One of the biggest stories of 2022 is the discovery of a new class struggle, happening right under our noses.
It’s the product of our technology society. It’s between those who own this society and those who “merely” manage it.
When I was focusing my work on American political history, starting in 2006 with the launch of this blog, I assumed technology would lead us toward equity.
That’s because technology runs on human capital. Talent is the gating factor to growth. Not land, not people. Talent.
What does it take to nurture talent? You have to set a wide net, because it can come from anywhere. You have to educate everyone, because anyone could be great, and anyone who’s even good provides value. You can’t care where talent comes from, the color of its skin or the way its heart works or something called “disability.” Let talent find the ability it has, and exploit that.
Let people be free and make them comfortable. That’s the best way to raise children. It’s also the route to economic growth and saving the planet.
What I didn’t count on was this new class war, between those who built the new society and those who, because of a limited amount of financial talent, simply owned it.
This new class of mega-billionaires, enabled by the Citizens United decision, and armored with the work of an obscure National Review “philosopher” named James Burnham, now represent the main threat to democracy, to freedom, and to our planet’s future. Yes, even more than Putin.
People like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk are all “Burnhamites.” They believe their money makes them better than you, that it should confer upon them absolute power. They see managers, even competent technology managers, as a threat. They mean to destroy the rest of us, bring us to heel, and create a new society based on their own wills.
This is stupid beyond stupid. Burnham isn’t describing anything new. He’s describing feudalism, of every global autocracy that has ever kept mankind down. Dictators can’t solve the problem of their own succession. Even at their best they wind up intermarrying and turning out generations of defectives. That’s what happens when your family tree doesn’t fork. Hunchbacks, hemophiliacs, madmen. At best, mediocrities.
This class of madman has gone to war against the rest of us, largely because 2022 has been very, very bad for this class of madman. The bear market, concentrated in tech and worthless offshoots like blockchain, has destroyed trillions of dollars for the ultra-wealthy. The world is now down to just 7 centi-billionaires, fortunes of over $100 billion. Only two are still active, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk. The biggest fortunes have been absolutely hammered – Musk and Meta-idiot Mark Zuckerberg are each down $100 billion in wealth this year.
That’s why they hate us. It’s why Musk bought Twitter and is now destroying it. If we’re able to see what’s happening, together, we can fight him. He fears that. He fears us.
Those tech billionaires who have kept most of their wealth, like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, have taken big hits. But they’re still in the game, because they’re letting younger, smarter people manage what they built. The Forbes 400 list is now dominated by heirs – Waltons, Mars, Kochs, Adelsons – and oligarchs who control entire economies like India’s Gautam Adani (now number three) and Mexico’s Carlos Slim (now number 11). The failures of these men to lift their local economies up is a cautionary tale.
Joe Biden’s greatest political victory is taking these assholes down a peg. It’s the great benefit of the bear market, even worth the coming recession. And it was all telegraphed by one man, Jay Powell, who warned a year ago that, to fight inflation, money would have to cost money again, and there would have to be less money floating around.
The threat remains. Looking at the demise of Twitter, and the control the ultra-rich have over our media. There are still reasons to fear Burnhamism. But now we know what it is, and we know how to fight it.
The struggle of class vs. class is a political struggle, and that struggle is now between the ultra-rich and the merely comfortable.
I’ll take the merely comfortable.
