“Democracy dies in darkness,” or so runs the slogan of the Washington Post, first taken up during the Trump presidency. But apparently it also gets by fine under oligarchy. The newspaper’s decision not to endorse either presidential candidate has thrown its newsroom into turmoil, slashed its subscriber base and triggered the resignations of several members of staff. But the decision itself is arguably less significant than who is alleged to have made it. The Post’s own journalists reported that its owner, the Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, personally intervened to spike the planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. This dynamic also played out with the billionaire owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made the same call. Media barons’ flagrant wielding of power tells us a lot about the true battlefield at this election: a phoney struggle set not within the politics of party, let alone traditions and ideas, but between the liberal oligarchy behind Harris and the populist plutocracy behind Donald Trump.
The former alliance was rhetorically outlined in a recent campaign speech by, of all people, RFK Jr, who has swung behind Trump since abandoning his own independent campaign. He claimed that: “The Democrat Party is the party of Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag[riculture], Big Food, the military-industrial complex, Wall Street.” But he forgot to acknowledge that the Republicans are no less beholden to the tech and finance power nexus connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. After all, much of US big business makes equal donations to both candidates as they seek to influence the eventual winner. The donor class is committed to ensuring that its vested interests get protected whoever occupies the White House. That’s why major donors to Harris – such as Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn – and the Republican Party – such as Elon Musk – have both encouraged the sacking of Lina Khan, the admirable Biden-appointed chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission who challenges monopoly power and has taken her fight to the likes of Microsoft and Google. Going after market power abuse has earned her respect across the political spectrum, from progressive politicians such as senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as well as self-styled “Khan-servatives”.
Not so long ago both main parties repudiated plutocracy. The New Deal-era Democrats opposed oligarchic abuse of market power. But since Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the Democrat Party has abandoned their working-class voters in favour of a new activist base made up of university graduates, corporate lawyers, investment bankers and human rights activists. Both parts of this base are loyal to the economic status quo. First, there is the old economic elite formed of the alliance between finance and high tech embodied by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But this is now fused with what the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “clerisy”, a second caste of educated professionals. Today we can find this class in higher education and the civil service – the intellectual “blob” that fused liberal legalism with free-market economics to bring us the 2008 financial crash, followed by the bailout of banks and austerity for ordinary people. It is in their policies that we can find the origins of the popular rage that defeated Hillary Clinton and could do the same for Harris.
The Republicans meanwhile are split between a similar oligarchic elite on Wall Street who championed the neoconservatives, and populist plutocrats in Silicon Valley who support the Maga insurgency. And far from the effectively independent campaign he ran in 2016, Trump 2.0 has actively courted and secured the support of populist plutocrats, including Peter Thiel, but most prominently Elon Musk, who increasingly carries himself like a de facto vice-president. Musk has even offered $1m a day to Trump voters in Pennsylvania, one of the swing states that could decide the outcome of an election that is too close to call. Musk embodies the metamorphosis that much of Silicon Valley has undergone since 2016: a liberal oligarch turned populist plutocrat, one who rages not just against the “woke” war on liberty but also accuses the Democrats of wanting to end democracy through an open-border policy that he claims would flood the country with “illegals” and keep the Republicans permanently out of power. Having previously won with working-class votes, Trump now depends on a tech tycoon who has previously fired his workers en masse and has praised the Chinese communist labour regime.
Democrats are united in their rejection of Musk and Maga. Yet for all their putative political differences, Republican and Democratic elites are fundamentally on the side of an economic model that increasingly resembles neo-feudalism. Social mobility has fallen to levels not seen since the 1920s. And far from the modern dream of a property-owning democracy, we live in a world of stratospheric elite affluence, middle-class stagnancy and generational poverty for everyone else.
“A nexus between the clerisy and the oligarchy lies at the core of neo-feudalism,” writes the American writer Joel Kotkin. “On the whole, they share a common worldview and are allies on most issues.” Indeed, both “castes” are examples of how the new professional-managerial class only further radicalises certain trends of the old elites, combining both the monopolising tendencies of the corporate captains of industry and the cultural condescension of the affluent middle class. The resultant political climate is one of legalistic process and utilitarian calculation, not the search for the common good. In the absence of any consensus as to what would even constitute goods we hold in common, this engenders a proceduralism that always ensures the triumph of means over ends.
In doing so, it has created an ever-more illiberal society. Parastatal bodies – federal agencies in the US or quangos in the UK – increasingly displace democratic government by imposing goals and “best practice” which pretend neutrality but actually advance a progressive agenda and foreclose debate. This may provoke a periodic populist backlash – a Caesarian revolt against the republic – but it nonetheless fails to renew the promise of popular democracy. The US election and Western politics more broadly are therefore no longer a true contest of ideas. Rather, they are a clash of personalities both ultimately backed by rentier capital, not honest labour. And the winner is never political transformation but the interests of the donor class who are anti-worker and anti-competition: plutocracy disguised as the defence of freedom. That’s the real story of Bezos, the Washington Post and the US election. As the ancients warned us, democracy without statecraft and virtue slides into a fatal combination of oligarchy and demagogy.
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