Have Billionaires Gone Too Far?

0:00If you're a fan of the Political Scene podcast from The New Yorker, I hope you'll join us for a live taping of the show at 92 NY in Manhattan. We're going to be talking about Donald Trump's falling approval numbers, the prospects of a comeback for the Democratic Party in the midterms. And let's just say the potential threats to the integrity of the election that are coming from the president. I hope you'll join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer on June 4th at 7 p.m. Ticket information is at 92ny.org.

0:39There are banners up all over town at construction sites. They were put up by Donald Trump that say, thank you, Donald Trump, and have a picture of himself in a hard hat. You know, it's just an unusual sort of thing to, like, put up huge banners at public expense with your picture on them thanking yourself. It's the latest outcropping of... Pyongyang on the Potomac? Yeah, Pyongyang on the Potomac. I mean, there is, of course, he has just unveiled his golden statue of himself at his club, but at least that's his own club. These are our city streets. I have to say, it's got to be a good time in the golden statue business.

1:20Like if, you know, it's been a tough millennium, I guess, in the golden statue business. They haven't had as much business since like Caesar. Even Caesars were in marble. Yeah, good point. It was a little more subtle. Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. Hi, Susan, and hi, Jane. Hey, it's so great to be with you guys. Hey, good to see you.

1:54Well, you guys remember, 18 months ago, Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, and the scene on that inauguration stage was indelible, truly. It was a kind of unusually candid exhibition of the nature of American power. You had a president there surrounded by so many tech tycoons and friendly billionaires that there was not even room on the stage for the leaders of Congress. They were relegated to the audience. And I think even with all of the history of big money in Washington, which we've all written about and talked about, this scene really felt like a step change because it was an announcement of an era in which the political advantages of the ultra-rich were not just being tolerated, it seemed as if they were going to be celebrated.

2:41It was a sort of year zero for shamelessness. Since then, however, we've seen a whole host of signs of a backlash. You had Zoran Mamdani, elected mayor in New York. A wealth tax is now on the ballot in California. And then this week, there were protests against Jeff Bezos being the big sponsor of the Met Gala. So you're seeing the spectacle of immense wealth colliding with economic frustration and really gaping inequality. And today we thought we would dig in to this feeling of a blowback, both political and cultural. So what's really taking shape here? What's happening on the left and on the right?

3:20And is this a blip or is this something larger happening in the zeitgeist? I'm curious, Susan, you know, we've been talking this week about some of these signs of anti-rich sentiment. You described it as pitchfork politics. And what has caught your attention? That's right. Pitchfork politics. Well, it's listening to you run down these sort of data points, right? What you see is blue America has one version of the backlash, right? You know, Donald Trump is selling a ballroom at a time when he's sort of immiserating millions of people around the globe with his foreign adventurism. So I sort of get that piece of it.

4:02I want to talk about that. But then for me, I'm also fascinated by what happens to right wing populism after Donald Trump. You know, I think we're now seeing in Donald Trump's second term just a sort of amazing clash between the electorate, the MAGA electorate that thought it was getting one thing, a man to burn it down on their behalf, and then the billionaire who's enriching himself, his family and his friends. So where does that go? Yeah. Jane, what do you think? I mean, I think there's been a fascinating outcropping of sort of class politics that you don't usually see in America where you see Momdani showing up at the building where Ken Griffin, the hedge fund manager who runs Citadel, lives.

4:47And it's one of his many homes and it's not his primary residence. He has a – I think it was a record-breaking$238 million penthouse there. And the issue that Mom Donnie is bringing up is whether people with very wealthy people with second homes worth more than$5 million in New York City need to pay a special tax. A pied -à-terre tax. A pied -à-terre tax. This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than$5 million whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for$238 million. This pied -à-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich.

5:26Those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don't actually live there. But even so... And what was interesting to me was that Momdani personalized it the way he did. And Griffin was furious and shot back at this and said, you know, I'm taking my chips and moving to Florida. The problem was he's already moved to Florida. So it's not much of a threat. He's already domiciled in Florida anyway. But he's saying he's going to take his money out of a big project in Manhattan. But the thing that you're seeing is that Mamdani is crossing a line in terms of what's usually polite in America and putting a face on who's the villain, who's the greedy rich guy.

6:04And I'm at his – what the rich do not want is people at their personal gates standing there with the pitchforks. And that's what that moment I think was so fascinating to see. A kind of uncomfortable level of attention. There were reports this week, too, competing reports on whether Jeff Bezos may or may not be selling his giant mega yacht. Bezos is so big that he can't bring it into normal ports, right? He's got to have it out where the cargo ships are. Yeah. You know, these are the practical logistical challenges that face, but, you know, a pied -à-terre at sea, I suppose. We are in a fortunate position, guys, because we have a guest to join us today who is really perfectly suited to talk about these issues culturally, politically.

