How the 'Broligarchs' plan to use Trump
One of the things that I think anybody can observe is that, even among the ultra-rich, they never seem to have enough. Never enough wealth, never enough toys, never enough. So what do you want if you've bought everything already? You want limitless wealth, limitless power. Even the feeble laws that constrain you, you want to shake them off. And that's what it means to dismantle the nation-state system.
—Dr. Brooke Harrington, author of Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism.
That's a quote from my interview with Brooke Harrington of Dartmouth College. She's a professor of sociology who has studied the ultra-wealthy for 25 years.
Our conversation on the latest episode of the FrameLab podcast focuses on how a new breed of tech billionaire "Broligarchs" ("bro" + "oligarch") seek to escape taxes and social responsibility, push women out of public life, replace the US dollar with crypto and undermine the power of nation-states.
It also some covers interesting ways we might fight back against the tech billionaire takeover.
"Our last resort is, essentially, social stigma," says Harrington.
Click any of the links below to listen, or find FrameLab wherever you get your podcasts. And please make sure to subscribe!
(Full Transcript below.)
FrameLab Podcast: The Rise of the Broligarchs w/Brooke Harrington
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Yesterday, The Atlantic published an essay by Harrington titled "What the Broligarchs Want from Trump." She wrote the following:
Their political vision seeks to undermine the nation-state system globally. Musk, among others, has set his sights on the privatization and colonization of space with little or no government involvement. Thiel and Andreessen have invested heavily in creating alternatives to the nation-state here on Earth, including libertarian colonies with minimal taxation. One such colony is up and running in Honduras; Thiel has also invested in efforts to create artificial islands and other autonomous communities to serve as new outposts for private governance.
Click here for a gift link to Harrington's piece.
Brooke Harrington
Transcript: FrameLab, the 'Rise of the Broligarchs with Brooke Harrington'
November 22, 2024
Note: Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.
Gil Duran: Welcome back to the FrameLab podcast. This is Gil Duran. This year I spent a lot of time writing about something called the Nerd Reich. That's a term used to describe a group of Silicon Valley zillionaires who have openly embraced extreme right-wing politics. Having attained massive wealth, these zillionaires now seek to attain massive political power to match it. And in 2024, many of them lined up behind Donald Trump. They bet big on the MAGA movement and the bet has now paid off.
Today, Elon Musk is positioning himself as Trump's co-president and Mini-Me. But he's not alone. Many other super wealthy tech figures are also lining up behind Trump, rejecting Democratic politics and going all in on Trump Many other super wealthy tech figures are also rejecting Democratic party politics and going all in on Trumpism. But what do these tech bros really want? The superficial narrative is that they just want lower taxes and fewer regulations. But I think it goes a lot deeper than that.
I believe we're witnessing the emergence of a new ideology, a high-tech, modern twist on oligarchy. The richest men in the world now believe it is their destiny to rule the world and to bend the rest of us to their wills using their money and technology. So let's talk about that.
My guest today is Brooke Harrington. She's a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the super wealthy. She authored a book called “Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,” which examines how super wealthy individuals are evading taxes, skirting laws, and trying to build their own political power structures. Earlier this year, she wrote an important essay for The Atlantic titled “The Broligarchs Are Trying to Have Their Way.” The essay looked at how a group of Silicon Valley billionaires, the Broligarchs, some of whom had previously criticized Trump, were now embracing him.
Harrington wrote the following, and I quote: "Eight years ago, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was an outlier in liberal Silicon Valley for publicly supporting Donald Trump. But now a number of prominent male tech plutocrats who previously opposed the former president have done an about face. These Broligarchs are publicly endorsing and donating to the Republican candidate and revealing a lot about their own priorities.”
So, what are those priorities? Here's my conversation with Dr. Brooke Harrington:
Gil Duran: Brooke, thanks for joining me. And to start, please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to study inequality and the habits and ways of the super wealthy.
Brooke Harrington: Well, I'm a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College. And I guess I've been studying inequality for more than 25 years now. When I was first doing my dissertation research, I started out looking at the way that Americans were investing in the stock market. And that got me interested in the sociology of finance and financial markets.
And of course, inequality hovers over all of that. So I knew I wanted to study the ultra-rich for a long time before I actually did because it's quite hard to get research funding in America to study anything sociological, but it's very hard to study the ultra-rich because one of the things they do with their money is they buy privacy on a scale that most of us can't imagine.
So, as we ordinary people are more and more surveilled, the ultra-rich are less and less surveilled. They live in gated communities or on their super yachts and they flit about in private jets. And even the ones who turn up like in the Forbes 400 list, those folks are typically just the people who haven't succeeded in keeping their name out of the public eye. A lot of really wealthy people employ full-time staff just to make sure their names never show up in the media. So it's expensive and time-consuming to study the ultra-rich and persuading an agency like the National Science Foundation to give you money to do it. It's an uphill battle to say the least.
So I mulled it over for many years before I hit upon a solution for doing it. And it also involved living for many years in Europe where funding for social science generally is much easier to come by. And I lucked out by falling into a research fellowship that was run in an organization where the director not only had a huge budget to sponsor any research he thought was useful, but he himself was interested in wealth and inequality. So he immediately saw the value of what I wanted to do. I didn't take a lot of persuasion and he gave me the seed funding to study the ultra-rich by going in the servants' entrance, so to speak. I became a wealth manager, which is the kind of person who helps very wealthy people hide their assets offshore to protect it from taxation or regulation or court judgments, divorcing spouses, disgruntled heirs, you name it.
Gil Duran: So, how it all works. You've studied this in depth and over a long period of time, and now we're living in a time when these super wealthy individuals are increasingly – some of them, not all of them – making themselves visible in our politics in very powerful and somewhat scary ways. So let's talk for a bit about the Broligarchs. The word is a portmanteau of bro and oligarch, basically referring to wealthy dudes who wanna be all-powerful now that they're super wealthy. And the term broligarch has gained some traction on social media because it's catchy and it's kind of funny in a way. Where did the word come from and what does it mean?
Brooke Harrington: My definition is that it refers to a group of male billionaires, most billionaires are male anyways, but they're male billionaires primarily in the high tech and financial services sector who have a very distinct political agenda that combines elements of libertarianism and of a sort of adolescent sci-fi fantasy world in which they're always the natural born rulers entitled to govern the rest of us through a series of corporate contracts rather than hassling with messy things like democracy.
As for where the term originated, as far as I can tell, it's been flitting around on Twitter since at least 2016. I think that's where I must have come across it. And it kind of went in and out of my consciousness as people mentioned it in tweets over the years. And then I used it in an article I wrote for the Atlantic that was based on a chapter of this new book I've written called “Offshore Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,” which is an attempt to get my arms around what the ultra-wealthy really mean for the rest of us.
Because, especially this new breed of the ultra-wealthy, they're not content with tax cuts and low regulation like the oligarchs of old. These guys really have a distinctive political agenda and they're quite far along down the path of trying to create alternatives to the nation-state as we know it.
Gil Duran: You wrote in your Atlantic piece, which I encourage everyone to read and which I'll put in the notes of the podcast here, you wrote the following: “Over the course of 17 years of research, I've heard repeatedly from financial advisors that multimillionaire and billionaire clients view themselves as above nationality and laws. One wealth advisor told me that some of his clients sincerely quote, believe that they are descended from the Pharaohs and that they were destined to inherit the earth.”
This suggests a certain kind of ideology that while not exactly new, does have a bit of a modern scary twist on it in terms of the fact that these guys have amassed super, super, super wealth, and they also have access to technologies that haven't previously existed. And I think we've kind of seen that play out in the 2024 election where Elon Musk got directly involved buying Twitter, pushing out misinformation, spending over $100 million, maybe even more to aid Trump. Well definitely more if you consider Twitter as a $44 billion acquisition that I believe was directly intended to help push the right-wing message. People use words like “fascism,” “authoritarianism,” “technocracy.” What do we know about this sort of emerging ideology and what it really wants out of our system?
Brooke Harrington: Well, it's really different from oligarchies of the past. If you think about figures like Howard Hughes or someone like John D. Rockefeller, Rockefeller was at least a philanthropist. He was part of this old school of wealth that believed that it had to justify itself morally through good works, even if he was a rapacious businessman, and by all accounts he was, there was still this sense that something was owed to society.
