A reasonable question might be, “Why not let the billionaires rule? Aren’t most societies ruled by the rich and privileged?”
In the recent defense prepared by Trump’s lawyers we have the answer to that question:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/us/politics/trump-lawyers-memo-mueller-subpoena.html
And a comment on that defense by a former deputy attorney general:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opinion/mueller-trump-executive-power.html
Following Trump’s lawyers’ logic, if a president accepted a large bribe from Kim Jung Un or murdered a hooker—or a Supreme Court justice—on Air Force One, any investigation by the FBI, or any federal agency, could be quashed by presidential order. A president who can commit crimes without accountability can obviously imprison or assassinate political opponents at will. Trump’s lawyers are arguing against the existence of American democracy and in favor of a dictatorship instead. Even Putin might hesitate to openly claim such expansive powers.
Their arguments, viewed within the context of American traditions, are almost laughable, particularly coupled with Trump’s subsequent claim that he has the power to pardon himself. The wording of this pardon might be interesting: would he pardon himself for anything, including things he might do in the future?
It seems likely that the development of this argument was guided by Trump himself—or perhaps his attorneys were motivated by a desire to please a tyrannical boss.
But as absurd as it is, obviously this idea makes sense to Trump, and at least some of the people around him. And there are no howls of outrage from Congressional Republicans, either. How can that be?
Let’s think about what our Constitution implies (or assumes) about the life experience of our elected leaders. Clearly, unless our leaders grew up dealing with others on a basis of equality, they will be unlikely to compromise easily and they probably won’t understand the separation of powers.
No one can rule in a democratic spirit without the experience of social equality, of standing in lines, of giving reasonable answers even to unreasonable questions, of avoiding conflict when possible and of finding a compromise when conflict does arise, and of apologizing when called for—or graciously accepting an apology when offered. Living with social equality means that you are constantly reviewing your own actions and words, to make sure you get what you are due without violating the rights of others. This is why the democratic constitutions of Latin America (in the old days) did not work. The people who wrote those constitutions believed in democracy as much as Jefferson and Madison did, but the underlying social structure of extreme wealth and poverty socialized everyone to autocracy and obedience (or defiance and violence). Only the very poor related to each other on a basis of equality, but of course they were seldom in a position to lead, Benito Juarez notwithstanding.
People do not believe in the balance of powers unless they’ve experienced them in everyday life. People who have never stood in line will instinctively resist democracy.
This is why people used to say that a large middle class was essential to democracy. Middle class people generally relate to each other as equals and they are also educated enough to provide leaders, hence Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman. Also, they are seldom alienated enough to support revolution, but they are usually not wedded to the system the way the wealthy are, so they will support change that makes sense to them.
In the 1950s, even the wealthy seldom had servants. So they had to stand in line, had to deal with the clerks at city hall by themselves, and if they wanted the city council to do something, they had to write them a letter or go to the meetings—just like members of the middle class. And even the ones who could afford a servant or two had to do those things. You could hardly ask your gardener to take care of a parking ticket for you, for example.
But let’s think about our modern situation. If you control a fortune of a certain size—let’s say $100,000,000—and you make on average 7% on your assets, that is, $7,000,000, then you can afford a staff. You can afford to pay an experienced attorney a retainer to deal with any situation that resembles a conflict, or which requires reading skills—at say $50,000 per year. You can hire a nanny for your children, a housekeeper (or two) to clean, cook and shop, a gardener/handyman so you won’t have to do yard work or routine household repairs, etc., all for perhaps $300,000 per year. You could also afford a good security service, even an on-site security guard at night. A full-time personal assistant would also be within reach.
And if your $100M fortune includes a business you have to manage, there will be employees you can use to run errands or do other tasks for you. If you buy a new personal computer, the IT manager will set it up for you. If you run the business yourself, you might have to deal with customers or suppliers or regulators, or you might be able to delegate those tasks.
Or you could hire a manager for $200K per year to handle the entire business side.
If you develop a drinking or drug problem, you won’t need to go to AA or NA and listen to others’ problems. You can afford private therapy or upscale rehab with gourmet food.
By the time you’re finished with this process, your reality principle is in tatters; you rarely have to confront a problem yourself. And you can no longer deal with people realistically, either. In an increasingly fragmented and isolated society, you are the leading edge in isolation. If you go to church, they will most assuredly pester you for money, and you will eventually either lord it over them or leave. If you date anyone, trusting their motives may be difficult. As with church, there’s the temptation to either dominate or withdraw.
