In 2019, I interrupted private equity emperor Stephen Schwarzman as he addressed several hundred of his and my Yale classmates at our 50th-year reunion dinner under a great white tent on the college's Old Campus.
"That's enough, Steve, You've dispossessed tens of thousands of Americans out of their homes," I announced in my stentorian, second-bass Yale Glee Club voice, rising from a seat at a table not far from the dais, where Schwarzman was holding forth self- indulgently about a donation he'd made.
"Well, it looks like someone has had a few too many," Schwarzman responded — somewhat lamely, I thought. But more than half of my classmates in the room leapt to their feet and applauded him as I turned my back to them and sauntered out into the night.
An hour later, I returned and learned that more than a few classmates had felt as I did but hadn't done much more than squirm.
They knew that Schwarzman and another Yale alumnus, Steve Mnuchin, the future treasury secretary, had indeed foreclosed on properties whose residents had been hoodwinked into over-leveraging their purchases in ways that doomed their ownership, as I recounted in the New Republic a few months after confronting him.
After my outburst that evening, our class website carried a frank discussion of the incident. Schwarzman didn't join in; I’d been criticizing his premises and practices since 2017 in the Washington Monthly, Dissent and other venues, and I criticized him with renewed purpose days after the 2020 election here in Salon.
The question matters now as never before. You might think that I’ve had my say by now about Schwarzman. I'd be glad to see others take up the torch of remonstrance and dissent. Fortunately, Financial Times writer and American editor Edward Luce has come close to doing just that in his Oct. 23 column, headlined "What Croesus Wants From Trump." Luce sees Schwarzman as an American Croesus, horrifically influential in politics as in finance, like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other billionaires.
More tellingly still, historian Christopher R. Browning, writing in the New York Review of Books, describes how wealthy, reactionary German elites anticipated that they'd be able to profit from, but also control, Adolf Hitler’s alarming if erratic demagoguery. That's pretty much what some American billionaires, including Schwarzman, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, think they can do with Trump after they've secured his election.
If they "elect" Trump, they'll regret it, as I've warned since writing the Salon article referenced above. Yet they may feel vindicated even if Trump loses narrowly to Harris but his acolytes erupt in litigious, violent and protracted fashion. I'm glad to report that Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has now assembled 20 former CEOs of major American corporations who endorse Kamala Harris, as he and Doug Parker, former CEO of American Airlines, have explained on CNBC and in Fortune Magazine. But Schwarzman isn't one of them.
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Schwarzman's and my alma mater has been riven like this before — long before our own years there in the 1960s: In 1860, before the Civil War began, some Yale students and alumni, including John C. Calhoun — Southerners deeply invested in slavery — packed up their bags and left New Haven, breaking from Northern classmates who would defend the Union and abolish slavery.
What will today's Ivy League alums, caught in what Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits dubs "The Meritocracy Trap," decide to do about what Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen describes as "The Road to Serfdom"?
Some of the nascent Yale abolitionists who stayed loyal to the Union were capitalists-in-training and by inheritance who were already profiting indirectly from slavery. Yet they also concluded that slavery was morally wrong and that a Southern slaveocracy's secession and success would cripple the republic, not to mention their own dignity.
What will today's Ivy League alums, caught now in what Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits dubs "The Meritocracy Trap," decide about Americans' submission to our own approximation of what Harvard political theorist and classicist Danielle Allen describes as "The Road to Serfdom" — the casino-like financing, the vicious political demagoguery and the caste-like inequities that Trump, a corrupt Supreme Court and a paralyzed Congress have all but normalized?
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Kamala Harris may not be an Abraham Lincoln who'll crush the worst of it, but the rest of us need to stop normalizing our submission to finance and corporate marketing which, especially since the Citizens United ruling, has deranged public debate in consequence of Schwarzman and others' Croesus-like interventions in free speech. We need to intervene in other ways, not only by voting against Trump but by reconfiguring our priorities and habits as investors and as citizens.
No one has said it better than the 19th-century social theorist and economist — and inveterate social-justice warrior — Henry George, who, in "Progress and Poverty," warned that "forms are nothing when substance has gone ... and a government of universal suffrage and theoretical equality may, under conditions which impel the change, most readily become a despotism. For there despotism advances in the name and with the might of the people.... There is no unfranchised class to whom appeal may be made, no privileged orders who in defending their own rights may defend those of all.... [It] was the middle classes who broke the pride of the Stuarts; but a mere aristocracy of wealth will never struggle while it can hope to bribe a tyrant."
So now, too? Trump, Schwarzman, Musk and the rest would have it so. And so, at least according to polls, will half the American electorate. May more of us than of them say otherwise.
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