Checking In on the Democrats’ Search for the “Good Billionaires”

While there’s clearly been a lot of infighting among the US ruling elite in recent years, there are at least a few unifying forces currently helping them to hold hands and sing “Kumbayah”:

(1)

US support for the Israeli genocide grows out of domestic pressures and imperial logics. But we should not underestimate the importance of this foreign policy as a venue for elite reconciliation, after eight years of unusually intense inter-elite conflict. https://t.co/74jI9E9TPh

— Tim Barker (@_TimBarker) November 18, 2024

(2) The looting of the US by Silicon Valley and Wall Street that is going into overdrive under the Trump administration.

We can see this elite reconciliation in the Democrats’ learned “powerlessness” to do anything — not even their patented “fighting” — in the face of cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, the Department of Education, affordable housing, accommodations for the disabled, environmental protections, public health, etc. Indeed, some Democrats even voiced support for DOGE’s mission of taking a wrecking ball to the government so that private corporations can pick up — and profit off — the pieces.

In a political masterstroke that betrays how rotten the American system is, Trump has united the Wall Street private equity crowd, Silicon Valley, Big Oil, the military-industrial complex, and Zionists behind him.

Where do the Democrats turn? The People, No. Don’t be silly. They’re not going to take on any of these billionaires by taking seriously the concerns of the unwashed masses. In fact, they don’t even want their money anymore. A group of moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials and party leaders recently gathered for a retreat where they plotted their party’s comeback. One eyebrow raising suggestion that came out of the meeting was the following:

Move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate.

You know the party is in desperate billionaire-ass-kissing mode when its turning down free money from the plebs. More from Politico on the party’s ongoing discussions on how to tinker with the messaging. While their takeaways do include a welcome move away from identity politics, it will of course not be replaced by any sort of working class politics, but instead “a focus on shared American values.” What exactly are those shared values? It’s difficult to tell from the document but the rebranded messaging will pursue them:

Embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery (e.g., farms, main streets).

Get out of elite circles and into real communities (e.g., tailgates, gun shows, local restaurants, churches).

Develop a stronger, more relatable Democratic media presence (podcasts, social media, sports broadcasting).

Encourage candidates to be bold, engaging, and authentic in their messaging rather than overly polished.

Engage with small businesses, business podcasts, podcasts like “Earn Your Leisure” that reach the aspiring class, and entrepreneurs to discuss economic policies.

Be Pro-Aspiration & Pro-Capitalism in a Smart Way

Recognize that working-class voters value upward mobility and economic success.

Have a prosperity gospel aimed at the working class.

Essentially, the party is going to lose the identity politics and remain a more couth version of Trump without accepting MAGA-style small dollar donations.

In the meantime their message largely revolves around attempts to outflank Trump on genocide:

House Dem leader Hakeem Jeffries:

“Sinwar is gone. Sinwar is gone. And Hamas is on the run… and Iran is at one of its weakest points in decades.

“We can’t take our foot off the gas pedal until Iran is brought to its knees — for the good of the world.“ pic.twitter.com/MvvfwQrn2u

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) February 2, 2025

And cheerleading more war with nuclear-armed Russia through childish taunts:

Wouldn’t want to hurt Putin’s feelings. https://t.co/rK69K8RCBD

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 2, 2025

Are Democrats really this feckless, as is widely accepted? Maybe. If you view America’s two-party system as a contest over who can better serve the money, they are now failing at that as well.

Maybe I’m too cynical, but from my vantage point American politics consists entirely of the two parties attempting to appeal to voters on the empire and its oligarchs’ terms. Which is why we see repackaging nearly identical policies from Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” to Trump’s “America First.” Their primary purpose is to sell the empire to the American people by demonizing the plutocrats’ “enemies” abroad, i.e., those that resist their control, and justify the transfer of public wealth to weapons companies and Silicon Valley firms tasked with winning the AI Cold War.

If you read political reporting closely you can see the real election is taking place behind the scenes with candidates and parties making their pitches to the plutocrats, and the fight over big money depends on whose narrative will better serve the plutocratic system.

With the gutting of campaign finance laws, this is more true than ever. We see this with Kamala being feted in the Hamptons. We saw it with Silicon Valley ripping off the faux woke masks and revealing the true hierarchical, eugenicist nature of the country’s tech capital as soon as the decision was made to back Trump.

We see it now with Democrats, without any real strong plutocrat backing, sitting on their hands meekly trying to renew their pitch to Silicon Valley. We get horse race coverage and most political reporting maintains the illusion that Americans live in the greatest democracy the world has ever known. Here’s a run-of-the-mill Politico piece that unintentionally revealed the stench from the stinking carcass of American democracy:

…the moneyed tech world that Musk hails from is critical to Democrats’ fortunes in 2026.

“There is a significant fear that these tech folks, who have been with us for a long time, will say, ‘fuck it, we’re going with the other guys,’” said Alex Hoffman, a Democratic donor adviser who works with donors across the country but did not attend the event. “These donors are also pissed, watching former and current colleagues have unlimited, unchecked power, and getting richer off of this and they’re not.”

