It must be spring time – or summer, autumn, or winter – because the voice of the billionaire has been heard across the country, and the voice of the billionaire crying self-pity that if the good lady with plans wins, he might be a little younger billionaire and some people in the richest country in the world think that a little redistribution will mean that, thirteen million children will no longer have to go hungry. For the record, the number of billionaires in the United States is about 600; They are a very small special interest group.
Think of being a billionaire as a rare disease, though much less rare than it was a few decades ago – except that it’s a disease that creates itself, deserves no sympathy, and is easily cured by amassing vast wealth of money that suppresses their empathic awareness. Unlike people with medical conditions, their disease is ours, too, because it distorts the very fiber of our republic with its outsized influence on politics – see, for example, Charles and David Koch, Peter Thiel – and the newspapers right now are giving them a platform they don’t need or deserve, and by doing so they are making their desires and whims seem like important and relevant things.
Too often they are framed as the constituency to be listened to when considering the economic future of this country, as if they are guaranteed that it will be OK no matter what, while perhaps a hundred million of their fellow citizens live lives of quiet financial desperation. This is due in no small part to the rarely acknowledged restructuring of the American economy over the past 40 years, which created massive debt and poverty for the many and immense wealth for the few.
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One hundred million is bigger than six hundred, but you wouldn’t know it from who we hear from. Nearly 25 times more people live on the Standing Rock Reservation than there are billionaires in the United States, and yet our mainstream publications have not felt compelled to run every possible candidate and outcome by the more than 15,000 members of this core community for approval. (It would be even more interesting if they did.) Meanwhile, according to the CNBC Millionaire Survey, “fully 60 percent of millionaires support Warren’s plan to tax the wealth of those who have more than $50 million,” but mainstream media outlets have chosen to amplify the voices of those who don’t.
The voices of billionaires and white male pundits have been heard, and of a whole army of conservatives who urgently believe that Democrats need to heed their voices (not really the equivalent of liberals or leftists who think Republicans need to follow their election strategy, because this demographic is clearly not high on their own smoke). It often seems as if the Democratic and Republican parties are unconsciously treated as wife and husband in a very traditional marriage, with the former having to respect and please the other, and the latter being free to treat the former harshly. To love, cherish and most of all to obey. Maybe that’s why for the first two years of Trump new York TimesLike a helicopter parent, always rushing to see how Trump voters were feeling since the last time they checked, without comparable coverage of how other constituencies were feeling. This disparity is magnified by his columnists.
new York Times Professional hand-ringers David Brooks and Ross Douthat are among those conservative white men who want to be Democratic election strategists, and there’s also a fox who wants to lovingly pet every bird in your henhouse, and a box of clay with some cleaning tips for you. These conservatives giving free advice to their enemies are usually saying that the Democrats should run someone like the Republicans, even though the Republicans are probably going to do it. [plot disclosure] Vote for Republicans. The situation is ridiculous, but these people sincerely believe in its seriousness, as they TimesBret Stephens, who publicly fretted that, “Those who have a plan for everything only prove that they can’t be trusted to plan anything,” and he said how unreliable Elizabeth Warren is for telling us what she would do.
Many people don’t like people who are running for president, but we don’t hear about their likes, or lack of likes, in the same way.
Stephens included this wisdom regarding his promise to ban fracking on federal lands: “You don’t have to think that fracking is a pure blessing – much less deny that tougher safety standards are necessary to acknowledge its benefits.” Like local pollution and global destruction, some people can be employed and the richest man and corporation on earth can poison the earth and squeeze a little more money out of it, except that’s his own former employer. wall street journalhas pointed out that fracking was always a bubble and it is bursting. “Frackers look for cash as Wall Street closes doors” was the June headline, While Bloomberg News noted in August, “Shares of shale producers have declined in recent months as investors have grown increasingly impatient with the sector’s track record of burning cash without adequate returns.” But Stephens chose to link a piece, instead national reviewWritten by someone who, speaking of billionaires, works for a Montana think tank partially funded by the Koch Brothers, who made billions of dollars on climate destruction. Who do you listen to?
