Crocodile Fears
The continued appeasement of the billionaire class by the Democratic Party poses great risks in 2024 and beyond.
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” Winston Churchill’s quote on the ultimate futility of appeasement still rings true today as we brace for the impact of another Trump presidency and the 21st-century variety of fascism that drives his continued will to power. As the only political organization standing in Trump’s way, the Democratic Party proudly presents itself as the resistance, the antithesis of the appeasers Churchill condemned for satisfying rather than resisting Hitler’s demands.
Trump is no doubt a clear and present danger to democracy. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump supposedly confided in his former Chief of Staff John Kelly. If Churchill were still with us today, he would surely recognize Trump as the most dangerous crocodile swimming through the murky waters of American politics. The Democrats are no appeasers when it comes to Trump, and he would eat his “radical left” political opponents first if given the chance. The problem for the Democrats is in their struggle against Trump, they have enlisted the help of other billionaire crocodiles who, while seemingly in line with a liberal agenda, pose their own threat to the future of democracy by perpetuating the corrupting influence of money in politics that helped spawn Trumpism in the first place.
Trump’s rise over the past decade is due in no small part to an unapologetic and flamboyant embrace of his status as an alpha predator croc. In the 2016 Republican Primary and his general election campaign against Hillary Clinton, Trump touted his billionaire status as giving him sway over politicians from both parties who groveled for his donations before he declared his candidacy for president. Trump claimed his wealth made him immune from the pathetic appeasement that less well-off candidates were forced to perform during fundraising activities for their campaigns. The same corrupting influence of money in politics that gave business mogul Trump power over the conventional politicians supposedly gave candidate Trump the credibility of being above the need to appease donors. He reassured his followers that even though he was a crocodile who could devour them all in one gulp, he loved them too much to swallow them whole. Within this topsy-turvy MAGA mythos, the will of the people could only be imposed by a billionaire crocodile big enough and bad enough to rule over the swamp he promised to drain.
Rather than follow the lead of progressives like Bernie Sanders and declare open season on all crocodiles, the mainstream Democratic Party has instead courted its own band of seemingly benevolent billionaires to provide the campaign donations needed to defeat Trump at the polls. The most notorious liberal crocodile appeased by Democratic politicians is George Soros. While the 94-year-old Soros has retreated from the public eye, the keys to his kingdom have been passed to his 37-year-old son Alex, whose social media accounts feature photos of nearly every Democratic Party bigwig cozying up to him. Right-wing mania over “Soros-backed prosecutors” is laced with toxic levels of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, but that does not negate the fact that Soros’s criminal justice reform agenda is profoundly out of synch with the priorities of average Americans and the Democratic Party’s appeasement of Soros damages the party’s credibility in ways that the out-of-touch DNC donation hustlers do not see. I witnessed these effects firsthand at the local level when Matt Dugan, whose campaign for Allegheny County District Attorney was funded almost completely by Soros, triggered such an intense flood of Republican voters that our local Board of Supervisors failed to flip from Republican to Democratic control - our local Democratic candidates lost by 1 and 2 votes respectively, while Dugan lost by almost 30 points in my Township. The Democratic Party’s appeasement of billionaires like Soros surrenders moral high ground in the fight against Trump and directly damages the ability of local officials in red and purple areas to restore confidence that we are a party that puts the needs of our citizens above outside influences.
Back to the national level, we can see the impact of Democratic appeasement in the damaging public statements made by Kamala Harris’s billionaire backers about the more progressive planks of her campaign platform. “So some people think there is going to be an unrealized gains tax on capital gains. There is not, there is not.” Mark Cuban declared at an Arizona Town Hall for Harris, dismissing the possibility of her following through with her proposed “Billionaire Tax.” As if questioning the sincerity of the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign promises wasn’t bad enough, Cuban warned that he would “work so she doesn’t get elected again” if Kamala imposed a Billionaire Tax. The Shark Tank star used a Harris campaign event to show off his crocodile fangs, letting it be known that he wouldn’t hesitate to gobble up Kamala if he wasn’t properly appeased by the Democratic Party. Cuban isn’t the only liberal crocodile publicly flexing their power to boss around a future Harris administration should she get elected. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Expedia chairman Barry Diller stated their desire to see Kamala fire progressive firebrand Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. The spectacle of billionaire supporters publicly undermining Kamala’s promise to uplift the Middle Class over moneyed interests reinforces the MAGA myth that billionaire Trump is the only candidate with the personal resources needed to stand up for the little guy.
