Curtis Yarvin, darling authoritarian ideologue of many tech billionaires, is back in the news, along with his deep links to J.D. Vance, via Peter Thiel. It’s no secret that plutocrats tend to be off-the-charts economic libertarians, with extreme hostility even to wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing. So, if they were principled thinkers, it would seem logical for them to oppose dictators and wannabe dictators. But no, more and more tech bros are fans of Trump and Yarvin’s very Trumpy brand of authoritarianism. Elon Musk is the most visible tech bro fan; there are many more. What gives?
Well, first, it should be clear that they are not principled libertarians. Principled libertarians believe in formal equality of negative liberty rights. You know, my right to swing my fist stops at your nose. Whereas the authoritarian-loving tech bros want absolute impunity to do whatever they like, without regard for anyone else’s rights or interests. Here, for example, is Marc Andreessen explaining who his enemies are:
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth” . . .
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences. . . .
Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.
So, full-speed ahead on building nuclear power plants without any safety regulation at all! Trust the genius tech bros, who will install safety equipment or not, just as they please, because they are the saviors of humanity whose judgment must never be questioned by experts with college degrees. Blindly trust them on everything they do, even though their contempt for everyone who expresses the slightest hesitation on giving them total impunity is absolute.
Who, exactly, is being “delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences” now?*
(Andreessen’s p(doom) is 0%, which seems rather low to me. Not because I fear that AGI will have a malicious mind of its own. Rather because sociopaths and megalomaniacs would do catastrophic damage harnessing AGI to their own ends.)
Yet it’s not even their supposed lack of impunity that enrages them against their “enemies.” In fact, Democrats have given the tech bros and other plutocrats de facto impunity for years. Obama failed to hold any of the Wall Street plutocrats accountable for the fact that they brought down the world economy in 2007-8. In fact, he bailed them out. His Attorney General Eric Holder was the great practitioner of deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements with criminal corporations. These essentially say “we’ll let you get away with crime this time, but only if you promise to be very conscientious in the future. And if you commit the same crime again, we’ll throw the book at you.” Except, all too often, criminal corporations, even ones not big enough for you to have heard of them, face trifling consequences (far lower than the profits from their crimes) even after repeating their crimes again and again.
No, what really enraged the Wall Street plutocrats against Obama was not that he held them to account, which he didn’t, but that he criticized them. He called them “fat cat bankers.” And in their rage at Obama’s insult, they threatened to seize up the economy again by refusing to loan money. They were still enraged even after Obama backed off his remarks. This is what you get when you join immense wealth and unaccountable power with infinite narcissism.
The authoritarian-loving tech bro set is no different. They already have practically unlimited wealth and impunity. What these wounded narcissists demand is to be worshipped, Ayn Rand style. Democrats, liberals, academics will never give that to them. They are too prone to fact-checking, too skeptical, too critical of the established order that put the plutocrats on top.
But Trump is happy to flatter the tech bros and all their malignant prejudices if they show love for him in return. Never mind that Trump’s flattery is entirely transactional. Narcissists don’t mind if the flattery is conditional, insincere, or even created by themselves. Trump boasts of fake golf championships. Musk got his employees to tweak the X algorithm to boost his posts over Biden’s. Andreessen demands that his megalomaniacal self-glorification be accepted by everyone else without question, lest he brand them enemies of humanity.
Where will this end? Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, argued that the central psychosocial motive driving inequalities of wealth and power is the desire for superior esteem. People compete to acquire more wealth and power than others, because that is what people come to admire above all as inequality increases. (As early 20th century oil magnate Haroldson L. Hunt said, “Money’s just a way of keeping score.“)
Rousseau claimed that, in the absence of a republican social contract putting brakes on inequality, the rise of private property and commercial society will lead to runaway inequality and ultimately to despotism. In the end, even the rich will become slaves to the despot, forced to bow and scrape before him.
We are even seeing it now, before Trump has been sworn in, much less crowned. Jeff Bezos has bent his knee to Trump at Mar-a-Lago; Musk is constantly in his company. Both, of course, have their fortunes tied to lucrative government contracts. They are slavishly flattering the guy who has promised to abuse his power in awarding or taking away these contracts. Now they are trapped. Couldn’t these towering geniuses have gamed this out ahead of time? No, because their own narcissism got in the way.
