Why Do Leftists Support Billionaire Oligarchs?
Understanding a strange and seemingly paradoxical relationship.
For a long time I have been puzzled about why the cultural and political Left has—in recent years—passionately embraced the Military-Industrial-Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, and gleefully favored all of the centralized control measures imposed by the billionaire oligarchs who control the Complex and profit from it.
Before the pandemic, people who identified themselves as “Liberal” seemed to favor things like free speech and were suspicious of Big Pharma and military adventures abroad. With the arrival of COVID-19, most of this cohort seemed to do a perfect about-face. A strange and strangely consistent feature of their belief system is a twin embrace of COVID-19 vaccine orthodoxy and Ukrainian War orthodoxy. The same people who were terrified of COVID-19 and insisted that everyone be locked up and receive an experimental injection, were wildly in favor of war with nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine—a country they knew nothing about.
Generally, I am reluctant to attribute mass belief and behavior to native intelligence or lack thereof, because humans are more often governed by emotions than rational thought. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer remarked in his essay On Stupidity, people with high native intelligence and education may, under certain social and political conditions, behave with astonishing stupidity.
And so it seems that something else has seized the minds of people who previously thought and behaved in a manner consistent with principles of Classical Liberalism. Especially bizarre has been the way in way in which young people who have fervently embraced Woke ideology seem to have also aligned themselves with the messaging and narratives propagated by the Davos crowd. How to explain this apparent solidarity between emotionally overheated kids who think of themselves as Social Justice Warriors, and guys like Bill Gates, George Soros, Larry Fink, and Klaus Schwab?
What do such youngster think about the wealth disparity between the overlords they endorse and ordinary Americans (including the majority of white Americans) who work for a living? Consider that a person who earns the U.S. median household income of $70,000 per year would have to work for 1.85 million years, without spending a dime or losing one to inflation, in order to reach Bill Gates’s fortune of $130 billion.
For the last three years I have been consistently puzzled by the paradoxically affectionate relationship between Woke youth and the Davos crowd. This morning I read an essay by Alt-Market columnist Brandon Smith that presents an interesting and entertaining theory.
It's really not surprising at all that people on the left who are highly educated and probably test to have relatively high IQs are so susceptible to propaganda on any subject. As you said, this is driven primarily by emotion. I think what often happens is that it is relatively easy to construct a very logical argument that begins with some unquestioned assumptions. Because nobody has time to investigate the implicit assumptions in any given argument, they focus instead on the logic that follows the implicit assumptions. Because of their education, they can often be persuaded by the structure of a complex logical argument. For example, the concept of CO2 is the primary driver of disturbances in the natural environment is one such implicit assumption that will always remain a question on the left. However, anybody who has studied traditional logic knows that if the initial premises of an argument are false, so is everything that follows. Other implicit assumptions might be that Vladimir Putin is a madman who is bent on world domination or that thousands of unarmed young black men are gunned down by police every year.
As a true "leftist" myeslf, the answer is simple: these people are traitors.
They are "champagne socialists" and it started (in the US) with Clinton and "triangulation" when he basically said: "you can become individually wealthy to an obscene degree and still not hurt or take from anyone else". He was a liar and he knew it.
In so doing, he and others (Blair etc) were only selling out. Legally, it is called "fraud".
And today we have fraudulent leftists advocating censorhip and corporate tyranny. Because they have tasted the champagne. And they like it. They have sold out for short-term benefit.