Thread by @davidfickling

The trajectory of Sheldon Adelson's life tells a fascinating story about how the patronage politics of the 20th century American urban political machine has come to rule the world in the 21st century (thread):

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Adelson and the greatest recipients of his patronage Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, grew up in oddly similar circumstances.

All were products of immigrant communities in the less tony sections of the U.S. northeast, in a postwar era when such cities were still dominated by the last of the great political bosses.

Trump's mother was from the western isles of Scotland and spoke English as a second language. He grew up in Queens — rich, but with the foundations of his wealth in Fred Trump's rickety slumlord property empire.

nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Netanyahu is, as his accent attests, pretty much from Philadelphia.

Though born in Tel Aviv, he spent nearly half his life till his late 20s in the U.S., where he went to MIT and worked with Mitt Romney at Boston Consulting Group.

Adelson is the only one who was really working class, growing up in Boston, the son of a Welsh mother and a Ukrainian/Lithuanian taxi driver father and starting in business as a teenager running newspaper stands and candy machines.

(taking a pause to put the kids to bed)

Both Adelson (consistently) and Trump (from time to time) were Democrats until becoming right-wing Republicans relatively late in life.

But I think that shift is less dramatic when you consider what being a northeastern urban Democrat meant in the heyday of political bosses.

Figures like Richard Daley, Meade Esposito and Frank Rizzo had run northeastern cities like their personal fiefs since the 19th century era of Tammany Hall corruption in New York.

There was a definite "type" among political bosses. You would hail from an immigrant community and boast of being able to deliver their vote as a bloc. You would use your grip on power to dole out patronage and further entrench your power.

You were much more focused on getting and holding power than on any idealistic ideas of what you could do with that power. You often had some shady underworld and law enforcement connections. And your manner would be a bit uncouth compared to more patrician political types.

The heyday of the political machine is seen as having died out around the mid-1970s, although you still see some figures (real and fictional) cast in the political boss mold.

But I think these three figures represent a sort of late flowering of that grim era.

It's telling that both Adelson and Trump got involved in casinos, because gambling is an archetypal boss industry.

After all, it involves buying an exclusive license from the government to run a sometimes-shady business that's incredibly lucrative and involves vast sums of untraced cash changing hands.

Vulgarity is also a big part of the image. Trump, as is often said, is a hobo's idea of what a rich man is like.

Adelson's resorts, with their fake gondola rides and scale-model Campaniles, aren't the sort of places that people who've visited the real Venice get excited about.

But they appeal to a lot of people who don't give a toss about what the real Venice is like and don't like being sneered at by those who do.

That's obviously the attitude of much of Trump's base — including the PoC communities in places like Texas and Florida that seem to have edged towards his camp from 2016 to 2020.

It's also that of the Mizrahim who form the backbone of Netanyahu's base in Likud — migrants from the Middle East who are more working class, more right wing, and tended to be looked down on by the Ashkenazim who formerly dominated Israeli society.

Adelson was a major patron of both Trump and Netanyahu, helping fuel their political careers. He's been a malign influence on politics across the world.

One last characteristic of a political boss: a deal is a deal. If you have to dance with the devil, so be it.

All three men found it easy to make their peace with profoundly anti-democratic forces if it meant furthering their political and financial ends.

Adelson leapt from the ranks of billionaires to multibillionaires when he won one of the casino concessions in Macau.

His resorts account for a third of the hotel rooms in the city, and he was canny at giving Beijing what it wants, as I wrote today:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

That business delivered him the huge profits to turn himself into the political player he's become. His Vegas resorts had become so overshadowed that in his last months he was looking at selling them:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Netanyahu made his own pact with anti-democratic forces. With Adelson's support, he latched onto the settler movement and those who would deny Palestinians any rights of self-determination or franchise and made them his political base.

I don't think I need to rehearse all the ways that Trump has joined himself to authoritarian and anti-democratic forces, because the evidence is all around us.

IMO, Adelson, Trump and Netanyahu have come close to turning machine politics from a local concern in a few U.S. cities into something that guides the fates of nations.

Plenty of other corrupt corporatist governments, from Budapest to Ankara, are using the same playbook now.

I wonder if we're seeing the sunset of these figures, or if they're just on the verge of growing to still greater dominance. (ends)