*I’m no enemy of well-regulated nuclear power, BTW, although I suspect that the economic case for new civilian plants is probably limited to a few extremely energy-intensive industries, given how inexpensive and rapidly deployable wind, solar, and storage are. But the tech bros can’t point to the safety record of highly regulated nuclear power to claim that unregulated nuclear power wouldn’t be playing God with everyone else’s lives.
{ 37 comments }
Dr. Hilarius 12.24.24 at 8:40 am
I first encountered libertarians way back in 1972. They overlapped socially with the Society of Free Space Colonizers and the Society for Creative Anachronism. One group wanted to pioneer Lagrange 5 between the earth and the moon. There they could have a society freed from earthly regulations and constraints. The other group pined for the days when serfs knew their place, knights got the girls and, again, there were only self imposed constraints on their behavior. It wasn’t about money, it was about power and control over others. Power and control that denied any criticism.
I could say more but it’s late and I must be up early for work. Ms. Anderson, you are on the right track.
Alex SL 12.24.24 at 10:20 am
Yes to nearly all of this. Key is, “in the end, even the rich will become slaves to the despot, forced to bow and scrape before him.” In fact, while poor people may suffer more in aggregate, ultimately an individual oligarch is in much more danger from the despot than an individual citizen of moderate means. The taxi driver, petrol station manager, or teacher are below the despot’s notice as long as they keep their head down (and, of course, do not belong to a scapegoated minority). The oligarch, however, is in the despot’s field of vision. He may offend the despot’s narcissism. He has a lot of money that the despot may covet for himself, and a business that the despot may want to hand over to one of his cronies. He may suddenly want to go into exile, or find himself singled out for corruption charges, because of course the despot has dirt on all he lets get close. Or if the despotism is going really mask-off, balcony.
As per the OP, these billionaires are simply not very smart. Many people assume that they must be smart, because they think meritocracy ensures that only smart people can get very rich, but the opposite is true. Some people are in the right place at the right time, and from then on, their wealth insulates them against the consequences of their stupidity, at least in a law-based society.
Except, all too often, criminal corporations, even ones not big enough for you to have heard of them, face trifling consequences (far lower than the profits from their crimes) even after repeating their crimes again and again.
Fining the companies, even heavily, is really pointless if the managers get to walk away. What do they care if the company goes bankrupt from the fallout of their crimes? And do we really want to fine, say, a water company that is caught releasing untreated sewage? All they will do is pass the fine on to the customers in raised fees. Therefore, I believe the principle should be that the managers and CEOs should end up in jail, fined heavily, and/or banned from working in the same field ever again. In the end, it is humans who are responsible, not the corporation they use to commit their misdeeds.
Janus Daniels 12.24.24 at 3:16 pm
You write of plutocrats and claim, “wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing”? They disagree.
They think, “Every penny going to help anyone else should go to me. First.”
Shirley0401 12.24.24 at 4:04 pm
RE: Alex SL @ 2
I remember learning in middle school that the “fear of reputational damage” is all we need to incentivize companies to play by the rules and even self-regulate. Despite the fact that companies routinely just rebrand or reorganize when this occasionally happens because their actions are so harmful or disastrous it actually breaks through to the general public. It’s almost as if all of these things are post-hoc rationalizations for the rich and powerful to do whatever they want.
Liz Anderson 12.24.24 at 6:49 pm
To Janus Daniels: It’s not clear that plutocrats pay anything into Social Security and Medicare. They can get paid with capital income rather than wages, and hence avoid wage taxes. That’s what the carried interest loophole is all about. Real estate moguls have various ways to declare a net loss on their income tax, which can offset 100% of their taxable income. Trump has done that for years. Practically all of the insane complexity of the tax code is driven by plutocrats who don’t want to pay a penny. If the plutocrats haven’t figured it out, they can switch to another wealth manager who will do it for them. So their objection to social insurance is not that they are paying into the system. It’s that they resent anyone getting free stuff, imagining that they earned every penny of their own income through sheer hard work and genius. This is a fantasy, of course. Every one of them is propped up and bailed out by the Fed, government contracts, tax expenditures, waivers of tax obligations by states and municipalities, the DoJ’s lax enforcement of laws against them, etc., etc. They are all profoundly dependent on the government for their fortunes. Their narcissism prevents them from grasping this reality.
