In 16th century Japan, the Daimyo feudal lords, like their Medieval European counterparts, battled to secure control of the realm. Today, in the current US presidential race, a similar conflict has emerged, over an increasingly feudalised landscape.
The discord among the American elites is far more pronounced now than in 2016 or 2020. This time, Donald Trump has gained more support from more tech and financial lords, notably the backing of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and America’s most accomplished entrepreneur. Some of this can be traced to Biden’s policies, which have led to the likes of Chase’s Jamie Dimon to praise Trump, something unexpected from President Obama’s “favourite banker”. Financial industries overwhelmingly favoured Biden in 2020, but now are slightly more oriented to the GOP – despite continued evidence that Trump remains ever more irrational and crude.
But Trump does best with those industries, like construction, manufacturing and agriculture, that actually make things. People who work with their hands – truck drivers, plumbers, electricians, oil-workers and farmers – generally favour the Republicans and so do the people who employ them. Trump’s business backers include those like Harold Hamm and Kelcy Warren, with ties to fossil fuel energy. The pro-Trump producer lobby also includes Musk, easily America’s most important industrialist, as well as others such as Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
One element is concern among producer companies that a Harris administration would follow the model she championed in California. The Golden State imposes environmental and labour laws that have accelerated the state’s significant de-industrialisation and the immiseration of swathes of its population.
But Harris is still winning the daimyo wars. As has occurred throughout her career, she continues to harvest big money from the tech oligarchy. The industry helped her raise four times as much as Trump in August, and gathered in over $1 billion, two to three times Trump.
These are the very people who Teamsters President Sean O’Brien claims have “bought and paid” for the Democratic Party. Certainly, Harris’ ties to the oligarchy can hardly be ignored. She even reportedly received expert coaching for her strong debate performance – clearly the highlight of her otherwise vacuous campaign – from a top Google attorney litigating an anti-trust case against her own administration. This same company’s dominant search engine also appears to do its best to steer people to view Harris favourably, according to a study by the Media Research Center.
Unlike those in the producer economy, tech and other ephemeral industries tend to be less concerned about environmental regulations and labour laws; they rarely make anything in the United States and employ relatively few blue collar or union workers. Harris allies constitute what Robert Bryce has called “the anti-industry industry”, which seeks to ban gas stoves, stop new LNG facilities, and crack down on plastics.
Recently, Harris has taken to moderating her positions on green issues, like fracking and EV mandates. But as I wrote last week, this does not reflect the views of her closest advisors. This feint will surely end shortly after November as her administration follows its demonstrated ideological imperatives.
But it’s not all a question of good intentions. There’s also an evident quid pro quo. Big business and its apologists, Left and Right, welcome mass immigration, in part to fill the lowest tier of jobs. They also favour the large-scale import of temporary foreign tech workers; three quarters of the Silicon Valley tech workforce is estimated to be made up of such people. Programmes to improve the deteriorating level of American education, so obvious in California, don’t matter when you get your high-end workers from Asia and your servants from El Salvador.
There’s also pressure from key supporters, like Mark Cuban, to remove Lina Khan, the trust-busting head of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan presents an inconvenient barrier to the “engulf and devour” crowd that now dominates tech, particularly in the emerging artificial intelligence industry.
Elon Musk, the new bete noir of progressives, may not be totally insane for predicting that he may be jailed under a Harris regime; his business has been hindered by parts of the Biden administration. And California’s coastal commission is looking into blocking launches from Vandenberg Airforce Base on the state’s central coast, apparently to punish Musk for his Trump support. Oil executives could also expect to be hounded and forced into court for their “climate crimes”.
If Harris wins, expect hard times for Musk, the oil barons, suburban developers and startup businesses unable to cope with the likely tsunami of regulations. If Trump is elected, things could get dicey for some tech oligarchs, who have managed to alienate the MAGA base. Campaign ads may target the middle and working class, but the real battle may be over which cabal of monied lords triumphs on the electoral battlefield.
Joel Kotkin is presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas