Armed homeowners standing in front of their house along Portland Place confront protesters as they march to Mayor Lyda Krewson's house on Sunday, June 28, 2020, in the Central West End in St. Louis. (Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS) The Brittle Grip, No. Infinity Prime Badge

As this election blurred forward I was taking notes for more editions of our “Brittle Grip” Series, the phenomenon of the super powerful and super rich feeling increasingly insecure in their power and wealth even as both wax. One of the key features of this new Gilded Age is the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful arguing that their ultra-wealth and ultra-power opens them up to criticism and animosity which entitles them to unique and greater rights and powers to protect themselves. I was forced ahead of schedule this morning by news out of St. Louis from the McCloskeys, the husband and wife sixty-something lawyers who entered the campaign drama when they came out of their house brandishing firearms and threatening to murder protestors who happened to be walking by their house. The couple has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the photographer who took those iconic pictures of them with their guns.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook, right, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, center, listen as President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with technology industry leaders at Trump Tower in New York, Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Gawker, Peter Thiel, Trump, the Brittle Grip and the Case of the Century

I just started reading this Buzzfeed article about Facebook board member and Trump backer Peter Thiel’s relationship with racist fringe groups. Thiel seems like an outlier in Silicon Valley because of his high profile support for Trump. But he is actually part of a rising tide of neo-authoritarian thought in the tech world which argues that democracy has failed and must be replaced. This reminded me of something I’ve been coming back to again and again with greater clarity and understanding its greater significance as the years have gone by.

At some point in 2015 I was sitting at my desk in TPM’s New York office’s talking with a good friend who worked at Gawker. The Hulk Hogan lawsuit had been on the horizon for a long time before it actually came to trial. In preparation Gawker founder and owner Nick Denton had recently cut some deal with a Russian oligarch to give Gawker deep enough pockets to withstand an adverse judgment which they anticipated and hoped could be reversed on appeal. My friend was walking me through all of these developments. He was very much preaching the Hulk Hogan lawsuit gospel. The future of freedom of the press, he told me, was on the line with Gawker’s fate.

I nodded in agreement with each point. As a publisher and strong supporter of press freedom, I supported Gawker’s position publicly and privately. And yet tucked away in my head part of me was saying, “C’mon. You published a sex tape.” Publishers see every libel suit and think there but for the grace of God. In this case, I knew to a certainty that this particular libel situation was not one TPM ever would have found itself in.

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The NRA’s Brittle Grip Prime Badge
Revisiting the “Brittle Grip”

We see reported today that a number of elite golf courses in the New York area rejected the White House’s requests to allow the President to play on their courses when he was in the area over the Labor Day weekend. Let’s start by stipulating that of the various kinds of respect or derision aimed at the first black president, his ‘golfing rights’, for lack of a better word, rate low on the list – certainly not ones the White House press office will want to focus on. Let’s further stipulate that if you pay a lot of money to belong to a country club/golf course you’d probably be a bit annoyed that the place had been taken over by the Secret Service when you were looking forward to playing on Labor Day weekend – the rest of us get a little bummed when whole urban centers are locked down because of Presidential visits.

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A Must-Read from the ‘Brittle Grip’ Series

I’ve been whittling away at this “brittle grip” series for a while now. And I confess it’s the first contemporary or public issue that I’ve felt any urge to write about at length in many years. But since I’m not able to do that I’ve had to content myself with observation, anecdote and hypotheses. Social psychology, economics, extensive interviews and much more would be necessary to really grasp the issue in all its dimensions. That’s why I was so charged to receive this reader email on the brittle grip theme from TPM Reader ML. It’s really, really worth your time to read.

I am an MBA and, after working in the “private sector” for a good while am back in the public policy world. I am also a fellow Brown grad (and long time reader – since early 2000s).

Anyway, I was, at one point, a real free market believer. I did some Jeff Sachs goes to Bolivia type of stuff. It was a heady time – the 90s. The market could bring prosperity to peasants in Bolivia (if only they let us privatize retirement and force them to become investors somehow). The market was good for you and everyone.

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Thoughts on the ‘Brittle Grip’

TPM Reader JL has some thoughts on the ‘brittle grip.’ This is a point I’ve given a good deal of thought to this point but more from the perspective of what the whipsaw effect of looking into the financial abyss and then getting all your money back and more. But JL looks at 2008 and Randian ideology …

Josh, love the Brittle Grip stuff. You’re definitely getting at something really important and the way Roberts is going, it’s getting more important, not less.

I just have one small thing to add. Maybe just another lens—one among many–through which to view all of this.

I’ve developed a rule of thumb over the last four or five years, maybe dating back to the Santelli rant that ignited the tea party. Maybe it was a bit before that, maybe a bit after. In any case, the rule of thumb is this: when it comes to the outer fringes of conservative thought–or at least what would have been outer fringes ten, twenty years ago, and now looks more like orthodoxy–never underestimate the influence of Ayn Rand. And that influence seems to run particularly deep on Wall Street and maybe even deeper in places like Greenwich and Menlo Park that are home to so many in the 0.01%.

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My Brittle Grip Series

I don’t think I’ve ever done this before. But I’ve had a number of readers write in today asking that I link to each post from the “brittle grip” series I’ve been doing – the most recent of which was this morning. If you’re new to this: it’s a series of posts (going back a couple years) about the seemingly growing insecurity of vast wealth, even as the power of the wealthiest Americans – judged by most conceivable metrics – has risen dramatically over recent years and certain over the last few decades. What’s behind a Tom Perkins Kristallnacht outburst? The antipathy of Wall Street toward President Obama? The widespread belief among the very wealthiest Americans (let’s say centimillionaires) that wealth is under siege.

The Brittle Grip … May 21st, 2012

The Brittle Grip, Part 2 … January 25th, 2014

The Brittle Grip, Part 3 … April 3rd, 2014

The Brittle Grip, Part 3

There is a level of vilification that is not appropriate in politics. Having someone make fun of your name does not reach that high threshold.

We can have some fun with billionaire Charles Koch’s Perkinsesque cri de coeur about attacks on him, his political giving and his “vision for a free society” as he puts it. But it is in line with, part of, the Perkinsonian vision of contemporary American political economy in which the extremely powerful nonetheless feel embattled and threatened. I see it as part of the larger story I wrote about here as the “brittle grip.”

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The Brittle Grip, Part 2

If you’ve been in the media slipstream today you know the outrage and mockery directed at Tom Perkins, one of the world’s wealthiest and most successful Silicon Valley venture capitalists, for an oped he wrote in the Wall Street Journal comparing the rising critique of income inequality and “the 1%” to Kristallnacht. Just so we’re all on the same page, Kristallnacht (“the night of shattered glass”) was essentially the opening act of Hitler’s Final Solution. It took place on November 9th and 10th, 1938. This claim manages simultaneously to be so logically ridiculous and morally hideous that Perkins deserves every bit of abuse he’s already receiving.

But I think we’re missing the point if we see this as the gaffe of one aging, coddled jerk. Because it’s only a more extreme and preposterous version of beliefs that have become increasingly widespread in the wealthiest sectors of American society, especially since 2008 and the twin events of the global financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama.

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The Brittle Grip

Republicans often say that the business community feels threatened by President Obama — that he’s hostile to money, hostile to business, etc. You’ve heard this before. And much of it is campaign chatter. But not all. I don’t think we can understand the dynamics of this campaign without getting that a lot of it is actually true — not the reality necessarily (in my mind not the reality at all) but the perception of it in key parts of the financial sector like Wall Street, venture capital and the dread world of private equity. Read More 

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