What Was VC Tom Perkins Thinking When He Compared “Persecution” of the 1% to Nazi Anti-Semitism? Here’s What.
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In the 1988 Vice-Presidential debate between Republican candidate Dan Quayle and his Democratic counterpart Lloyd Bentsen, Senator Quayle compared himself to President John F. Kennedy, and Senator Bentsen quickly took him down with the famous retort: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” The line was a stinger that garnered thunderous applause, and Bentsen did his level best to knock Quayle off his high horse. But the damage was done, and not to Quayle. In comparing himself to Kennedy and inducing a personal attack from his opponent, Quayle effectively reframed the qualification issue as being about Bentsen’s outrage and—counterintuitively it would seem—took the focus off his own insufficient experience for the presidency. Gotcha.
Tom Perkins, who’s in the news right now for comparing the 99% to Nazis, is no dummy. He’s made many millions for himself and others by choosing wisely where to invest his capital and the capital of those who invest with him, as well as where to place his words. In making his remark, “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich,’ which appeared in a letter he wrote to The Wall Street Journal, Perkins is doing exactly what Quayle did to Bentsen, drawing fire upon himself to shift the debate on wealth disparity in America from centering on how we should help the less fortunate to how we should stop persecuting the privileged. So just how does this chicanery work?
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Well, in an initial response to Perkins’s letter by media executive Rick Mandler, run on January 26th here on The Good Men Project, Mandler followed Bentsen’s playbook exactly. He devoted the first half of his article to explaining eloquently and effectively why the Nazi comparison was both egregious—especially coming from a WASP like Perkins—and totally flawed, added a paragraph about the horrors of unfettered capitalism, and assailed Perkins’s character with the following question: “This of course begs the question, if Tom is such an idiot, how did he get so rich? I am reminded of Upton Sinclair’s line which goes something like ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.’ Mandler then qualified his “attack” on capitalism by throwing out the NSA scandal as a nod to the dangers of an excessively intrusive state. What began as a full-throated charge faded into a full-out retreat. I was heartened to see Mandler smash the holocaust reference to smithereens, but as in the ’88 debate, the winner is Perkins, who after apologizing for his “awful” comparison, is now mewling all over the mainstream media about how horribly the rich are being treated.
It’s fine to zing back at Perkins with a spoonful of horseradish flung at his eye, but we need the “beef” to bring the debate back to where it belongs if we’re to have any hope of actual progress. And Perkins is all too aware of that.
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Whether or not Perkins is an idiot is the wrong question to beg. And the real question Mandler’s response begs is, “Where’s the Beef?” meaning where’s the meat of the ethical argument, the structured statements underlying rational, emotional, and spiritual appeals for the principle that as a society we are obligated to care for our have-nots, that their not having is not their fault, that it is not enough to say we’re doing our part by giving to charity and creating jobs, and that sometimes too much—too much accumulation of lucre at the expense of those labeled as “losers” in our economic equation is actually too much and needs to be rectified by the societal apparatus that isn’t devoted to making money and enriching itself at the expense of others—namely our government. The free market is a wonder, but some things don’t take care of themselves and really do need to be legislated. It’s fine to zing back at Perkins with a spoonful of horseradish flung at his eye, but we need the “beef” to bring the debate back to where it belongs if we’re to have any hope of actual progress. And Perkins doesn’t want that beef to be served.
Even the great industrialist Henry Ford believed his own workers should be able to afford his automobiles on their hourly pay, a variation on the idea that you don’t shit where you eat.
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The destitute people begging on city street corners and in subways or surviving on food stamps or working for minimum-wage whom Perkins compares to the Nazis (who by the way had paying jobs, food to eat, and nicely pressed uniforms) can’t afford much beef at the grocery store—if there is one in their neighborhood—and can barely buy the burgers they’re flipping at McDonalds. Even the great industrialist Henry Ford believed his own workers should be able to afford his automobiles on their hourly pay, a variation on the idea that you don’t shit where you eat. It’s fair to say that Perkins is operating at a disadvantage to Ford, because like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, he creates nothing and just owns. That movie, made by rich studio executives and investors in or near the 1%, skillfully shifted the focus from wealth disparity to Gekko’s own despicableness, giving the working poor a villain to revile and a hero to champion in Charlie Sheen, while doing nothing to advance the dialogue and address the real issue. If it had, perhaps we might have avoided the crash of 2008 that came 20 years later and left so many of the 99% hurting from the direct result of unregulated Gekko-like greed.
The free market is a wonder, but some things don’t take care of themselves and really do need to be legislated.
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No, Perkins’s intellect is not in question. He is a highly skilled manipulator of both money and the media who is sacrificing himself (don’t worry, he’ll be OK) to frame the wealth disparity issue in terms of the excessive accumulation, detachment from reality, and insensitive remarks of a few greedy bastards – the ones he flies with on private jets and hangs out with at private clubs – to make the real question of what to do about wealth disparity go away. In truth, his fear of a revolution in this country in which the poor knock down the fences that surround the gated communities of the rich, smash their plate glass picture windows, and plunder their mansions for state-of-the-art electronics, 1000 thread count sheets, bottles of Chateau Lafite, and boxes of truffles—that fear—is not entirely unfounded. History has not been kind to oligarchies. And the 1% are indeed becoming frightened. We see their fears—as well as those of the NRA now—played out in all the zombie films, in which “good, hard-working people” are nearly overrun by “the living dead” but saved by everyday heroes with a take no prisoners attitude and lots of big weapons. If the rabble does manage to raid Perkins’s Sub-Zero, they probably won’t find any six-packs of Bud, but they may find a six-pack of Rolexes—or actually the equivalent in the form of a six-figure timepiece—on his nightstand.
