Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
As shocking as it was, there was also something about last week’s election that felt sickeningly obvious and familiar, like a violent flare-up of a chronic malaise that has plagued our reality for more than a year now.
On a certain level, that is to say, watching Kamala Harris lose felt like watching the latest installment in a great Oligarch Purge that started last October and swallowed everyone from Hollywood actresses to an NFL coach to a volunteer Santa Claus who pushed back too aggressively on a Likudnik rabbi’s talking points in a Hamptons community forum on the history of Israel and Palestine.
Many of the purge’s casualties were honorable Americans whose revulsion toward the genocide of the Palestinian people had professional costs. The first publicized victim came on October 8, 2023, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced he was cutting off all food, fuel, and electricity to the “human animals” of Gaza, and a website owned by the daughter of a centimillionaire New Jersey developer fired its NBA blogger for posting, “Solidarity with Palestine always.”
But the highest-profile victims of the purge were cautious, pragmatic people trying too hard to appease a capricious and bottomlessly vengeful boss class. Unsurprisingly, most of these victims were ambitious women, like the three Ivy League university presidents wiped out by the billionaire donor revolt over a largely imaginary surge in “campus antisemitism.” In attempting to maintain an illusion of intellectual authority and principled neutrality from posts they inhabited entirely at the mercy of feral billionaires, they were baited into mumbling word salads, inadvertently exposing the fraudulence of our most hallowed Enlightenment institutions. But the purge would eventually come for men as well: Gallant himself was fittingly axed for not being genocidal enough, just hours before Kamala’s shellacking.
TIME WAS YOU HAD DEMOCRAT BILLIONAIRES, Republican billionaires, and opportunistic bipartisan billionaires. Republicans had the resource extraction guys and the Waltons and anyone who employed enough workers that they needed to bust unions; Democrats had Hollywood and Big Tech; both parties had joint custody of Wall Street. And the billionaires got what they wanted 99.9 percent of the time.
This election was different. For all the venal raves the media bestowed upon Kamala Harris’s fundraising prowess, the whales near-universally lined up behind Trump. Of the top ten mega-donors, only the bottom two gave to Democrats; Trump’s haul from his own top ten donors—none of whom boasts the surname Koch or Thiel—amounted to about $945 million; Harris’s topped out at $254 million. (Harris ended up raising more money, thanks to Resistance giving, but Trump got to spend much less time raising it, and with Musk, he had the algorithms on his side.)
October 7 really disrupted the old paradigm. Within one week of the attacks, while State Department officials were internally sounding alarm bells about the “unfolding humanitarian crisis,” “war crimes,” and even “genocide,” dozens of billionaires were openly colluding, on conference calls and group chats and old-fashioned email chains, to begin defunding institutions they deemed overly critical of Israel, starting with their Ivy League alma maters and various art world establishments and then continuing on to media outlets like The Washington Post, Business Insider, and The Intercept, each of which pushed out top editors and laid off dozens of staffers this year following extensive infighting over coverage of Israel and, in BI’s case, the (ALLEGED) plagiarism of Zionist billionaire boycott orchestrator Bill Ackman’s wife.
The highest-profile victims of the purge were cautious, pragmatic people trying too hard to appease a capricious and bottomlessly vengeful boss class.
On social media and group chats, the billionaires raised funds to hire a private detective team to assist the NYPD crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters and reward the gang of thugs who violently attacked peaceful protesters at UCLA with sticks, clubs, chemical sprays, and a backpack full of poisoned mice. International humanitarian organizations with operations in Gaza suffered as well, with the World Food Program reporting a near halving of its fundraising haul in 2023; a colleague who works in fundraising for UNICEF told me the group’s most loyal mega-donors would not touch “anything Gaza” with a ten-foot pole.
This was nominally about Israel, but it also always seemed obvious that it wasn’t principally about Israel at all. At its heart, the billionaire revolt was the expression of a broader dissatisfaction with Joe Biden that was most surely rooted in the real, substantial, and (in the post–Cold War neoliberal era) unprecedented things his administration was quietly (too quietly!) doing for working people, small-business owners, and the proliferating subsistence entrepreneur class that falls somewhere in the middle. It sued Amazon for squeezing sellers to the bone while manipulating prices ever higher, Albertsons and Kroger for conspiring to gouge shoppers by littering the country with dead strip centers where supermarkets once stood, Live Nation for indenturing a generation of young musicians and turning tickets to concerts and sports events into luxury goods, Welsh Carson (the most powerful private equity firm in health care) for gouging hospital patients and suppressing the wages of anesthesiologists in multiple states, and more. It even got a court to label Google a monopolist.
