Just before I began writing this post, I saw this article from The Washington Post about the rise of billionaires in American politics. Given Bezos’s ownership and the recent shift in its editorial policies I’m mildly surprised they published it. The key points aren’t terribly surprising. But it brings them together in one place — the vast growth in billionaire giving over the first quarter of this century, the rapid trend from a relatively even partisan split to overwhelming giving to Republicans. It is among other things the story of billionaires becoming increasingly class conscious. It’s always been true that money buys influence in American politics. In some ways, it was even greater and more brazen in the past since there wasn’t even the pretense of limits on giving or disclosure.

But the role of billionaire ownership of the political process has not only grown rapidly in recent years. Public recognition of that fact has, too, which has — perhaps paradoxically or perhaps not — spurred the drive for even tighter ownership. It’s no exaggeration to say that the deca-billionaire or even centi-billionaire class — setting aside those who might command a mere few billion dollars — act now as a kind of post-modern nobility, a class which does not rule exclusively but interacts with politics in a fundamentally different way from the rest of society.

I first encountered Niall Ferguson in a real way when I was writing a review essay for The New Yorker at the end of 2003. The editors had sent me a small stack of books about what we might call the “neo-imperial” moment that took hold of Washington, D.C. in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. One of these books was by Ferguson, a fairly rousing and unabashed celebration of the British Empire. If anything it was among the more indirect and implicit versions of the story told by the various authors, celebrating the glories of empire and leaving it to the reader to draw the conclusion it was time to bring them back. As I’ve read columns of his here and there over the last couple decades, the historianness has receded as the tendentious provocateur has moved to the front. But something different struck me about the piece he published in The Free Press earlier this week (subscription required) about Trump’s Gaza peace plan: that was how much it matched in key outlines the piece I wrote on the same topic last week. If you recall, I wrote that the Trump plan was actually a fairly big deal and one that for a variety of reasons only Trump was in a position to pull off. The basis of the agreement is the common authoritarianism and corruption that now knits together Washington, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and other regional capitals through the personal relationships binding together Trump family and the princely families of the Gulf.

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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At TPM, we have certain terms we use over and over. Dignity wraiths. The brittle grip. A new one in recent months: Schrodinger’s DHS secretary. You can find a (very) partial list of these terms — Josh Marshallisms, largely — here.

For our 20th anniversary celebration next month, we’re putting together a master list. It’s quite an undertaking: Twenty years of proprietary terms. But we think it will serve as a useful guide to some of the key themes of the last two decades. Also, we think it will be funny.

However: 20 years is a long time, and we need the help of our dedicated readers to remember some of these terms.

So, if you remember one that we’re missing, shoot us an email.

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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A bit uncharacteristically and somewhat uncomfortably I’ve been mulling over a series of issues and commonalities connecting the global rise of strongman rule, Trumpism and extreme wealth but without feeling I’d pulled my thoughts together sufficiently to write about it. So absent any new posts, I thought I’d share the list of earlier posts I’ve been reading through to focus my thoughts.

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TPM Reader JEB follows up with some thoughts on Trumpism, strongman rule and extreme wealth …

As it’s a slow Thanksgiving weekend Friday I re-read your “Brittle Grip” series of posts. You spoke today about the global rise of extreme wealth and strongman rule, though you had previously written mostly about the United States only. This prompts a few thoughts.

The first is the most obvious. Strongman rule has been around for a long time. In one form or another it long characterized the government of nations in several regions of the world. Most of those nations were not especially wealthy; your typical local strongman held political power but not a great deal of economic power, certainly not compared to the United States or the European countries. This has changed somewhat in recent years, more in some countries than in others.

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