"... FORTUNATELY FOR DEMOCRATS, the very rich have been hard at work convincing the public to hate their guts. Where Steve Jobs was once hailed as an innovator providing smartphones to the world, with a personal profile that tended more toward asceticism than conspicuous consumption, the current crop of Silicon Valley billionaires are not only ostentatious in their spending but overtly hostile to employee rights, consumer interests, democratic forms of government, racial egalitarianism, and, at least in the case of Elon Musk, normal life. Through their indifference to the effects of social media on children (and the rest of us), and their huge investments in AI and the data centers required to power it, they’ve become the promoters of the most widely feared 21st-century phenomena. Not since John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Henry Clay Frick have we had such a crop of oligarchs. That the Musks and the Bezoses, the Zuckerbergs and the Brins, the Thiels and the Andreessens have turned themselves into the financial base of Trumpism—both the man and his madness—has likely created a reciprocal downward pull on the approval rating of both Trump and themselves.
"Democrats should be climbing over each other to welcome their hatred." -- Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect, on "Encircling the Royalists," following his review of nearly 100 years of Democratic politics and policies. As Meyerson notes, at the 1936 Democratic convention, FDR famously said of the "economic royalists" that "They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred!" The economic royalists -- or Epstein class in today' terms -- like Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Thiel, et al., are deserving of that hate for what, in service to their own greed and lust for power, have done to our country. There's no downside for Democrats in expressing that, and acting upon it.