So that's all gone with the Broligarchs. In addition, the reclusiveness that we saw in billionaires of old, you who want to just take their money and sit on it like dragons on their hoard of gold, that's gone too. These guys are really public facing and they have this kind of messianic zeal to remake society, except it's not in the image of any set of religious beliefs, but in a secularized, technologized sort of mode that draws on narratives of genetic superiority and the innate superiority of men to women.
I mean, part of the importance of the term Broligarch as opposed to simply oligarch, is that this ideology very explicitly excludes women from public life. And it's not just speculation on my part. People like Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, and of course, Elon Musk have been very public and open in speeches and manifestos they've published saying really the role of women is to stay home and make more babies for us to propagate our superior genes. It's not that different from what Jeffrey Epstein tried to do by like, getting himself together a little collection of attractive young women and putting them on a ranch and getting them all pregnant.
I mean, it's creepy, it's gross, but they're doing it. They're trying to do it. Peter Thiel owns a magazine called Evie that publishes articles that discourage women from using birth control because it's not natural and how they should just allow their cycles to proceed as nature intended.
Thiel has also been very public about his belief that the 19th amendment in which women gained the right to vote in America was a mistake. Really very fringe ideas, even as of the beginning of the 21st century, but now front and center on the part of people who were either right by President-elect Trump's side, like right now, or who are the power behind the throne of people like JD Vance, who would just be a 40-year-old tech bro if it weren't for the support of Peter Thiel over years.
Gil Duran: Yeah, Peter Thiel kind of essentially created the JD Vance that we know. And that makes this sort of extra scary. I also, as you know, have been focused on some of this stuff this year. That's how we connected. And I sort of stumbled into it through San Francisco politics because I noticed something weird was happening here and I couldn't quite explain it to someone who got my political career started here in the Bay Area. There was a certain kind of polarization and strange ideology that I couldn't quite … people who seemed to be Democrats were sounding like Republicans and behind it all was billionaire and millionaire money, a lot of it with right-wing connections. And there's been this real mating up of the Broligarchy and the Peter Thiel, sort of the Thielverse, as some call it, the universe around Peter Thiel and direct right-wing politics in MAGA now, Republican Party. And even a year and a half ago, people were saying, “you're paranoid, this has nothing to with Republicans, these are Bay Area people, this is tech, tech is liberal.” But now it's kind of been a mask off moment in 2024.
And when we see things like pronatalism, and the idea that women should be subservient and that their job is just to have babies for these wealthy men, we can see there's many ways in which this tech ideology that's emerging is very right-wing – not just in one way, not just in terms of wanting lower taxes or fewer regulations, but across a range of social issues and the idea of even of how nations are structured with the idea of the “network state” where these people think they should be able to create their own countries and rule over them. You mentioned that in the quote that they believe they were destined to inherit the earth and they're descended from pharaohs and they're above nationality and laws.
The important thing we're identifying here is that this isn't just some marriage of convenience or a temporary partnership. There's an ideology behind it. And there's a lot of ways in which the tech bros, the Broligarchs, are unified with the MAGA party. And we're about to see in the next couple of years what that means now that they have control of the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court.
So now that Trump's won the 2024 election with lots of help from some of these Broligarchs and Elon Musk is trying to act like Trump's co-president with plans to eviscerate government through massive cuts. What do you think we're going to see in the next few years in terms of the partnership between the government and the oligarchy? Any predictions or ideas for what's next?
Brooke Harrington: I see three major public policy changes. One is the increasing prevalence of what you might call representation without taxation, which is just the set of Broligarchs not being subject to the law in the way that the rest of us are, and yet having the ear of the president, or better yet, dictating terms to the president or being deputized by the president to slash federal agencies, to slash federal budgets without any of the accountability that we're used to seeing even under Republican administrations. mean, no vetting, no elected office. It's just, you know, by fiat, King Trump says: “I'm delegating the dismantling of the federal government to these guys I like for now.”
And I guess presumably Trump's assumption is, if he stops liking them, he'll get rid of them. Although it's an open question whether he can do that since they seem to control the purse strings. It's not clear to me how stable the relationship is between Broligarchs and Trump. Given that they're all, everyone involved is notoriously transactional. Those don't tend to be super stable relationships. And the egos involved are of such titanic dimensions that it's hard to imagine they won't be in conflict at some point.