Even if you go to parties with other rich people, you probably won’t bond with them either. If most of your conversations are with employees who have to feign interest in your views, how will you ever learn to charm a stranger?
Facing opposition is a particular challenge for the rich. Any sort of face-to-face disagreement, unmediated by lawyers or security guards, is a rare experience for them, and they often react as if they are confronting the French Revolution.
Recently Macron called Trump up to complain about the tariffs Trump had placed on French products. Trump reacted very badly, Macron held his ground, and the scene reportedly got ugly. This is of course not how a rational person (that is, someone socialized to middle-class values) reacts to an ordinary business disagreement. But for 99% of Trump’s adult life, he’s heard nothing but adoring agreement. Macron’s behavior was shocking to Trump: he thought Macron was his friend!
My example above assumes a fortune of $100,000,000. If that sum is increased tenfold or a hundredfold, then the problems increase accordingly.
The extreme concentration of wealth in our economy results in a class of powerful and narcissistic individuals with weak reality principles. The exception to this is, of course, the billionaires who run highly technical businesses, like Larry Page or Tim Cook, whose job it is to think about rapidly changing technology and how to drive their businesses using those changes. They cannot afford to allow their reality principle to atrophy, although it does happen even among tech leaders. Carly Fiorina had some shocking lapses, and Ken Olsen in his later years was not reading the headlines.
Most billionaires are like Trump: he learned a lot about the hotel business when he was in his twenties and thirties, but since then it’s been all deal-making and self-worship.
Again: the concentration of wealth socializes the very rich into highly unrealistic narcissists; this makes them almost unfit to live in a democratic society, much less lead it. Trump is of course the poster child for this phenomenon, but consider Michael Bloomberg, who seems like an intelligent and well-meaning individual.
Every four years he floats the same trial balloon to the same media outlets: that he is considering running for president as an independent. The country is tired of partisan gridlock, people need a new face, a new vision—they need Bloomberg, free of special interest influence and partisan taint. And then of course—he doesn’t run. Because no one cares, and no one would vote for him; there is no surge of support. But he (and his staff) never learn. The timing isn’t right, they tell themselves. They can never admit to themselves that Michael Bloomberg is politically irrelevant. The reporters go along because the stories require no time to write—they have them archived, after all—and because it’s traditional to print whatever billionaires have to say.
But in Bloomberg’s mind, he’s a VVVIP, and the people around him every day treat him that way. Bloomberg himself appears unaware of the actual political situation. And that’s how an intelligent billionaire sees the world.
Within the social bubbles that surround billionaires, and those of lesser wealth, there is no accountability. As Yeats wrote of kings:
And drunk or sober live at ease
Where none gainsay their right,
And keep their lovers waiting,
Keep their lovers waiting.
Their lovers may have recourse to divorce court, if a pre-nup doesn’t tie their hands, but ordinarily a billionaire is untroubled by accountability. If he refuses to pay a debt then it will often be written off, and his credit rating of course is meaningless; if a billionaire humiliates or assaults an employee or family member, he will rarely go to jail or pay any settlement large enough to be inconvenient. And likewise for violations of environmental or safety regulations.
A rich man or woman can still get into trouble for fraud, as Bernie Madoff and Martin Shkreli prove, but only if they steal large sums from—of course—rich people. (Although Elizabeth Holmes miraculously walked.)
I won’t mention bankruptcy court, because when the rich file for bankruptcy, they tend to benefit. It’s their creditors who feel the sting of accountability.
Nevertheless, run-ins with regulators and law enforcement have a significant psychological effect on the very rich; they resent these events bitterly, and the concepts of narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage seem to describe their response. We see this almost every day with Trump, and also with Harvey Weinstein and Martin Shkreli. They experience being questioned or accused as Louis XIV might experience lese majeste—as an intolerable insult.
And given their everyday lives, being held to account must be a terrible shock. If your parents were adoring pacifists who never corrected your behavior, then one day someone may slap your face or handcuff you and take you to jail. And you will experience this as an assault on your very being—the world is not supposed to treat you this way, no matter what you do.
And within their social bubbles, what the rich say is the Absolute Truth. So when they encounter a different version of the truth—based on science, for example—outside their bubble, they tend to see that as an infringement on their rights. Hence climate change denial, the war against endangered species, etc.
