In 2004, Thomas Frank published an insightful book titled What’s the Matter With Kansas? that documented how the working class abandoned its class interests to wage culture war. The proletarians embraced what Herbert Marcuse and others once called “false consciousness.” Frank didn’t use that term specifically to describe the working-class Kansans of his book, and indeed Karl Marx, who’s often credited with coining the phrase, never used it either. But false consciousness was the essence of Frank’s idea: Here’s how the proles got conned into internalizing their own oppression.
The 1960s vogue for false-consciousness analysis predated by several decades its emergence as an indisputable fact of American economic life. During Marcuse’s lifetime, a union card ensured the same economic security as a bachelor’s degree, rendering working-class victimhood a fairly abstract notion. Deindustrialization, union decline, and the emergence of ever-widening income inequality removed that conceptual difficulty in the 1980s. The working class responded by embracing their class enemy, Ronald Reagan. The apotheosis of false consciousness, however, arrived with billionaire President Donald Trump. In three successive elections, Trump scored 49 percent, 51 percent, and 56 percent of the non-college vote, despite the fact that Trump relentlessly undermined their labor rights, eviscerated their worker safety protections, reversed their expanded overtime coverage, and so on.
Trump’s second term is ushering in a second variety of false consciousness. The familiar type, wherein working-class people get suckered into supporting Trump, is now joined by an unfamiliar type, wherein the plutocratic class gets suckered into supporting Trump as well. Like the proletarians, rich people are stampeding away from their economic interests to support the forty-seventh president.
I didn’t see this coming. Trump’s first presidency pampered oligarchs with tax cuts and deregulation. Trump’s second presidency will have more of that, sure, but it will also bring a mismanagement of the economy so grievous that it’s indistinguishable from sabotage. Not even Trump disputes the growing likelihood of an economic downturn. And unlike his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who last month bent himself like a pretzel to blame Joe Biden for putting the country into a (wholly imaginary) “private-sector recession,” Trump gladly takes the blame. Here’s what he said Sunday on Fox Business News: “There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing.… It takes a little time. It takes a little time.”
Be patient, Trump said—but the S&P 500 fell 2.7 percent Monday. That followed a week in which Trump’s multifront trade war pushed down the S&P Index more than 3 percent, wiping out all previous gains in 2025. The bond market, meanwhile, is jittery about Trump’s plans to expand the budget deficit by extending the 2017 tax cut and his not-so-veiled threat last month to default on some Treasury bonds. Then came news of something called a “Mar-a-Lago accord,” a scheme to swap existing bonds for “nonmarketable” 100-year bonds that would shrink U.S. debt obligations even further at the expense of bond investors. That is a very dangerous idea that could tank the global economy.
One would expect all this financial mismanagement to have billionaires elbowing one another to get into the anti-Trump resistance. But Steven Rattner, a former Wall Street investor who was President Barack Obama’s auto czar, wrote last week in The New York Times that “many, maybe even most, of the people I’m talking to in private are still quietly cheering his move-fast-and-break-things approach” even though one of the things Trump is breaking is the economy. Confidence among chief executives rose to its highest level in three years in February, even as consumer confidence dropped faster than it has in three and a half years. It was hard to read Rattner’s piece and not conclude that plutocrats are kind of stupid. (Not Rattner, however; he’s appropriately pessimistic.)
I’m well aware that the economic fortunes of this country often diverge from those of its richest inhabitants. But when the stock market tumbles and the bond market is pushed to the edge of a cliff, that tends to cost plutocrats no small amount of money. Elon Musk’s adventures in government have been so ruinous to Tesla’s stock price that Musk himself lost a reported $156 billion so far this year. I was not previously familiar with a universe in which even the world’s richest person would shrug off losing $156 billion. That’s almost half Musk’s present net worth!
Those losses are attributable largely to consumers being disgusted by Musk’s own giddy sabotage of the federal bureaucracy. But Musk is also destroying other people’s wealth—along, probably, with some of his own—by destabilizing the government. Yes, Elon, our economy depends on a stable government! As the economist Dean Baker points out, Musk’s arbitrary cuts are especially costly to the health care sector, which (as I’ve pointed out) is the biggest employer in the United States. How can you be a plutocrat and not have some financial stake in the country’s biggest industry? For that matter, why did Big Pharma, which I thought runs the country, allow Republican senators to confirm its sworn enemy Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary? According to Politico, it held back mostly from fear, which isn’t the same thing as false consciousness. But another reason Big Pharma was silent was that it thinks, hubristically, that it can handle Kennedy, which is false consciousness in spades.
“What’s the Matter With Billionaires?” was the headline that Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, attached to a March 4 Substack essay. Naturally, Bonica was echoing Thomas Frank (who was himself echoing a famous editorial by William Allen White excoriating William Jennings Bryan, which is neither here nor there). “The billionaires who bankrolled [Trump’s] campaign knew—or should have known—precisely what they were buying,” Bonica wrote. “Yet they still chose to support policies that have historically hindered their own wealth accumulation.”
In Bonica’s view, plutocratic false consciousness is nothing new. Looking back 40 years, he calculates that billionaire wealth grew 57.1 percent during Democratic administrations and 16.5 percent under Republicans. That wasn’t because Democratic presidents gave billionaires special breaks; it was because Democrats were superior stewards of the economy.
So why did billionaires support Republicans? Because they hate to pay taxes. The result is “a complete decoupling of billionaire interests from general economic prosperity.” That’s classic false consciousness: Whatever billionaires would lose if Democrats were to succeed in imposing significantly higher taxes upon them (a goal that eluded Biden) would be far exceeded by what they stood to gain in a more prosperous economy.
But the billionaires don’t care! Bonica continues:
The ultra-wealthy appear willing to sacrifice overall economic health, market stability, and general prosperity to protect their privileged position. This isn’t rational economic behavior in the traditional sense—it’s a calculated decision by a rising oligarchic class that prioritizes tax avoidance and wealth preservation above all else.
I object only to the phrase “in the traditional sense” because that’s an unnecessary hedge. It isn’t rational economic behavior in any sense. And it’s less rational when Republican mismanagement of the economy is as out of control as it is right now under Trump.
The codependence between the rich and the GOP, writes Bonica, “is now driving America’s descent into oligarchy.” But it’s worse than that. The codependence between the rich and the GOP is driving America’s descent into incompetent oligarchy, wherein the oligarchs don’t understand their own economic interests, much less America’s. If being a billionaire makes you this stupid, then thank God I’ll never be one.