So, anyway, they already don't pay very much in taxes, Musk, Bezos, they go years sometimes without paying anything. When they do pay, it's in the neighborhood of like one to three and a half percent, far below the top marginal tax rate of about I think 39.6 or 39.8%. So more and more their contributions financially to the upkeep of society will asymptotically approach zero.
They will probably go a ways in pushing women out of public life, especially if they succeed in doing away with the Department of Education. Anyone who has a child, who has any sort of learning disability, any kind of disability at all, the Department of Education is the part of the government that requires public schools to accommodate those kids. And if there's no more Department of Education, no more accommodations, they're expensive. So what happens to those kids? They're probably gonna go home into the care of their mothers, who will have to quit their jobs to take care of them. And that, I'm sure, suits the Broligarchs just fine.
And finally, most alarming to me, although I'm plenty alarmed about the other two things: The one policy change that makes me feel like I'm tied to the tracks and watching a freight train bear down on me is the shenanigans they want to get up to with crypto and the finances of the US government.
Your listeners may already know that the US government is already the biggest holder of crypto in the world. I think it owns a Bitcoin reserve valued at roughly $5 billion. But the Broligarchs want the federal government to really go all in on crypto, either to make crypto a competitor to the US dollar or to supplant the US dollar, which is that would have seismic consequences for the entire world because for the last 80 years, the US dollar has been the reserve currency for the entire world.
Back in the late 40s when the economist John Maynard Keynes was helping world leaders plan a post-World War II world, about an hour from here in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, he actually proposed a world currency, something like the Euro is for the EU, but a world currency that would allow international trade to happen through a single conduit. And he couldn't get that idea through, but the US dollar became the default in place of a world currency. So a lot of the stability of international trade over the last 80 years, a huge amount of US primacy in world economics and in soft power politics has been made possible by our currency being the default world currency. There are all kinds of things the US can do other than going to war. For example, by financial sanctions, using the US dollar to leverage other countries to make them do things the US wants them to do. It's been hitting Russia really hard, for example. If you undermine that power though, by forcing through a substitute or a competitor to the US dollar in the form of crypto, you're crippling US political soft power, you're undermining our economic preeminence in the world, and you're destabilizing everyone's currency reserves at home.
So I'm sure like most of your listeners, we have most of our life savings denominated in US dollars. Well, what happens when US dollars get devalued because the US goes all in on crypto? It's a zero-sum game. You can't have a strong dollar and strong crypto at the same time. The two currencies may coexist, but one is definitely going to dominate to the disadvantage of the other.
Right now, the US dollar is still dominant, but the crypto bros, the Broligarchs, they want to shift that balance towards crypto, which is great for them because they're all holding gigantic crypto wallets. This will force the US government essentially to cash them out and to validate this investment that they've made. But for the rest of us, I don't want to end up like the poor Argentinians after their peso was devalued. If you remember those images from 20 years ago of middle-class Argentinians dumpster diving because they couldn't afford food, you know, it was like Weimar all over again. Nobody wants that. And I'm still of working age. So what happens to the millions of Americans who aren't of working age, whose life savings are still in US dollars? They're screwed.
Gil Duran: That's been one thing that's been very concerning and sort of shocking to me is the degree to which no one is telling Americans what crypto is really about. Even as it becomes obvious that crypto is largely a scam that's being used for crimes and Americans have lost billions and billions of dollars to crypto scammers. think it was $5.7 billion last year alone. And yet you have even democratic politicians lining up to be supporters of crypto and portray it as a very important part of the future.
And on the other hand, you have the crypto billionaires in their weird podcasts talking about their desire to completely undermine the dollar and therefore undermine the US economy and US power in the world. And it seems like nobody in a position of power is telling that story. Even Kamala Harris, who – I really wanted her to win – was trying to sort of be pro-crypto. And it seems to me that the crypto bros so far have been able to frame this as something that has to happen, that's going to happen and that is somehow going to be very, very good for everyone, even though there's really no way that that makes sense, especially if they undermine not only the dollar and the US economy, but the working class, millions of Americans, and also the power of the United States and the world.
