A new book jumping the queue

"The Haves and the Have Yachts."

    

The makings of history can be hard to discern in the moment, but, occasionally, a scene arrives that is instantly indelible. On January 20, 2025, the world watched American politics embrace plutocracy without shame or pretense. Donald Trump took his oath of office on a stage filled with billionaires. Off his left shoulder stood the world’s three richest people: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. A few feet to the right were Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, who, in the past, had said Trump’s rise to power was “deeply offensive,” and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who had evidently got over his outrage at the “shameful” riot at the Capitol. There were so many billionaires onstage that the leaders of Congress were relegated to the audience. 

The moguls on hand to celebrate Trump’s return to the White House had little in common with the old-fashioned corporate conservative elite. They were political players born of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2010 to remove limits on political contributions. As a result, candidates no longer needed large pools of rich supporters; they only needed small pools of ultrarich supporters, who gave far more and received far more in return. When oil-and-gas executives had visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he told them he would remove restrictions on drilling, for which they should raise $1 billion for his campaign. Musk devoted at least $288 million of his fortune to getting Trump and other Republicans elected, and, after Election Day, it proved to be a colossally fruitful investment. In a single week, stock traders, betting that Musk’s businesses would prosper from the new era, boosted the value of his shares by an astounding $54 billion. 

Trump named thirteen billionaires to the top ranks of his administration. Musk devised the Department of Government Efficiency, a new entity ostensibly charged with finding savings. Within weeks, Musk and a small band of acolytes, some barely out of college, had tipped the federal government into chaos by seizing the powers to fire people, access classified files, and all but close branches of the government. Opponents sued, but Musk was backed by a fortune so large that he could exhaust almost anyone in the courts. 

There had, in retrospect, been many signs that this is where we were headed. Days before Trump’s inauguration, Joe Biden, in his final speech as president, said belatedly: “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.” In fact, that oligarchy had been taking shape for decades. The tableau at the inauguration was the culmination of ideas and ambitions that run through the pages of this book. 

The effects of great fortunes exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society, but otherwise obscured by jargon and secrecy. Only occasionally, when something collapses—a myth, a confidence, a scrim of propriety—does the true power of the world’s biggest fortunes become visible…

Osnos, Evan. The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich (pp. XIII-XIV). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

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OK, WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO SPEND SOME TIME ON THIS DUDE

 

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Ava Kofman, The New Yorker. (72 minute long-read)

 

Lordy...

 

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