One of the most striking visuals from the inauguration was the presence of America’s grandest tech moguls on the dais with the new president. This event has produced conflicting kinds of commentary. Some see it as big capital bending the knee to the executive, proof that his triumph has subjugated even the heights of private industry to the whims of an autocratic executive; others see in it a signal of precisely the opposite: that big business will co-opt Trump and suck any authentic populist energies out of his administration.
“The ‘oligarchs’ are at peace with Trumpian populists because they have a common enemy.”
There might be something to one or both of these interpretations; time will tell. But both strike me as giving in to the temptation to overread a recent phenomenon. The “oligarchs” are at peace with Trumpian populists because they have a common enemy; or if you will, both populists and the summit of our tech-industrial aristocracy believe they have found a friend in Trump.
A historical analogy might be useful. In ancien régime Europe, the population was divided into three “estates”: the Clergy (First), the Nobility (Second), and the rest, the people, in all its multifariousness (Third). Now, we might say that Trump—with the conjunction of the highest socioeconomic reaches in Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Bill Ackman, and other such captains of industry at his side on the one hand, and the majority of non-college voters on the other—has managed to combine much of the second and third estates of modern American society, putting together his own anti-clerical coalition. And he is able to do this because the second and third estates both hate the first: our modern clergy, the professional-managerial class and the HR departments, the professors and nonprofit workers, the press and “public-interest” lawyers, and the regulatory apparatus.
Of course, this metaphor is rather strained. But the American professional and her bastions, the universities—which once trained our Christian ministers, and now train our progressive ones—are extremely unpopular. Of course there is no exact equivalent for the clergy in the Old World, but it’s not a stretch to say that the Democrats’ base shares many of the same characteristics. The clergy of the ancien régime directed education and what we would now call the philanthropic or eleemosynary sector; they were international and cosmopolitan in their sensibilities, and often felt (or were perceived to feel) more allegiance to a universal Catholic Church than to their own states; they relied on tax-exempt endowments for their financial base and disposed of a good deal of the public wealth; they had significant control over media and the circulation of information; they were in charge of moral supervision and regulation, and not just over the peasantry—they were able to wield significant formal and informal powers over the nobility as well; and the state and nobility often depended on their education and professional skill in administering affairs and providing counsel, knowledge, and moral guidance. The parallels with the jobs and social roles from which Democrats today most often hail are not hard to see.
In the time between 2016 and 2024—when Trump won over a significant portion of our business and tech nobility and deepened his popularity among the working class across racial lines—cultural progressivism reached a peak. In that time, the Democrats backed every significant movement pushed by the clerics, from covid emergency measures to DEI to new gender dogmas to “misinformation” panic to open borders—and neither entrepreneurs nor the average Joe much liked the meddling and censoriousness and palpable sense of constraint that descended on American life.
While it would be naïve not to believe that short-term economic calculation plays a role in the switch of allegiances, it seems misguided to attribute it simply to a wish for lower taxes; after all, many of these captains of industry remained liberals in good standing after Trump’s 2017 tax cut. Instead, many of the reasons Musk and Zuckerberg are pro-Trump are not all that different than those of the lower-middle-class parent who feels put upon and looked down on by the many politically correct clerics that cross his family’s path: Both see Trump as a monarch friendly to their values and aspirations against the clerics. Our entrepreneurial and tech barons went along with the insistent and aggressive progressivism of recent years because they felt they had to, that the powers of the modern clergy were too great for them. Or they deferred from habit to the clerics on moral matters, and now regret that they did so; just as, even at the zenith of the Great Awokening, the most liberal state in the country rejected affirmative action in a referendum and racial minorities overwhelmingly dissented from “defund the police,” but could not stop the train of educated cultural leftism from running them over. (The difference, of course, between popular and plutocratic acquiescence to the intellectual apparatchiks is that the latter is much more morally culpable; if you’re a billionaire, there really is no excuse not to follow your convictions.)
Zuckerberg resents that he was bullied by Biden administration officials, who imbibed the ethos of policing disinformation from academic circles, to remove misliked opinions from his platform. He decried the “feminization” of the corporate and tech worlds, by which he seems to mean that he believes there has been an excessive importation into an entrepreneurial, risk-taking domain of attitudes and ideas from clerical domains in which women are often ascendant. He and other tech CEOs likely also see, as was observed by the political scientist Helen Thompson, that the intelligentsia that wants to break up their companies and impose social orthodoxies upon them looks to be in sync with the hyper-regulatory and anti-free speech attitudes of the European Union, which has shown systematic hostility to their businesses; the American clerisy often takes its cues from Europe in decrying both American capitalism and speech libertarianism as cruel and degrading.
Musk had a child transition, which he regards as akin to a death; he despised Covid restrictions, both personally and in terms of their effects on his companies; he hates DEI, which he judges inimical to merit and efficiency; SpaceX was sued by the Biden administration for failing to hire refugees, one of the more bizarre episodes in the Democrats’ open-the-floodgates approach to immigration over the 2020s. Much of the tech oligarchy lives in San Francisco or other metropolises that have manifestly declined in safety and quality of life as a result of the conjunction of the “luxury beliefs” dear to professionals and NGO mismanagement. Major entrepreneurs have stated that they feel their businesses and personal lives were targeted for reprisals by “activists in institutions” for their beliefs. One could recount many further instances where the clerics and the barons clashed directly. But the basic trend is clear in the response (or non-response) of our aristocracy of capital to the first few days of Trump executive orders: American oligarchs have now joined the deplorables in rejecting that broad package of attitudes and regulations which we sum up as wokeness, seeing it as stymying liberty, enforcing mediocrity, retarding innovation, promoting conformity, and impeding their ability to conduct their lives and business through a misguided identitarianism and an instinct to cancel dissenters.
With Republicans winning the popular vote in the presidential and last two congressional elections, we can say that even in an age when knowledge-workers and the PMC make up an enormous sector of the economy, the combined might of capitalist barony and the small-c conservatism of democratic everymen is a potent electoral force. Two estates are better than one. No one is more disliked than the censor and scold—except perhaps the theater kid turned censor and scold. And yet Democrats consistently prioritized this class in their decision making. They are now reaping the whirlwind for becoming the party of the first estate.
Whether and how an anti-clerical coalition can hold will be the great question of the Trump era. There will be conflicts of economic interest between the second and third estates that will require compromise and deft coalition management from Republicans. But one can go a long way in American politics hating the clerics. After all, the clerics have been exceedingly powerful in our social structure, and it looks like challenging their prerogatives and undoing their policies may just be a strong enough adhesive to bind together a motley crew—at least for a little while.