- golden bubble
- Jun 3, 2011
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yospos
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"Cancel culture" is just when things get protested or boycotted for left-leaning reasons instead of right-leaning reasons. The only reason it's notable is because in the Western world, conservatives in general get deferred to as a moral authority by an incredibly large number of idiots.
As already noted, the problem is that that comes with Trump, who did a great job loving up all the logistical stuff bigcorp types depend on. Saving cash isn't as important as predictability, and Trump & co are deeply unpredictable.
If there's one type of elite we should look more at it's the local elite. The merely super rich people who have the city council at their beck and call, and are just as much of rear end in a top hat to the local poor as any billionaire, and also are local enough to ignore the global logistics that the billionaire elite care about. If anything, they are usually bigger assholes because
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-american-gentry-wyman-elites/620151/
quote:
American wealth and power usually have a certain look: glass-walled penthouse apartments in glittering urban skyscrapers, sprawling country mansions, ivy-covered prep schools, vacation homes in the Hamptons. These are the outward symbols of an entrenched oligarchy, the political-economic ruling class portrayed by the media that entertains us and the conspiracy theories that animate the darker corners of the American imagination.
The reality of American wealth and power is more banal. The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies that govern daily life for tens of millions of people. Donald Trump grasped this group’s existence and its importance, acting, as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct. When he crowed about his “beautiful boaters,” lauding the flotillas of supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January 6 crowd that included people who had flown to the event on private jets, he knew what he was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry, the "salt-of-the-earth" millionaires who see themselves as local leaders in business and politics, the unappreciated backbone of a once-great nation.
....
Wherever these elites live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. In the aggregate, through their political donations and positions within their localities and regions, they wield a great deal of political influence. They’re the local gentry of the United States.
These folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions we typically associate with the world-shaping clout of international oligarchs. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elites who get all of the attention. They’re not the faces of instantly recognizable brands or the subjects of award-winning New York Times profiles; they own warehouses and Applebee’s franchises, concrete companies and movie-theater chains, hops fields and apartment complexes.
....
It’s not hard to spot sprawling apple orchards or vineyards and figure out that the person who owns them is probably wealthy; it’s harder to intuitively grasp that a single family might own 17 McDonald’s franchises in East Tennessee, or understand just how much money that the ownership of the third-biggest construction company in Bakersfield, California, can generate.
When we talk about inequality, we skew our perspective by looking at the most visible manifestations of it: penthouses in New York, mansions in Beverly Hills, the lavish wastefulness of hedge-fund billionaires or a misbehaving celebrity. But that’s not who most of the United States’ wealthy elite really are. They own $2 million houses on golf courses outside Orlando, Florida, and a condo in the Bahamas, not an architecturally designed oceanfront villa in Miami. Those billionaires (and their excesses) exist, but they’re not nearly as common as a less exalted category of the rich that’s no less structurally formative to our economy and society.
An enormous number of organizations and institutions are dedicated to advancing the interests of this gentry class: chambers of commerce, exclusive country clubs and housing developments, the American Society of Concrete Contractors, and fruit growers’ associations, just to name a small cross section. Through these organizations and their intimate ties to local and state politics, the gentry class can and usually does wield significant power to shape society to its liking. It’s easy to focus on the massive political spending of a Sheldon Adelson or Michael Bloomberg; it’s harder, but no less important, to imagine what kind of deals about water rights or local zoning ordinances are being struck across the U.S. on the eighth green of the local country club.
And while individually they don't do as much damage as billionaire, there a lot, lot, lot more of this garbage millionaires. For example, in Nashville, Lee Beaman, a four-times divorced car dealership owner, essentially killed two pieces of transit legislation in the six years through personal lobbying. While this damage is limited to Nashville, collectively the many thousands of fat car dealership owners who inherited the dealership from their dad do more damage to US public transport than the far small billionaire class does.
Or to put it another way, the medium-sized business owner is just as much a part of modern capitalism as the billionaires, and there a lot, lot, lot more of them.
golden bubble fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Oct 25, 2022
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Oct 25, 2022 06:17
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