Hyperaffluence, and hyperinequality, generate some fascinating social pathologies in these United States. When lots of people here have tens of millions, up to billions, in personal wealth, it tends to make them arrogant to the point of sadism. Hence my term the Sado-state; hence William I. Robinson’s term, “sadistic capitalism” — both are efforts to capture the escalating cruelification of our country’s money and governing elites. Not just master sadist Donald Trump, of course, but his important allies and appointees: V. Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, John N. Kennedy — all of them easily diagnosed as what Freudians would call sub-clinical paraphilic coercives.
Perverted money viciousness goes way back – recall the pre-revolutionary French court – but our inconceivably rich country has been generating its own particular forms of this depravity. In 2014, for instance, a reporter snuck into an ultra-private dress party for the financier members of a club called Kappa Beta Phi, where, not long after the national financial collapse, the partygoers reveled in the pain many of them had caused.
[V]eteran Kappas … gorge themselves on racks of lamb, throw petits fours at the stage, and laugh uproariously [while ridiculing] the real harm [they caused] to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis… [A] group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009 [was] laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (One of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street.
In sadistic capitalism, the suffering and deprivation generated become a source of aesthetic pleasure, leisure and entertainment for others, says Robinson; it’s as if the very effrontery of being an ordinary person with ordinary life struggles immediately qualifies you for brutal blows. Just as importantly, the very fact of having successfully exploited the American economy to an obscene degree now elevates you to a position of sadistic overlord, like the head of Oracle, who simply bought up many houses in a development near his estate and deposited his extensive personal staff in them. Established homeowners there, unaccustomed to thinking of their community as a feudal settlement, complained, but could do nothing.
The Cruelty is the Point, Adam Serwer titles his recent book, and in titling it so, he underscores the specific rough beast whose hour has come round. Although we have Ramaswamy’s attack ad to thank for prompting a national conversation about sadism, there is so much more to be said.