Bret Stephens: Let’s start with primary night in New York on Tuesday, in which all three of the candidates Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed for House seats won, and two won big. Is this part of a broad Democratic Party turn to the far left or purely a local phenomenon that won’t come to define the rest of the party?
Frank Bruni: It’s largely a local phenomenon, inasmuch as New York City is no microcosm of the party or the country. It doesn’t reflect how most Democratic and potentially Democratic voters nationally think. But the results will nonetheless cause significant ripples, because progressive Democrats will claim validation, moderate Democrats will push back and an argument that has long bedeviled the party will intensify anew — just in time for the midterms!
Bret: Unfortunately, I watched the same horror film play out on the opposite side of the political aisle. The carnival barker element of the G.O.P. started as a fringe with Pat Buchanan, then became a movement with Newt Gingrich in the early 1990s, continued gaining strength through talk radio and cable news (the social media of the time), then turned on the old Republican establishment through Tea Party candidates like the aptly named Dave Brat. And, of course, it took power with Donald Trump.
If you think the Democratic Party is immune to something similar, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Frank: Democrats have received no such vaccination, and you’ll have to find another customer for your bridge. But I’m not prepared to call Mamdani a carnival barker — he has real principles, whether I agree with the policy prescriptions that flow from them or not — and “horror film” goes too far. I’m not terrified of some monstrous transformation in the party. I’m certainly concerned, but I’m also mindful that there’s a disgust in the electorate that may make Mamdani and his allies more broadly appealing and wiser than my gut says they are.
Bret: Let’s turn to something more uplifting. We haven’t yet had a chance to speak about Elon Musk. Do you think he’s underpaid?
Frank: Be nice, Bret. He has how many families to support? The bills pile up.
Bret: I once called Musk “the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley.” That was in 2018, when I thought Trump would be a one-term president and that the wheels would soon come off Tesla, given how much the electric-vehicle industry relied on government subsidies. Turns out my moral acumen may exceed my political or financial smarts. Still, I worry about an economy in which a company, SpaceX, that hasn’t yet managed to turn a profit can still have a $2 trillion market valuation. Something tells me this can’t go on, though I’ve been wrong so many times before. What am I missing?
Frank: That question is like a kick-me sign. The long answer or the short one?
Bret: Have at it.
Frank: Actually, your blind spot in this case is the same as mine and many other journalists’. We’re living with one foot in the past, holding tight to a few shreds of idealism and trusting that substance eventually triumphs over swagger. Trump’s career before politics put the lie to that conviction; Trump’s career in politics makes a soul-slaying mockery of it. This is an era of illusion, and Musk and Trump are the self-adoring, self-promoting emblems and emperors of it.
Bret: In a different era, Trump would have bowed his head in shame after his third or fourth bankruptcy and become a hairdresser. And Musk would have taken a break from life after the DOGE debacle and spent a couple of years at a monastery in Bhutan. But in our age, people turn notoriety into celebrity and celebrity into riches, and so one of those guys is the most powerful man on earth and the other is the richest.
I think that’s a comment not on what they’ve been able to get away with but on what our culture allows them to get away with.
Frank: I doubt we’ll ever coax Musk to a monastery, but maybe we can tempt him to rocket to one of Jupiter’s moons for a good long while? Anywhere but here.
As for shame, I’ve always maintained that Trump’s utter lack of it is his single greatest competitive advantage. When nothing embarrasses you, when nothing is beneath you, when your very brand is perfidy and provocation, you deploy lies and employ tricks that your rivals don’t dare to. You cast off the restraints that everyone else agreed on. We’ve learned through Trump that American laws and institutions didn’t provide our most important protection against monarchy and madness. The real guardrails were manners, dignity, decency. Politicians feared that they’d disgrace themselves — and appall supporters — with behavior too regal and repugnant. But not Trump. He gleefully smashed norms, cast his destructiveness as boldness, sold his immorality as authenticity and found more buyers than many of us thought possible.
Bret: Can I bring us back to the subject of billionaires and trillionaires for a moment?
Frank: If you must. But wait — trillionaires, plural? Did Jeff Bezos breach that sanctum while I was fishing for lost quarters under my couch cushions? Did Lauren Sánchez give him some ultimatum?
Bret: I won’t pretend to understand that relationship. But anyway, “trillionaire.” My question for you is: Does that say something good or bad about our economic system? Is there such a thing as “too rich,” or genuinely “obscene” wealth? Do you think we should “abolish billionaires,” as the progressive slogan has it? Or at least tax them on their net worth, rather than their realized gains?
Frank: “Trillionaire” says something bad, and so does the bloat of the billionaire class. Some wealth is obscene, if it’s gained and flaunted without any regard for the effect on less privileged people’s lives and livelihoods. But “abolish billionaires” is too sweeping and too pat; it’s indeed a slogan, not a strategy. It ignores a dynamic implicit in your questions. For an economy to thrive and a democracy to survive, balance is everything. We need to encourage entrepreneurship more strongly and reward success more lavishly than many progressives want to: A capitalist system — which is what we’ve got and what we want — depends on powerful incentives.
