When Oligarchs Warn About Oligarchy

Two financial elites validate the success of all the work to shift the Overton Window and make anti-oligarchy and anti-corruption salient political issues.

For mental sanity, I avoid television news chat shows, but two clips from Bill Maher’s latest episode came across my social media feed, and I have to say — they are really important. They validate something I recently wrote — that while all these decades of work trying to shift the Overton Window have often felt fruitless, in fact the work has been incredibly successful.

The first notable clip from Maher’s show came from hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, the guy who has said he “represent(s) the Wall Street community.” For context, in 2010, Scaramucci used a televised Obama town hall meeting to play the persecuted-rich-guy card, bewailing Wall Street oligarchs allegedly being treated as a “piñata” as their bankrolled politicians gave them a $12 trillion government bailout while they were throwing millions of families out of their homes.

Fast forward 16 years, and the same Scaramucci is now bewailing the “undue influence” of oligarchs to buy elections and public policy after the master plan to legalize corruption culminated in the Citizens United decision.

Having devoted most of my adult life to exposing political corruption — and having spent nearly two years on the Master Plan series — I find it pretty funny that Scaramucci seems to only be discovering the corruption problem at this late a date. But whatever — better late than never.

And what’s genuinely significant here is not that one hedge fund manager has changed his entire posture and seemingly discovered a core truth. It is that one of the most aggressive attention hogs in America now understands that in order to be within the newly shifted Overton Window — in which oligarch power and a rigged campaign finance system are finally salient issues — he must position himself as a critic of endemic corruption. That’s big.

On the same television episode, there was also billionaire Lloyd Blankfein, who as CEO of Goldman Sachs helped engineer the financial crisis, got his bank a government bailout as millions of Americans were thrown out of their homes, and got himself a get-out-of-jail free card, even after lawmakers referred his bank to the FBI for prosecution.

And yet, nearly two decades after that society-altering disaster, Blankfein is now sounding the alarm about the pain being inflicted on the working class — and he’s advocating a redistributionist policy agenda to the left of much of the Democratic Party.

Again, this isn’t about one oligarch’s seeming change of heart about the economic system that vaulted him into the oligarchy. What’s important here is that even an oligarch like Blankfein recognizes that the Overton Window has so shifted that in public settings he must acknowledge that wealth inequality is the central political and economic issue of our time. What’s more, he seems to implicitly recognize that if there’s not a serious rebalancing of resources, the pitchforks will likely come for his class.

In other words, Blankfein seems to appreciate the ancient axiom (or at least the imperative to look like he appreciates it when he’s on TV): taxes and the social services they finance aren’t noblesse-oblige altruism, they are aristocrats’ insurance policy against the kind of desperation that tends to bring out the guillotines and the Luigis.

Taken together, these two clips confirm the notion that the discourse has radically changed over the last two decades. We’re finally starting to get beyond the billionaire-worshiping era in which both parties feel the need to rhetorically venerate rapacious oligarchs as altruistic “job creators.”

Eighteen years after the fleeting 2008 populist moment, we’re once again back at a potential inflection point, which creates the very real conditions for policy change. MAGA has been trying to harness that outrage for its authoritarian agenda, much like the Tea Party did when Democrats squandered the Obama presidency by turning hope and change into more of the same. But center-left populists have their own new opportunity to channel the rage in a very different, more productive direction — into causes such as campaign finance reform, anti-monopoly, Medicare For All, and higher taxes on billionaires.

This anti-oligarchy agenda is incredibly popular. But as a constellation of oligarch front groups like Abundance, Third Way, Searchlight and others try to beat back the center-left populist uprising, there’s one big outstanding question: Will the Democratic Party once again stand in the way of change and condemn America to the same downward spiral we’re now on?