JimV 12.24.24 at 10:42 pm
Amen.
Peter Dorman 12.24.24 at 11:57 pm
LA is pointing us at a contradiction that has always been at the core of libertarianism. (A similar contradiction adheres to left wing anarchism, but that’s for another day.) On the one hand, freedom from coercion and interference is absolutely valorized, or so it seems, and on the other it is enforced by illiberal, authoritarian means. Hayek, for instance, was as principled a libertarian as you ask for — his critique of the welfare state on the basis of the arbitrariness of nationality is prescient and correct IMO even if it does not carry as much weight as the counter, within-nation argument drawing on positive freedom and flourishing — and yet he was all too willing to support a tyrant like Pinochet. Slobodian documented a similar pattern in Globalists, with nostalgia for the Hapsburgs.
That said, the techbro version is still pretty extreme. Freedom to exploit market opportunities has become a moral imperative as well as a political one, and enforcement is pretty broadly conceived. It’s true that the division between these two realms has always been somewhat artificial, and in this crazy version hardly exists at all, i.e. the fate of the oligarch at the hands of the despot.
Alan White 12.25.24 at 3:50 am
Liz ( if I may) @5 : this is exactly right.
MisterMr 12.25.24 at 9:25 am
Even if we speak of historical fascism, Von Mises was initially very pro fascism, before being hunted because he was a jew so he realized fascism was bad.
Or in art, if you read “Martha Washington goes to war”, a comic by Frank Miller, it has clearly libertarian themes, however many of them echo recent days right wing paranoias.
Frank Miller always said he is a libertarian, but later comics like Sin City or 300 have a somewhat fascist undertone.
So there is some evident practical link between fascism and libertarianism, even though on paper they are opposed.
However, it seems to me that there is another danger today for the USA, that Trump is not Putin, but rather Eltsin. If this is true and the american public infrastructure is now on sales, the various plutocrats have very good non ideological reasons to be friends of Trump.
engels 12.25.24 at 1:47 pm
there is some evident practical link between fascism and libertarianism
Quinn Slobodian has written about this.
https://www.academia.edu/39530020/Anti_68ers_and_the_Racist_Libertarian_Alliance_How_a_Schism_among_Austrian_School_Neoliberals_Helped_Spawn_the_Alt_Right
qwerty 12.25.24 at 3:14 pm
“However, it seems to me that there is another danger today for the USA, that Trump is not Putin, but rather Eltsin. ”
No, rather, Biden is an equivalent Yeltsin, an irrelevant figurehead controlled from the outside.
The way I see it, Trump certainly does want to be American Putin, a strong man pursuing national interests, and pressuring domestic super-rich (downsized from “oligarchs” in control of the Yeltsin’s regime) to serve national interests as well.
But chances are he might become a Gorby, liquidator of the overgrown out-of-control empire. Who knows. These are interesting times.
Jim Harrison 12.25.24 at 6:18 pm
Perfect equality and limitless inequality require ruthless police power for their establishment and persistence because they are unnatural. The libertarians and the Leninists both call for the withering away of the state, but the predictable consequence of their efforts is its hypertrophy.
nastywoman 12.25.24 at 6:53 pm
@ ‘Biden is an equivalent Yeltsin, an irrelevant figurehead controlled from the outside’.
and we thought that it is ‘trump’ who is ‘an irrelevant figurehead controlled from the outside’ as some ‘bro’ called Elon Musk has proven and the point that this ‘outside force’ is now trying to do the same in Germany makes it ‘interesting’ times – indeed.
nastywoman 12.25.24 at 7:14 pm
and about: ‘Trump certainly does want to be American Putin, a strong man pursuing national interests, and pressuring domestic super-rich (downsized from “oligarchs” in control of the Yeltsin’s regime) to serve national interests as well’.
Now that sounds a lot what some German – Trump loves to quote pursued…?
