No Such Thing As a Benevolent Billionaire

Liberal priorities need straightening

My liberal friends, many of whose feeds I have been watching melt down in the wake of some supposed act of political treason on the part of Mark Zuckerberg, must at long last take stock of the fact that there never was such a time as when a privately owned social media platform was “on their side.”

Meta’s announcement several weeks ago, that they were drastically modifying their fact-checking program, making a dramatic about-face from their stringently enforced policies on what is often referred to as “misinformation” towards a much laxer policy around its censorship apparatus, thrust many liberals into an anxious tailspin. As mass migration to more amenable sites like BlueSky continues, there seems to be a great hunger to assign blame on Zuck for what is deemed a kind of craven genuflection before the altar of some new power named Trump.

This mistakes a great deal and only further entrenches the struthious posture of liberals in the face of a new consensus that should—though in all likelihood probably won’t—inspire the exact kind of introspective confrontation with first principles they have desperately been in need of carrying out since Trump first came down the golden escalator ten years ago.

Yet, it appears that heads in sand continue their self-interment.

A decade is a long time to live in such spiritual darkness, in a wilderness of one’s own fears and confusion. It is time to reckon with the failures of which the liberal worldview has been one very important cause among many and one which explains a great deal the increasing power of rightwing populism.

This begins with understanding the dialectical nature of the grotesque assembly of wealth we saw to Trump’s right as his hand lay over the Bible during his inauguration. For as we saw the central locus of global power change hands, onward looked a handful of men holding the most concentrated wealth the history of humanity has ever seen, and not physically farther than ten feet away at that.

We must be grateful for this display. For now the charade which many of us have been participating in, the stupid game of “which billionaire is the good billionaire,” may mercifully come to a close.

But in order to fully close this chapter, liberals must disabuse themselves of the cherished fantasy that there ever was a time when a billionaire was on the side of good.

Between state power and capital there occurs a very interesting dynamic, though a large part of it is theatrical: politicians come forward and appear as though they are domesticating wealth. Zuckerberg was hauled in front of Congress and made to a wear a suit so as to carry out the illusion that he is not in control. His observance of this pantomime was a matter of friction reduction: it is good business to go and assist the politicians who have the power to make their businesses less profitable in those politicians’ efforts to appear to be doing the bidding of their constituencies.

Similarly, it looks very good from a Trump voter’s perspective to see that Zuck attended Trump’s inauguration because the fantasy that he has “come to his senses” is entertained for their amusement.

Neither one of these vistas, one liberal, the other conservative, is correct.

For whether Zuck is in a suit in front of some committee in DC promising that he will do better to remove content from his site that offends only 50% of the population, or whether he is now attending a presidential inauguration in a display of solidarity with the other fifty percent’s wishes to allow their voice “to be heard,” makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

There is no such thing as a billionaire that is on your side, whether you are a coastal lib who doesn’t want to see any hate speech while you drink your fair trade brews in the morning or whether you are a middle America MAGA diehard that wants to consume as many anti-trans podcasts as possible.

The bottom line is the same. They put their money where they think the horse is going to win. They are very good at reading information from the direction of the wind. They spend a lot of time with the tea leaves and such.

But what motivates the billionaires, regardless of where they decide to plunk down their “investments” (read: briberies), is what it always has been and that is the profit motive.

If there is anything to read from the array of billionaires standing to Trump’s right as he talked about some “golden era” it is that now things have gotten a lot simpler. Make sure to invert whatever anti-Trump canard you are currently holding on to: it is not he that corralled them, but, frankly, the other way around.

The political winds lined up such that they could now all team up to control one person—whom we call the most powerful man on the planet, though, in essence, is merely one more marionette dancing by the pulled strings of a system of transnational capital.

The idea that Trump is some independent dictator who has managed to shore up power like a little latter-day American Orange Hitler mistakes the dialectical nature of his rise to power. Rightwing populism and its attendant demagoguery is merely a stage in the consolidation of transnational capital flows. It is a merger of interests such that capital may now centralize itself through symbolic figureheads like strongmen supposedly “in charge” of the affairs of the nation.

The sense of agency often ascribed to leaders like Trump is always a misapprehension of the occluded agency of transnational capital which operates like a bloodstream inside the corpus of whichever leader happens to be in front of the masses at any given time.

What should be celebrated in this moment is the clarity of the dialectical process that has brought out the puppet masters to show their faces as the many-headed hydra they have always been. The enemy no longer pretends to the good cop/bad cop routine and this is to be lauded.

If there is an actual enemy that my liberal friends need to trot out in front of their firing squads, make him Bill Clinton. Make him Chuck Schumer. Make her Nancy Pelosi. Make her even—or especially—AOC.

These are the people, the Social Democrats, who lied to you, not Zuck who is merely a garden variety robber baron.

These were the people who lied to you when they told you they were going to keep the bad orange man from winning.

These were the people who told a senator from Vermont—the only leader who was remotely capable of meeting the moment and providing a viable alternative to MAGA—not to continue on and save the country from the Trumpian menace but to actually step aside to instead allow a teetering geezer with one foot in the grave to lead the “opposition” to Trump.

These were the people who then said that now it was the time for the teetering geezer to step aside when the mask fell and the open secret of his debilitation could no longer be ignored and who then installed a talentless hack with no discernible platform except “joy” to lead an always doomed opposition to rightwing populism.

These are your responsibilities now, for you continued to believe in the lie and it sounds sometimes like you still, here in 2025, after the billionaires have assembled and are practically screaming the word “oligarchy” at full volume, continue to believe the lie.

It starts with getting straight and getting off the sauce. Many drunks continue to crow about traitors and mediocrities during their first meetings after hitting rockbottom. But, if they are to really make a life away from the bottle, they need to not just come clean physically, but spiritually.

The liberal world order has hit rock bottom. That’s the news. Whether we like it or not. Now is the time to find the correct enemies. And the correct friends. They do not lie in the ranks of the duopoly. They do not lie in the ranks of Silicon Valley.

That is also news. And it is difficult to bear. But nothing empowers more than the scales falling from one’s eyes. Let them fall. For the sake of the future, let them fall.