The Rich Are Natural Fascists

Contra Anand Giridharadas, wealthy assholes are not anti Trump, and never were.

Anand Giridharadas’s 2018 Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World is a prescient warning—though not exactly in the way that Giridharadas intended.

The book argues that the charitable efforts of wealthy do-gooders exacerbate inequality and resentment rather than ameliorating them. As a result, Giridharadas says, corporate do-gooding creates the grounds for populist right-wing backlash. And yet, the evidence he provides points to a more sinister and more convincing truth: namely, that the right-wing backlash is not directed against the wealthy, but is directed by them.

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Giridharadas general thesis is straightforward and convincing. Wealthy financiers, he says, are aware that decades of massive productivity increases have resulted in huge gains for those at the top and 35 years of virtually no increase in wages for everyone else. These same wealthy financiers—the top 1% who have seen their income triple since 1980—say they want to help.

Specifically, they want to lead change, and thereby coopt it. “For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is—above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners,” Giridharadas writes. The wealthy want to invest in for-profit apps that help people smooth their cash flow from week to week, rather than backing legislation to raise the minimum wage and protect part time workers from exploitation. The wealthy want to create scholarship funds with their names on them rather than increasing taxes so schools are fully funded. And so forth.

Giridharadas argues that the increases in inequality, and the smugness of the global elite, has alienated the public and led to a backlash against “rootless cosmopolitans”—a Stalinist antisemitic slur which Giridharadas blithely and really unfortunately applies to the “globalist elite” (which, yes, is another antisemitic dogwhistle).

In this view, right-wing populism is powered by economic anxiety rather than by, say, racism or sexism. That argument has been thoroughly debunked. And Giridharadas’ analysis demonstrates why giving it credence is dangerous.

Legitimizing fascist backlash makes fascist framing seem legitimate, so that you start excoriating the wealthy not (just) because they are hoarding privilege and power, but because they supposedly lack authentic connection to place, or because they live in cities—arguments that erase the many, many poor people who live in urban areas, and which suggest that there’s something wrong or elitist about being connected to diaspora or traveling to live in new places. If you’re calling the wealthy “rootless cosmopolitans”, you’re not actually targeting the wealthy; you’re targeting Jewish people and immigrants and everyone who, supposedly, doesn’t belong here. That doesn’t help the poor. It helps fascists.

Though Giridharadas doesn’t fully realize this, his own broader discussion shows exactly why the very wealthy often see fascists, not as a threat, but as congenial allies.

In particular, Giridharadas explains that the very wealthy do not see themselves as powerful. Instead, they see themselves as victims. Giridharadas describes a Q&A session he witnessed with venture capitalist pig Shervin Pishevar. One of the people in the audience asked Pishevar, “How do you find the balance between morality and ambition and having to compete?”

Giridharadas then parses Pishevar’s answer:

Because Pishevar did not think himself powerful, because he refused to see the companies he invested in as powerful, he seemed not to understand the question. It takes a certain acceptance of one’s own power to see oneself as facing moral choices. If instead what you see in the mirror is a rebel outgunned by the Man, besieged, fighting for your life, you might be tempted to misinterpret the question in the way that Pishevar now did. He interpreted it as being about how he, a moral man, representing a moral company—again, he chose the example of Uber—stood up against immoral forces….

In his answer, Pishevar babbled about how Uber was fighting against evil unions and evil protestors; he frames workers and laborers as a totalitarian mob, and himself as a bold fighter for truth and liberty. The rich few are weak; the poor many are strong. Or as Giridharadas explains, “VCs are among the most powerful people in the world today, but in [Pishevar’s] mind he was the little guy.”

Again, Giridharadas argues that the cluelessness and self-deception of people like Pishevar leads to right wing populism. But what he doesn’t fully grapple with is the fact that Pishevar’s reversal of powerful and powerless, his self-pity, his left-bashing, don’t lead to right-wing populism. They are themselves right-wing populism.

Fascism, scholar Robert O. Paxton notes, is “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity…” Fascists simultaneously see themselves as besieged and weak and as ascendant and powerful.

Hitler, as one example, believed that a vast Jewish conspiracy was targeting Aryans for extermination; this was his justification for the Holocaust. Neoconfederates believed that freed Black people were going to overrun them and enslave them with a corrupt tyranny; this was their justification for Jim Crow and lynch law. TERFs claim that trans people are terrorizing cis women; this serves as a prelude to exterminating trans people.

Those with power in established hierarchies constantly claim that they are weak and imperiled in order to prepare the ground for massive violence against the marginalized. So when venture capitalists say that unions and protestors are oppressing them, and then use that as an excuse to call in the cops to bust heads, or as a justification for using their massive wealth to gut labor protections, that is not laying the groundwork for a fascist backlash. It is itself a fascist backlash. Giridharadas thinks he is criticizing Pishevar for creating the inequality which empowers fascists. But in doing so, he effectivey whitewashes the fact that Pishevar is himself the fascist he is empowering.

In 2018, perhaps, you could still fool yourself into thinking that the VCs, the tech billionaires, and the 1% were to some degree in good faith when they said they wanted to make the world a better place, even if they weren’t willing to pay more in taxes. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk and all their lesser sycophants and wannabes were unwilling to change structures in any way that would harm them. But they still did truly think that they could use their vast fortunes to fight climate change with electric cars; make books more available to everyone; enable space flight; fund scholarships; etc.

But in Trump’s second term, the masks have come all the way off. Jeff Bezos killed a pro Harris editorial from his Washington Post, and has shifted the paper dramatically rightward to kowtow to Trumpism. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan shuttered their school for low-income students as they’ve embraced resegregation under Trump. Elon Musk does Nazi salutes while perpetrating global genocide. For the very wealthy, it turns out, doing good was always just another way of doing fascism, and with Trump ascendant, they can stop pretending it ever meant anything else.

There are certainly some people like Bill Clinton and corporate-friendly Democrats who dream they can uplift marginalized people by pocketing checks from multi-billionaires. But the main fault lines in our current politics are not between placeless, globalist elites and rightly enraged nationalist populists. Rather the lines are between marginalized people who are seen as denaturalized outsiders and traditional aggrieved hierarchies—of race, of nationality, of gender, and very much also of class. The rich love fascism because fascism tells them that they are the beleaguered heroes of history, and that they deserve their wealth and the thrill of lording it over their lessers—whether through philanthropy or extermination. To the rich, it’s become clear, the difference hardly matters.