Snobulism

The oligarchy is culturally appropriating the working class

Alex Karp in Sun Valley in 2019

“At Palantir, we are on the side of working class Americans,” Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, told the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin on stage at the DealBook Summit a week ago.

Palantir is a data analysis company that got its start contracting for the Pentagon to assist George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. Its clients include ICE, DHS, HHS, the IRS and the Department of Defense. It seeks to be the U.S. government’s “central operating system,” though it also contracts with foreign allies like Israel and Ukraine. Its stocks are worth over $430 billion. Last year, Karp personally made close to $7 billion.

Despite being one of the wealthiest people on the planet, Karp’s rambling 45-minute conversation with Sorkin was punctuated with ostentatious declarations of contempt for America’s elites. “Our country has selective empathy for everybody but working class, particularly white, males,” he scolded. By way of example, he railed against the hypocrisy of “the mainstream media” for questioning the constitutionality of the Trump administration drone striking boats in the Caribbean. “I guarantee you that if that fentanyl was killing people at schools we went to, potentially your kids are going to,” he said, looking at Sorkin, “it would be constitutional to blow up those boats.”

The boats Trump is blowing up are not carrying fentanyl. If they’re loaded with drugs at all, it’s cocaine. Fentanyl is made from precursor chemicals shipped from China to Mexico, where they’re made into the synthetic opioid. From there, they’re smuggled across the border. It strains credulity to believe that Karp, who belongs to a very small clique at the helm of the American military industrial complex, actually thinks that those boats were smuggling fentanyl. He was not speaking from ignorance; he was lying. (Sorkin failed to correct him and even reiterated the lie.)

But invoking fentanyl rather than cocaine allows you to cast the extrajudicial killings as heroic, given the drug’s lethality, which is why this particular piece of disinformation has become a staple of the Trump administration’s propaganda campaign for a new regime change war. And it does something else, as well: it aligns you with America’s poor, forgotten underclass, the members of which are disproportionately the victims of the fentanyl addiction crisis. Through this preposterous charade, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, who has built a corporate empire off of wars fought by other people’s children, can cosplay as a tribune of the working class. The real elites, he can pretend to believe, are clustered in the Harvard faculty lounge, not in places like the stage of the DealBook Summit and the C-suite offices of Palantir.

I’ve written enough posts here about how knowledge economy professionals have become the new ruling class to exhaust long time readers. I’ve even written somewhat sympathetically about Elon Musk’s jihad against the professional managerial class. The thesis that upper-middle class, college-educated liberals constitute a powerful and at times even dominant faction of the American elite is a hill I will proudly die on. But that doesn’t mean that right-leaning tech billionaires are suddenly the salt of the earth.

Since Trump won re-election on a wave of backlash to the Ivory Tower social justice crusades that we know as “wokeness,” we have seen this inversion over and over again, in which the most cartoonishly elite people in America pretend to be bulwarks against the tyranny of Gender Studies majors. This kind of absurdity may be the inevitable by-product of the paradoxical emergence of a populist political movement of aggrieved workers led by a billionaire celebrity, but at least Trump has, quite famously, never been embraced by the upper crust of America’s cultural establishment. The same cannot be said for the tech oligarchs who have appointed themselves emissaries of the forgotten American.

Americans who object to blowing up cocaine boats in international waters in order to jump start a regime change war include, no doubt, New York Times readers who live in coastal metropolises, went to brand name colleges, and send their kids to private Montessori schools. And those people are certainly “elite” relative to the two-thirds or so of Americans without baccalaureate degrees. They are not elite relative to Alex Karp, Pete Hegseth, or the All-In bros. Nor is their opinion on this issue some kind of “luxury belief”; until about 15 minutes ago, opposition to new military interventions was a staple of MAGA populism.

But we live in a democracy, or at least a society purporting to cherish democratic values. As such, in order to speak from a position of moral authority, one must profess to be speaking for the people, not for the military, or corporations, or the ruling class. You can’t just say you want a new war for glory and profits, like a feudal aristocrat. You have to pretend that everything you do on behalf of the powerful constituencies and special interests you serve is actually for the struggling, hardworking families of America. Hence we’re treated to the nauseating spectacle of billionaire tech founders raising their fists against the uncaring elites of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California. This is the MAGA coalition’s version of virtue-signaling. It’s woke jingoism.

Alex Karp’s voracious appetite for forever wars places him in the same bucket as Hillary Clinton, John Bolton, and Lindsay Graham. The working class Americans he pretends to speak for are the ones who will pay for their wars with soaring gas prices, influxes of refugees, and, perhaps, dead enlisted relatives. Corporations like Palantir are not “on their side”; they are the infrastructure of social control for the elites. That’s why Karp can’t be honest about what the drive to war in Venezuela is really about, and has to lie through his teeth to pretend he’s serving anyone’s interests but his own.