War Among The Finpols?

In yesterday's post, I brought up Ferdinand Lundberg's incisively Swiftian term finpol, which refers to a person wealthy enough to control the levers of public life. In 1968, he was referring mainly to people like the Rockefeller brothers, Averell Harriman, Henry Ford II, J Paul Getty, and Sid Ricbardson. Times have changed, these people have passed away, and a new generation of finpols has come onto the scene. By coincidence yesterday, I found this piece at The Atlantic via Real Clear Politics, What the Broligarchs Want From Trump.

Let's not be misled here: The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs's widow and the heir of his fortune. Laurene Powell Jobs is a finpol, or at least she thinks she is. We must assume this piece is speaking for her, and it at least recognizes that it's speaking from within the world of finpolity:

After Donald Trump won this month’s election, one of the first things he did was to name two unelected male plutocrats, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a new Department of Government Efficiency. . . . [I]ts appointed task of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing its spending heralds a new political arrangement in Washington: a broligarchy, in which tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates, some of whom appear indifferent or even overtly hostile to democratic tradition.

Ferdinand Lundberg would insist there's absolutely nothing new here. In The Rich and the Super-Rich, he observed,

In their overlapping aspects, government and finpolities are almost identical, a fact most apparent in time of war and in matters of defense. The so-called defense industries are such an indispensable part of government today as to have given rise to the concept of the Warfare State. Company boardrooms are departments of the Department of Defense or, looked at another way, the Department of Defense is a special branch of the big-company boardrooms.

. . . On the whole, most of the time, the relations between the president of the United States and the leading finpols have been cordial. Actually most of the presidents of the United States appear to have admired and stood in awe of the finpols-- men who have mastered or have been put in mastery of the mysterious life-giving market.

So let's begin with the understanding that there should be absolutely no surprise that at Mar-a-Lago, which since its building in Palm Beach, founded by the finpol Henry M Flagler, has always been something of a palace in the Versailles of finpolity, there should be something of a party under way. Ms Powell Jobs's avatar at The Atlantic is nevertheless shocked, shocked:

The broligarchs’ ranks also include the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance’s mentor, former employer, and primary financial backer—as well as venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, both of whom added millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. Musk, to be sure, is the archetype. The world’s richest man has reportedly been sitting in on the president-elect’s calls with at least three heads of foreign states: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Musk joined Trump in welcoming Argentine President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago and, according to The New York Times, met privately in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a bid to “defuse tensions” between that country and the United States. Recently, after Musk publicly endorsed the financier Howard Lutnick for secretary of the Treasury, some in Trump’s camp were concerned that Musk was acting as a “co-president,” The Washington Post reported.

But Henry Kissinger rose to prominence as a retainer of the finpol Nelson Rockefeller, and we may assume that his China policy innovations during the Nixon administration, his settlement of the Viet Nam War, his continuation at the State Department after Nixon's resignation, when Rockefeller himself was named to the vice presidency under Gerald Ford, were all with the full approval of the finpolity. There is absolutely nothing new here.

So is there war among the finpols? Ferdinand Lundberg would suggest this is a logical impossibility:

National policy with respect to the finpolities has been paralyzed by ambivalence relating to two ideas. There has been, first, the strong national belief in competition. Without competition the national history itself would be seen as without meaning, simply a record of random activity. On the other hand, there has been admiration for advancing technology, linked purely by association with the corporations, and with bigness. Americans generally admire competition, advanced technology and pure bigness. The fact that one must choose between competition and corporate bigness has been evaded. It is logically impossible to have finpolity and competition, yet few are willing to make a choice between the two.

So what's really going on among the finpols in the wake of Trump's victory? This story at Page Six gives hints:

President Biden jokingly urged a roomful of Democratic donors and insiders not to jump in the White House pool at a weekend dinner to thank them before he leaves office.

. . . We hear that guests included big donors and Biden’s cabinet, as well as friends and others who have been super-supportive of the Bidens through the years. Former and current ambassadors came in for the elite event.

Spotted among the crowd was former Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, who were chatting with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

One source said some donors who’d given $250,000 skipped the bash.

“Insiders who were invited and didn’t go are calling it ‘the losers party,’ ” groused one source. “Many said they didn’t want to be associated with the Dems right now because of the embarrassing loss” to Donald Trump in the election “and anger over the $1.5 billion spent on the campaign that failed.”

It looks to me as though the finpols are getting in line behind Trump. Trump, however, is probably not a finpol himself, or if he is at all, he's a minor leaguer. Wikipedia lists his net worth in the $5-6 billion range, while lists of the world's richest men, true finpols, put them orders of magnitude higher, Elon Musk at over $300 billion, Jeff Bezos at over $200 million, and Larry Ellison, also just over $200 billon. All three are thought to be aligned with Trump, visibly or less so.

Trump had a career in real estate, then in media and entertainment, and he finally turned to politics as a retirement activity, where he turned out to be surprisingly successful. But he's a politician, not a caudillo.

In fact, it appears that finpolity was hghly skeptical of Trump in his first and second campaigns and was even somewhat dubious up to the time Biden withdrew from the race this past summer. As of now, though, it looks like a firm political consensus is building as Trump morphs into a mainstream politician -- but what this bodes for the MAGA agenda is up in the air.