No, billionaires won’t save us. That’s a myth that links Zuckerberg and Trump. - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/no-billionaires-wont-save-us-thats-a-myth-that-links-zuckerberg-and-trump/2018/03/20/88c2fec0-2c5c-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html
And yet we want to believe in what Giridharadas calls “the billionaire-savior delusion.”
This idea is so foundational in our society, so entrenched, that it cuts across our deepest political divisions.
On the right, it produces a President Trump, whom sufficient swaths of the country viewed as so rich as to be incorruptible: He couldn’t be bought, the thinking went, because a guy like that doesn’t need the money.
On the left, we get Zuckerberg, whose name has been bandied about as a presidential candidate because of his purported brilliance as a “thought leader” and his ability to connect the whole world into one supportive community.
Magical thinking.
“At the heart of the fantasy,” Giridharadas said, “is the idea that the world is best changed privately, on high, from the rich and powerful, not democratically, through political reform.”