John Q 12.25.24 at 7:32 pm
I had a go at Andreessen’s manifesto last year. The flip side of the nuclear fanboyism is a dismissal/hatred of solar PV, the most startling example of technological process since the microprocessor.
Musk is an odd position here, given his ownership of Tesla, which has also been a big success. It will be interesting (in the sense of the spuriously Chinese curse) to see how all this plays out in Trump’s energy policy.
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/retrofuturism
nastywoman 12.25.24 at 7:45 pm
@’It will be interesting (in the sense of the spuriously Chinese curse) to see how all this plays out in Trump’s energy policy’.
It already did (play out) – when Trump told US that after Elon supported him – he HAS to like the e-mobility – even if the questions remains – what is more horrifying – to be electrocuted by a sinking e-boat or eaten by sharks?
Ken_L 12.26.24 at 3:09 am
I think this is too dismissive of the dangers Musk poses to society, mainly but not exclusively America’s. If money is a way to keep score then Musk is so far ahead of everyone else he is in a class of his own. I think it’s likely, for example, that he’s told Trump he’ll give him $4 billion in return for his worthless Trump Media shares, and Trump is in awe of a man who commands such vast financial power.
I see Musk as a genuine megalomaniac; a wannabe James Bond villain made flesh and dwelling among us. Bored with Bladerunner cybertrucks, unfulfilled by being social media’s biggest troll, tired of playing with big spaceships, the 12-going-on-50 Musk has decided it would be fun to run America and selected other countries. Needless to say he won’t succeed, but he could cause enormous damage if the inner 12-year-old starts throwing tantrums and breaking his toys.
Mike Huben 12.26.24 at 1:18 pm
Peter Dorman @ 7 writes: “LA is pointing us at a contradiction that has always been at the core of libertarianism. (A similar contradiction adheres to left wing anarchism, but that’s for another day.) On the one hand, freedom from coercion and interference is absolutely valorized, or so it seems, and on the other it is enforced by illiberal, authoritarian means.”
This is absolutely correct, but can be generalized a bit more, to apply to all rights-oriented philosophy, including liberalism and libertarianism.
Freedom from coercion and interference is created with rights, which must be enforced with coercion and interference. (Rights create duties for others, which must be forced upon them.). This would seem a zero sum problem, except that we value some rights more than the reciprocal duties.
Wilhoit’s Law:
“There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
That’s exactly what the rich want rights and duties to do.
Anarcho 12.26.24 at 4:18 pm
Propertarians (to give them a more fitting name) have always been attracted to fascism — von Mises, for example, was happy to praise fascism and work with fascists in Austria:
Propertarianism and Fascism
In terms of “principled” libertarians, well, if they were “principled” then they would not call themselves libertarians — a term they knowingly stole from the left (anarchists) in the 1950s:
160 Years of Libertarian
It is because they stole the name to describe an authoritarian ideology that we have the apparent contradiction of propertarians supporting fascism. Once you realise that is the case, that their ideology is actually hierarchical and authoritarian, then their support for fascism (in the short term, you understand) becomes less paradoxical.
marcel proust 12.26.24 at 9:22 pm
Ken_L @17
1250-going-on-5012 MuskFTFY
Ebenezer Scrooge 12.26.24 at 10:03 pm
AlexSL@2 is right. Criminal penalties against corporations are kind of dumb, especially if you believe that corporations are not moral entities.* Fines can be a reasonable deterrent, for relatively small repeat-play events that are verifiable for a court. But they’re a joke for major social costs. (Possible exception: antimoney laundering, where the fines can get ginormous, although I suspect US regulators of being harsher on foreign banks than their own.) Incarceration of senior officers is the only way to go.
One problem Obama had in 2008 was that the big banks had excellent proactive lawyering before the event. They were able to separate “everybody knows” from admissible evidence against high-level corporate officials. I wouldn’t blame this on Obama. That’s why preservation of e-mail evidence is so important, and the current rules (even for banks) so inadequate.
Conservatives vacillate on the moral status of corporations. When corporations do something evil but legal, conservatives retreat to the moral neutrality of the firm. When corporations participate as citizens–law-makers in a democracy–conservatives insist they are only exercising their God-given free speech rights. Corporations can only be viewed as morally neutral if they are political eunuchs. If they buy the rules by which they are judged, they cannot retreat to moral neutrality with any consistency.
