The Underlying Problem

This is happening because some people are too rich.

Poison soil growing poison trees. (Photo: Getty)

There is a lot of chaos emanating from Washington. A decade of Donald Trump’s presence as a political figure has shattered the assumptions of many who thought that they understood how things worked in America. This year’s drastically increased ideological aggression—the apparent determination of the administration and its allies to destroy the federal government itself, to run the White House like a mafia, to simultaneously undertake dozens of devastating existential changes—contributes to the swirling feeling of pandemonium. Not just the left, but all of the political establishment, feel themselves grasping for an anchor, something they can use to orient themselves and determine the way forward.

In this environment, it can be extremely difficult to analyze what went wrong. Each new crisis feels like a data point that must be added into the analysis, creating an intellectual stew with an infinite number of ingredients that is never finished. Trump is such a sui generis figure that it is possible to attribute his rise to any combination of a laundry list of personal attributes, social trends, and political events. Is all of this a consequence of Trump’s own celebrity? A racial backlash to the Obama years? The outcome of decades of brain poisoning by right wing media? Pandemic social isolation and inflation manifesting in a national death cult? What the hell?

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The reality, of course, is that all of those things were factors. Trump’s rise can be reasonably analyzed through a political lens, as the consequence of corrupt and amoral parties; through a racial lens, as one more instance of the long tradition of white America fiercely defending its own dominant position; through a technological lens, as an example of a singular lunatic whose own skill set perfectly overlapped with the bizarre opportunities opened by the internet’s destruction of American media and minds; or through any number of other frameworks. Events in the world are produced by a confluence of things. Single-cause explanations are a comforting illusion. They are a way for pundits to sell books and make careers, more than they are a genuine accurate description of our unpredictable world.

Still—some causes are bigger than others. Trump’s personality and the rise of Fox News and Musk buying Twitter and the effects of the pandemic and angry old racist whites all contributed to where we are, yes, but they are not “the reason” we got here. If you pull back your focus, away from the individual personalities at play, you can perceive a brittle, dysfunctional system that was sitting there waiting for these guys to step in and run wild. How is it that the richest nation in the history of the world allowed itself to reach a point where all of this was possible? How did the United States of America become so vulnerable?

The underlying cause of our situation is inequality. We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions. The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience. The inequality, the decades of regulatory failures that led up to Elon Musk’s net worth, were the precondition for all of the insanity that is now playing out. It is easy to lose sight of this amid the daily headlines and the cartoonish corruption and the outrageous statements and the think pieces about the esoteric philosophy of Mencius Moldbug. It is tempting, because of the sudden severity of our situation, to imagine that there is a secret, hidden reason driving it all.

There’s not. This is the outcome of the class war—the same class war that we have been talking about for decades. This is what happens when it is lost.

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In the midst of our national dissolution, people sit and dream of the quickest route to salvation. Air Force One crashing into a mountain, with Musk and Trump on board? The electoral defeat of the MAGA movement? A few enlightened Supreme Court rulings? Would that do it? No. It sure would not. The closest thing there is to a magical solution for our predicament would be: Erase three zeros from the net worth of every multibillionaire in this country. That would, at least, catapult us back to the comforting world of normal flaws that many are now pining for.

Democracy is incompatible with the extremity of wealth inequality that we now have in America. The two things cannot coexist. Why? Because an electoral democracy, even the half-functional sort that the US has, only has value if all interest groups have to participate in it. Democracy is a grand gathering of interests around a table, and then a symbolic wrestling match among them all to have their interests represented and defended. Once you have one hundred or two hundred or three hundred billion dollars, however, you do not need to show up and sit around the table. You can buy the whole table. Everyone else sits around your table now, and begs you. Just like that, democracy has been replaced. This is where we are. We thought it was bad when our opponents momentarily triumphed in the wrestling match. Now we can see that the wrestling match was preferable to standing in a long line to beg the king.

Chart via Visual Capitalist.

I am writing this not because there is any novelty in the realization that inequality is a grand crisis. I have been writing that for decades, because thousands of people smarter than me were writing it for decades and centuries before that. I am writing this only in service of providing some focus in an unstable time. The soil from which everything else grew is: Rich people have too much money. That is a political and economic choice, a predictable consequence of the failure to get ahead of capitalism’s well understood tendency to produce this very situation. Here we are. We have allowed it to go too far and now the richest guy is buying total power. The key thing, the big mistake, was letting the rich people get this rich. If they were not this rich—if inequality were not so wide—the various other interests in our democracy would themselves be powerful enough that they could not be outweighed by single oligarchs. But wealth is power, and we let the oligarchs get too much wealth, and they, personally, got stronger than other interest groups that represent millions of people. If Even if Elon Musk had four billion dollars, we would not be here. If Elon Musk had forty billion dollars, that would be a significant social and political problem, but we still would not be here. But if Elon Musk (or anyone else) gets four hundred billion dollars, well. Here we are. This is what happens. All of the specific consequences flow from the general problem of too few people being too rich which makes them so powerful that nothing can stop them from enacting their idiotic will.

The value of pointing out this kind of obvious thing is that it can, perhaps, allow you to block out some of the daily distractions and think about how to solve the underlying problem. The more frantic the political opposition grows, the more like the systemic battle against inequality feels a bit academic, like some high minded distraction that should be set aside in order to fight the individual battles. Wrong. If you need a cause, if you need a purpose, if you need a crusade that will do the most to produce the world you want, it is this: Class war. The same damn class war! Taking wealth away from the rich and giving that wealth to the less rich. Our democracy, such as it is, will never, ever be stabilized until that happens. Do not allow yourself to be hypnotized by the myriad results of the rich having too much money. Keep your mind instead on the problem itself. The rich are too rich. How do we change that?

This simple analysis tells you why just defeating Trump at the ballot box, or Elon Musk choking on a cracker, will be only a temporary solution. The great pools of money are stronger than Trump, stronger than the Republican Party, stronger than the Democrats too. To change the politicians without changing the pools of wealth is just to shuffle the cards in a losing hand. You have to break up the big fortunes. You have to change the rules that allow one man to accumulate that much money. There is a library’s worth of books about how to do this. (I even wrote one myself.) We know how to do it, we know that we haven’t done it, we know that it is hard, and we know that it is necessary.

I apologize for the obviousness of today’s essay. But I can feel the way that the pandemonium can overwhelm us and lead us astray. Before anything else, remember that things are being broken because certain people are strong enough to break them. Their strength is their enormous, staggering, unreasonable wealth. Take away that, and they will have to sit at the table with the rest of us, and argue their stupid point.

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• Related reading: On Having a Maximum Wealth; Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe; You Can’t Rebrand a Class War; Demonize The Rich.

• You notice I did not bother to spend much time writing out policy prescriptions for reversing inequality in today’s post. That is because I have done that at length elsewhere—particularly, as I mentioned, in my book “The Hammer,” which is an extended explanation of why building labor power is the most promising path out of all this. It’s good and I encourage you to read it and buy it and share it with your friends. (A funny thing about books is you kind of stop promoting them at a certain point but they don’t stop being relevant, so I hope you don’t mind that I keep on mentioning my book periodically.) You can order it here, or wherever books are sold. If you want me to come speak to your union or university or other group about these topics, email me.

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