America’s Backlash Against Oligarchy

Marketing note 1: I have a new ebook, Navigating the Chaos: Chronicles of Economic and Political Madness, which uses material from this Substack to construct a thematic narrative of the past two years and the issues that Democrats must now address to build an enduring progressive movement. Available from Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop, and Nook.

Marketing note 2: I’m doing a live, in-person event with the inimitable Heather Cox Richardson Wednesday Nov. 11 at 6:30 PM. Seating is fully booked, but it will be livestreamed: details and registration here. We’re trying to find a way to livestream it on our Substacks too, and I’ll let you know if we can.

Now, today’s post:

The midterm result was a tale of many backlashes. There was the backlash of erstwhile Trump voters, particularly young white males, against high gasoline prices and the Iran War. There was the backlash of Hispanic voters against ICE and Trump’s horrific deportation policy. There was the backlash of Black voters against Republicans’ gerrymandering to negate their votes and Trump’s open racism. There was the backlash of women against the destruction of abortion rights and suppression of the Epstein files. There was a backlash of ordinary families against the loss of healthcare coverage. There was a general backlash against Trump’s bottomless corruption and lies. And there was a backlash of patriotic Americans against Trump’s bromance with Putin.

Yet one of the most stunning blows was against the class of oligarchs, whom voters reasonably believe have been major enablers Trump and the Republicans, allowing them to inflict significant economic, social and strategic harm the country.

Since the 1980s, America’s society and economy have become increasingly oligarchic. The share of wealth held by the top 0.0001% — roughly 200 people — is now more than 7 times what it was in 1980.

That tiny billionaire elite spent massively in this year’s midterm elections, with the spending overwhelmingly in support of Republicans:

Note: Andreesen and the Brockmans are very right wing, but their bars aren’t red because they give a lot of money to tech groups that aren’t explicitly pro-GOP.

But to the credit of American voters, the oligarchs’ party and their preferred candidates lost, bigly.

Elon Musk, in particular, was nearly the sole funder of Ken Paxton’s senatorial campaign in Texas. Overall, he spent more than $200 million in the state — only to see James Talarico beat Paxton by 12 points, and Gina Hinojosa become the next Texas governor. Musk has been the leader of the tech bro faction trying to promote a move to Texas away from liberal California. Now, suddenly, the broligarchs’ promised land has turned blue.

You should not conclude from Tuesday’s humiliation that concerns about the threat to democracy from extreme wealth concentration are unfounded. Wealth still buys power; oligarchs played an enormous role in supporting Donald Trump’s return to the White House, throwing billions behind Trump, Republicans, and their aligned PACs. And they will surely keep trying to buy elections until and unless steps are taken to limit their excessive wealth.

Yet the results of the midterms do suggest that there are some inherent factors that limit the ability of malefactors of great wealth to sway elections. Indeed, their support can backfire, inflicting serious damage to the political prospects of whomever they support. I would identify four factors in particular:

· Big money can be self-defeating in American politics

· Big money feeds big corruption

· Billionaires live in bubbles of self-delusion

· Parties supported by billionaires also end up trapped in bubbles

Big money can be self-defeating: Money obviously matters a lot in political campaigns. A well-financed candidate can afford to run ads, hold rallies, hire staffers to get his or her message out. But getting the message out is self-defeating when the candidate doesn’t have a message that resonates with voters. In fact, the messages that Republicans delivered in the midterms alienated voters.

The October AP-NORC poll asked voters whether a number of issues were “One of the most important.” Leading the list were “the economy” and “the cost of living,” followed by healthcare and the war with Iran. What could Republicans say about these issues, when the Trump era has been marked by surging inflation, government cuts that have led millions to lose health insurance, and a military debacle in the Persian Gulf? They could echo Trump’s “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes” proclamations that everything is great and we’re living in a Golden Age, but that would do them more harm than good. Instead, the Republicans offered personal attacks, cries of “communism”, AI-generated misrepresentations, and tired culture-war broadsides.

Not only that, the massive flood of big money has sensitized American voters to the fact that the oligarchs are, in effect, trying to buy their vote. And we should commend the many principled Democratic politicians who trusted the instincts of voters and foreswore accepting superPAC funding, like the newly elected senator from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.

Big money feeds big corruption: Suppose you’re a billionaire who wants some changes in government policy, almost always involving decisions that directly affect your personal wealth. One way to get those changes is to finance campaigns by politicians you believe will act in your favor. But there’s also a more direct route: Just give money directly to officials who deliver what you want.

So when a party of, by, and for oligarchs took power, it was inevitable that we would see raw corruption on an unprecedented scale — although Trump’s personal greed and lack of self-restraint made that corruption especially lurid.

True, much of Trump’s personal profiteering involved crypto bros rather than the mega-donors listed in the chart above, and Jared Kushner has been raking it in largely from Middle East potentates. But corporate America rushed to fund Trump’s pet projects, like his grotesque ballroom, and the support of big money fed a general attitude within the administration that anything goes.

And voters noticed. Both pre-election polling and the exit polls show perceptions of corruption as a major factor in the election — possibly, depending on the phrasing of the question, comparable in importance to the cost of living. As a result, the cozy relationship between oligarchs and the G.O.P., which enabled this unprecedented corruption, may well have hurt Republicans far more than lavish campaign funding helped them.

Billionaires live in bubbles of self-delusion: The obscenely rich are different from you and me. They live in a bubble, populated by yes-men and yes-women, who never dare to tell them that they are dangerously deluded. They have no conception of ordinary Americans’ concerns or their struggles. So when Elon Musk rants that all Democrats are communists, uses his megaphone X to promote the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Democrats are deliberately trying to replace whites with immigrants, or uses his control of Starlink to aid Putin’s war against Ukraine, there is no one willing or able to inform him that these are self-defeating acts.

Furthermore, because oligarchs like Musk have effectively bought the G.O.P., they are able to impose the delusions and obsessions that festered inside their bubbles on the Republican Party as a whole. Notably, Musk also was a leading forcebehind the remarkably large amount of Republican anti-transgender messaging during the midterms, with more than $280 million spent on anti-trans broadcast and connected TV ads. Not only were these ads full of lies, but nobody cared about the issue. It always ranks dead last when voters are asked about which issues they consider important.

Finally, by providing Trump and the Republican party virtually unlimited financial support, making them feel impervious to the concerns of ordinary Americans, the billionaires have dragged Republican politicians and influencers into their bubbles

Parties supported by billionaires also end up trapped in bubbles of self-delusion: While the scale of the Democratic midterm victory surprised almost everyone, the victory itself came as no surprise. Generic ballot polls had shown a 9-point Democratic advantage (it actually came in at 13.) This predicted advantage, according to modelers like G. Elliott Morris and Nate Silver, translated into a near-certain Democratic takeover of the House and approximately 80 percent odds of taking the Senate.

Yet like Trump, many Republican activists and politicians appear to have been completely shocked by their defeat. Why? Because they were living in a self-referential bubble, getting their information from right-wing influencers and Fox News, who led them to believe that the polls were either outright fakes or massively understating Donald Trump’s popularity.

Indeed, at this point I’m starting to believe that Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and his conversion of the app into a safe space for fascism, has actually been harmful to the right wing, because it means that the Republican elite is marinated in misinformation, including misinformation about the U.S. political scene.

Now, while Democrats have every right to savor their historic midterm victory, I will paraphrase what I wrote in yesterday’s post: to quote Churchill, this is not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning of the fight to reclaim this country from the oligarchs. A lasting victory will require greatly reducing megabillionaires’ power, which means reducing their share of national wealth.

Tuesday was, however, a good start.

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