6:49She has studied the culture of wealth in America for a long time. Brooke Harrington is a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth. And I first learned about her work after she did something unusual for a scholar, which is that she got fully trained as a wealth manager to basically embed in that world. and be able to understand the byways and the bylaws from within. So great. Brooke, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thank you. Brooke, you've spent years really studying the culture of wealth in the United States and around the world. You've embedded in it. You've been trained in it.

7:28We've always had tycoons. I think some people say, well, what is really different, frankly, about what's happening in the world today around wealth and ultra wealth? Is it just a matter of numbers, about scale, about the size of these fortunes? Is it about culture? What's distinctive about this cohort that looms so large today? In my view as a sociologist, what's really distinctive about the wealthiest people in society today is how unconstrained they are by any kind of sense of mutual obligation towards the societies that made them prosperous to begin with. You've coined this phrase, this wonderful phrase, the broligarchs.

8:11Did they have a different ethic generally from, say, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts and Carnegies? Yes, those are more the tech guys, but the general post-Reaganite era of wealth has been characterized by what I call noblesse without the oblige. So they want the trappings of aristocracy and they want the deference from us, but they refuse any sense of obligation towards us. That's new. So, Brooke, something flipped for these guys in the 2024 election. And, you know, we've all seen, you know, former Democratic givers like Jeff Bezos become not only Trumpified, but, you know, physically transformed, apparently, in the process of becoming Trumpified.

8:57Do they see themselves as Donald Trump sees himself very definitely as kind of burning it down? And in fact, he is the leading enemy of liberal democracy inside America today. Do these ultra wealthy, do they see themselves as actually seeking to break down the liberal democratic state or simply to wield disproportionate power over it? I think it's important to recognize that the ultra wealthy in the U.S. and elsewhere are not a monolith. So some of them definitely view the world the way you just described. Peter Thiel has famously said that he thinks democracy and capitalism are incompatible. Too cool, as it were.

9:37So some people are very out and proud about that among the ultra-rich. Others, I think, just haven't thought about it. Like, they're not, like, sitting there like Mr. Burns trying to figure out, you know, how can I be maximally destructive to the United States of America? They're just thinking the way that economics says you should think. Like, how do I maximize my utility? And if everyone else does the same, it'll somehow work out through the offices of the invisible hand. But, like, anyone who's, like, read a page of a history book or literature knows it doesn't always work out that way. Can I ask you a question, though, just to back up for one sec?

10:18I mean, the sort of the supposition that somehow the robber barons were good guys or better guys or were philanthropic or whatever, I really wonder if they actually were or if it was just that society forced them to have to do this. And the change is not really in the character of the rich so much as in the character of society in that they were forced. Rockefeller was forced. He and his son had to hire, you know, famously a PR man who taught him how to improve his image. Ivy Lee, I think, was his name. And it was because they were afraid of the pitchforks. They were afraid of the backlash politically coming after them, particularly after the Ludlow massacre in Colorado.

11:02So is it that the rich are the same, but we as a society are not shaming and threatening them in the same way? Maybe it's we who've changed more. I'm really glad that you raised that because it never occurs to me to clarify that because I always thought, well, obviously people are just people and they've been pretty much the same kind of people for thousands of years. I'm not aware of anyone arguing that the robber barons were better people. The way I see it as a sociologist is you have to look at what does society demand of us, of all of us, not just the rich, but all of us. Like, there are some pretty strict rules about things like you shouldn't take without giving back.

11:44You shouldn't exploit other people. So, those rules tend to be more heavily enforced on those of us who aren't rich, but they used to be much more heavily enforced even on the rich, though they had a little more wiggle room. So if you read the work of economic historians like Guido Alfani, for example, he just wrote this wonderful book called As Gods Among Men. And he talks about how exactly societies did enforce norms. This is this crucial word for social scientists. Not the law, but norms. Because the Achilles heel of all these rich people throughout history, they want deference and respect and admiration.

12:28and if we withhold it from them, they change their behavior. So we've started simply admiring them maybe since, I don't know, Ayn Rand or something, the greed is good, the kind of Gordon geckos have won. Is that the idea since the 80s? This is within my lifetime. This is a fairly recent change. And like I remember that massive sea change culturally from like the Carter administration, let's all turn down the heat and wear some cardigan sweaters. to greed is good, civic virtue is for chumps, paying your taxes or, you know, doing the things that used to be expected, especially of elites, that's for losers.

13:08And you should look out for number one only. You know, it seemed to me that we reached a new cultural phase in 2025 when you had the world's richest man get something that his predecessors like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's would have dreamed of, which is literally his own department of government that he could use to then dismantle, for instance, regulatory powers that were relevant to his own businesses. And what was fascinating for me, and I wonder if it was a precursor to what we're seeing and we'll talk about in a moment, was that actually, in some ways, Elon Musk was kind of defenestrated from Washington by the American public.

