed by the Right to undermine public support for democratic institutions and antipoverty programs. The result: falling real wages and accelerated income and wealth inequality even among Whites. Simply put, racism is destroying the American middle and working classes.

But that story is not told clearly, loudly, or often enough. Most liberal discussion of the economy addresses race, if at all, in terms of disproportionate economic hardship. And much of the current national discussion about racism only addresses jobs and the economy in order to pivot away from the realities of racism. What we need is a synthesis.

As Heather McGhee and Ian Haney-López have argued, “The progressive movement should expand from a vision of racism as violence done solely to people of color to include a conception of racism as a political weapon wielded by elites against the 99 percent, nonwhite and white alike.” Call it the love child of Black Lives Matter and Occupy. Let’s make it clear that racism is not a viable vehicle for economic advancement for the growing White precariat. ...

Recent movement eruptions have called out what's wrong (Occupy) and that it will take stubborn self-love that's both smart and principled (Black Lives Matter) to change those things. The Donald makes sitting on the sidelines unacceptable.