This stuff was extremely popular, and Democratic leaders never talked about it, likely because it pissed off the donor class—which is of course the very reason they should have been talking about nothing else.
All of the whales had self-serving grievances with the Biden White House. Elon Musk has been fuming at Biden ever since the National Labor Relations Board forced him in 2021 to delete a 2018 tweet threatening to rescind the stock options of Tesla workers who voted to unionize. Harvard boycott and “do not hire” list coordinator Bill Ackman is likely nursing a grudge over some deleted tweets posted by a top SEC official about his dubious SPAC, and has a $2 billion position in Google’s parent company, whose shares have climbed nearly $10 a share since the election on speculation that a more forgiving Justice Department will downgrade the promised breakup the agency won in its landmark antitrust trial to some sort of obligatory agreement to stop being evil. Marc Rowan, who first unleashed the purge by calling on his fellow alumni to boycott donations to the University of Pennsylvania over its refusal to cancel a Palestinian literature festival (which happened several weeks before October 7), is the CEO and co-founder of the private equity firm that owns the aforementioned Albertsons, along with a for-profit diploma mill Biden’s Department of Education is suing to force it to forgive more than $100 million in the debts of cheated students. (It was lobbyists ostensibly representing that diploma mill, the University of Phoenix, who briefed Elise Stefanik and other House Republicans before the first round of campus antisemitism hearings.) And every rich guy with an interest in anything Web 2.0 was mad about SEC chair Gary Gensler’s treatment of crypto tokens and stablecoins as the Ponzi schemes they are.
But the billionaires were not stupid enough to show their hands. Instead, they expanded their crusade against “antisemitism” to encompass the scourge of “wokeness” and the overall problem of Democrat virtue-signaling, melodrama, and hall-monitor behavior. And yes: They did all of this while simultaneously (and somewhat unbelievably) deploying the language, logic, and lawfare of the microaggression snowflake set to cast Zionists as an oppressed class. This made them the subject of mockery among equal-opportunity anti-woke pundits like Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang, but most people are not Ivy League and did not notice the hypocrisy. Most people simply dislike terms like “Latinx” and “pregnant people.” I have a good friend whose spouse is trans; she “misgenders” them all the time, in part because referring to a singular person by a plural pronoun is inherently confusing and awkward and that’s just something we’re all going to have to be able to deal with a lot more before it wins broad-scale acceptance.
In any event, though, the billionaires weaponized toxic wokeness to make themselves seem more receptive and in touch with Normal Dudes than the Democrats, who unbeknownst to most Normal Dudes had actually been working tirelessly on behalf of the common man while Joe Biden was preoccupied wringing his hands over why Bibi was being so mean to him. While the Democrats should have been telling crowds how Sean O’Brien had won six-figure salaries for every UPS driver, how Shawn Fain had secured 25 percent wage rises for autoworkers across the Midwest, how Lina Khan was working to free every doctor, lawyer, and sandwich shop prep cook from the yoke of noncompete clauses, or how Rohit Chopra had been heroically toiling to erase medical debt from the nation’s credit reports, they instead brought Liz Cheney on the road and dispatched Michelle Obama to sternly remind her fans that “nothing [Trump] says or does is funny.” I’m sorry, but that time he mused about nuking the hurricane? I still laugh every time I think about it.
But the Democratic Party that can’t tolerate the notion that Trump is funny is the Democratic Party that spends the months before the election parading around the endorsement of the 21st century’s second-most-prolific war criminal as evidence of stewarding the old “Rules Based International Order,” while ejecting from rallies and meetings anyone with the temerity to wonder why it spent the past year bankrolling the 21st century’s first-most-prolific war criminal. It’s the same Democratic Party that refrains from boasting about its deep reserve of genuine populist accomplishments, because it is too accustomed to dutifully demonstrating its impeccable beholdenness to the donor class to even know about said accomplishments. But it failed to recognize, far too late, that the donor class started jumping ship more than a year ago.
And while the last deep-pocketed loyalists were preoccupied scrambling to push Joe Biden out of the race at the last minute, Bibi was down at Mar-a-Lago promising Trump he’d end the war by January. A cynical conspiracy of the Israel lobby and the Everything Else lobby had sent events careening wildly out of Democrats’ control, and the one way to take it back was to welcome their hatred. But once again, they chose instead to lean in, and here we are.
