The feral rich

Dread in tooth and claw

I haven’t read Jack Beatty’s Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, but if books can be judged by their bad reviews as people are by their enemies, I’ll have to find a copy. When Beatty’s book about the Gilded Age came out in April 2007, William Grimes panned it at the New York Times. His review characterizes the book as an “industrial-age passion play” that “seethes” “with great moral fervor” at how America, in Grimes’ account of Beatty’s telling, “squandered the moral capital painfully accumulated during the war, selling its soul to big corporations and capitalist fat cats.”

The review is glib and dismissive throughout; the Gilded Age tycoons and financiers “crush the working class with glee and slake their unquenchable thirst with the people’s blood,” ha ha etc. Grimes scoffs at Beatty’s “strange penchant for obscure words like ‘salvific,’” and even finds his “prodigious [and] scrupulous” research a drawback: “Scarcely a sentence passes without a quotation or a citation,” Grimes complains. “It is reassuring to know that an author has done his homework, but dispiriting when he proves it relentlessly.” (This rather reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s alleged “overpreparedness” for the Presidency in 2016.)

Maybe the book is bad, but the reviewer seems less interested in its literary qualities than puzzled and offended that anyone would be so outraged at the subject era’s famous celebration and ostentation of wealth and its resulting legal, moral, and social outrages, such as bloody suppression of the labor movement and the Supreme Court’s finding of corporate personhood — outrages enough to lead, in short order, to a somewhat successful Progressive movement — and especially that Beatty would draw distressing parallels to what was then the present day:

Mr. Beatty serves up these familiar dishes extra-spicy. The past for him is present, and if he seethes, it is because he sees all around him the natural heirs to the satanic figures he describes. In asides and footnotes, unexpected names like those of Karl Rove and Antonin Scalia take a quick turn on the stage, smelling of sulfur. The evil work of the Gilded Age continues because the system it put in place remains substantially the same…

This “anger at current American politics on an era well beyond living memory” Grimes considers “anachronistic.” (You may recall April 2007 was just before the Bush era began its spectacular collapse, which got severe enough in the public’s estimation to lead to the election of a black Democrat from Chicago as President.)

I don’t bring up this old review of a book I haven’t read to harsh on the reviewer, but to remind you that, though you and I may have a certain understanding of the malign role of unregulated wealth in our Republic, right this very minute as in previous eras there are plenty of people who just don’t see what the problem is.

This is meaningful to consider because our complaisant-to-complicit Prestige Press is about to welcome Trump II with a massive What’s So Bad About Hypercapitalism campaign, on the order of the national-corporatist rah-rah that came in with the Reagan era. And it won’t just be MAGA lunkheads cheering the debacle, but also intelligent and even well-spoken people who write for major newspapers.

This would be worth noting even if the present oligarchs were just run-of-the-mill rich guys. But as you may have noticed, the current Masters of the Universe —to use a Reagan era term which, in its original context, was understood by most to be hyperbolic — are a very different breed.

The super-rich have never been the best people in anything but the social sense. But I’m not the first to observe that, say what you will about the Gilded Age, at least Carnegie, Morgan et alia endowed libraries, colleges, and other public works. The richies whom Reagan made super-rich were shittier — Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and Charles Keating come to mind — and the “Poverty Sucks” ethos they embodied was as pernicious as “the public be damned.” Also the effulgences of their greed were repulsive — compare the Carnegie Libraries with the hideosities celebrated weekly on Robin Leach’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” But at least sometimes their criminality was actually punished, and you didn’t see too many normal people talking about how much they admired Warren Buffett.

But flash forward to now and, well… as if Elon Musk were not already nauseating enough, this just ran in the Wall Street Journal:

Right off the bat I smelled a rat here, and by the time I reached the deeply-buried (20th graf!) about how “some players speculate that Musk paid someone to ‘grind’ his or her way to the top on his behalf,” I smelled a pack of them. And now gamers are revealing that Musk’s alleged Diablo IV prowess appears to be bullshit.

More to the point, though: What kind of person uses his immense wealth and public profile to pretend to be a top gamer? The answer is obvious: The kind of person who made a personal quest of poisoning a popular social media platform, and encouraging its pollution to leak into the politics of the society to which it was attached, so that all might feel the force of his wealth.

John D. Rockefeller probably didn’t put a tiny fraction as much personal energy into letting people know he gave out dimes to paupers. He would have been mortified if anyone dared suggest he misrepresent himself to the world as a tennis champion.

Also in the news recently is the billionaire vampire Peter Thiel, who penned and had published (and was not dissuaded by underlings, which is even more telling) a lunatic screed in the Financial Times, in which he proclaimed that Trump’s reelection, which he helped finance…

…augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.

Who or what is the analogous apartheid regime in this “truth and reconciliation” fantasy? The “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC).” What is that? It has something to do with Jeffrey Epstein, Democrats, how Oswald was a patsy, debanking, Democrats again, the COVID hoax — nutbag conspiracy theories, in other words, of the sort one used to only find scrawled on cardboard signs, which later colonized the foggiest fringes of the internet and were uplifted by the Republican Party and now are regurgitated by one of the richest men on earth.

Yet another such rich loon now appears on the internet with billionaire’s friend Bari Weiss to dispense this wisdom:

These guys make General Bullmoose — a mild parody of the big business go-getters of the 1950s by the reactionary Al Capp — sound like Erasmus.

These are our feral billionaires — people who have the most advantages — indeed, practically speaking, all the advantages — of modern life, yet apparently are not content to enjoy these in peace and quiet, nor motivated to do anything positive or constructive with them. They are rather eager to exalt and insert themselves in our day-to-day lives, not with libraries and museums but with bullshit, and to spread confusion and foment mistrust among anyone within reach of their heavily amplified voices. Rather than contribute to improve the public square, they plant bombs under it.

The easy explanation for this seemingly perverse behavior is that the feral billionaires expect by it to acquire still more money and still more power. (In his chiding review of Beatty’s book, Grimes reported that in the Gilded Age “the richest 1 percent owned 26 percent of the wealth.” They have at least that much now.)

But even for an oligarch this would seem a dangerously explosive way to get it. They lavish money on corrupt politicians, but why would any of those, from Trump on down, favor one donor over another, especially when all the amounts are so large? And though billionaires have a lot in common, their behavior in this regard does not appear collusive — self-aggrandizement is not a team sport. They are not destroying democracy for one another, but each for himself. If one of them comes out on top and has no reason to share his good fortune, what happens to the rest of them?

This is why I call them feral. In earlier times our rich men were somewhat domesticated, but as our society increasingly relinquished such control as it had exercised over them, the rich grew wild and savage; rather than taking their place at the trough, they fought their own kind for as much prey as they could get, and some emerged fatter, more vicious, and, by the standards of anything resembling civilization, depraved.