A Crawling Prosperity

 We all recall that disgraceful ruere in servitium—dubbed at the time the "Great Accommodation" — that followed Trump's second election and the start of his second term—when formerly Trump-critical billionaires stepped forward one by one to "bend the knee," as people called it at the time. 

Mark Zuckerberg went—seemingly overnight—from a liberal donor who backed immigration causes to a chain-wearing Trumpophile who described the president as "badass"; the head of Palantir went from endorsing Kamala Harris to being a right-wing zealot who makes excuses for Trump's extrajudicial killings in even less time. 

And Jeff Bezos—who bought the Washington Post back in Trump's first term and emblazoned it with the almost cringey Resistance-era slogan on its masthead "Democracy Dies in Darkness"—apparently decided after 2024: "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," and became yet another conspicuous Trump toady. 

"He turned his coat and would have turned his skin," as Byron wrote of Southey, in the Vision of Judgment — "Fed, paid, and pampered by the very men / By whom his muse and morals had been mauled."

Well, here we are a year and a half into Trump's second term, and many of these men could claim to have profited handsomely from turning their coats. The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday describing how Bezos's brown-nosing to Trump has helped him land major contracts for his space venture, Blue Origin. 

"How Bezos Learned to Love Trump—and Win More Contracts for Blue Origin," the headline reads. 

It would seem that those who chose to "bend the knee" at the start of Trump's term have indeed been "fed, paid, and pampered" well by their new keepers. 

I was reading Moncure Conway's abolitionist classic this week, The Golden Hour, and I found that he knows exactly what to make of such servile yet lucrative accomodationism. In his era, he was dealing with the Northern merchants and conservative politicians who sought a deal with the South that would preserve slavery and cotton markets for their trade interests. 

He answers the Great Accommodation of his time—the "Compromise" with Slavery that many Northern conservative interests demanded—with a fable: 

"A lion on a plain was taunted by a serpent," he writes, "which was on a high, steep rock, with his inability to climb to an equal height. The lion answered, 'I might like you have risen, if like you I had crawled.'"

Conway himself draws the moral: "What was all this prosperity, this wealth, this spread-eagle nationality; the first untainted breath sent through the Capitol showed that it was all a crawling prosperity." 

Indeed—that is all the prosperity our Trump-toadying billionaires have managed to win for themselves. A "crawling prosperity." 

And it will go in the end the same way as the wealth of the pro-Slavery Northern accommodationists. 

As Conway observes, after the start of the civil war, the Northern merchant "friends" of the South who had favored accommodation lost half their property to confiscation—whereas the small number of Northern businessmen who had refused to compromise on principle had nothing below the Mason-Dixon line to lose. 

So too, as Trump buys government stakes in the businesses in which he takes an interest, and exercises more and greater power by the day—with the blessing of the Supreme Court—over what were once supposed to be independent regulators—our oligarchs may well start to wonder whether this "crawling prosperity" they achieved was worth the price of their freedom and honor.  

Meanwhile, the rest of us will prosper without them, in a truer sense of the word. 

We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence;

Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre;

Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence,

Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire (Browning)