Donate
Kamala Harris: creature of the oligarchy

Kamala Harris: creature of the oligarchy

The Democratic nominee is a tribune of the elites.

Joel Kotkin

Joel Kotkin
Columnist

Topics Politics USA

Want to read spiked ad-free? Become a spiked supporter.

Kamala Harris and her new sidekick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, have opened their vibes-based campaign with a faux-populist platform. Included in this are plans for a massive expansion of federal power, paying mortgages for homebuyers, raising corporate taxes and fixing grocery prices. It’s an agenda even leading Democratic economists, as well as conservative ones, lambast as impractical.

The right mistakenly paints these ideas as ‘socialist’. ‘Kamunist’ has become their new attack line. Last week, the ever-crazed Donald Trump posted a picture on X depicting her addressing something like a Stalin-era Communist Party congress. These memes may work on Goldwaterites in their eighties, but mean very little to most voters more than three decades after the fall of the USSR.

Harris may be many unpleasant things, but being a serious Stalinist is not one of them. Throughout her career she has been one thing – an ambitious operative of the oligarchs, government bureaucrats and urban warlords who dominate today’s Democratic Party.

As she edges closer to power, Harris has been miraculously resurrected as the ‘only hope’ by leftist media like the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. Places like the Nation, which claims Harris represents the ‘end of the neoliberal era centrist consensus’, are perhaps even more deluded than Harris’s right-wing critics.

Harris was introduced to the San Francisco elite in the 1990s by her former lover, California’s longtime assembly speaker and former San Francisco mayor. She has never been a grassroots candidate with a strong working-class or minority base. Rather, she is the creation of a cabal of elite capitalists, their media megaphones and a network of nonprofits capable of producing hundreds of millions of dollars for progressive causes.

Harris has enjoyed consistent support from those who inhabit the Hamptons, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. California donors collectively contributed over $500million to her 2016 Senate race. The largest benefactors to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign included employees at Alphabet (the parent of Google), Cisco and Apple, as well as many prominent media and entertainment interests.

Now, as a recent Politico article breathlessly reports, Harris is now the ‘favourite daughter’ of the powerful Bay Area political cabal. Her base lies with Bay Area law firms and tech mavens, such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Sean Parker, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, former Yahoo managing director Marissa Mayer, venture capitalist John Doerr, Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell, and various executives at tech firms like Airbnb, Google and Nest.

Harris’s husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, was a managing partner with Venable, whose clients include Microsoft, Apple, Verizon and trade associations opposing strict internet regulations. Before his wife became VP, he worked at DLA Piper, which also has strong Valley ties and represents unseemly foreign interests like Qatar and the financial arm of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Harris, despite her green bona fides, relies first and foremost on the support of the private airplane class. This follows a similar pattern to 2020, Biden outraised Trump on Wall Street by five to one. The 2020 campaign also featured massive investment on the grassroots level, notably by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which poured in $300million to stoke turnout. This was concentrated, conservatives claim, in high-propensity Democratic areas. It constituted what Time magazine – owned by oligarch and Harris fan Marc Benioff – gleefully described as ‘a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes’.

Although a few oligarchs, notably Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have hopped on the Trump train, Harris will easily win the money in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Venture capitalists and tech CEOs were prominent among those who sent her an astounding $310million in July, twice what Trump raised that month and close to what he spent on his 2016 campaign. Some 100 VCs have already signed up to do battle for the new party leader.

This odd alchemy of the ‘left’ with some of the world’s most rapacious capitalists comes in part through the courtesy of Trump. His crude policy of tariff hikes wins few friends in business or among economists. He also alienates tech executives because of his aggressive stance on China, where many have major ties. China’s subsidies to manufacturers, by far the most in the world, may hurt American workers, but for tech executives and Wall Street investors, this is often good for their bottom line.

For most in the oligarchy, Harris is a far safer bet than Trump, despite her occasional populist outbursts. As California attorney-general from 2011 to 2017, she was tough on energy companies, homebuilders and manufacturers, but somewhat of a pussycat towards tech giants. When it came to privacy legislation, she supported policies favoured by her tech backers.