13:49Trump was picking up on the fact that Tesla sales were dropping, that people on some level that maybe people didn't even explicitly articulate, it offended this subtle balance that we have in the culture between admiring success on one hand and also being pretty creeped out by somebody gallivanting all over the notion of reasonable political power. That's exactly right. And I'm sure all of us are old enough to remember when the term wealth creator came online, and we were all sort of collectively encouraged to have a sort of worshipful attitude toward the rich as if their wealth automatically showed how virtuous and smart they were.

14:31But what we've seen is them overplaying their hand so that people like Musk and Teal and Bezos, you know what happened with the Met Gala recently, they're coming across as like buccaneers and pirates. You know, they're pillaging American cultural institutions. They're pillaging democracy. And I think that is so egregiously out of character for these sort of objects of worship that that's where people are starting to go, you know, time out here. Maybe they've gone too far. Is it their conspicuous consumption and sort of privateering, or is it the line that they're crossing is that they're going from becoming oligarchs to plutocrats who are actually running, trying to run a democracy with their money.

15:19I mean, I think the thing about Musk is no one elected him and there he was running the government. And it seems to me that there's kind of an instinctual American backlash against the idea that people we didn't elect because they're rich are completely running our lives. Is that a line that is being crossed now? I think that's part of it. I mean, you probably remember, as I do, when Hillary Clinton, in Bill Clinton's first term, was trying to put forward ideas about a national health care system. And the thing everyone was saying was, nobody elected her. What is she doing here? Yeah. You know, it's interesting, though.

15:58I guess for me, the fear is, have our institutions become so eroded. Have we changed the rules so much already? I mean, you know, Jane is our amazing chronicler of dark money. It's been a long time since Citizens United and the hyper-empowerment of billionaires and wealthy corporations in our political system. My question now is, okay, well, maybe there's a populist backlash that's going to brew against these broligarchs and Elon Musk and Trump, but maybe it's really just now a series of proxy wars between the ultra-rich of the right and left. Can the people actually assert themselves anymore in a meaningful way in the political system?

16:40That's actually one of my great anxieties as we enter the age of artificial intelligence. And my worry is that what AI is doing is accelerating, you know, the winners winning even more. And the trillionaire class could be even worse for America than the billionaire class. Do you get a sense, Brooke, that people, that this anxiety, this emerging backlash is driven partly by some sense of what AI is going to do in economic and cultural terms? I think most people don't even see it, like beyond the sort of headlines of like, AI is going to take your job. It's going to take everybody's job. Be really scared.

17:17Other than that, I think most people don't know enough about it to anticipate what it could mean, say, for democracy. That's actually what kind of keeps me up at night is like, how do you have a democracy if nobody knows what's real anymore? We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, more on the billionaire backlash and how the political pressure is building in response to this increasingly visible in your face form of oligarchy. The political scene from The New Yorker. We'll be right back.

17:53We are in uncharted territory. Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to The New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world, and I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

18:29Before we get back to it, quick question. What do you think the overlap is between our listeners and people who are, let's say, anxious about the 2026 midterms? midterms. I would say the overlap is significant. Probably some cautious optimists out there, too. People with very strong opinions either way. It's a lot. Whatever you're feeling about the midterms, though, please come and see us live. We are doing a special taping of the podcast at 92 NY in New York City on June 4th. Yeah. We're going to be talking about election integrity, what's at stake, whether Democrats can actually capitalize on Trump's falling approval numbers.

19:09And whether some of these once safe Republican seats are really as competitive as they look. And by the way, what happens if Democrats actually do take back Congress? What does it mean for 2020? For anyone with a VIP ticket, there's also a meet and greet after the taping. So the political analysis will continue over drinks. It's true. And if you're not in New York, good news because we have streaming set up so you can watch from wherever you are. So head to 92ny.org for more info or check the link in our show notes. We hope to see you there on June 4th.

19:51When you're talking about how the broligarchs don't respect the humanities and don't understand history, I'm curious, what lessons can you tell us about what happens when there is this kind of concentration of wealth? Should we expect this backlash to be significant enough to bring these people down? I mean, when do you have, you know, are we expecting a revolution in the country or are we expecting just sort of a built-in ruling class? Thinking about the work of historians like Ruth Ben-Ghiat, she wrote some very interesting things about how previous strongmen have been deposed. And it was done in many cases without revolution in the sort of the France and 1789 sense of the word, you know, where heads actually rolled.

