Eight years ago, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was an outlier in liberal Silicon Valley for publicly supporting Donald Trump. But now a number of prominent male tech plutocrats who previously opposed the former president have done an about-face: These broligarchs are publicly endorsing and donating to the Republican candidate—and revealing a lot about their own priorities, writes Brooke Harrington, a Dartmouth College sociology professor.
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To many billionaires’ dismay, democratic governance involves taxation, regulation, and scrutiny by the free press. The same system that facilitated their prosperity through the rule of law and good economic stewardship also constrains them—as it does all of us. But hell hath no fury like a broligarch who doesn’t get his way.
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That’s how the rich really are different from you and me: Some of them, particularly Silicon Valley CEOs, see any form of democratic constraint on themselves as illegitimate by definition. Rather than participate in the compromise and turn-taking that are second nature in democratic societies, they say, “Don’t you know who I am?” Their sense of entitlement cannot be understated. For example, Musk allegedly soured on Biden when the latter didn’t invite him to a 2021 White House summit on electric vehicles; Musk publicly bemoaned the “cold shoulder” he received. His friend Jeff Skoll, the billionaire former eBay executive, went so far as to accuse Biden of “persecuting our entrepreneurs.”
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But for all their rejection of taxation, regulation, and press scrutiny, the broligarchs are not anarchists. They’re in full support of laws protecting their property rights and enforcing their contracts. They use public goods such as potable water, well-maintained roads, and police protection. They’re just not keen on being subject to the law, doing their part to keep government up and running, or acknowledging their dependence on a free, functional democracy for their prosperity.
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To counter Musk, Sacks, and other pro-Trump Silicon Valley figures, more than 100 venture capitalists announced Wednesday that they will support Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House. But even broligarchs who support Democrats seem to bristle at public oversight of the tech industry. The LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Biden donor who signed the “VCsForKamala” statement, has urged the vice president to dump Lina Khan, the Biden-appointed Federal Trade Commission chair who has argued for more aggressive antitrust enforcement on tech companies. Tech plutocrats of all ideological stripes try to bend the political system to their wishes.
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To some, the politics of the new pro-Trump broligarchs might seem shortsighted. But they do not rely on public schools, Medicare, Social Security, or other shared initiatives. If all of those institutions—created and maintained through representative democracy and the tax contributions of generations—disappeared tomorrow, the billionaires would be fine in the short term. In fact, they would be better off, because they could keep for themselves the relatively small share of their wealth they now pay via their taxes to support those institutions.
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The ultimate displays of wealth and power are the space-travel projects that might someday allow Musk and other broligarchs not only to escape the laws of the state but also to escape the planet entirely. Slipping the surly bonds of society, they could leave the rest of us to maintain the democracies that brought them prosperity.
Virtually all of the focus has been on the racists and misogynists and christofascists and all the other reactionary fuckwads who are supporting and promoting Trump and who contributed to Project 2025 and so on.
But they don’t really matter. They’re just tools. The people who matter are the ones who are funding it all. Aside from some personal quirks (like Musk’s weirdly aggressive pronatalist thing) the people who are funding Trump and Project 2025 and such really don’t give a shit about all of that. Those are just emotive issues to make a lot of noise about to win over the base and provide cover forbthe real goal. The real goal - the exact and only reason that they’re funding all of that - is quite simply to destroy US democracy and institute an autocracy, so that they can have a system in which their rule and our submission are codified and absolute.
This isn’t a culture war. That’s just cover for the real war, which is a class war. And it’s not a war that might happen - it’s a war that already is happening. The rich are already fighting it, and have been for quite some time now. And if we don’t do something, we’re going to lose it by forfeit.