The Big Business-Billionaire-Fascism Nexus

Some of the tech billionaire fascists at Trump's inauguration (Source: here) 

One of the most worrisome consequences of the increase in inequality since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been the sharp rise in influence of big business and very wealthy individuals on politics in Western democracies via very large donations to political parties.

By donating truly eye-watering sums to politicians, big donors have been able to insert themselves between voters and politicians and tilt policies in their favour at the expense of voter concerns.

Since the big donors mostly operate behind the scenes and away from the public eye, it is difficult for voters to understand why their issues are not being addressed. Their confusion about and disillusionment with mainstream politics is readily exploited by Far-Right populists, who pin blame on minorities, such as immigrants, who are actually not to blame at all.

Really big donations are a relatively new phenomenon. They clearly present a problem in Western democracies, which were never designed to handle that kind of money. In 2022 Barre Seid, a Chicago business man, donated a whopping USD 1.6 billion in company shares to the conservative Marble Freedom Trust. In 2024, the largest individual election donation was done by Elon Musk, who gave at least USD 277 million to support Donald Trump. Also in 2024, Timothy Mellon, a conservative banking heir, donated USD 150 million to pro-Trump super PACs. In 2024, Miriam Adelson, an Israeli widow of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson donated more than USD 100 million to pro-Trump and conservative groups.

How is it possible for democratically elected leaders to represent ordinary voters in the face of such giant sums of money? Party politics has to all intents and purposes become a money-making machine, which serves mega-donors by skewing policies heavily towards business and the Far Right. This is particularly evident in the US political system, where the Republican and Democrat parties are now both completely beholden to big business. No wonder then that the US political system has delivered a society with very weak unions, awful environmental and food standards, and very poor public healthcare and social security systems, while the rich enjoy one tax cut after another.

While mega-donations are a relatively recent phenomenon, relationships between big donors and Far-Right politicians go back a long way. For example, alliances between big money and politicians were integral to the operation of the fascist economies of Germany and Italy in the 1930s. Big business and the German Nazi party formed close partnerships built on mutual economic profit, anti-communism, and shared goals for rearmament, while in Benito Mussolini's Italy the relationship between big business and Fascism took the form of practical partnerships of mutual benefit in which industrialists held on to private property and high profits in exchange for supporting Mussolini's political and military goals.

Trump has been influential in bringing precisely such practices back into vogue. A slew of tech billionaires from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to Amazon's Jeff Bezos thus lined up to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump during his second presidential election campaign and at his inauguration. What was their top-most aim in aligning themselves closely with political power? Undoubtedly to ensure that the US government does not invoke its considerable anti-trust powers against their businesses, so they can continue to make super-normal profits at the expense of consumers. These profits are turning their CEOs into billionaires many times over, which is why they now lobby President Trump personally to keep their highly favourable arrangements in place.

No one schmoozes better than Elon Musk, who also makes no secret of his Nazi sympathies. Musk took the game of controlling the US government to a whole new level by running an actual branch of the Trump Administration, namely the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). To this day, Musk continues to use his enormous wealth to support Far-Right political parties all over Europe as well as pro-Trump candidates in the lead-up to November's US midterm election.

Bombshell! Annual funding for British political parties (Source: @timbale.bsky.social)

This week it was then Europe's turn to come face to face with big money politics, when two British billionaires, Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, each donated GBP 36 million to Nigel Farage's Far-Right populist Reform party. Delo is a criminal, who was convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls, but later pardoned by Trump. The Delo-Harbourne donations sent shock-waves through British politics; they are a game-changer as far as the funding of British political parties is concerned as the chart above shows. At least 80% of Reform's funding now comes from just two men, one a crook, who have, in effect, bought the party. Reform currently runs a close second to the governing Labour party in the polls (see below).

 Reform runs a close second to Labour in most recent polls (Source: here)

The rationale behind the Big Business-Billionaire-Fascism Nexus is extraordinarily simple. As fascists, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage put power above all else. Above Democracy. Above rule of law. Above human rights. They also equate money with power. The rich recognise this, so they see Trump and Farage as someone who will look after their interests, i.e. help them protect their wealth and likely increase it. As long as Trump and Farage get a piece of the pie, that is. And complete loyalty.

The loyalty bit is not a problem. After all, the big tech CEOs and Far-Right politicians, like Trump and Farage, share very similar perspectives on life. Both want monopoly power. The tech giants want market monopoly, so they can crush their rivals and reap the greatest possible profits, while fascists like Trump and Farage want political monopoly and are prepared to crush their political enemies to get it. The big business billionaires and fascist leaders are therefore mirror images of each other in the economic and political realms, respectively.

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How did we get to this point? In the 1970s, it was typically trade-unions which held disproportionate sway over policy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the trade unions were so powerful that they held the government hostage, threatening to cripple the economy unless their demands were met. The main beneficiaries were relatively small numbers of unionised workers, while the losers were non-unionised workers and society at large. Similar types of parasitic unions have existed in places like Argentina, such as the CGT union under Hugo Moyano, who for years held a Sword of Damocles over the Argentinian economy. In France, powerful farmers unions regularly shut down roads, while American teamsters and traffic controllers paralysed US transport systems on several occasions until the early 1980s.

However, the trade union strangleholds in Europe and the United States were decisively broken in the 1980s and today the shoe is very much on the other foot. Big business and the uber-wealthy now run the show and their rise to prominence can be traced directly to the policies pursued by Western governments over the past two decades or so.

Specifically, cut-backs in state provision of education, healthcare, and other public services to pay for tax cuts for the middle class - what I call a Faustian Bargain - worsened conditions for lower-income groups, while businesses and wealthier people benefitted hugely. De-regulation also allowed larger firms to gain a greater degree of monopoly power, especially in the technology sector. Finally, for many years following the GFC central banks printed money to buy bonds (Quantitative Easing), which contributed to massive rallies in stock and bond markets that disproportionately benefitted the rich on account of their larger share of financial assets in total wealth.

While these changes unfolded, the funding rules for political parties failed to keep pace. This enabled the new cadre of billionaires to gain unprecedented influence over policy by donating large amounts of money to political parties. These donations soon yielded results in the form of even more reckless de-regulation, even bigger tax cuts for the ultra-rich, truly grotesque levels of rent-seeking, and further roll-backs of already stretched public services, including foreign aid and funding for science and education.  

These policies obviously did not do anything to improve the lot of lower-class voters, so it became politically necessary to find someone other than big business and the rich, who could take the blame for lower-class discontentment. Immigrants soon emerged as culprits of choice. Lower-class voters harbour deep-seated prejudices about foreigners due to direct competition in labour markets. They are also profoundly ignorant about real causes of the economic schisms in Western economies. Western politicians were therefore able to hoodwink lower-class workers into pinning blame for policies that actually only served the very richest and most powerful onto the poorest and most vulnerable groups of all, namely immigrants.

Xenophobia, while deeply distasteful, has been - and continues to be - highly effective from a political point of view in Western democracies. As the sharp rise in support for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the recent state election in Saxony-Anhalt showed, scapegoat politics is continuing to gain traction with European voters and surely there will be many more such gains to come for Far-Right European political parties.

And herein lies my biggest concern. As more and more voters buy into the fascist rhetoric about immigrants, the Big Business-Billionaire-Fascism Nexus only gets stronger, but this all but guarantees that the underlying causes of lower-class disenchantment will not be addressed. We are in a feed-back loop in which Right-wing extremism begets more scapegoat politics, which detracts from real solutions to the problems, which therefore get worse and lead to yet more Right-wing extremism and yet more scapegoat politics. And so on. At the end of this road lies only tragedy, not salvation.

The End