The best way to answer Tom Perkins is not to answer him at all. The best way to beat him and his cronies at their own zero-sum game is to give them no quarter and marginalize them (after all, they’re only 1%) and keep the debate squarely focused on how to engineer a more compassionate values-based economic and social system that sustains everyone – from the 1% at the top right down to the 1% at the bottom.
Photo—Wikimedia Commons
I knew this day would arrive at some point, and now it’s here. We’ve reached the end of the process.
Now *anyone* in American can claim to be a victim. Everyone now has the right to appeal to sympathy in the name of victimhood. If a billionaire white guy can claim it, then anyone can.
Everyone is a victim, and there are no more non-victims left. So now what do we do?
From a Kristallnacht survivor, letter published in WSJ 2/1/13: Having lived and suffered through Kristallnacht in 1938, I find Mr. Perkins’s parallel both insensitive and flawed. While his 1% live in a free, democratic society with all civil rights available to them, the Jews in Germany were disenfranchised, with no access to the biased judiciary, their property and livelihoods were taken away, and many were made destitute because of the biased laws. He needs to find a more appropriate parallel. Perhaps the oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine would be a better choice since they more closely resemble his 1%. He… Read more »
When a man is 81 years old and cant manage to put his $ 380,000 watch on right side up he may make comments that are outrageous, Its a mistake to focus on the outliers in this debate. The question is far more fundamental and difficult to confront. Giving to the starving and the destitute is important but the real issue is that the concentration of wealth in this country has sucked away the chance for upward mobility from what was once the middle class. When you buy 5 tee shirts or an iphone from a company that believes that… Read more »
I would love to hear a little more about how the economic policies of the NAZI’s were friendly to the wealthy. I remember reading about abolishment of unearned income, nationalization of industries and communilazation of businesses.
Perkin’s letter was laughably over the top but the twisting and gyrations of the class warfare crew are equally bad.
According to the documentation in “The Vampire Economy” the Nazi regime was anything but friendly to the vast majority of businessmen, even those with great wealth who previously had considerable power.
The correct analogy for Perkins to have used would to have compared the current regulatory regime to that of the Nazis…it’s going in the same direction.
The analogy doesn’t even make logical sense. Many of the people in his audience don’t think the Holocaust ever happened and don’t think the Nazis were all that bad anyway. There are lots of people on the right who don’t really think of “Nazi” as a terrible insult. Actually, the analogy is even more egregious when you consider the NSDAP economic policies. Hitler and his cronies were tight with German industrialists. The Nazis helped the wealthiest people in Germany make a LOT of money. The Nazis were perfectly fine with modern-day corporate capitalism and vast inequalities of wealth. Hitler was… Read more »
Wait a minute… “Many of the people in his audience don’t think the Holocaust ever happened and don’t think the Nazis were all that bad anyway. There are lots of people on the right who don’t really think of “Nazi” as a terrible insult.” Are you serious? You honestly believe that their are MANY Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers who read the WSJ? I read the WSJ. Back to the broader article- In terms of wealth- if you adjust for inflation Henry Ford was far richer than ANYONE not named Buffet or Gates alive today. Rockefeller and Carnegie tripled Gates’… Read more »
As for the question of what percentage of Tom Perkins’s wealth does anyone deserve or intend to take, that frames wealth disparity as a conflict, which is exactly what Perkins himself tries to do and what the article argues against. The point of the article is return the debate to values and the choices we make based on those values, to who we are as a nation and a society. Do we believe there should be a basic safety net and economic opportunity for all, or do we believe it’s just every man for himself? If it’s the former, the… Read more »
Actually- you need to get to specifics if you want to enact policy. So- what are the specifics? 1. Who is rich? 2. How much of their income should we redistribute? 3. Who gets it and how? If you’re not willing to address these questions you’re just rabble rousing and playing with emotion. A basic safety net (which we have) costs money. What people on here talk about costs a whole heck of a lot more. The money has to come from somewhere- so who is brave enough to answer the question. For someone like Perkins- how much? For someone… Read more »
CW, The purpose of the article was to offer an explanation of why Tom Perkins invoked the Nazis to try to reframe the “debate,” and to advocate that we – as a nation – steer the “discussion” towards the value of compassion for the less fortunate and the importance of finding common ground on how to address our neighbors’ needs. Perkins simply says, stop persecuting the rich, which does neither of those things. The article was also never intended to be a policy piece on the mechanics of wealth redistribution, so I am not going to provide you with the… Read more »
If you will not give specifics for what “fair” is how can you say something is “unfair”?
There is no evidence to support the assertion that the audience reading Perkins’s remarks sympathizes with the Nazis or denies the holocaust in greater numbers than any other group. It is true that Hitler’s idea of wealth redistribution was a bit different (understatement intended), from what a democratically elected government attempts to do through tax policy.
Isn’t there actual live video of the holocaust? I swear I’ve seen pictures of people at Auschwitz being walked to the gas chambers. Do the deniers think they were going to a rave party??
Not just live video but there is an entire museum dedicated to the Holocaust in DC. I went there a few years ago and after seeing it my first question to any Holocaust denier would be explain where they got the items that are in that museum.
There is a small theater room in the museum that plays footage recorded from that era (some of which includes speeches from Hitler) on a constant repeat. There are displays of actual items that Jewish people were forced to leave behind when taken out of their neighborhoods. There are replicas of hiding spaces.