Por qué no los dos

I think part of the problem is the framing here. Americans literally equate ‘liberal’ with ‘leftist’ the vast majority of the time in political discourse. Most Americans seem to have no clue whatsoever that there’s a difference. But liberals are agents of the status quo. Conservatives may be more overt and sweeping in their protection of privilege, but liberals are also set on protecting parts of that privilege. They may be more comfortable with granting some rights to people who don’t look like them, but they’re probably not going to risk their own power for it. Ultimately their priorities tend to still be selfish, upholding the system to continue to benefit from it, even if they’re sympathetic to suffering and injustice. They probably support gay rights, maybe even trans rights, but they’re probably not up for UBI or dismantling the prison industrial complex.

The liberal billionaires that we do see aren’t any different. They’re still people who are ultimately focused on upholding the system and the immense benefit it provides them. Whatever lovely platitudes they might share with us, they choose to use their power to amass wealth rather than to correct injustice. They’re doubly agents of the status quo, as liberals and as billionaires.

I don’t know how you’d get a leftist billionaire. I suppose it’d have to happen pretty suddenly for them to actually have that much at once. The problem is, if a leftist puts their literal money where their mouth is, they really shouldn’t have excessive amounts of it.

Like, there’s a point where the utility you gain from having an amount of money becomes substantially less than the utility literally anyone else would gain from having the same amount. Jeff Bezos could lose 1 million dollars in the blink of an eye and wouldn’t even notice, but to pretty much everyone in my life that would completely transform their experience and that of many of those around them.

There’s a moral and ethical cost to that difference. Leftists are ostensibly in support of compassion, equality, the sharing of resources, and the elimination of suffering. I think a billionaire could call themselves a leftist, but I feel pretty confident that it would nearly always be a lie.

But, like, I’m also not sure how they’d get there in the first place. It seems to me that you have to make a lot of decisions favoring profit over compassion and human decency in order to make a billion dollars.

I’d argue that Bill Gates and George Soros are good examples of people trying to push vaccinations, push democracy, push general worthy causes as opposed to just “more money and power for me and my friends.” The problem is, billionaires motivated by power for its own sake are going to (a) outnumber the other kind by quite a lot (b) put much more effort into grabbing the reins of the media and steering it to manipulate public opinion, than are those who’re just do-gooders in a general sense.

This right here. There’s simply no mirror image of Fox News or Breitbart on the left, nor would I want one.

The problem is that we have a wildly uneven playing field where one side refuses to play by the rules. There’s no good faith engagement with right-wing media because they will say and do whatever it takes, destroy whatever and whomever it takes, lie, cheat, spin, etc. to achieve their goals. The right wing is working in a fully scorched earth mentality. It doesn’t matter if what they’re doing hurts themselves, their followers, whomever: they are 100% fueled by hatred and a desire for dominance, and if it means burning the whole country down to get what they want, that’s just fine to them. A while back I saw someone say “Republicans would let Trump take a shit in their mouths as long as a Liberal had to smell it” and it never fails to be true.

There’s simply nothing like that on the left, and I totally agree that it wouldn’t be effective even if there were. Truth means nothing to the Right. But using spin and rage-baiting is not something that’s part of a leftist ideal. For people who believe in truth, equality, equity, basic human decency, and a desire to actually build a society that cares about the people in it, using tactics like that are antithetical.

I don’t know what the answer is though. As someone up the thread pointed out, there’s no such thing as a liberal billionaire, and even if there were, trying to buy back all of the media in the country wouldn’t help. It would just feed the right’s narratives even further. But what the fuck do we do when we have media that presents “Let’s have a more caring and compassionate society” and “We think entire groups of people shouldn’t exist” as equal ideas that should be given equal weight and discourse?