Even as Harris attacks price ‘gougers’ from the food industry, she will pose no threat to Big Tech’s monopoly power or profit margins. Tech firms exercise almost total control over key niches. Google, recently declared a ‘monopoly’ by a federal judge, controls over 90 per cent of the global search market and uses that power ruthlessly to maintain its position. Big Tech’s ability to continue as monopolists may be bolstered by her ascension to the Oval Office.

If this is socialism, it is certainly a strange variant. No threat to big property – like Lenin’s Bolsheviks – but a form of collectivism that more resembles the pro-big-business approach of fascist Italy and contemporary China. In these systems, massive private accumulation is permitted so long as they submit to what Mussolini described as ‘formal adherence to the regime’.

Today’s most likely model comes from China. We know that vice-presidential candidate Walz is a serious Sinophile, having visited there many times. But the real connection can be seen in China’s influence on Silicon Valley and Wall Street. For them, the People’s Republic remains a key source of electronic components, financing and potential markets. The very oligarchs who now see themselves fighting for democracy had little trouble genuflecting and clinking glasses last year in San Francisco with China’s brutal dictator, Xi Jinping.

The confluence with China reflects growing similarities in the world’s two dominant economies. As in China, economic power is also becoming increasingly concentrated. This is the case notably in tech, but also in finance, real estate and other fields. China, as the American Prospect recently suggested, purposely exploits these corporate interests, using America’s ‘intense duty to individual self-interest’ to further the CCP’s goal of achieving global pre-eminence.

Critically, as in Mussolini’s Italy, China permits massive accumulation and wealth, as shown by being home to the largest collection of billionaires in the world. With many of them also being party members, the model here melds the interests of big wealth with the social goals of the party. Corporatism, as one scholar observes, has become ‘a socio-political process’ where monopolies flourish with the assistance and connivance of state agencies.

In contrast, Chinese authorities see that ‘a conflictual-competitive system’, like that long dominant in America, as holding back ‘national economic priorities and damaging to the social fabric’. Under the rubric of ‘corporate social responsibility’, the state still holds the command keys and, although entrepreneurs are allowed to get rich, they cannot deviate much from the state orthodoxy.

The admixture of corporate elites and expanded government is increasingly evident in the US, even if not on anything like the scale in China. Harris, if elected, is likely to usher in a new era of collusion between the wealthiest and most powerful with an increasingly powerful state, run by a federal bureaucracy that mostly feels Americans have too much freedom already. These elites, not surprisingly, have also shown a China-like willingness to censor opponents, acting increasingly in sync with state power.

As California attorney-general, Harris evidenced little interest in protecting such things as due process, privacy and free speech. Indeed, her approach to censorship would likely be that currently being taken by her buddies at places like Google. In 2022, the tech giant announced a ‘crackdown’ on climate-policy sceptics, a position eagerly embraced by Biden’s former national climate adviser, Gina McCarthy. As it is, big American tech firms are already major contributors to China’s surveillance state.

Harris’s founders also seek to reduce competition and head off any effort to break up the Big Tech oligopolies. LinkedIn founder and big-time Harris bankroller Reid Hoffman is openly working to get her to dump Biden’s trust-buster, Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). This is certainly a service to Microsoft, which bought LinkedIn in 2016 for over $26 billion, and other oligarchal firms who increasingly rely on acquisitions to bolster their already dominant positions.

When former Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping opened up his country in the late 1970s, he envisioned creating a ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This included incentives for people to go to work for themselves and build fortunes. Our oligarchs might not be so eager to control all dissent, but they have a stake in playing along with a regime that protects their interests and allows them to expand their market dominance. Maybe we can call it ‘Chinese capitalism with American characteristics’.

The biggest difference between the two corporate states increasingly lies in business attitudes toward their host nations. The goal assigned to Chinese businesses – like their Italian fascist forebears – is essentially to help a national one – assuring that the Middle Kingdom overcomes the West, an agenda that focusses on the dominance of high tech and space. ‘The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist Party] in leading the people in revolution and development’, Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, ‘is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation’.