It seems to me that undermining the power of the US and the nation-state in general seems to be really important goal of theirs. And I know you are aware of a book called The Sovereign Individual from 1996, where a lot of these ideas are laid out. This was a sort of semi-apocalyptic book that looked at the future in the 21st century, and it predicted the collapse of nation-states and the rise of digital currencies. And the book is very, very important to people like Peter Thiel, and who actually there was a 2020 version, I think, that came out and he wrote the forward to the 2020 version of the book.
And as I've gone down the rabbit hole into these things over the past year, I think the thing that's been most shocking to me is that nobody is talking about why a whole group of people who have benefited the most from our system now seek to completely undermine and dismantle it. To some degree, that's always been a project of the Republican Party, to dismantle the public and the public good and to privatize everything. But this is privatization on steroids and DMT. It's like a whole different level and they're really trying to do it.
Why is it so important for them to undermine the nation and the nation's power and why are American politicians letting them get away with it?
Brooke Harrington: Let me take the last part of that question first. Two words, Katie Porter. The Broligarchs made an example of her. So if you remember a member of Congress named Katie Porter from California, she was an early critic of crypto and she tried to explain to the American people with her whiteboard why it should be regulated. And so the Broligarchs decided to sort of target her, to make sure that she would lose her bid for a Senate seat. And they succeeded.
And as soon as that happened, like all the other left-wing California politicians fell into line like good little soldiers. You know what blew my mind even more than Kamala Harris talking about it? Maxine Waters. My jaw was on the floor. I'm like, of all people to be touting crypto, I still can't believe it.
They struck the fear of God into every Democratic politician on the West Coast. And it was a message. It was like a mafia boss leaving a horse head in somebody's bed. It was like, yeah, see what happens when you try to go against us. We'll do it to you too. So everyone fell in line.
So that is my answer to your question, “Why isn't anyone who's in a position to know warning the American public about it?” Politicians have been taken out of that equation because of the importance of finance in American elections. It's a great way to lose your next election. And the people who are raising the alarm are people who can't yet be bought and punished by the Broligarchs although I'm sure they're working on it somehow. To your other question…
Gil Duran: Why is sovereignty so important, and getting free of nation-states?
Brooke Harrington: Why is sovereignty so important? Well, one of the things that I think anybody can observe is that even among the ultra-rich – they never seem to have enough. Never enough wealth, never enough toys, never enough. So what do you want if you've bought everything already? You want limitless wealth, limitless power. Even the feeble laws that constrain you, you want to shake them off. And that's what it means to dismantle the nation-state system. And particularly that's what it means to dismantle cross national alliances like the European Union, which is or NATO, the two last transnational organizations that have any teeth to constrain the broilers. So naturally, high up on the agenda of the Broligarchs has been to dismantle both of those alliances.
So you mentioned the book, The Sovereign Individual, which Peter Thiel has listed as one of his favorite books of all time. It was co-authored by the father of a British MP named Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was one of the architects of Brexit. And what did Brexit do? It knocked a big chunk off of the European Union to the great disadvantage of the people of the UK and somewhat to the disadvantage of the European Union and its power. And the next target is NATO itself, which Trump has promised to withdraw from and Vance seems to be totally on board about. And notice that when the EU maintained its promise to enforce EU law against Elon Musk, who stepped up to the plate but Thiel protégé JD Vance saying, “We're going to withdraw the US from NATO unless you back off enforcing your laws against private citizen Elon Musk.”
Imagine that. Now think of all the people who have been arrested or prosecuted under the laws of other countries. The vice president doesn't get up on national television and say, we're going to punish you unless you back off. Brittany Griner languished in a Russian prison cell for quite a while. And the vice president, no US official got up and said, “You know, we're going to sanction Russia for keeping her in there.” She broke the law, allegedly.
When the Danish government was prosecuting me for giving an invited lecture on my research to the Danish parliament, you better believe that no US government official stepped up to say, “we're going to withdraw the US from NATO unless you drop the charges against Brooke Harrington.” But suddenly, Elon Musk?
The US is going to retaliate against the entire EU because the EU wants to enforce its sovereign laws against this one guy. That's pretty extraordinary. And it gives you a sense of what the Broligarchy is all about. It's: “You cannot constrain me.” Not with law, not with sanctions, not with anything. So Brexit was about this. Crypto is about undermining the power of the nation-state because nation-states are defined by two monopolies, the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, that is through the military and the police, and the ability to create and maintain a money supply. Crypto wants to knock down one of those pillars, and you better believe they're coming for the other one too. That's what Erik Prince is all about with his mercenary armies.
