Copyright Salon
President Donald Trump is a prototype for an American plutocratic form of authoritarianism, but the new MAGA order is much bigger than one man or leader. It has allowed an estimated 42 million Americans to delay their Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and a painful government shutdown to drag into its fifth week, becoming the longest in American history. But as the election results in New York City’s mayoral race became decisively clear on Tuesday night, the country was given a template for casting off Trumpism — and what the Washington Post recently referred to as “aristopopulism.” America’s democracy is functionally a plutocracy — and, in the Age of Trump, a naked kleptocracy — where elected officials and other elites are increasingly distant from average Americans and living, almost quite literally, in walled-off cities and archipelagos of influence and affluence. As a class, social scientists and other experts have shown that the richest Americans — and corporations, which have been given the rights of people by the Supreme Court — often behave like sociopaths. They view life as a zero-sum game, manipulating and showing little empathy or care toward others. This behavior is especially directed against those whom they view as less than, not of their social class. These people are dehumanized and objectified as “takers” and not “makers,” or as non-player characters in a video game. For these Ozymandias figures in our new Trumpian Gilded Age, winning — and dominating — matters more than people. As the Post reported this week, a group of elites, led by Chris Buskirk, a JD Vance-like figure, “aim to build a bridge between wealthy capitalists and the working-class people they intend to represent” by “profitably reindustrializing the country and tying their interests to that of their base.” The project, which is funded by technology leaders, “aims to equip MAGA to outlive Trump.” In this era of global democracy crisis, such a prospect is terrifying and has serious implications for our politics and society. In reporting for his book “Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live―and How Their Wealth Harms Us All,” journalist Michael Mechanic spent years gaining access to the richest Americans, a notoriously private group. Via email, he explained that “[s]uper-rich families tend to self-segregate” and live in their own realities and echo chambers. “Their kids go to fancy private schools, and the adults typically move in circles where they don’t interact much with people who are struggling to get by, which means reality and empathy take a backseat,” he explained. “And because these are the people lawmakers listen to, whose desires get turned into policies, you can see why we’re getting massive cuts to things like public education, and food and health care for the poorest families.” This has a profoundly negative impact on the collective personality, values and overall behavior of the rich. It’s what led Trump to host a “Great Gatsby”-themed party at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, on Halloween evening — mere hours before SNAP benefits were scheduled to expire. “Like the first Gilded Age and Robber Baron era of over a century ago, today’s billionaire class is celebrating Gatsby era excess, building glitzy ballrooms, and wielding unprecedented wealth and power in hijacking our democratic system for tax cuts and subsidies,” said Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and author of the new book “Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.” Such policies and behavior, he explained, is much worse than mere “tone deafness. It is a mockery of the people who are struggling to make ends meet and live paycheck to paycheck.” The rich and powerful benefit from the fact that poor and working-class Americans are less likely to vote, or otherwise participate, in the political system in large numbers. The realpolitik calculation is simple: policymakers are largely unresponsive to the political needs and demands of these average Americans and are instead hyper-responsive to the most wealthy. America’s working class and poor represent a huge sleeping giant of tens of millions of potential voters who could radically reshape the country in ways that would strengthen and expand access to the American Dream. America’s working class and poor represent a huge sleeping giant of tens of millions of potential voters who could radically reshape the country in ways that would strengthen and expand access to the American Dream. Here is a thought experiment about real democracy in America: What if more working-class and middle-class Americans were elected to public office? What would the country look like if there were more politicians who actually shared the everyday struggles and experiences of the average American? Trump and MAGA Republicans, of course, don’t want us to know. This is one reason they are embracing increasingly extreme anti-majoritarian policies such as voter nullification, voter suppression, radical gerrymandering and even rewriting the Constitution to end birthright citizenship. In the direst scenarios, they have even floated invoking the Insurrection Act and imposing martial law in Democratic-led cities and other blue parts of the country, leading many to suspect their ultimate goal is to end free and fair elections in the 2026 midterms and beyond. Enter Zohran Mamdani. On Tuesday, the self-identified democratic socialist won New York City’s mayoral election by over a million votes, taking more than half the total vote in a three-way contest. Mamdani will be the first Muslim and the first South Asian to serve as mayor of the nation’s largest city. His platform includes stabilizing out-of-control rents, providing free public buses, improving public schools, creating city-owned supermarkets, lowering childcare costs and making the city more livable for everyday New Yorkers by raising the corporate tax rate and imposing a millionaire’s tax. Mamdani has been consistent with his message of economic populism and fairness; he does not believe that billionaires should exist. Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. During his victory speech on Tuesday evening, Mamdani thanked “the working people of New York” and described them in powerful, moving language. “Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power,” he said. “And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.” The potential of those words to reach working class and poor voters beyond New York’s five boroughs should strike fear in the hearts of MAGA officials. Mamdani had a personal message for Trump: “If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.” Predictably, billionaires spent huge sums of money to defeat Mamdani. Their efforts did not work. Trump and the right-wing are enraged over his victory, with the president threatening to punish the entire city by cutting off federal money. We need your help to stay independent Throughout his campaign, Mamdani was met with racist rhetoric and tropes. Now that he has won, it will only escalate. Trump and his MAGA messaging machine are going to dig deep into their bottomless bucket of racism, nativism and Islamophobia to make the mayor-elect, who is Muslim and the child of immigrants, the face of the Democratic Party. In that way, Mamdani is a gift to Trump and America’s neofascist right. But the people of New York spoke loudly on Tuesday. Economic fairness — challenging a rigged system that serves the rich and erodes the American Dream — is a winning message. This is especially true in a time when inflation is out of control, the job market is stagnant and economic misery is spreading because of Trump’s policies. The question now is whether Democrats will embrace this winning message of real economic populism — or fall back into their circular firing squad of post-2024 autopsies, listening to a consistently wrong consultant class and how they need to be more centrist, triangulating with MAGA Republicans to better understand their angry white working class voters.
