The left has an oligarch problem. No, not the problem Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are railing about on their multicity “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Nor is it the problem that President Biden chose to highlight in his farewell address from the Oval Office, when he warned, “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

The left—and the Democratic Party to which its members have pledged allegiance—is the party of wealth and oligarchy.

This conundrum was captured inadvertently in a recent issue of the New Yorker, where readers were offered a glimpse “inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers.” The spread featured many cultural celebrities of the left (AOC, Al Sharpton, Gloria Steinem), but the most notable image was that of former Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin and her fiancé, Alex Soros (son of George, he was recently installed as head of the progressive Open Society Foundation), shown in his apartment in NoHo, “in a room whose spectacular city views serve as its adornment.” Both Abedin and Soros are dressed casually in the same monochromatic olive-green color as the modern armchairs, and both wear the dour and slightly disturbed expression of subjects in a portrait painted by Lucian Freud (whose coffee-table book is one of a few visible in the photograph).

The palpable awkwardness of the scene reflects the contradiction embedded in the Democratic Party and the cultural left more broadly these days: Images of oligarchs in repose are off-brand for their messaging and yet reflective of reality. As Sam Zacher of Yale University noted in a recent paper about the polarization of the rich, “Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats.” But the Democratic party still wants to be viewed as the representative of ordinary working Americans. No wonder Huma and Alex look like unhappy contestants in a billionaire’s version of Squid Game.

The Democratic Party’s capture by the wealthy happened in large part because it is the wealthy who have the luxury of caring a great deal about cultural issues rather than basic economic concerns such as inflation. They can weather economic storms, so the details of tax policy or regulation have become less pressing for many of their devoted members; the real battle, in their minds, is prodding the rest of the country to embrace their own enlightened views about race, sex, immigration, drugs, and the like. Writer Rob Henderson coined the phrase “luxury beliefs” to describe the ease with which the wealthy embrace extreme ideological positions about criminal justice and drug use, for example, even as the negative impacts of such policies (poverty, rising crime) never affect them.

The Democratic Party’s doubling down on extreme cultural issues, such as transgender ideology and its insistence on allowing men in women’s sports, or open-borders policies, is fueled in large part by its wealthy supporters who experience no real-world consequences for their own moral grandstanding. Indeed, those supporters have successfully raised a great deal of money through a network of foundations and super PACs whose overriding mission is to promote cultural causes most Americans oppose, and that likely cost Democrats the 2024 election.

This also explains the cognitive dissonance that emerges whenever Democratic officials try to talk about the dangers of the influence of wealth on politics. In March, Senator Charles Schumer confessed on The View, “I wake up at three in the morning sometimes, so worried about the future of the country under these oligarchs.” Schumer’s Senate PAC raked in over $81 million between 2021 and 2023 from a single liberal dark-money super PAC, Majority Forward. Evidently, not all oligarchs keep him up at night.

Likewise, Democratic socialists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are touring places like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Des Moines, Iowa, attacking the rich at every stop, trying to win back the working-class voters who defected to Trump and the Republican Party. The tour’s slick website solicits donations, describes special celebrity guest stars appearing with Sanders (Maggie Rogers! Joan Baez!), and hawks merchandise such as a “Tax the Rich” T-shirt.

Yet their largest crowds thus far have been in solidly Democratic cities like Los Angeles. Sanders even made an appearance at the Coachella music festival, where general admission starts at around $600 per ticket. There is also the long-standing fact that those in the Democratic Party’s socialist wing live like the class of people they attack: Sanders is a millionaire who owns multiple homes (keen observers note that he no longer harangues millionaires, only billionaires, in his speeches). He also travels like an oligarch to the rallies where he calls for their heads; the Washington Free Beacon reported that Sanders spent more than $200,000 so far on private jets for his tour. He was unrepentant when asked about his private jet use by Bret Baier on Fox News, saying it was “the only way you can get around, no apologies” and scoffing at the idea that he would travel like a pleb: “Think I’m going to be sitting at a waiting line at United?” As with the climate activists and celebrities who own multiple homes and fly private jets around the world while demanding that ordinary people stop using fossil fuels, “Do as I say, not as I do” is a message that encourages cynicism among the masses.

Such sanctimony is perhaps what drove a frustrated Democratic senator, Elissa Slotkin, to suggest that her fellow Democrats stop railing against “oligarchy” and find a message that connects better to voters, particularly on economic issues. She’s right to argue that wealth-shaming isn’t the silver bullet Sanders and others think it is. For one thing, the American people might think the wealthy have rigged the system, but they also find the rich to be objects of fascination. Popular culture is overflowing with voyeuristic gateways to the way the wealthy live, eat, dress, and, often, misbehave, as shows such as The White Lotus and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills demonstrate. Many Americans might think an oligarch like Elon Musk is a loose cannon, but they also respect the fact that he is the wealthiest man on the planet. They notice that he doesn’t engage in bouts of public self-flagellation about his wealth and doesn’t pretend to be a normal person rather than the influential billionaire he is. Similarly, when Donald Trump was campaigning and went to work the fryer at a McDonald’s for a photo op, he wore his standard suit and tie under his apron, not a McDonald’s uniform. He didn’t pretend to be a worker; he was Trump being Trump at
a McDonald’s. Voters recognize the difference.

Founding Father John Adams understood something that today’s cultural and political left has forgotten: Yes, oligarchy is a threat to democracy, because if money buys influence, the concerns of those without it go unheard. But the flip side is that people also admire the wealthy. Adams compared the allure of wealth to that of physical beauty. Like beauty, which is also unequally distributed but esteemed, wealth is “acknowledged to glitter with the brightest luster in the eyes of the world,” he wrote.

Which brings us back to the dead-eyed stare of the billionaire Soros scion in the New Yorker’s photo spread: Like many on the left, Soros is cosplaying normalcy when everyone knows he is a second-generation oligarch with great influence on the future of the Democratic Party. The real question is this: Will the party he funds—the party formerly known as that of the working man—finally acknowledge its new luxury branding?

Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism.

Reprinted with Permission from AEI.org – By Christine Rosen

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.