Democrats need a billionaire strategy
You can be pro-capitalism or anti-oligarch, but the middle ground won’t persuade voters.
Have you felt overwhelmed by the past few weeks? Maybe I’m projecting. Amid lots of Nate-adjacent news — acceleration in artificial intelligence and NBA trades, and a very active first three weeks of the Trump administration — it’s sometimes been hard to know what to prioritize for this newsletter. So, I’ve perhaps neglected one of my favorite pastimes, which is criticizing the leadership of the Democratic Party.
Even at a nadir in their popularity, Democrats are making long-term plans. On Feb. 1, they chose Ken Martin, the leader of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, to be the new head of the Democratic National Committee. I have no opinion about Martin, though he’s presumably an improvement over the outgoing DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, who was delusional enough to say that Democrats should have stuck with Joe Biden.
Following the DNC meetings was discouraging if you want a vigorous opposition party. Democrats were partying like it was 2020 in a meeting that featured land acknowledgments, interruptions by protestors, and lots of praise for Biden. I suppose the proceedings didn’t shift my priors much, but that’s only because they were pretty cynical in the first place. I’m not so pessimistic about the Democratic Party’s future just because thermostatic effects are so powerful — Trump is probably going to make a mess, and voters are probably going to be unhappy about it. But if there’s a change we can believe in or a change we need, it will have to emerge organically from the grassroots of the party — not from the top.
Martin won the chair election partly because the second-place candidate, Ben Winkler — his Midwestern rival who heads the Wisconsin Democratic Party — was seen as too cozy with billionaires, receiving contributions from George Soros and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. But Martin also said this:
There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.
This is a message that might persuade the 0.001 percent of Americans who attend DNC meetings and approximately no one else. The commentator Keith Orejel, an associate professor at Wilmington College, at least seems to understand Democrats’ dilemma:
Khan is the outgoing head of the Federal Trade Commission; she resigned rather than face a near-certain firing by Trump. Under her watch, the FTC was aggressive, suing Amazon, Meta (reviving a lawsuit that had originally been filed by Trump 1.0), Google and other Big Tech companies and earning the enmity of Silicon Valley. Cuban, of course, is a billionaire, the founder of Broadcast.com, and the former head of the Dallas Mavericks — he got out before the Luka trade, so don’t blame him for that — and a Kamala Harris surrogate and possible 2028 presidential candidate.
I’m not sure I have much to add to Orejel’s observation other than to endorse the sentiment. Elon Musk is already fairly unpopular and, if I had to bet, is likely to become more so as he plays a larger and larger role in shaping the direction of the country. “Elon Musk is co-president” might sound like typical liberal cope, but there’s a lot of truth to it. You don’t have to be an alarmist or disagree with everything Elon does to think this is an unprecedented situation.
So, why don’t Democrats go full populist? Well, there are some risks. Capitalism is popular even if billionaires aren’t; in September 2024, an NBC News poll found that “capitalism” has a net +26 favorability rating versus -37 for “socialism.” I don’t want to turn this into a tedious anti-woke screed, but at least part of Trump’s success, especially among younger men, can probably be attributed to a rebellion against a left-wing mindset that prioritizes “equity” above equality of opportunity and sees high achievement as cringy or even racist.
And with Musk having made a successful bet on Trump, perhaps we’re in a world where billionaires see a high ROI from investing in politics, and — I’m trying to remember the Civilization technology tree — Democrats would be doing the equivalent of fighting back with catapults against heavy artillery, even if billionaires are deploying their power clumsily.
But the party also faces another challenge. Although the migration of a prominent wing of billionaires toward Republicans somewhat upsets the balance, Democrats have been on a long-term trajectory toward being the party of the well-off. Despite Musk’s help, Harris received almost as much outside money as Trump last year. And she actually had her strongest performance among voters making $100,000 or more per year:
Being a mere hundred-thousandaire or even a millionaire is a long cry from being a billionaire. You don’t have to be Elizabeth Warren to be concerned about the concentration of wealth and power in the very few. Still, this situation calls for what I describe as a raise-or-fold strategy: either Democrats should be with the billionaires or against them. The Martin-esque middle ground of separating the world into naughty and nice billionaires is probably the worst option.
Democrats don’t need money, from billionaires, or from anyone, really. They need a mirror, and a compass. And then, a leader.
Nate I disagree with you on this one. It’s not about being with billionaires or against them; it’s about ideas. What propelled Trump (both times) to the White House was ultimately his idea. He was the first major candidate to speak up about China, essentially calling them a predator (even in a praising way at times). He clumsily ascribed ill motive to “illegal immigrants”, but the idea, that (1) they’re taking jobs and creating a perverse privileged class that doesn’t pay taxes at the bottom, and (2) that some of them are violent, was embraced by America. And on and on.
So to ascribe “we’re either with them or against them” to a class of people with widely divergent ideas is misguided, IMO. Not as misguided as selecting that woke High School shooting kid as Vice Chair (whoa boy), but it’s still off base. Which is fine with me personally, because I absolutely love what Musk is doing at DOGE and with a few important exceptions (avoid the Middle East altogether!) am very happy with Trump 2.0 - so the Dems fumbling about might be good except the Republicans will inevitably go off the rails eventually, too - so we need a coherent alternative in this country. It sure as hell isn’t what the Left is putting together right now.
On top of that, to learn that USAID was funding Soros to fund these left wing causes, on top of all the other *insane* expenditures they’ve put up….maybe ya’ll don’t see it yet, but the people protesting the defunding of these agencies are tarring themselves and their party for an entire generation. At the admitted risk of using personal experience to make grand assumptions, I live in a *super* left wing area of wealthy people (I.e. the entire support base for Kamala) and *everybody* is stunned by what’s being uncovered. While the elites keep shouting from the ivory towers about the need to maintain these (very obviously rogue) agencies and pressing lawsuits, the rest of us are wondering why North Carolina went totally ignored for MONTHS when in a few weeks the new administration is getting it fixed up while doing all this other stuff, and the perceptions being created will be catastrophic for the next few years.
There is so much more to write but I hope the Democrats start taking these events to heart. They’ll need to learn eventually.