Democrats are “trying to mend fences and they’re also trying to keep them in the tent,” Hoffman added.

Politico cites the Biden administration’s antitrust enforcement — the one good thing team Biden did — as a primary reason Silicon Valley billionaires went so heavily for Trump. Democratic leadership have no doubt learned their lesson already.

That’s because their donors are sitting on the sidelines. Is that just because the Democrat leadership is composed of feckless morons? Or are the donors currently satisfied with what Trump is doing? The evidence points to the latter, considering Democrats paved the way for Trump-DOGE by largely pursuing the same policies over the years — just at a slower pace.

Dems will have to wait for Trump to stumble (i.e., alienate a sector of oligarchs) so the good billionaires currently with the bad guy can come back to good side. Got it?

Democratic Party’s newly elected Chair, Ken Martin: “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”pic.twitter.com/oNdCet0NNB

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) February 1, 2025

Meanwhile, the Dems will have to come up with better ways to enrich the “good” billionaires (peel away the weapons oligarchs by being more hawkish than Trump?), which is what a bigtime donor at Jefferies Los Altos Hills gathering was saying:

“When will we move off this posture of complaining and moaning about Trump,” the person said. “What positive ideas will Democrats offer to people to bring people back in?”

By people, they mean the billionaire donor crowd, not people. After all, The group included several top tech executives, including DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar and Cooper Teboe, a major Democratic donor adviser in Silicon Valley. Robert Klein and Danielle Guttman Klein, major Democratic donors, hosted it at their home in Los Altos Hills.

And so Democrat-controlled states are now doing their best to prove their worth to Silicon Valley. Let’s take the Democrat supermajority state of California. What is it doing to help people that are going to have their lives destroyed by the Trump goons’ neoliberal shock therapy?

Aside from more cruel crackdowns on the homeless (about half of which are working and still unable to afford shelter by the way), the state is shoveling evermore money to Silicon Valley. Led by golden boy Gavin Newsom, commonly mentioned as 2028 presidential candidate, Sacramento is ready to start buying generative AI tools to “help solve statewide issues” like housing, unemployment and budgeting. Hey, it’s working so well at the national level, and with Musk’s ketamine indulgences he could probably find time to do the same to California.

As Dan Schnur, a political analyst and professor at UC Berkeley puts it, “[Calif. Governor Gavin] Newsom’s incentive for strengthening his relationship with Silicon Valley is probably stronger than his need for yet one more issue to fight over with Donald Trump.”

Newsom’s desire to out-Trump Trump on public destruction for Silicon Valley gain could get a lot easier, too. That’s because the California Democrat supermajority just made it easier for Silicon Valley oligarchs to bribe state politicians.

Of course this was always going to be the Democrats’ response to the election. They possess no reverse gear on the neoliberal train to fascism because they exist to lay the track by erasing class-based politics.

Adolph Reed Jr., who has a long history of always being right about this stuff, maintains that as hopeless as it seems now, rediscovering those class-based politics is the only way to stop that train from continuing to barrel down the tracks:

To the extent that the totality of politics, including among those who see themselves as the “left” or even advocates of a working-class agenda, has reduced to winning this election or preparing to win the next one, there’s no impetus to break with what passes for “sophisticated” political understanding that people like Kornacki, Ezra Klein, et al. peddle and the others who seek to join and follow them in that breathless, oh-so-serious Conversation swallow and regurgitate. And this isn’t to suggest that we need to disengage from electoral politics. We must engage; the everyday world and its concrete challenges don’t go away just because we want to transcend them. And we have to relate to that domain through the Dems, not consider it a platform for “Here I stand; I can do no other” performances of individual righteousness. We have to face up to the fact—finally—that all we can expect from Dem success is kicking the can of confrontation with fascism down the road for four years. But for that approach to make sense someone, and only the labor-left can lead it or maybe even do it, has to spend another four years between elections organizing a real constituency for a different way of talking and thinking about and doing politics. To put it bluntly, we won’t be able to face up to the fascist juggernaut without working to build an actual popular constituency for a different, openly working-class-based politics.

I’m not alone in noting that Trump/ism is not an anomaly; it’s now the point of the lance of what’s clearly a fascist international. As nonsite readers know, I’ve been contending for a while now that neoliberalism is, from one important perspective, only capitalism that has eliminated effective working-class opposition. And for the right that fact has always held out the same promise: thirty years ago, after the GOP took over Congress, I happened upon a press conference of seven of the most reprehensible reactionaries in the House, led by Gingrich, gloating about their plans to take the country back to the 1920s. More recently, I’ve asked what if neoliberalism is no longer capable—if only because significant sections of the bourgeoisie and its political reactionaries no longer see a need or are so drunk with their own power that, like their bolsonarista allies in Brazil or Gilded Age progenitors here, they’re utterly mortified by having to share public space with the rabble or pay taxes—of delivering enough to enough of the population to retain legitimacy as a nominally democratic order? And I’ve suggested that, if that’s the case, we may be facing the equivalent of a T-intersection at which there are only two possible, totally opposite directions to take.

Problem is, which groups are out there showing any promise of taking the wheel and steering it to the left — or at least putting up a fight?