Bobbyp 12.28.24 at 2:51 am
Criminal penalties for corporations should include seizure of shares and the firing of executives and members of the board. Increased penalties for repeat offenders.
JoeinCO 12.30.24 at 2:48 am
The Principled Libertarian is the the neighbor of the True Scotsman. Never met either. Libertarianism, in practice in the US at least, has always had an undercurrent — or even an overt expression — of authoritarianism. As noted above, the libertarian order (and I mean Order as in Law and..) is established by authoritarian means. I also distinguish techno-libertarianism because of its amalgam of authoritarian, libertarian, and techno-utopian ideals. The techno-utopian angle is their deus ex machina.
somebody not quite old enough to remember the signs 12.30.24 at 4:14 pm
the principled libertarian looks down a main street choked with signs on every business: “no blacks”, “no jews”, “no trans”, “women may not speak within fifty feet of this property”, “no mexicans”, “no chinese”. raw sewage floods the street, slowly oozing into the sinkholes that are chewing it away. “Ah,” the princpled libertarian sighs with evident satisfaction, “freedom at last.”
Tom 12.30.24 at 4:52 pm
While OP does not state it, it would seem from OP that most, if not all, plutocrats went with Trump. And I have seen many making that claim anyway.
Well, it is not clear how to define plutocrats but I would like to dispute that notion. Data on this is hard to come by, but it is fair to say that several, if not more, billionaires supported Harris rather than Trump. And even among those who did not make any endorsement, many likely leaned Democratic. E.g. Bezos did not endorse anyone but he owns the Post which has always leaned Democratic (otherwise we die in darkness, I suppose).
This is not to take away from valid criticisms of Musk and his ilk, and the damage they are going to inflict upon the nation. But just to correct some of the possibly hidden premises here.
J-D 01.01.25 at 1:48 am
Well, somebody hasn’t been paying attention! Yes, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, and what was the political effect? The effect was that the paper was prevented from endorsing the Democratic candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
Billionaires are, necessarily, not as diverse a group as the population as a whole, but they are still diverse enough to make it reasonable to suppose, by default, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, that some of them are Democrats. However, the Republicans are, and have been for decades, the party of tax cuts for the rich and other billionaire-enriching policies, and that makes it reasonable to suppose, by default, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, that more billionaires vote Republican than vote Democrat. A blog comment saying ‘Well, I don’t know, but maybe more billionaires supported the Democratic candidate’ is nowhere near close to being strong enough evidence.
Tom 01.01.25 at 7:23 pm
J-D @26, I am afraid it is you who has not been paying attention. Bezos bought the WP in 2013 and the WP endorsed Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. If you want to talk about the “effect” of Bezos buying the WP, you can’t select one data point out of three.
In any event, the claim is that plutocrats stick to authoritarians like flies to flypaper. Some, like Musk and (long-time Chuck Schumer donor) Bill Ackman, enthusiastically do. But others do not. I provide Bezos’ example. If Bezos’ example is not considered valid (wrongly in my opinion), a simple Google search would return you the list of billionaires who endorsed Harris: Gates, Cuban, Pritzker etc. Even for those who did not make official endorsements, their sympathies are often clear, or have been in the past, e.g. Zuckerberg.
One could retort that, yes, there are exceptions, but that still most billionaires support Trump. But then you have to count them, and I am not sure why the burden of proof is on me to provide the quantitative analysis rather than on those who are defending a general claim about plutocrats.
It is true that historically the rich have tended to support Republicans. But this misses the point about Trump and the fact that he has received many votes from lower-income voters too. This was true in 2016 too (I disagree with Anderson’s previous post too) but it is obvious in 2024 when Harris got higher margins for those making above 100k. So, it is hard to generalize to Trump – who ran as an anti-system candidate – what had happened before. For example, Wall Street financiers clearly liked Trump’s tax cuts but they also like stability and they clearly enjoyed the stock market returns during the Biden’s presidency. So, your “default assumptions” are disputable and underestimate the connections that the Democratic Party had with powerful economic actors in the US economy.
