Democrats and the "Good Billionaire" Blindspot
The DNC's new chair says that Democrats should take money from "good billionaires", a strategy that has resulted in immense blowback for Democrats and their constituents.
Beneath the shadow of a government dominated by their opposition party, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) held a contentious race to find a new chairman last month. In the face of a vigorous and emboldened Trump-led GOP, the Democrats have been struggling to find their voice. Different pontificators with competing analyses about why the party has been floundering have been vying to dominate the conversation and shift the party according to their vision. As such, given that this race determines the leader of the committee responsible for organizing primaries, supporting candidates, and building messaging for the party, many constituencies, from the grassroots to the donor class, took special interest in this particular race.
Amongst the contenders were Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ former campaign manager, and Marianne Williamson, the long shot presidential hopeful who was marginalized in the media, smeared, and artificially blocked from ballot access in the 2024 election. Ultimately, two relatively safe bets made it to the top of the ticket: Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin DNC, and Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota DNC. Progressives threw their lot in with Martin, given Minnesota’s progressive policy record (by American standards) under Martin’s purview in the state, and he managed to comfortably secure the win.
The process was not without hiccups. Adversarial groups like the Sunrise Movement and Climate Defiance, after endorsing centrist politicians and receiving practically nothing in return, sought to make their presence felt, interrupting speakers and demanding that climate and workers be the center of the Democratic policy platform moving forward. Jaime Harrison, the outgoing chair of the party, was seen personally manhandling some of these protestors in what was an emblematic display of the last few decades of Democratic Party attitude toward its base. At the core of all of these grassroots demands was a common thread: that Democrats unequivocally reject corporate and billionaire money.
“There are a lot of good billionaires out there . . . and we will take their money, but we’re not takin’ money from those bad billionaires.”
In what has become a viral stain on his reputation, Ken Martin responded directly to some of these concerns. “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money, but we’re not takin’ money from those bad billionaires,” he assured us before smirking triumphantly as though this vapid pledge should assuage all concerns. We are in a moment where the entire Silicon Valley Big Tech donor base, a base that was once a comfortable mainstay of the Democratic Party, is making a sea change towards the Republicans, led by a handful of ideologues, and all it took was a popular rebuke of the incumbent political party and the threat of mild regulation for huge swaths of this donor base to abandon those so-called “shared values” Ken referred to. The right’s so-called opposition party seem to be learning nothing.
The photo of Musk and Obama at the top of the article harkens back to an almost unrecognizable world. Given his nearly $300 million in donations used to help catapult Trump to the presidency in 2024, you’d be forgiven for not realizing that Musk used to fashion himself something of a Democratic Party ally, even donating fairly generously to prominent Democratic Party candidates like Gavin Newsom and Hillary Clinton in the past. On its face, it would track; he’s spearheaded a company whose ostensible mission is, “to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy,” after all, a mission which would ostensibly align with a climate-focused policy platform. The relationship between Democrats and Musk was reciprocal. Democrats advanced subsidies and incentives for programs that directly benefitted Elon’s companies, to the tune of nearly $5 billion by 2015. Those subsidies helped catapult Musk’s net worth from the low tens of billions to over $400 billion today, making him the richest man in the world on paper. And through a long running corporate onslaught, beginning with associate judge Lewis F. Powell’s infamous memo in 1971 and culminating in the Supreme Court’s calamitous 2010 Citizens United ruling, which effectively allowed unlimited corporate spending in our elections, the old mantra “money is power” has become truer every day. In this case, Democrats had a direct hand in vesting immense power in a man who has essentially become one of their top foes.
In the face of moderate antitrust scrutiny from the likes of Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan in the last administration, Silicon Valley big wigs pooled their money to empower someone more hospitable to big business than the Democrats already were. Controlling both levers of finance and information, corporate benefactors with a vision of oligarchy threw their lot in with Trump. Harris being in the pocket of tech billionaires herself and tacitly implying that she would fire Khan (in spite of antitrust enforcement becoming increasingly popular with the general public) apparently wasn’t enough to pull a few strategic partners away from Trump. A gaggle of large corporations has even sought to placate the current administration ideologically. They are no longer pretending to care about DEI initiatives, are eliminating fact checking programs, and are even kowtowing to Trump’s asinine shticks, like the Gulf of America nonsense. But the commitment of corporations is not to any true ideological priors, just to their modus operandi: the continued accumulation of surplus capital, even at an ever increasing cost to the working people of the general public, by any means necessary, even if that means installing autocratic rulers. American mega corporations and defense firms have long facilitated violent coups across the world in the interest of expropriating resources, and now, their sights have begun to shift inward, as those same crises of capitalism (poverty, wealth inequality, worker disillusionment and alienation, worsening quality of life) felt abroad are rearing their ugly heads at home in an ever increasing fashion.
Importantly, just because corporations have bought our politics, this doesn’t mean that Democrats have to accept corporate money in order to remain viable. The absolute amount of money spent does not dictate the outcome of an election, as Trump himself has demonstrated in both 2016 and 2024. In both of those races, his campaigns spent less in total than his opponents did. Perhaps even more relevantly, Bernie Sanders, who famously only accepted grassroots donations, nearly won both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries and polled favorably in head-to-head matchups with Trump (in spite of a chorus of corporate media figures vehemently maligning him on a regular basis), simply because he ran on popular policies and a strong narrative that offered an alternative vision to the right.
But many in the current lineup of Democrats don’t want to contend with the fact that they are ideologically bankrupt and don’t believe in popular policy prescriptions, and thus are too afraid to jump from the nest of corporate dependency into the hands of the grassroots, fearful that no one will be there to catch them. If Democrats continue abandoning their core constituencies in favor of monied elites, a jaded public unwilling to donate will become increasingly unmatched for a corporate blob which is continuing to concentrate wealth (and political capital by extension) into the hands of the elite. Democrats need to pivot quickly and pivot hard towards organizing grassroots campaigns, centering working class policy prescriptions, offering a compelling alternative narrative to Trump’s faux populism, and rejecting billionaire and corporate wealth so as to absolve themselves of any corruption and influence. Should they return to power, if they wish to have any semblance of breaking this cycle of rightward lurching, they must, at the very least, come down vigorously on the corporatists and the oligarchs, passing sweeping legislation to undo protections like the Citizens United ruling in order to eradicate as much influence of money in politics as they can. And if there’s one thing the near-century after the New Deal should have taught us by now, it’s that a society organized around the accumulation of capital by the merchant class and the commodification of everything will always recenter itself on maximizing this engine over the well being and viability of everyone and everything else. This must fundamentally change in the long term.
But if the party leadership’s strategy continues to be meeting with billionaire elites in an attempt to mend ties and curry favor, then I’m not going to hold my breath on any of that.