Bret: I’m with you so far. Is there a “but”?
Frank: A big one. History has repeatedly shown what our current degree of cartoonish inequality also demonstrates: Considerable regulation and some redistribution of wealth are necessary to prevent exploitation, to preserve opportunity, to propel social mobility, to maintain citizens’ trust in the system and to wave America’s oligarchs away from flamboyant acts of extreme ostentation. Right now, there’s an anything-goes, sky’s-the-limit, watch-us-and-weep mentality that leads some showboats to believe that they can claim much of Venice for their wedding, no matter the inconvenience to everyone else. That embitters people to a dangerous extent.
Something’s gotta give. We should start with meaningful changes to a tax code that lets too many wildly rich people pay much too little. Which brings us back to Trump, who treated his own tax avoidance as a perverse point of honor.
Bret: I do think it’s crazy that labor gets heavily taxed but capital gets lightly taxed, so that wage earners suffer as they move up the income ladder but investors only profit. Switch the income-tax rates with the capital-gains rates and we might once again start rewarding hard work over speculation.
Frank: Here’s where I nod vigorously, courting whiplash while bracing for a sudden end to our ideological amity.
Bret: That said, I think the progressive effort to demonize billionaires — a great many of whom are self-made and whose success creates jobs and services people want — is wrongheaded and self-defeating. Wrongheaded, because America didn’t become the most prosperous nation in the world by penalizing success. Self-defeating, because the very rich will always find a tax haven someplace, whether it’s Florida or Wyoming, Monaco or Bermuda. That’s a lesson that seems to be lost on California’s lefties who are trying to chase out the very people who make the state rich.
Frank: I apologize if I’m misreading you, and I’m definitely taking some liberty with what you just said, but I reject the idea that evading taxes is so inevitable that we shouldn’t invest too much effort in fighting it or nurse too much hope for correcting it. That’s a defeatist attitude promoted conveniently by people who don’t like being taxed.
Bret: I am not in favor of tax evasion. And not engaged in it, either. Just putting that on the record.
Frank: I concur about the broad, indiscriminate vilification of billionaires. It’s morally lazy. As you point out, some billionaires have built businesses of enormous benefit. Some have engaged in vital philanthropy. Billionaires aren’t some monolithic menace, and too many Americans’ insistence on categorizing whole groups of people as sinners or saints, enemies or allies, is a principal cause of our dead-end partisanship.
Bret: I think one of the reasons some of us find Musk’s net wealth distasteful is that, by the standards of the ultrawealthy, he gives away a small fraction of his wealth to charity — and even then tends to give to nonprofits he already controls. I tend to think that what we really need aren’t higher taxes or heavier regulations on the ultrarich, but rather a 21st-century version of Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth.” Warren Buffett’s and Bill Gates’s “Giving Pledge” is a helpful attempt at this, but its message is aimed mainly at other billionaires; it isn’t really explaining to everyday Americans why wealth and philanthropy ought to be linked, and why well-managed charities funded by generous donors can accomplish more for the poor or sick or disadvantaged than a cumbersome government bureaucracy.
Frank: But, Bret, government is so good at solving problems! I give you … the Reflecting Pool. With water so clear that the Seychelles are claiming copyright infringement. And glints of blue that turn sapphires green with envy.
Bret: I seem to remember Trump all but claiming to be the world’s leading expert on pools, so I find this story delicious, at least to the extent that every time Trump gets a well-deserved comeuppance it’s delicious. But, seriously, how can this possibly be so hard to get right?
Frank: Our news-side colleagues have done a terrific job explaining the complicated challenges involved. Trump didn’t create this swamp. But because it’s such an easily grasped, visually irrefutable embarrassment — and because he so arrogantly promised a quick fix while attacking his predecessors’ efforts — it has become a devastating metaphor and may be hurting him in a way that infinitely more consequential failures haven’t. There’s a thick, bilious coat of algae on his costume of hypercompetence.
Bret: Frank, before we go, I have a confession to make — a closet to come out of. I’m addicted to house-renovation videos.
The more daunting the challenge, the more elaborate the reconstruction, the more storied the structure, the better. They’re my mental-health breaks whenever I’m stuck on a tricky segue between paragraphs. And my favorite is a YouTube channel called “Escape to Rural France.” It’s the work of an English expat named Daniel Preston, who, ably assisted by a handful of friends, is painstakingly bringing back to life the mostly destroyed Château de Chaumont in central France, which once served as a refuge for Jewish children hiding from the Nazis. What I love is the vicarious experience of patient, meticulous, hands-on work; of the thought that goes into tricky carpentry and engineering and logistical decisions; of the love for something old and all but forgotten; of the excellent camera work; most of all, of the determination to give the chateau a new lease on life.
Watch it and you’ll see what I mean. We live in an age of technological magic and moral bankruptcy. What Preston offers is a return to basics, a belief in the worth and beauty of the old, and a possibility of repairing, even resurrecting, stones and spirits alike.
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