Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"It’s early in the second Trump term, but it seems like politics is now in a different place. This time, corporate America and billionaires are working with the Trump administration, not against it. The inaugural photos of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sundar Pichai kissing the ring were crystal clear in their implication. Big fancy lawyers aren’t doing pro bono work “resisting” Trump, for fear of upsetting their clients. The mask is off.</p><p>More importantly, the public is in a different place. Democratic voters, who almost always support their leaders, are actually angry with their own party. Certain institutional elites get that. Here’s the President of the United Auto Workers union, Shawn Fain, attacking Democrats, saying that “Trump is president because we have candidates in this party who can’t decide who the fuck they want to represent.”</p><p>There’s a lot of skepticism about whether we live in a democratic society, as it often seems like the government and our corporations just aren’t responsive to the public’s concerns over corruption, inequality, monopoly, and so forth. But I think this view masks a much scarier possibility, which is that we do live in a democratic society, and the public just hasn’t been particularly concerned about corruption, inequality, monopoly, and so forth.</p><p>What’s important about what Bernie is doing, and these other signals, is he might be showing that fear of oligarchy is the dominant view of a large swath of the public. If that’s the case, a lot of things could change, and quicker than we might imagine."</p><p><a href="https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-populist-revolt" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">thebignewsletter.com/p/monopol</span><span class="invisible">y-round-up-the-populist-revolt</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Bernie" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Bernie</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Monopolies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Monopolies</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BigTech</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Oligarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Oligarchy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Plutocracy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Plutocracy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DemocraticParty" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DemocraticParty</span></a></p>