I started this blog in 2016, and one important goal was to convince people that Billionaire Capitalism is real; that it is a powerful and destructive force that requires a focused response.
This point may have resonated with some of my readers, but none of them said so. I don’t know whether my writing wasn’t clear, or whether people had difficulty putting Billionaire Capitalism into context. But in either case, I didn’t seem to make my point.
Until now. Maybe I shouldn’t say I told you so, but I did. Now, no one can reasonably deny Billionaire Capitalism’s existence, or its determination to operate outside the law and due process; this is a revolutionary movement.
ICE and CPB agents are now conducting summary executions in broad daylight. And if they’re killing American citizens when they know they’re being filmed, what are they doing to detainees behind closed doors?
Nor is it likely that the deaths of Good and Pretti will ever be investigated properly.
These murders, and the deaths of detainees, are a direct result of Billionaire Capitalism, which is both a political and an economic movement. Its political goals are almost inseparable from its economic goal, which is to concentrate wealth into as few hands as possible. The power to concentrate that wealth comes from seizing political power, not economic innovation.
For Billionaire Capitalism to succeed, it must destroy democracy, because in the long run people will not vote to impoverish themselves. Destroying democracy (in an American context) means destroying or neutralizing the Constitution. Since the right to demonstrate is guaranteed by the First Amendment, killing demonstrators on whatever thin pretext ICE agents can invent is literally cancelling the Constitution.
And beyond that, the Trump administration is cancelling even habeas corpus and the concept of due process, legal traditions that pre-date the Constitution.
If the federal government acts outside the Constitution repeatedly, the Constitution becomes irrelevant. The Constitution doesn’t exist in a vault somewhere; it’s just the beliefs and habits that people hold to in American political life. The Constitution expresses the Founders’ vision of our political life, and since people have mostly agreed with that vision, the document itself has remained relevant.
But now the government is controlled by people who do not share that vision.
Liberals struggle to describe what Trump is doing. It’s all profoundly wrong, and they mostly chalk it up to Trump’s personality. But the sheer variety of what he’s doing demands a deeper explanation than pop psychology can provide.
For example, deporting people to El Salvador has no obvious connection to the war against universities, and dissolution of the Dept of Education. Furthermore, how does firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics relate to the cancelation of DEI?
Keep in mind that the purpose of Billionaire Capitalism, as a political movement, is to concentrate wealth by acquiring political power. Naturally there will be significant opposition to this, and what advantages does the opposition have? It’s the ideals and institutions of the Enlightenment: reason, tolerance, the Bill of Rights, an independent judiciary that upholds due process and does not use torture. It’s science, coupled with humanity, as a guide for government decisions and social policy.
So the cancelation of the Constitution and American democracy, as momentous as that sounds, is only part of Billionaire Capitalism’s agenda. It intends to change our values and culture, to uproot reasonableness, humanity and critical thinking.
But the ideals and institutions of the Enlightenment are the main source of legitimacy in our society. Do the billionaires have a plan to govern without legitimacy? I doubt they think in those terms, but I don’t know what they’re planning.
Everything Trump is doing is designed to undo the Enlightenment. We are witnessing something similar to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, where the goal was to undo the achievements (and legitimacy) of Confucianism and thereby solidify the Communist Party’s hold on the minds of the people.
And as with the Cultural Revolution, whatever Trump destroys will take its legitimacy with it; direct rule by a billionaire dictator will never achieve any lasting credibility.
Our form of government is now direct rule by a billionaire dictator. Congress no longer has the power of the purse strings, and the Supreme Court is filled with partisan hacks who will not insist on habeas corpus or other due processes, and who will not lift a finger to prevent prosecution of Trump’s political enemies and even former presidents. And it will not defend the clear “originalist” intent of the 14th Amendment. Citizenship itself can be revoked—without due process, needless to say—by Trump.
This is an immense constitutional crisis. Or rather, the old Constitution has been largely cancelled; the crisis is now how the people respond. This has been a long time in the making; the Republicans first made it impossible to amend the Constitution, and then they made it impossible to convict an impeached president. And finally they appointed judges who believe that a dictatorship is constitutional.
So our Constitution hasn’t functioned as intended for a long time.
Yes, Trump can’t quite get his way on everything, but he’s working on that. He is obviously looking for a Reichstag moment, some bombing on shooting he can pin on antifa or the Democrats, to declare a state of emergency. And odds are the Supreme Court will let him get away with it. At that point, he can cancel the 2026 midterms and use ICE and the FBI to imprison political opponents, journalists, judges—anyone, really.
Executions are inevitable.
We are entering a time of tremendous instability. Billionaires themselves have no constitution, no way of resolving disputes, and so Trump is at war with Musk, Murdoch and sometimes Putin—who has nuclear weapons. The risk to the world is greater than we may realize.
Within America there is currently an illusion of relative stability, because state and local governments are largely operating under the Constitution, where court orders and the law are respected. But that could change, and at the federal level it’s already chaos.
