RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/18/trump-is-dividing-americas-oligarchs/

The shot heard around the world may have been aimed at Donald Trump’s head, but it could also put extra cash in his pocket. In the aftermath of last weekend’s assassination attempt, two prominent billionaires – Elon Musk and investor Bill Ackman – announced their support for the former president. Two other formerly Trump-sceptical billionaires, Paul Singer and Ken Griffin, are also reportedly considering joining them.

The importance of these endorsements, as well as others from both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, reflect America’s increasingly oligarch-dominated political system. Traditionally, populist Democrats would have made much more of the announcements. In 2018, Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse claimed Trump was in the ‘back pocket’ of billionaires, but the attack didn’t quite land – not least because Whitehouse himself and his Democratic allies have become major recipients of oligarchic funds. Democrats received far more ‘dark money’ than the GOP in 2020.

Even recently, a spokesman suggested that Joe Biden was sending the message that ‘America is not for sale’. That is despite the fact that in 2020 Biden easily outraised Trump with a major advantage from donors in Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, just as Hillary Clinton had done in 2016. While some Democrats posture about seeking to reduce oligarchic power, they equally want to ensure that it’s their oligarchs who thrive.

None of this is to say that Trump was previously lacking his own reliable trove of right-wing donors. Investors like Jeff Yass and Timothy Mellon have given tens of millions to his campaigns. Trump donors tend to be rich investors who are in control of their own funds and less beholden to shareholders or a board of directors. In contrast, big corporate elites have, at least until now, favoured the Democrats and Biden. They have done this through contributions not only to Democratic candidates, but also to left-leaning nonprofits.

Indeed, look at Biden’s top donors this year and you see a host of tech luminaries. His top-10 supporters are either tech executives or financial moguls, led by Michael Bloomberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. The impact of tech companies is amplified by their employees, including at Netflix, Nvidia, Adobe, IBM, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Workers at these companies all overwhelmingly backed the Democrats in 2020. Amazon employees gave 77 per cent of their donations to Biden. At Google it was 88 per cent. At Netflix and Nvidia it was over 90 per cent.

These same tech oligarchs also increasingly dominate the media, providing greatly needed lucre to the new progressive Pravdas of the modern world. Some of the most influential party organs include the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Time and the New Republic – the latter of which recently published a new cover story painting Trump as Hitler. So extreme is some tech moguls’ hatred of Trump that an adviser to Hoffman suggested that the shooting may have been a false-flag operation.

Such insane claims may be par for the course for Democratic operatives, but it is possible that this time Biden’s fundraising dominance in Big Tech may not be as great. The oligarchic elite has become increasingly divided between the two miserable old men competing to run the country. Much of this reflects dissatisfaction not only with concerns over the doddering president, but also with his policies.

The Middle East is one such flashpoint. Biden’s feckless policies and the Democratic Party’s drift towards anti-Zionism – and even flirtations with anti-Semitism – has the potential to alienate key backers. Earlier this year, Blackstone co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman said he plans to donate to Trump, in part due to ‘the dramatic rise of anti-Semitism’. Schwarzman was already a Republican super-donor, but the Democrats are in trouble if their own Jewish backers are put off by the party’s anti-Israel turn. Jewish donors have long been a major force in Democratic politics, including prominent backers of Biden.

More than anything, though, it’s the economy that’s driving the oligarchic split. Many on Wall Street are distressed by Biden’s handling of economic issues. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon criticised Biden’s policies for only ‘partially’ working for ordinary Americans. He has even taken to praising Trump – something completely unexpected from the man who President Obama saw as his favourite backer.

At a time when Democrats seek to talk up the success of ‘Bidenomics’, business executives like Dimon are concerned about customers’ financial stress under Biden’s continued inflationary regime. Inflation has hit the less affluent especially hard. The news from the small-business front is particularly grim, too, with bankruptcies running at the highest level since 2010.

Dimon has also criticised other parts of Biden’s programme, particularly his ban on liquified natural gas (LNG) exports. In a world still – and even increasingly – dependent on fossil fuels, not taking advantage of America’s energy abundance seems foolhardy to say the least. Yet Biden is largely a prisoner of the green lobby, which itself has strong ties to the speculators in wind and solar power.