Gil Duran: And we have seen a big migration of tech interests toward weapons production in the military industrial complex while through the other side of their mouth, they're preaching about the need to end wars and have peace. Then why do need to create all of these drones and go into the weapons business? There's a lot of double talk going on there.
Brooke Harrington: Maybe the way they make sense of it in their own heads is to say, well, if we play our cards right, if we own everybody, if we own nation-states and act as the power behind the throne, and we surveil the living daylights out of everyone through things like Palantir and our drones, we will never need to have a kinetic war. We'll just fight information war. It seems to me that that's what they're doing, that World War III is being fought right now mostly through information and surveillance and that that will continue to escalate and that most people aren't even aware that it's happening or that the adversary is not a nation-state but it's this group of gajillionaires who believe they have the right to rule the rest of us.
Gil Duran: Now that the Broligarchs have united with Trump, how far do you think things will go? What will they do to solidify their power? There's a lot of people on social media panicking and saying, you know, making it seem as if people are going to be rounded up and everything is going to change. I think it'll get pretty dangerous, but I tend to think that we can't lose sight of our own collective power. The tens and tens of millions of people who didn't vote for Trump, the states, others who have their own degrees of sovereignty and independence from what happens in Washington.
At the same time, I mean, it's not going to be a pretty picture. And I assume that we're about to see an even bigger flood of misinformation and power grabs and normalization of breaking the law and doing things that no one would have imagined being done in our system a few years ago. What do you see in the short term in terms of how this will manifest and how our lives will change on the day to day?
Brooke Harrington: I think it's likely that as we saw between 2016 and 2020, a lot of our lives will, in retrospect, end up hinging on the individual actions of a few people with integrity inside and outside the government. Those of your listeners who remember the Cold War may recall that there were a couple of really close calls where the Cold War almost went hot. At one point, the Russians had a malfunction in their missile detection system, and they thought that there was an incoming first strike from the US. And one of the military officers on the Russian side, who was charged with sort of pressing the button that would launch a retaliatory strike, exercised his judgment and said, “doesn't smell right. I don't think this is real. Let's hold off. I'm not going to press the button until I'm absolutely sure that these are real missiles coming from the US right now.”
I can't recall his name right now, but his name sort of lives on as having saved us all from annihilation. There are people like that that we now know about who saved democracy from annihilation during the first Trump administration. If Trump succeeds in destroying the civil service and replacing it with his lackeys, there may not be enough of them left to prevent the worst from happening. I think part of what's driving everyone, including me, out of our gourds is the uncertainty of knowing will anyone in Congress actually stand up to this guy? Will anyone in the media, legacy media in particular, actually stand up to this guy? Like the spectacle of Mitch McConnell, know, feebly waving his shriveled index finger saying "you can't eliminate the need for the Senate" is not reassuring. The spectacle of the hosts of Morning Joe going to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee is not reassuring. So all I can do is hope that there are still enough people who are actual patriots who believe in democracy instead of this sort of personalized autocracy that they'll say, "wait a minute, man, this is a bridge too far."
Kind of like the election officials in Georgia, who when Trump called them up and said, all I need is what, 11,000 and some votes. And they were like, “I don't think so, man. We really like you, but we can't do that.” I hope there will be enough people to say no, who have the courage to say no. And I'm sure at least some of them will be made gruesome examples of. I fear that we might end up like the people of Belarus or Georgia, who have to take to the streets for long periods at great personal risk of imprisonment or even death or other reprisals like asset seizure, like what they do in Russia.
It may take a lot of that, which Americans haven't done much of. I mean, the George Floyd BLM protests were notable exception to that. But getting Americans out of their homes and their cars and their workplaces to take to the streets, maybe there's enough of us to turn the tide. But it would require major social change and mobilization.
I wish I could be more certain of anything.
