Twilight of the Oligarchs?
16th February 2019
Joel Kotkin is delightfully dyspsptic today.
For a decade, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and Puget Sound worked overtime to win over progressives. For the most part, they enthusiastically back the Left on its immigration, environmental, gender, and racial agendas. The merger of the tech oligarchs with the Democrats went swimmingly—until the contradictions became too obvious. Even as they muzzled conservatives both inside and outside their companies and donated heavily to President Obama and other Democrats, they have remained at their core ruthless capitalists, determined to crush competition and shape society to their liking.
As Amazon has discovered, though, progressives now seek to limit the power and influence of these monopolistic behemoths. The Left’s new firebrands, including New York’s freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, much as Bernie Sanders did in 2016, openly regard both tech oligarchs and Wall Street billionaires as class enemies. The progressives’ alliance with private-sector unions, whose presence has shrunk in tech-driven urban economies like San Francisco and Seattle, has drawn attention to Amazon’s non-unionized warehouses and fulfillment centers, where widespread claims of low pay, brutal management practices, and an accelerated search to replace workers with robots have energized labor advocates. The new scrutiny is especially critical because an increasing number of millennials—soon to be the nation’s largest voting bloc—say that they prefer socialism to capitalism, threatening the future profits of even the most “woke” Silicon Valley plutocrats.
This is the newest twist on an ancient game. It has long been customary for rich politicians to launder their wealth through ‘progressive’ demagoguery (see Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, or really almost any Democrat in national politics), but Actual Rich People are discovering that they can get in on the fun without the fuss and bother of running for office. But they’re discovering that there are a lot of ankle-biters flopping around who actually believe this stuff. I think that it was in anticipation of this that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post — it’s not as if it was a profitable enterprise.