20:42It was actually done through subtler social means of the kind of normative pressures that I was talking about. You know, unlike when the Medici were around, I'm talking to you from Florence, so I think about the Medici a lot. Oh, nice. Lucky you. Tough work. So, you know, the Medici were kept in line by the reality of eternal damnation and the possibility of excommunication. That's what we need is eternal damnation, Francis. Yes, yeah. Enter the Pope. Well, it's part of what makes, you know, the White House attack on Pope Bob so shocking. It's like, wait a second, J.D. Vance is trying to talk theology to the Pope?

21:22That's crazy. That's an indicator of how far our sort of normative controls have weakened. Imagine, you know, even 100 years ago, any sort of Catholic trying to like scold the Pope. But in the present day and in the recent past, like the last 50 years, we have examples in the case of, say, Pinochet or Mobuté Sese Seiko of being able to depose autocratic rulers basically by stigmatizing their rule, and that making it kind of toxic for the elites who keep them in power to continue supporting them. And so it's a slower and less dramatic process than rolling out the guillotines into the Place de la Concorde.

22:08But what you get is things like Tucker Carlson saying, I repent of my support for MAGA. Yeah. Interesting. What you're describing is the sense that there is a cultural moment that is in some ways upstream from the political changes that it produces. I mean, we're seeing now when you look at data on public attitudes, there is a sign of something changing. I mean, traditionally, it's been that Americans are sort of completely divided between admiration for giant wealth and then also saying, well, I'm not sure it makes this country more fair. But just recently, I mean, I'm looking at a poll right here that says that now there are it's only 49 percent of Americans who say billionaires are good for society, which is down from 63 percent just four years ago.

22:55So, I mean, that's a substantial indication of the mood and particularly among young people. You see a lot of that sort of concern. Do you get the feeling that this is something temporary or does your reading of the waves of this through history suggest actually when this happens, it takes a while to work itself out? It seems like it takes a while to work itself out. But what you get is this peeling away, like peeling the skin of a banana. The elites who propped up the strongman kind of start to back away or publicly repudiate him. And then you can't be a strongman by yourself. You have to have elite support.

23:36And when you start losing the elites and they come out and say it publicly, that's really bad news. And I think that's probably irreversible. Can I ask you a little bit about the behavior and sort of how these roligarchs have pivoted into engaging in politics? I'm fascinated by their reaction and their public statements in the context of this California billionaires tax. This is a proposed one time 5 % tax on Californians with a net worth of over$1 billion. So it's a very it's a pretty narrow. 200 people, right? It's a narrow cohort. They are literally acting like the end of the freaking world.

24:14They are behaving in a way that is so, to me at least, incredibly revealing. I feel like they're going to create populists out of people who are not exactly, you know, the pitchfork wielding types. But tell me a little bit about like their, as they become explicitly political actors, right? You know, they're not just sitting back in retirement, hanging out on their yachts and, you know, sort of watching the world flow by. By the way, you know, the grievance of these people, I feel like that's what's fused them to Donald Trump. But like, my goodness, you know, you got a billion dollars. Why are you so damn angry?

24:48And petty. That's your problem. Just so petty. What is wrong with them psychologically? I think it's like some sort of Howard Hughes phenomenon where you're so isolated by your own wealth and by being surrounded by yes men that you kind of become psychotic in a way. You lose touch with reality. My favorite example of this is, I think way back in 2014, Tom Perkins of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield, he was interviewed about the criticism that was then occurring in the Bay Area press about the growing wealth of, we didn't call them brolegarks then, but that's what they were. And he said, basically, criticism of the wealthy is just like Kristallnacht.

25:31And I remember this. Yeah. Yeah. My job has been on the floor for 12 years because of that. I just still can't believe he said it. It's so ludicrous. But, you know, what we see now in terms of the grievance you described, this has been coming for a long, long time. And apparently all these guys are in group chats now. And so you get this social phenomenon called polarization or risky shift where you put a bunch of people together who are basically aligned in their views and you set them talking to one another. And they come out of that discussion way more extreme and radical in their views. End the group chat.

26:05Yes, exactly. So what do you think maybe are the triggers right now? Is it that tableau of the oligarchs at the inauguration? That was a while back. Or is it the affordability crisis, the sense that inflation is becoming more and more painful? Or why now? What's happened, I wonder, that you're beginning to see this in California and in New York and, you know, even people protesting at the Met Gala, that kind of thing. I think there's a sense of, like, the refusal on the part of the broligarchs and other elites even to do the minimum pro forma performance of civic guardianship, you know, the way the Rockefellers used to do.

26:55Like, don't charge us any taxes, but here, we'll give you a library or a university. The refusal to engage even in that most minimal performance of civic engagement has penetrated to the point where it's no longer cool or acceptable to be aligned with people like that who are just picking our pockets right and left. And the sense that there is one law for them and another for the rest of us is kind of inescapable. In addition to every time an American goes to the gas pump these days, you know, their eyes pop out of their head at the per gallon price. One of the things you wrote about, Brooke, in your work that really stays with me is this idea of cultural norms.