Gil Duran: Last question. Over time, what do you think is the solution to the Broligarch problem? If we get past this era, if we get to a point where we have a better balance in our political system, you know, is it higher taxes? Is there something else we need to do? What's the solution? Otherwise it seems like we have a future where we just have these people becoming wealthier and wealthier, becoming trillionaires, being rivals to government, which we already have in the multi-billionaires. 2hen you think about it as a scholar and as someone who studied this, what do you think is the overall solution? If there is one – there may not be one at this time.
Brooke Harrington: It may be too late for this, but the way that other countries have prevented themselves from being subject to hostile takeover by people like the Broligarchs is by actually taking seriously the principle that everyone is equally subject to the law, and particularly that the tax policy should be enforced. In the nine years I lived and worked in Denmark, had several people come up to me and, in the course of talking about my research on offshore financial centers, which many people know just as tax havens, Danish people would say to me, “I pay my taxes with joy.” And I thought they were pulling my leg at first. So I waited, I sort of stared at them for a beat, waiting for them to go, “ha, ha, ha, just kidding.” And then I realized, my God, no, they're dead serious about this.
And it is possible to live in an advanced capitalist society where people believe in paying taxes and it's socially unacceptable not to pay taxes. It doesn't mean that everyone has a heart of gold and wants altruistically to give away as much money as possible. This isn't an argument about good people or bad people at all. It's an argument about enforcing the law and enforcing it not just with legal sanctions, but also with social sanctions. If you tried to get up in front of a group of Danes and say, you know what, think taxes are garbage and I'm not going to pay them, you wouldn't be invited into polite company anymore.
And I'm old enough to remember when that more or less would have been the case in the US. So my jaw was on the floor in the first presidential debate of 2016, where Hillary Clinton called out Donald Trump for not paying taxes for 19 years. And instead of countering that statement in any way, he embraced it and said, basically, “you're damn right. And that makes me smart.” And then as with the Access Hollywood tape, there was this moment I think where all of us, Gen Xers and older, waited for the social condemnation to follow and instead were horrified to realize that there was this kind of massive invisible high five going on among MAGA people. Like, “hell yeah, we shouldn't pay our taxes. We should sexually abuse women en masse. Like, that's cool. We should have a president who does that and represents our values.”
That was very shocking to me because I'm not that old, but I still remember when that would have just turned a political candidate to a pillar of salt on the spot, end of political career, no discussion. So the good news is there are still Americans alive, plenty of us who remember when even elites had to at least simulate some sort of social responsibility and reciprocal duty to the society that made them prosperous. If there are people still alive who remember that, that means it's possible to reinstate those norms.
One of the biggest surprises I experienced in almost two decades of studying the ultra-rich is that – I went in like a normie thinking, well, if I were super rich, I would simply cease to care about other people's opinion of me, except maybe a handful of loved ones. But it's the opposite. Humans don't lose their sensitivity to social status and reputation. What they gain from wealth is the ability to prosecute and punish people who damage their status.
And that's why Peter Thiel famously decided to put Gawker out of business when the publication outed him for being gay. And he took pride in that. That was a years-long project. And it's emblematic of the way a lot of Broligarchs think, which is, “you don't want me in your club? Well, I'll buy you. I'll put you out of business. I'll see you in prison or I will otherwise punish you and send a message to everyone else who's thinking of reflecting back to me an image of myself that I don't care for.”
Even Putin, after he was initially sanctioned for the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he only got on camera and started issuing threats when the EU started talking about denying tourist visas to the tiny group of elite Russians who have the right to travel outside of Russia. Only a very small percentage of Russians even have a passport that is valid for foreign travel outside of Russia. a move like that by the EU, which was only being discussed, would only affect, I don't know, a couple thousand people in Russia, but that was a bridge too far for Putin. He got on camera and started ranting about cancel culture and how European orchestras won't play Tchaikovsky and how dare those arrogant Europeans even think about denying travel visas to our oligarchs, we will nuke your asses. And I was like, that's the thing? That's the thing that winds up Vladimir Putin? It's these status insults.
So the good news for the rest of us is by making these beliefs and behaviors unacceptable in polite company, it's one of the last weapons we have left when regulators have been captured, politicians have been bought, the media and an info space has been corrupted by money. Our last resort is essentially social stigma.
Gil Duran: Brooke Harrington, thanks for joining me today and I'm sure we'll talk again sometime and thanks for your work.
Brooke Harrington: Thank you, it was a pleasure.