The dangers of crocodile coddling for the Democrats become even more apparent in light of the shocking rightward shift transpiring in what was once a stronghold of liberal politics, Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel’s shock endorsement of Trump in 2016 was written off as a freak anomaly, just another weird idea spawned from the same brain that embraced seasteading, cryogenics, and injecting himself with the blood of younger, fitter human beings. Rather than an isolated crackpot one-off, Thiel’s early adoption of MAGA would be the first tremor foreshadowing a tectonic shift in the politics of Silicon Valley. Venture capitalist partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, once darlings of liberal Silicon Valley polite society, have gone full MAGA, donating $2.5 million each to Trump-supporting Super PACs. The most dramatic villain arc of all has been the transformation of Elon Musk from an evangelist of green energy to the most dangerous billionaire crocodile American politics has seen since Donald Trump. Watching Trump grit his teeth as Musk spastically skips around the rally stage is all the proof we need to dispel the MAGA myth that Trump’s wealth makes him immune to the humiliation of soliciting donations from the billionaire class - as if Trump’s on-camera promises to cut billionaires’ taxes was not enough to put that lie to bed. Still, enduring Elon’s cringe antics is a minor price for Trump to pay to swim side-by-side with a mega croc who is just as willing as Trump to push beyond the boundaries of campaign financing laws. From using his X platform to peddle misinformation and election security conspiracy theories to doling out $1 million each to random swing state voters who sign his America PAC petition, Musk is the living embodiment of the inherent danger to democracy posed by the billionaire class. The rightward shift of Silicon Valley elites proves that so long as Republicans are the party of tax cuts and deregulation they will be the last ones eaten by the billionaire crocodiles who will only grow bigger and more dangerous as the wealth gap in America grows wider and wider.
With little more than a week to go in the election and the New York Times/Siena College Poll reporting the national popular vote as a virtual tie, it is time for Democrats to admit that all the campaign money in the world cannot buy the trust of the American people. Voters were more enthusiastic about Kamala Harris before she had $1 billion in her campaign coffers, before she had billionaires like Mark Cuban speaking on her behalf, before she was scrambling for the Liz Cheney and Nikki Haley vote by walking back every progressive stance she took in the 2020 Democratic Primary. While Harris might still pull off a win on November 5th, the slow and steady decline in trust that has come with her Party’s appeasement of the billionaire class is hard to deny. If Trump scores a legitimate victory on November 5th his right-wing crocodiles will feast upon a fractured and forlorn Democratic Party. Even with a Kamala victory, if the Democrats allow policy to be dictated by the likes of Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman the heart of the party will be devoured by the liberal crocodiles its fundraisers are so eager to appease.
Win or lose in 2024, the only viable path forward for the Democrats is to take a stand on campaign finance reform as aggressive and uncompromising as the positions it takes on social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights. This will not require radical left “eat the rich” talk of gulags and guillotines. It won’t even require the much milder Bernie Sanders rhetoric that “Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist.” It requires a left-populist reaffirmation of the longstanding democratic principle of one person one vote. It requires a relentless push for Constitutional amendments to undo the disastrous Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United decisions, a crusade driven by the confidence that the average American does not believe campaign donations are a form of protected speech or that corporations deserve the rights of ordinary human citizens. It requires seriously considering replacing the income tax with a progressive consumption tax and an aggressive wealth tax that will tame and weaken the billionaire crocodiles rather than allow them to grow bigger and stronger. Most importantly it will require that these words uttered by Justice Louis Brandeis become a defining principle of the Democratic Party, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”