So, what should we do? The typical Gen Z response is that the Democrats need to do something, and they aren’t wrong. However, you can’t say that Governors Newsom and Pritzker have been passive, and Congressional Democrats were willing to shut down the government to restore some healthcare funding. Also, the public outrage over the Epstein files and ICE atrocities is reflected in Congress, and remarkably so.
But it’s not easy to come up with good tactics when the President is routinely acting outside the law, and the Supreme Court is willing to let him get away with almost anything.
But no matter what the professional Democrats do, if the people aren’t willing to weigh in—including taking to the streets—then this struggle will be lost.
And they by and large will not weigh in if Democrats only ask them to go back to the old system, the system that’s been in place since 1981. For 45 years this system has seldom worked for ordinary people, and even when it has (Obamacare, Biden’s legislation), the fog of disinformation has kept the people from seeing the benefits clearly.
Lobbyists, dark money and disinformation have overwhelmed our democracy. The people won’t trust us to govern unless we acknowledge that and present a solution.
This is an important enough to repeat: American democracy, in its current form, has largely lost its credibility with the people. Some of the great issues of the day, like universal health care, gun control and abortion, have been decided against the clear will of the people, by a well-funded minority. And the needs of the people for housing, efficient transportation and affordable groceries have likewise been ignored by the billionaire class.
And perhaps worst of all, issues never get settled. The billionaires have put everything on the table, so for example even the clear meaning of birthright citizenship is now unclear. The question of abortion is never settled, and immigration seems destined for the same fate, since the Republicans have no legislation proposed for a national ID card or penalties for hiring illegal workers—in other words, they have no long-term solution. They are apparently just going to let ICE agents run wild for years, ignoring court orders and terrorizing communities, with no end in sight.
Yes, the people have lost faith in democracy largely because of relentless pressure by Billionaire Capitalism, and we must fix that. The current system has some legitimacy still, but people by and large don’t believe it works in their interests, nor does it.
But in such a dire situation, a solution requires a true vision for the future of our people. A complete discussion of this vision is beyond the scope of this post, but I can provide a few examples that will indicate the general idea. Note that all these proposals benefit the people at large, and not a single group.
One example is widespread adult education, tailored to the individual. [See Inequality, Productivity and M2]. This would increase productivity and restore upward social mobility, without requiring a tax increase. It would also compensate for the past failings of our public schools.
Another possibility is to depend on referenda more. Imagine if the people could vote on Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, for example. Of course referenda aren’t in the constitution, but they could be part of the rules of Congress, to cite one possible implementation.
The people need to vote on whether the current rules surrounding the internet should change, and how. Should death threats be a serious offense? Should anonymous accounts be strictly limited? Should the algorithms reward extreme rhetoric? The people should decide what sort of internet they want.
We also need a national family policy, so that people can afford to have children, to pay for daycare and still be able to buy a house. I know how unattainable that sounds in the current environment, but this country can definitely afford it. [See The Wealth of this Nation].
We need strict limits on lobbying. Conversations between congressmen and lobbyists must always be recorded and monitored, and lobbying firms must be carefully audited to make sure the flow of money is strictly legal.
And of course we need judicial reform. The Supreme Court still doesn’t have a code of ethics, which is their way of telling the American people that they can be as capricious, arbitrary and corrupt as they please.
And no one who believes a dictatorship is constitutional can be a federal judge.
And we need some check on institutional disinformation. This might include a “name and shame” campaign, but I’m open to other methods. I consider freedom from disinformation an absolute necessity for democracy, because if you are systematically deceived, none of your rights have any meaning. Who can be free, living in a world of lies?
Further, the people need health care, including mental health benefits. In the long run, health care for profit needs to be eliminated except where there are clear benefits to the people, for example in the development of new drugs and diagnostics. But we need to be careful not to de-stabilize the existing system. In this area, incremental change seems the best path forward, for example by expanding Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare.
In addition, we need wage and price controls, at least on a temporary basis; Nixon imposed them in 1971 without challenge, and although conservative economists have been disdainful of that move ever since, at the time the controls seemed to work. The oil shocks of the seventies came later and changed the entire situation, but that doesn’t mean that wage and price controls didn’t work before October 1973.
Billionaire Capitalism is always looking for new ways to concentrate wealth, and inflation has proven quite useful to it. The “pricing power” of large companies is too great, and we cannot stop that kind of inflation merely by raising interest rates.
The price controls shouldn’t be too intrusive, but violations should carry significant penalties—say all of the profits a company made in the year of the violation. And penalties for CEOs individually could be useful.
But no political vision can be achieved without a movement, and there is none. Or rather, there are a million movements, most of them focused on identity issues and fundraising. And despite their skillful and ceaseless fundraising and their intense focus on a narrow range of issues, their political power is slight.
At one time, I believed that environmentalism, the civil rights movement, and feminism could all converge at the point of justice. I believed that the future could and would be a “rainbow coalition,” because coalitions are common in politics and Cold War conservatism was clearly played out by Nixon’s time.
That belief was an illusion. The fragmentation of the Left and Center has allowed the billionaires to steamroll the people again and again.