You might say, hasn’t it always been this way? Haven’t the rich always been this self-centered? Not exactly, at least not in America. I searched for a parallel to Trump from the old days, and John Jacob Astor IV shows some similarities. He inherited great wealth and made money in New York real estate. He was widely derided for his triviality—his nickname was “Jack Ass-tor.” And his infidelity led a New York court to grant his wife a divorce, a rarity at the time. He aggravated the scandal by then marrying a woman 29 years his junior. Melania, by comparison, is 24 years younger than Donald.
And yet, in Astor’s defense, he volunteered for military service in the Spanish-American War and actually went to Cuba, where the danger (especially from disease) was not trivial; he was also an inventor: he patented a bicycle brake, a “pneumatic road improver,” and a turbine engine; he wrote a science fiction novel and he had an interest in family history.
And most of all, John Jacob Astor IV sat stoically smoking on the deck of the Titanic, allowing lower-class women and children to board the lifeboats ahead of him. When his body was recovered, there was cash in his pockets equivalent to $95,000 in 2018 dollars, and yet he made no effort to bribe anyone. John Jacob Astor IV had an existence that transcended his class and its privileges.
There were three differences between Astor and current billionaires:
Astor experienced significant ostracism as a result of his divorce and subsequent re-marriage. Some sense of Christian morality was still alive among the rich at that time. Astor seems to have borne this humiliation without public complaint, perhaps implicitly admitting his fault.
Astor had a sense of masculine duty that was stronger than his sense of privilege. When Astor’s pregnant wife boarded the lifeboat, Astor approached the deck officer and asked permission to accompany her, as she was in “a delicate condition.” The deck officer said there were no exceptions to the “woman and children first” rule, and Astor did not push it. He may have been gripped by mortal fear, but he turned away and sat quietly smoking as the ship sank.
Astor had a sense of patriotic duty, perhaps tinged with noblesse oblige. He financed a volunteer battery of artillery in the Spanish-American War, without serving as its commander. The unit went to the Philippines; Astor himself went to Cuba. Now, there may have been some prestige value, some ego-gratification—but Astor didn’t have to do that. He paid for the uniforms, the training, the caissons, the guns (!) and presumably the horses, more or less as a gift to his country.
And all three of these differences point to a sense of being part of the human race. The same rules of Christian morality, masculine duty and patriotism that applied to all men also applied to the very rich, like John Jacob Astor IV. Whatever their wealth and power, they had roughly the same obligations as the poor and the middle class.
The rich today are obliged to do nothing. Of course some of them—Bill Gates—work to benefit all of humanity, but he’s not obligated to do so, and that’s a key point. The rich have no social duty.
The modern rich simply grow richer. Since their weak reality principle undermines their business skills, they mostly concentrate their efforts on obtaining tax cuts, regulatory breaks and subsidies. If they seek public office, it’s almost always to benefit themselves and their class. The days when Nelson Rockefeller and John F. Kennedy governed with a fine disinterest are in America’s rear-view mirror.
The modern rich are conspicuously absent from the military, and they only serve diplomatically when they buy ambassadorships through campaign donations. They do not lend whatever expertise they have to think tanks or, when retired, teach in either universities or in poor school districts.
Their connection to other Americans is weak and thin. There is no Andrew Carnegie, who remembered working 12-hour days as a child.
It shouldn’t be necessary to mention this, but these same individuals, if socialized differently, might be humanitarians, scientists, scholars and poets. There is nothing inherently wrong with most of them. And there are individuals who make an effort to transcend being merely rich.
But socialization is powerful, and most people go along.
The rich live in a way that is destructive for all of us, even for themselves. They have inadvertently created a spiritual and intellectual desert from which most of them cannot escape.
This is why we cannot allow billionaires to rule—they are no good at it, due to their socialization as unrealistic narcissists. We see examples in every headline, every tweet, especially now, in June 2018. Trump believes that tearing children away from their parents at the border is a great idea—or if it isn’t, it’s the Democrats’ fault. He believes a trade war is “easy to win”; he believes Kim Jung Un “loves his people.” And Trump is not too much of an outlier; he is a fair representative of his class.
A long time ago our ancestors created democracy because they had learned, from bitter experience, that the rich and powerful could not be trusted to rule for the good of all.
The Socialist Investor 