The Democrats and New York Times Are Misunderstanding Liberal Wins Yesterday

Musk is a symptom, not the disease.

The New York Times credits Democratic wins against deep pocketed attempts for Republican expansion of office on Tuesday to a tactical maneuver. Instead of focusing on “wedge issues” like abortion or immigration, they made the story about Elon Musk.

NYT: Her win showed that, at least in one instance, Mr. Musk’s seemingly endless reserves of political cash had energized more Democrats than Republicans.

The narrative shifted from the assault on civil liberties and the rule of law, and more onto the audacity of the South African billionaire’s $25M of campaign funds he helped pour into the most expensive State Supreme Court race in history. This gaudy attempt to buy their allegiance was pitched as offensive to the Wisconsin people — and reason enough to reject his candidate.

So the analysis is: set aside this Leftist agenda, and point fingers at the dislikable billionaire boogeyman that the President is using as a pasty human shield. And there is a certain effective logic to this narrative that national, state and local leaders can learn from. But by missing the why this was actually effective, opposers to authoritarianism doom themselves to flailing in the face of well-organized assaults on the Republic.

The opposition didn’t primarily leverage the headspace of voters to educate them on how Republicans would use a Supreme Court majority in WI to deeply gerrymander the swing state, making opposition on a national level to their anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-Social Security agenda that much harder. Instead, they focused on the supremely dislikable Musk and his presumption that he could (literally) buy their votes and loyalty.

This is likely going to encourage opposition leaders to give up the defense of anything vaguely supporting minorities, letting the false narrative flourish that diversity, equity and inclusion priorities were wrongheaded, reverse racist, and causing plane crashes. There’ll be a defense that “we’re just pivoting to what people can agree on,” but Democrats, ever right for all the wrong reasons, will do their best to misunderstand what the Musk of it all represents.

Musk is going to be pitched as “the bad kind of billionaire,” the wrong way to do oligarchy. He’s crass and gaudy and makes ugly cars and doesn’t even have Trump’s decency of coming up with some good one liners. And worse yet, he’s a freaking nerd. That’s why the public has turned on him, in a way that’s useful for the Democrats. Right?

No.

Leaders on a national, state, and local level need to understand that the unchecked power of unelected plutocrats having their way with policies that affect the security, wealth, health, and pursuit of happiness of the people whose labor generated the wealth the accumulated (virtually always through means of exploitation and tax avoidance) — that is the sickness that Musk represents. And even if party leaders do not understand that, voters across the aisle do. And they always have.

And a thing that we, as voters, need to understand, is that they do understand that — and the role of the two party system is, in a very real sense, to distract us from this obvious fact — and to give us something else to fight over besides their unchecked power.

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The fight against Musk and DOGE has been gathering in steam since Inauguration Day. A planned nationwide protest against Musk and mass deportations is scheduled for April 5, an upcoming event that is receiving conspicuously little coverage by major media like The Times.

Democratic leaders are risk averse in precisely the same way Hollywood is said to be “conservative”. They can be tolerant of diverse voices and upholding the marginalized if it’s proven to be effective at the box office / ballot box, but there is deep resistance in trying things that didn’t work previously — and ultimately, it’s the shareholders that decide what movies get made and what policies are possible.

The Democrats as a party have shareholders that will be weary of the actual motive force behind the anti-Musk momentum. By clinging to what will be acceptable to the class of “good billionaires”, any resistance to Trump authoritarian ambitions is doomed to fritter away its good will, enthusiasm and ability to cross party prejudices that have become more divisive than religious allegiance.

The reason this argument is effective with voters, that billionaires and the economic system geared to their benefit at our mass exploitation, is that it's true.

The ways this exploitation manifests, with decades of stagnant wages, rising prices, expansion of exploitative debt and lack of protections for debtors, has been very hard for the public to focus on because of the hard work done over centuries — centuries scapegoating the cause of inequality onto minorities. Somehow, despite them having the least social and political power, the reason the average white person can’t get ahead is because of the Black man, or the gay man, or the trans woman.

The reason that Anti-Musk rhetoric is resonating in ballot boxes is not merely because he is an irredeemably loathsome manifestation of Grima Wormtongue with a worse speaking voice, but because the American people are not stupid. We’re just distractible.

We can get distracted by social issues created and thrown at us, pointing fingers at each other and those who look and live different than us, as the source of our suffering, but deep down we know the truth: rich assholes are fucking us over and have been for centuries.

And there is no grand 4D logic or invisible hand that makes this right, nor is it even an economically intelligent way of doing things. It is the worst of all sinful injustices, one that does not even benefit those perpetuating the injustice in the long run.

The oligarchical ambitions of the “good billionaires” that the DNC upholds is not identical to Trump’s. But they are both opposed to the enfranchisement of citizens to make their own policy decisions about their future, and they leverage distracting social issues to drive wedges between us to prevent class solidarity. And the “good billionaires” are considered good simply because they are better at make this arrangement seem desirable — not because they world they propose is more equitable.

The mild protections for the vulnerable that are doled out by Democratic machines of “good billionaires” is just a Liberal protection racket — “Of course you can vote for a third party, but it sure would be a shame if something happened to your immigrant friends, reproductive rights, or social security…”

As much as Musk and Trump have made progress dismantling the social security state, that have been far more effective at dismantling the narrative that capital C Capital cares one dollop of Wisconsin Cream Cheese about us.

Musk and Trump’s post modern crassness and abandoning of all pretenses of erudition and sophistication lay bare what class structure has always been — not a civilizing of humanity, but a drive to do slavery on common people for the benefit of a few, delusional despots who have confused their good luck and/or lack of empathy for godhood.

Those opposing Authoritarians will likely be confounded when Musk is sidelined, the proper strategy that Trump may or may not take. Once he’s back running Twitter into the ground and Teslas into pedestrians and SpaceX on taxpayer money (despite his obsession with government waste), the Democrats will have to ask: now who is the boogeyman behind all the bad ideas we can point to?

What Bernie and AOC, and most Trump aligned people who joined his movement because of their economic disenfranchisement have in common is that the rising unchecked tsunami of economic exploitation on a national, state, and local level is unacceptable.

Yet the Democrats, as the rightful inheritors of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatchers economic legacies, and as the true believers in the power of economic neoliberalism to “civilize” the world may not be ready to accept, is that Elon is the beast of their own making.

As long as the road to becoming a billionaire is paved on exploitation, cruelty, self-dealing, tax evasion and ecological annihilation, there is short, if not non-existent list of “good billionaires” whose acceptable version of resistance will be effective.

To paraphrase someone whose platform would be considered “too Leftist” to make it as a Democrat in this environment, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to determine good policy to fight fascism.”