J-D 01.04.25 at 1:16 am
If your research strategy is ‘search the Web for the names of billionaires who endorsed the Democratic candidate without also searching the Web for the names of billionaires who endorsed the Republican candidate’ then the fatal flaw is obvious (although you haven’t explicitly confirmed that you have actually carried out any kind of Web search).
There is no burden of proof on you. There’s no burden of proof on me, either. Neither of us is under any ‘burden’ here; we’re posting our comments here because we have chosen to do so, not because we are obligated to do so.
I made an observation in an earlier comment which I repeat here in case it’s tiresome to have to go back and find it:
Anybody can read that and note that I have said nothing about conducting a quantitative analysis of specific information and also note that I have given a general reason for my general conclusion. Anybody who would like to indicate a flaw in my line of reasoning is free to do so; anybody who doesn’t prefer to spend their time that way needn’t. If anybody wants to report the results of a systematic investigation of specific information (like the Web search suggested) that will be of interest to me and (as I already indicated in the previous observation quoted) it might (if the research strategy is a sensible one) prompt me to change my opinions. The Web search suggested, however, doesn’t seem to me as if it’s worth spending my time on.
Austin George Loomis 01.06.25 at 4:16 am
“So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.”
Which, it seems to me, raises the question posed, on a different kind of watcher-watching, by the unnamed German philologist whom Milton Mayer interviewed: “…how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?”
Tm 01.06.25 at 4:03 pm
Big money donors (defined as the top 400 donors per party, a somewhat arbitrary definition but illustrative nevertheless) gave far more to Trump than to Harris in 2024, and also accounted for a far bigger share of total contributions. (Source: https://bsky.app/profile/adambonica.bsky.social/post/3lbfmyrabxc24)
What is striking is that the role of big donors has grown massively in just the last 4 years, and even more striking, in 2020, they gave more to Biden than Trump. This is strong evidence for my suspicion that the biggest electoral “swing” let alone “realignment” has nothing to do with “working class” or Hispanic voters, it’s the capitalist class that decidedly rallied behind Trump in 2024 and – through donations but more importantly through their control of almost 100% of the legacy media as well as social media (Murdoch’s, Musk’s and others’ Trumpist propaganda has been worth billions, and doesn’t even show up in any official statistic) – gave Trump the wining margin.
Apparently, in 2020, many rich people were sufficiently pissed off by Trump to come out in support of Biden, but their preferences changed. I wonder why that may be. No I don’t.
Tm 01.06.25 at 4:14 pm
I have said this before, the real meaning of Trumpism is the alliance of fascism and oligarchy (or plutocracy). What I find particularly worrying is that this alliance isn’t even explainable by rational profit interest alone (which would leave the possibility open to reason with them). It really is about narcissism and the resentment of a highly privileged class against the fact that less rich people have any rights at all (see Liz Anderson’s excellent analysis: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/12/19/plutocracy-masculinity-and-the-psychology-of-fascism/). The relative prosperity and sanity of the post war decades is in part due to the fact that the capitalist class understood that a rules based order was in their own interest. Not any more.
I wrote this a few weeks ago:
Our survival now essentially depends on whether the oligarchic class understands that a livable planet is in their own selfish best interest. And as we have seen, they don’t understand it. They are dumb as rock, probably the dumbest upper class in history. They just rallied behind Trump like a herd of lemmings. They support the movement that proudly announced to make polio great again. They think they don’t need a functioning public health system becauset their money can buy them health. But in the old days, rich and poor alike sufferd from diseases like polio. The rich suffered more comfortably but suffer they did. Vaccines are most effective when the vaccination rate is near universal. Medial progress doesn’t happen without publicly funded research. Never happened, won’t happen.
The oligarchs think they don’t need environmental protection because their money can buy them clean water and air. Totally dumb, They really seem to believe – Musk most certainly believes it – that they don’t need a livable planet because with enough money they’ll be able to buy a new one. They are gonna destroy this civilization of ours not even out of any rational profit interest (the recent stock market records make it crystal clear that the oligarchs are doing extremely well), just out of resentment against the impertinence of liberal democracy to pretend that the rich have to follow any laws at all, laws made by governments elected by ordinary non-rich people who never should have gotten voting rights.