Sadly, such adherence to national priorities rarely impedes the American oligarchy. Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, waxes enthusiastically about a ‘common future in cyberspace’ with autocratic China. Wall Street actively lobbies on behalf of China, hoping to cash in on investments that strip America’s productive capacity but enrich financiers.

Certainly, the political economy that produced Harris in California would not likely appeal to Karl Marx. Some progressives who embrace California as a social-justice role model somewhat resemble those who in the 1930s portrayed Stalin’s Russia as the beacon for the human future. Today, California suffers the highest percentage of people living in poverty, tepid job growth and near the US’s highest rates of unemployment. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates another fifth live in near-poverty – roughly 15million people in total. Overall, Californians suffer severe housing shortages, have among the worst public schools (particularly for poorer pupils) and experience the highest gaps nationally between the comfortably rich and the middle classes.

Ironically, the people most hurt by the state’s progressive policies – most notably on climate – come from the middle and working classes. The California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s green agenda, recently projected that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually. At the same time, they will boost incomes for those above this threshold.

The imposition of California-style policies could, ironically, benefit not the right, but the far left. The ‘right’ may be seen as ascendant in many places, but it was the far left that did best in the recent French elections, winning 40 per cent of the under-35 vote. Meanwhile, Labour won a historic victory in Britain. Indeed, as countries de-industrialise, in part due to Net Zero policies, the lobby for industrial growth diminishes, while that for redistribution grows.

An America, where most people seem on track to become lifetime renters and dependent on government aid, seems ideal for a programme of expanding the welfare state. California, rather than invest in key growth-inducing infrastructure like roads and water supply, spends more of its budget on welfare than virtually any other state – and twice as much per capita as arch-rival Texas. Not content on expanding entitlements, California governor Gavin Newsom has embraced racial quotas and proposals for slavery reparations that could cost upwards of $640 billion dollars, despite the fact that California was never a slave state.

Accelerated by rapture over Harris’s nomination, the left, including the old-fashioned socialists, have achieved influence not seen since the 1930s. Already, more Democrats favour socialism than capitalism. There’s even a growing socialist movement among woke-indoctrinated employees in Silicon Valley. Watching Howard Schultz, a self-defined progressive capitalist and founder of Starbucks, fight off a unionisation drive recalls French aristocrats who supported radical ideas before losing their heads.

This process may be exacerbated when Net Zero meets ‘degrowth’. Today, Democrats largely eschew a strong economy, but focus more on ‘fairness’ and environmental issues. The ideological leaders of the movement, like Bernie Sanders, do not believe in good or bad billionaires, but that billionaires should not exist at all.

If the fortunes of working- and middle-class Americans continue to deteriorate, there may be a demand for a more robust, Sanders form of socialism. This could well include a massive tax on the super-wealthy.

Early signs of this more radical approach can be seen in left-wing attempts to build state-owned companies, ranging from grocery stores in Chicago to refineries in California. If similar proposals begin to impact Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Harris may find her biggest headache coming not from the much-demonised MAGA hordes, but from the very progressives now so giddy about her emergence. Across the world, capitalism is falling out of favour, notes one 2020 international survey. Even in the US, the majority of young people are embracing socialism as a better model.

Amid a ‘degrowth’ agenda that precludes upward mobility, Americans, like Europeans, would finally forgo ambition and decide that the best course is simply to ask Uncle Sam for more. Rising inequality and general fear of downward mobility have boosted support for expanded government and greater redistribution of wealth. This is at least the case among the young. Even some Trumpistas are speaking about ‘MAGA communism’.

Ultimately, these contradictions between oligarchy and traditional socialism could break apart Harris’s coalition, particularly if the adhesive that is Donald Trump mercifully leaves the scene. Facing limited opportunities, more Americans could become less bovine and more leonine, demanding that the oligarchic elites give up a large portion of their vast riches. At that moment, Harris’s faux socialism may prove insufficient. Demand for the real thing, despite its awful historical record, may become inexorable.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the RC Hobbs presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, published by Encounter.

Picture by: Getty.

To enquire about republishing spiked’s content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

Topics Politics USA

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Only spiked supporters and patrons, who donate regularly to us, can comment on our articles.

Join today