Thread by @doctorow

Louis Brandeis once said, "we can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both." It's part of a long American tradition that abhors the gathering of power into just a few hands. 1/

But there's a countertradition in American politics: the belief in the unchecked power of plutocrats and robber-barons, who amass great fortunes, convert them into political power, and use that power to unaccountably structure the lives of millions of working people. 2/

Some Americans call this "liberty."

The tension between aristocratic aspirations and democratic limits has been part of America since the earliest days. 3/

Thomas Jefferson (unsuccessfully) lobbied for an antimonopoly clause in the Constitution to check the power of the wealthy - only to be defeated by the wealthy landowners who saw American independence as a means to transition from one set of hereditary rulers to another. 4/

The war against new aristocracy never ended in America. In 1890, John Sherman told the Senate: "If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life."

marker.medium.com/we-should-not-… 5/

But as @PikettyLeMonde showed in his "Capital in the 21st Cen," market economies inevitably produce oligarchies, unless there is a muscular state that strips the wealthy of the power and influence they win through rent extraction and exploitation:

memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/tho… 6/

So it is that aristocrats-in-waiting are always with us, working tirelessly to create the Frank Wilhoit's society of " in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/lib… 7/

The great fortunes of today's robber-barons have a vast, distorting influence on our society, bending our most urgent projects away from evidence-based policy and towards the pet theories of billionaire dilettantes. 8/

The ultra-wealthy gave us education-denial in the form of the charter-school movement:

theguardian.com/education/2018…

And they gave us #VaccineApartheid and the endless new variants it spawned, which threaten our very civilization:

pluralistic.net/2022/05/11/a-d… 9/

But more than anything, they gave us climate denial, and with it, the most urgent threat to our species we face today. 10/

The dark money billionaires pour into climate denial doesn't merely fool people into disbelieving in climate change - even more importantly, it fools people into thinking that everyone around them has been fooled. 11/

Per a study by @GreggRSparkman, @nathanielgeiger and Elke Weber in @NatureComms, "Americans experience false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half." We all care about the climate emergency, but think we don't.

nature.com/articles/s4146… 12/

That's the greatest trick billionaires pulled on us - making us feel like we are alone in our understanding of how they are destroying our world and our civilization. That is why "Every billionaire is a factory for producing policy-failures":

onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-f… 13/

Here's a policy-failure gigafactory: Barre Seid, founder of Tripp Lite, who became a billionaire selling power-management tools and turned his fortune into a dark-money juggernaut. 14/

Barre has spent billions funding climate denial, abortion bans, Islamaphobic propaganda and other far-right causes, including a campaign to bring back DDT:

propublica.org/article/barre-… 15/

Seid operated in secret, using pseudonyms and cutouts, spending at least $775,000,000 between 1996 and 2018 to promote his pet causes. 16/

One of his major projects was support for the Federalist Society and its goal of packing the Supreme Court with far-right ideologues who supported forced birth, voter suppression, and other authoritarian projects (Seid calls himself a "libertarian"). 17/

Seid called this project "attack philanthropy" and it reached its zenith last month, when he handed $1,600,000,000 to a far-right dark-money group - the largest political donation in American history:

levernews.com/how-a-secretiv… 18/

Seid described this money-tsunami as a countervaling force to the funding provided by "liberal" billionaires like George Soros. 19/

While Soros's political spending is an overblown bogeyman of the right-wing imagination, it's absolutely true that Democrats have a billionaire problem, too. 20/

Up and down the ticket, "self-funded" candidates with stupid ideas and weak campaigns are bankrupting their progressive primary rivals and their supporters in pointless races:

pluralistic.net/2022/08/02/oli… 21/

Image:
MrT HK (modified)
flickr.com/photos/mrthk/1…

CC BY 2.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.… 22/

ETA - If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/09/08/tor…