Tm 01.06.25 at 4:18 pm
Oops. I hadn’t noticed that both blog posts are from you Liz Anderson. Excellent analysis, thanks!
Tom 01.06.25 at 7:18 pm
@TM30 and 31. Thanks for the chart, very useful. There are a few patterns that I find interesting:
Contra J-D, the Democrats have been the party of plutocrats as well. Republicans may have an edge, and clearly did this election, but both parties have drawn considerable support from the mega-rich.
The swing since 2020 is what I suspected (but did not write about in previous comments). Biden campaigned as a candidate of stability but then, when in office, he had some pretty progressive policies, at least by US standards. This clearly made him some enemies among the plutocrats. The Democratic Party then had to face a decline in plutocratic support while having only timidly ran as a populist party. So they did not get enough votes of the working class either.
I agree with your assessment of the current capitalist class (I think they do not even see themselves as a class). But this risks taking too much agency away from voters. The Dems ignored how unpopular some of their policies were and were not able to connect with enough voters. It is fine to scapegoat the plutocrats, but there is a tendency to always blame someone else or to find the “culprit”. The reality is that Trump got more votes more than Harris and the Dems had no real game plan to deal with him as they would have lost in 2020 too, if not for Covid.
ps: thanks to Liz Anderson for keeping comments open.
Tm 01.07.25 at 8:05 am
“But this risks taking too much agency away from voters… there is a tendency to always blame someone else or to find the “culprit””.
I agree with the sentiment, but then you are engaging in the blame game against the Democrats. Voters have agency, politicians have agency, the capitalists have agency. What I think we need to grapple with is that the biggest change apparent in the political alignment in recent years is not in voter preferences (voter preferences have changed remarkably little in the US, see JQ’s post), and it’s not in Democratic party strategy, it’s in the revealed preferences of the Capitalist class. As a class, they were always right leaning, always leaning Republican (perhaps 2020 being an exception, when a large fraction rationally decided that Trump wasn’t in their best interest), but never so unified in support of the right wing party as in 2024. And the same pattern I think holds internationally. The capitalist class is not monolithic and there are different economic interests and cultural preferences and a large fraction of the class didn’t care so much which party was in charge as long as they don’t seriously threaten their interests. But in 2024 they came out in near unified support for an openly fascist candidate regardless of his obvious incompetence and the risk he objectively poses to the economic interests of many capitalists. This should frighten us.
Propaganda works. Most mass media in the US and globally are controlled by oligarchs and most of them are now either openly or tacitly supporting reactionary politics. Most election post-mortems have ignored or downplayed this fact, perhaps because nobody knows what to do about it. But we cannot deny the fact that propaganda works. Given the relentless Führer worship in a large segment of the US media environment, and the absence of any relevant leftist or at least liberal counterweight, and the well-documented tendency of all social media networks to amplify disinformation and right wing propaganda, on top of the openly fascist Musk-network, it is hardly suprising that Trump won. It is more surprising that he won so narrowly. That doesn’t negate the agency of voters. Half of voters resisted the propaganda offensive. Propaganda doesn’t work on everybody, and those who fall for it are not just passive victims. But it works well enough to make fascism competitive in democratic elections.
J-D 01.07.25 at 8:32 am
I have quoted Tom’s exact words; here are my exact (earlier) words:
It’s just not true to say that in recent decades the Democrats have supported, to the same extent as the Republicans, tax cuts for the rich (and other billionaire-enriching policies). The fact that they have attracted some support from (some) billionaires doesn’t change this.
Tm 01.07.25 at 10:02 am
“the well-documented tendency of all social media networks to amplify disinformation and right wing propaganda”
I should have said nearly all social media networks. There are a few exceptions, like Bsky.
Tom 01.07.25 at 10:44 pm
@TM Thanks for your reply. I only half-agree but, given the way CT comments work (they can take quite some time to show up) and that this is an old post, I am afraid we won’t be able to quickly hash out our differences. I have also seen JQ’s post and I disagree with most of it, but the discussion there seems to be quite tense and so I am not in the mood to engage. Thanks again for the linked chart, which was exactly what I was looking for.
@J-D. Readers can look at the chart linked by TM30 and judge for themselves whether it supports your position or mine.
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