Politics

I think part of the problem is the framing here. Americans literally equate 'liberal' with 'leftist' the vast majority of the time in political discourse. Most Americans seem to have no clue whatsoever that there's a difference. But liberals are agents of the status quo. Conservatives may be more overt and sweeping in their protection of privilege, but liberals are also set on protecting parts of that privilege. They may be more comfortable with granting some rights to people who don't look like them, but they're probably not going to risk their own power for it. Ultimately their priorities tend to still be selfish, upholding the system to continue to benefit from it, even if they're sympathetic to suffering and injustice. They probably support gay rights, maybe even trans rights, but they're probably not up for UBI or dismantling the prison industrial complex.

The liberal billionaires that we do see aren't any different. They're still people who are ultimately focused on upholding the system and the immense benefit it provides them. Whatever lovely platitudes they might share with us, they choose to use their power to amass wealth rather than to correct injustice. They're doubly agents of the status quo, as liberals and as billionaires.

I don't know how you'd get a leftist billionaire. I suppose it'd have to happen pretty suddenly for them to actually have that much at once. The problem is, if a leftist puts their literal money where their mouth is, they really shouldn't have excessive amounts of it.

Like, there's a point where the utility you gain from having an amount of money becomes substantially less than the utility literally anyone else would gain from having the same amount. Jeff Bezos could lose 1 million dollars in the blink of an eye and wouldn't even notice, but to pretty much everyone in my life that would completely transform their experience and that of many of those around them.

There's a moral and ethical cost to that difference. Leftists are ostensibly in support of compassion, equality, the sharing of resources, and the elimination of suffering. I think a billionaire could call themselves a leftist, but I feel pretty confident that it would nearly always be a lie.

But, like, I'm also not sure how they'd get there in the first place. It seems to me that you have to make a lot of decisions favoring profit over compassion and human decency in order to make a billion dollars.