In contrast, many of Trump’s backers – such as Harold Hamm and Kelcy Warren – have ties to the fossil-fuel industry. No doubt these executives are thrilled by Trump’s proposal to ‘unleash’ American energy and boost their profits. These investors tend to be located in places, notably Texas, that still produce tangible items and work in markets where international competition is intense.

This division at the elite level helps explain the current oligarchic split. Biden backers tend to be involved in the non-material economy – notably finance, entertainment and technology. Some, like Bloomberg, don’t just want to drive the so-called energy transition. They also want to wipe out the remnants of all fossil-fuel production.

This extends to more than just assaulting the livelihoods of coal miners and oilfield workers. It involves a wider ‘carbon economy’ that includes agriculture, logistics, manufacturing and construction. Bloomberg and his allies – including Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene, the Rockefellers, Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr – form part of what analyst Robert Bryce labels the ‘anti-industry industry’.

These and other oligarchic allies are waging a sophisticated, well-financed media and institutional campaign to catastrophise the climate issue as a way to ban gas stoves, stop new LNG facilities and crack down on plastics. They are also allied with companies building windmills in the oceans – something backed by ‘green’ oligarchs, despite evidence that such projects are damaging to wildlife, notably whales.

Ultra-green views are common among the tech and finance elites and are particularly attractive to the inheritor class. These people see higher energy costs as necessary for everyone else, while they maintain their own fossil-fuel-powered lifestyles. Like feudal lords decrying the excesses of the commoners, they themselves continue to live large. Many of the greenest of the green oligarchs are prodigious users of private jets.

Now that the reality of these Net Zero beliefs is catching up with the tech elites, the appeal of Biden seems to be fading even in Silicon Valley. For years, tech firms saw themselves as the ultimate green machines, creating vast wealth with little dependence on cheap and reliable energy. But two of the biggest trends, the electric vehicle (EV) mandates and the energy demands of artificial intelligence (AI), may be changing the equation in profound ways.

Last month, Musk ally David Sacks and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya hosted a widely attended Silicon Valley fundraiser for Trump – something that would have been unthinkable four years ago. Others such as Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale are giving heavily to pro-Trump get-out-the-vote efforts. They are joined by Elon Musk, who is reportedly pledging $45million a month to counter Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Zuckerbucks’ campaign to bring out reliably Democratic voters. Just this week, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, announced they would be making large donations to pro-Trump political action committees.

The techies have particular reason to be concerned about Biden’s energy policies. AI and data-centre demand are leading to massive expansions in projected energy use around the world, at a time of restricted supply. Microsoft alone is opening a new data centre globally every three days. Both Microsoft and Google already separately consume as much energy as whole countries including Ghana, Iceland and Tunisia. Their appetite for juice is likely to keep growing, with AI-related data centres expected to consume almost a tenth of total US power demand by 2035.

Tech now faces a contradiction between its economic needs and its penchant for green virtue-signalling. The industry still leads on the stock market, accounting for six of the seven most-valued companies on the S&P rankings. At the same time, firms like Google now admit they are spewing out more and more greenhouse gases – about 50 per cent more than in 2019. And as it stands, the giant data centres needed to service AI cannot be reliably supplied by the current grid, which is under intense assault by Biden’s regulators for being too dependent on coal and natural gas. It could prove almost impossible to reconcile the industry’s needs with green ideology.

However much the oligarchs might disdain Trump, his Jacksonian vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, and their populist base, a surprising number of the economic elite are either backing the former president or staying out of the fray. Of course some backers, like Hollywood, are unlikely to move towards Trump. But the entertainment industry itself is shrinking, at least in California, as production heads abroad. In any case, the Jeffrey Katzenbergs and George Clooneys of the world are a lot less consequential than the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Ackman.

What do these shifts in the oligarchy mean for democracy? Whoever wins, the power of the super-rich over our economic and political life is less than desirable. But the fact that the oligarchs are now divided actually represents a great opportunity for the rest of us to reclaim our country from the threat of a feudal-style system, dominated by a likeminded few. The American oligarchy may be about to reach its high water mark.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the RC Hobbs presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, published by Encounter.