new York TimesIn its eternal oscillation between reporting the news and harmful poppycock, earlier this year it ran some good pieces, by women, of course, about the term “likeable,” a completely misogynistic nonsense. But in January the newspaper published an article by a woman titled “Is ‘Chance’ Sexist in Politics? Yes. It’s Old Too” This week a man published an article saying, “Polling supports concerns among some Democrats that her ideology and gender — including the fraught question of possibility — could hurt her candidacy among a significant portion of the electorate.”* new York Timesplease read this new York TimesAlso, is an important piece shaped like a penis? Or is it an analysis based on the idea that Democrats win by kissing the wavering middle rather than activating a radical edge? Or by talking about husbands who hate human rights, feminism, reproductive rights, economic justice, and environmental protection, abandoning all the ideals that matter in order to recruit the enemy?
The article about Warren’s choice appeared in the same newspaper on the same day as Stephen Ratner’s headline, “The Warren Way is the Wrong Way.” Wikipedia tells me he is “chairman and CEO of Willett Advisors LLC, a private investment group that manages the personal and philanthropic assets of billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.” Regarding the elite panic we’re seeing everywhere if Warren goes ahead, Ratner says, “She would turn America’s uniquely successful public-private relationship into a strict, European-style system. If you want to live in France (economically), Elizabeth Warren should be your candidate,” and yes I would like to live in France, at least in terms of health care and trains and college costs, and if our public-private relationship is uniquely successful by any definition. Which includes Standing Rock and those thirteen million starving children, so I am the Queen of Sheba.
That Likeability Thing: A lot of people don’t like people who are running for president, but we don’t hear about their likeability, or lack thereof, in the same way. An entire army of women may be annoyed by Joe Biden’s habit of patronizing women – especially young women asking him about climate change recently, Elizabeth Warren’s testimony on bankruptcy in 2005 and in the recent debates – but apparently that doesn’t raise the question of his liking for men who don’t know that by liking he means they can’t tell the difference between one another. Me And we allAnd they don’t like women who want to be president, especially women who can succeed.
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According to the Pew Research Center report, “Among the public overall, 38 percent describe themselves as independents, while 31 percent are Democrats and 26 percent call themselves Republicans, according to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2018. The overwhelming majority of independents (81 percent) continue to “lean” toward the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Among the public overall, 17 percent are Democratic-leaning independents, while 13 percent lean toward the Republican Party.” The math says that the blue side has 47 percent and the red side has 39 percent, which suggests that the next election will depend on voting for those who already like a progressive platform, not on weakening that platform or abandoning it for those who don’t. Perhaps these pundits are advocating for the election they wish we were having or that we were having, rather than the election we’re about to have next year, with millions of young people and people of color registered to vote and lots of old conservative white people laid to their eternal rest (Republican voters are almost all white and also skewed old; the party has planned its own extinction.)
I examined easily extracted data last spring and found that about 11 percent of Democratic voters in the 2016 presidential election were white men. It told me something really important: that white men in this context are a fairly small minority by gender and race, even under the exceptionally corrupt circumstances of an election that prevented large numbers of people of color from full and fair access to the ballot. If and when we have free and fair elections, even barring the incoming non-white majority, the Republican Party will be out of its red pockets and the Democratic Party will be accountable to a far more progressive constituency.
If we had editorials that reflected demographics, maybe we wouldn’t have this avalanche of white people telling us what to think. But far too many publications are committed to amplifying minority voices as much as majority voices, and vice versa. Thus we hear disproportionately from billionaires and conservative white men who believe that we should all get what they want and decide for themselves. This is a problem.
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(*To be fair, new York Times Not the only culprit, just consistently the most aggressive. Washington Post On November 4 this headline ran on a column by another white male conservative trying to push for the Democratic nomination: “Democrats will be horrified by Warren’s lead in the polls.” The funny thing about it is that it was responding to the same external new York Times The poll suggested Warren would lose against Trump, while other polls showed her pulling off a landslide victory, and polls taken a year later are not very reliable. By the way, his lead in the polls is because many Democrats are the opposite of scared.)