There are millions of people in this country who contribute regularly to NOW or the Sierra Club or similar groups—in good faith—and believe by doing so they are opposing Trump, or the Billionaire State, as I would put it.
But they aren’t. Nothing these organizations are doing will stop Trump. And that’s true for most single-issue and identity-based groups. An exception would be the ACLU and the No Kings Day protests that it sponsors. Trump cannot achieve his goals without eviscerating the Bill of Rights, and if the ACLU wins enough court cases, Trump will be partly stopped. And the No Kings Day protests demonstrate the depth of opposition to autocracy.
Another example of effective opposition is the anti-ICE movement. Trump cannot stabilize his dictatorship without a para-military organization that will routinely violate human rights and act outside the law. ICE is not primarily about immigration; it’s about having an armed group that is outside the control of courts or Congress. ICE is Trump’s SA and Gestapo, rolled into one, and any efforts to reduce the budget and power of ICE is simple self-defense by the people and the Democratic Party.
What Trump lacked in his first term was any group within the government who was willing to follow illegal orders. He’s fixed that now.
But there is nothing NOW or the Sierra Club or the LGBTQ movement are doing that will prevent the destruction of democracy and the establishment of the Billionaire State. There is no link between their agendas and the overall economic and political structure of this country. But they are certainly effective at fundraising.
Ensuring a woman’s right to an abortion does nothing to prevent the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the billionaires. And ditto for everything the environmental movement is doing, except around the margins: opposing the sale of public lands is useful in slowing the concentration of wealth but it won’t stop it. If Trump and Billionaire Capitalism meet a setback on one point they will only shift their efforts elsewhere.
The model of political change we inherited from the sixties and seventies is never questioned by identity politics, but the current situation is profoundly different. The civil rights and anti-war movements assumed that their particular grievances existed within a society that was somewhat fair and ultimately democratic. If blacks achieved civil rights and the troops came home from Vietnam, then we believed that was some justice at least. And the environmental movement was similar, although some environmentalists realized that wider social and economic change might be necessary—in the future.
Although there was a revolutionary component to the sixties and seventies, particularly in opposition to Cold War socialization [see The Sixties], it was the reformist movements that influence the present: civil rights, environmentalism, the anti-war movement.
And the system then did allow for reform: civil rights legislation passed, and likewise for the early environmental program. And the Vietnam War did end, because the people decided it had to. Simply canceling democracy wasn’t an option for the conservatives of the day, because that would have handed the communists (and the New Left) a tremendous propaganda triumph.
But our situation is much different: the Norman Rockwell vision of white people in small towns and suburbs living reasonably happy and prosperous lives has turned false. Of course Rockwell’s paintings were always exaggerations, but no amount of sentimental nostalgia could disguise how miserable and poor those people are today. And why? Because Billionaire Capitalism is a predatory and revolutionary movement, and it is always there, destroying the prosperity and dignity of whatever group is currently most vulnerable, and replacing civic discourse with toxic disinformation.
Hence, Billionaire Capitalism is fundamentally dehumanizing for everyone, and it becomes more intensely so as each decade passes. To believe otherwise is to submit to capitalism’s divide and conquer strategy. There is no permanent hierarchy of oppression; we might suppose that blacks always have it worse until we consider the deaths of rural whites from oxycontin and the problem of homelessness. There’s no worse form of oppression than being dead—but being turned out on the street might be close.
I have presented a critique of capitalism already [see A Higher Power, Is Billionaire Capitalism a Thing?, and Why is Billionaire Capitalism Bad at Pandemics?], but until now I have neglected to discuss the structure of our oppression. That discussion is beyond the scope of this essay, but I should make two preliminary points: first, Billionaire Capitalism routinely divides to conquer, and second, identity and single-issue politics play right into the hands of this strategy.
This relationship between divide-and-conquer and identity politics is an important part of our oppression.
So, what is the movement we need to resist Trump and the Billionaire State? Obviously, it must be unified—or unified enough—and not a function of identity politics, in order to resist Billionaire Capitalism’s divide-and-conquer tactics. What does it mean to not be a function of identity politics? It means giving up on intersectionality. You cannot knit together the modern identity movements to resist Billionaire Capitalism because most of them decided long ago to accept capitalism; they have been co-opted. And Billionaire Capitalism is capitalism today: what you see is what you get. Few people even remember a capitalism that wasn’t controlled by billionaires.
Structurally speaking, the Democratic Party is the obvious choice for a popular front organization. It can field candidates, it can organize campaigns, it can pass legislation under the right circumstances. There is no purity test, no “learning about your privilege,” to become a member. You merely have to declare you are a Democrat, and it’s okay if you’re religious or otherwise somewhat old-fashioned. And it is flexible; it does usually listen to the people, although sometimes too slowly.
And the Democrats usually take governing seriously. Biden’s legislative record was sterling, to take one recent example.
The current Democratic Party lacks only a vision of a society driven by the needs of the people—all the people—rather than the wants of the billionaires.
It’s our job to provide the vision.
The Socialist Investor 