OPINION: Kamala’s Capitalist Class
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An old parlor game among radicals is speculating on divisions among the owning class—by industrial sector, geography, networks, or political leanings—and their possible consequences, if any. In that tradition, it’s worth a look at how the American business class is lining up behind the two presidential candidates: one an alleged billionaire, the other with a net worth estimated by Forbes at a mere $8 million. I’ll stick mainly with Kamala Harris.
A nice point of entry into this analysis is a recent article from CNBC, which recounts an open letter signed by “88 high-profile business figures” endorsing Harris for president. The letter assures us—and, perhaps more importantly, their fellow titans of commerce—that “the business community can be confident that it will have a President who wants American industries to thrive.” Most (though far from all) of the signers are recognizable to those of us who follow this sort of thing. It was, however, not what you’d call a broadly representative sample of the “business community.” Of the 88, 33 were from finance, 17 from tech, and nine from the media, which adds up to 59, or two-thirds. There was a scattering of retail execs, a couple of “entrepreneurs” (including the ubiquitous Mark Cuban, whose claims to fame have eluded me for years), a long-retired airline executive (American Airlines ex-CEO Robert Crandall, an icon of the tough 1980s style of cost-cutting, who famously got caught conspiring with a competitor to raise fares in 1982), and a smattering of retired manufacturing chiefs. There were a few active manufacturers, but in niche subsectors like food and cosmetics. There was no one from the fossil fuel business or construction; few from health care or transportation (aside from Crandall). Quite a few of the Harris backers are retired; the word “former” appears 46 times in the document.
Most of the signers aren’t at the summit of American wealth. For a look at the upper altitudes, we can turn to a survey by Bloomberg—the news service, not the plutocrat—which helpfully assembled an census of which candidates members of their billionaires list are supporting. In their words, “Among the ultra-rich, Trump comes out on top.” Trump has gotten $24 million from these mega-moneybags, almost twice as much as Harris’s $13 million (though some of that was donated to Biden before he withdrew). Adding up the wealth of the backers, Trump’s 2/1 advantage prevails: $438 billion for Team Trump, $222 billion for Harris supporters.
A big chunk of the Trump total is Elon Musk’s $237 billion net worth; take him out—which would be nice, but you can’t—and Trump lags Harris by $21 billion. The plutocrat who gives the news service its name, Michael Bloomberg, is deliberately excluded from the list. Adding his hoard, $105 billion according to Forbes, to the total brings Harris’s camp up to $327 billion. That still lags Trump, but not by all that much, especially when you consider how much of this wealth is ephemeral stock market money, liable to melt away if the market heads south. One culturally significant billionaire not on Bloomberg’s list—because she barely makes the ten-figure cut at $1.1 billion—is Taylor Swift, who in this taxonomy probably counts as media.
Clearly, Harris has no serious problems with the super-rich, even if the putative billionaire Trump has an edge. But you can’t run a campaign on the affections, or even the contributions, of billionaires alone. You need some money from the merely affluent as well, like upper-middle-class professionals. To find who they’re giving to we need to look at the contributors to the campaign and associated PACs.
Harris’s main fundraising vehicle is Harris for President, née Biden for President. (She inherited Biden’s campaign money on his withdrawal.) As of July 31, it and its affiliates have raised $770 million, 59 percent of it from large contributions (defined as over $200). According to OpenSecrets’ compilation of data filed with the Federal Election Commission, contributions from those employed in finance and real estate accounted for 21 percent of the total; law firms and educators, each 6 percent; tech and media, each 5 percent. Among the also-rans: health professionals (3 percent) and the medical–industrial complex (2 percent), who may not have aligned interests.
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Two of Harris’s billionaire fans—LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and entertainment polymath Barry Diller—have made it clear they want her to fire Lina Khan, the trustbuster at the head of the Federal Trade Commission; both are coincidentally undergoing FTC “scrutiny,” according to Bloomberg. Mark Cuban has been vocal in demanding she fire Gary Gensler, the Elizabeth Warren-approved chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, while suggesting himself as a replacement.
Will she listen, should she be elected? So far she hasn’t offered any hints, but political risk pundit Ian Bremmer told Politico’s Morning Money that Harris’s rightward moves (or moves to the center, as they say in the mainstream) on taxation and immigration have helped “create some funders for her [campaign] that she otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.” She’s already announced more indulgent taxation of capital gains than Biden had proposed.
Another finding from an exercise like this is the extent of divisions within the American business class that find expression in partisan politics. (If I had world enough and time, I could even talk about divisions within finance.) What’s left of our industrial economy leans Republican; they hate nothing more than an environmental regulation. Dems meanwhile draw their support more from the highly credentialed post-industrial world, where advanced degrees are often required; the prominence of educators on Harris’s list is testimony to that. What is often perceived as the polarization of our politics is in no small part the public expression of these less visible fissures.
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