Politics
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February 10, 2025
Elon Musk’s power grab is finally energizing a resistance. But it’s already being undermined by the party elite’s dependency on Silicon Valley.
Elon Musk’s ongoing coup, taking over the administrative state, has succeeded in doing something Democrats have struggled to do for many months: remind voters why they hate Donald Trump so much and why he needs to be actively resisted. Trump’s first victory in 2020 produced immediate nationwide protests that roiled for weeks along with years of civil society agitation. The dismal sequel in 2024 has generated no immediate wave of dissent. In sharp contrast to events eight years earlier, the anti-Trump coalition, already weary not just from resisting Trumpism for a decade but also from having to defend the hapless presidency of Joe Biden, was stunned, demoralized, and withdrawn. As opposed to mass protests, there was a widespread disengagement from the news, an internal migration into private despair common to the onset of authoritarianism.
Musk’s power grab has changed all that: the spectacle of the world’s richest man exercising extra-constitutional power to review and possibly remake the internal computer network of the federal government, while also arbitrarily putting federal employees on leave and threatening to shut down whole agencies, raises the specter of massive corruption and authoritarianism to an immediate threat. Musk’s move has been met not just with the expected court challenges (which, while welcome, might slow down Musk, but as my colleague Elie Mystal cogently observes, are unlikely to stop him). Substantial protests are starting to break out again all over America: in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana, California, Nevada, and Washington, DC.
Resistance 2.0 is being born before our eyes—and there’s reason to hope it may be free of the vices of the earlier Resistance: pro-establishment nostalgia, a slavish fealty to the leadership of the Democratic Party, and a propensity to elevate grifters and crackpot conspiracy theorists.
Reporting on the protests in Washington for The Nation, Chris Lehmann observed that the ire of the assembled activists was directed not just at Musk and Trump but also the weak-kneed opposition of Democratic Party leaders, some of whom, like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, spoke at the event. According to Lehmann, a “striking disjuncture between an aggrieved public demanding action and a national Democratic Party operating on autopilot was the backstory to the Treasury protest.”
Prodded by their angry base, Democratic leaders are starting to become more vocal, but finding themselves hobbled by the contradictions of their own relationship to the Silicon Valley plutocratic class that Musk belongs to.
The clearest argument against Musk and Trump is straightforward class politics: This power grab is a way for the superrich to control the public treasury, gain access to potentially lucrative data that should properly be under the safekeeping of government officials subject to congressional supervision, and prepare the ground for tax cuts to make the already wealthy even wealthier. As the world’s richest man, Musk makes a perfect villain in this narrative.
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Senator Bernie Sanders—not himself a Democrat, but an important ally of the party—has been the most forthright in this line of attack. He’s long urged, with only partial success, for Democrats to target not just Trump but the wider oligarchy.
On Saturday, Sanders posted:
Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world, is going after USAID, which feeds the poorest people in the world. Next, he’ll go after the programs that impact you: Medicaid, Medicare, community health centers, Pell Grants, affordable housing. We can stop him.
This is a message that Sanders has been repeating for some time—and it is finally starting to take hold. Appearing on the podcast The Weekly Show on Friday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries surprisingly sounded the same note: “Republicans in the House, the Senate, the administration, they want to enact massive tax cuts for their billionaire donors and wealthy corporations. Follow the money. This is the reality of what is taking place. And in that process, they want to stick working-class Americans with the bill.”
It’s hard to reconcile Jeffries’s groveling before Silicon Valley with his harsh words against “billionaire donors.” As Politico reported that very day, Jeffries “quietly met with more than 150 Silicon Valley-based donors last week in California—an early step in Democrats’ efforts to repair relationships with a once-deep blue constituency.” According to one participant, “The singular focus was—how do we ensure Silicon Valley remains with Democrats because, right now, Silicon Valley is feeling very purple.”
It’s hard to reconcile Jeffries’s groveling before Silicon Valley with his harsh words against “billionaire donors.” As Politico notes, “the moneyed tech world that Musk hails from is critical to Democrats’ fortunes in 2026.”
The central contradiction is that electorally the best hope Democrats have is economic populism—but the party’s centrist leadership class is addicted to plutocratic money. The only path out of this impasse is through adopting the Bernie Sanders model of relying on small donors—but there is little evidence that the party wants to follow that model. It is always happy to use the mailing lists of politicians who know how to appeal to small donors (aside from Sanders, another prime example is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). But the main result is clogging these donors’ e-mail inboxes and DMs with increasingly dire and annoying requests for money. The larger party remains slavishly dependent on larger donors.
As data guru Nate Silver notes:
Although the migration of a prominent wing of billionaires toward Republicans somewhat upsets the balance, Democrats have been on a long-term trajectory toward being the party of the well-off. Despite Musk’s help, Harris received almost as much outside money as Trump last year. And she actually had her strongest performance among voters making $100,000 or more per year.
As Silver points out, Democrats have to make a choice between a strategy of either keeping their billionaires happy or embracing economic populism.
Democrats have long tried to resolve this contradiction by obfuscating the issue of class domination as a morality play that distinguishes between “good” billionaires and “bad” billionaires. Ken Martin recently ascended to the leadership of the Democratic National Committee thanks in part to the fact that he was seen as less beholden to billionaires than his main rival, Ben Winkler. But during the leadership race Martin also said, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
But this move from the economic to the ethical is a spurious distraction. The question isn’t whether Musk is “bad” and George Soros “good” (after all, Republicans think the opposite, so this is just a mirror image of their politics). The question is: Do Democrats reject a wildly unequal society where billionaires have immeasurably more sway over politics than ordinary citizens? If they do, they have to push to rein in the very few “good” billionaires along with the many more “bad” ones (who, being wealthy, naturally gravitate to the GOP).
Class politics is by definition polarizing, raising the core question: Which side are you on? Are you with the billionaires—or with the people?
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Unless Democrats can express this class politics with clarity, they will have no edge over Republicans on economic issues. This will reduce politics to the endless farce of culture-war antics—a farce whose theatrical conventions Trump mastered long ago.
As Silver says, “this situation calls for what I describe as a raise-or-fold strategy: either Democrats should be with the billionaires or against them. The Martin-esque middle ground of separating the world into naughty and nice billionaires is probably the worst option.”
We might add that the Martin and Jeffries strategy of playing both sides of the street is also a good way to get everyone—pro-establishment people and anti-system insurgents—to hate you.
Musk is leading the Republicans to catastrophe—but he might yet be saved by the utter political incompetence of the Democrats.
