Fractures in Power Structures: Why Elite Infighting Matters and How We Can Make Use Them
By Carl Davidson
LeftLinks Weekly, June 6, 2025
It's Not just the Sparks, Look for What’s on Fire: This week’s headline feud—President Donald Trump’s very public break with Elon Musk, his one-time megadonor—is best viewed as a symptom, not the disease.
Similar quarrels are simmering among a dozen other power centers. Taken together, they signal a larger question first framed by Lenin a century ago to sum up all politics: “Who does what to whom?”
For starters, We Have A Democracy with Antique Plumbing. Our constitutional machinery, from lifetime-appointed judges to the Electoral College, was never built for broad participation. When genuine avenues for settling disputes are narrow, combatants look for shortcuts—sometimes violent ones. Our judges, lawmakers, and election officials are now reporting an unprecedented wave of threats, largely from the political right.
Fault Line One: Ideology: First, a Globalist-Neoliberal Wing: finance executives, coastal media, and portions of Big Tech who accept modest reform as the price of stability. Then, a Nationalist-Populist Wing: fossil-fuel barons, defense contractors, and culture-war entrepreneurs who champion protectionism and traditional hierarchies. The Musk-Trump slugfest widens this gap and encourages each side to wield government for private gain.
Fault Line Two: Old Money vs. New Money: The transition from industrial to information capitalism pits yesterday’s titans (merchant bankers, oil, autos, agribusiness) against Finance Capital, Platform and AI moguls. Wall Street itself is splintered: hedge-fund raiders, venture capital, and private-equity giants often lobby for mutually exclusive rules.
Fault Line Three: Media Echo Chambers: Our old Mainstream Media have “demassified” into a dozen digititized ‘news’ siloes. Legacy outlets compete with new influencer networks whose audiences rarely overlap. Instead of calming tensions, media increasingly monetizes them, leaving citizens—and even elites—in alternate realities.
Why We Care: Policy paralysis hurts: Gridlock on climate, healthcare, immigration, and defense occurs because rival interests pull policymakers in opposite directions. Public confidence in institutions declines as Americans watch billionaires engage in a macho-honcho brawl. Foreign-policy whiplash hurts: Regarding Ukraine, European allies can’t count on U.S. commitments; Putin’s Russia exploits the confusion. Regarding Israel and Gaza, the current policy, built up by both Biden and Trump, has us a minority of one in a UN vote, while we constitute contributing to the Likud’s genocide against Palestinians. The combined effect increases the risks of authoritarian drift at home and miscalculations that could lead to wider wars abroad.
What Can Be Done from Below: Grass-roots coalitions are already testing a counter-strategy: The Bernie–AOC “anti-oligarchy” tour and the nationwide “50501” mobilizations are showing how progressives, labor unions, and minority-rights groups can set a common agenda and take it to the streets. Local Democratic organizations are joining these efforts, aiming their “main blow” at the Trump-led neoconfederate bloc while courting persuadable centrists and even a slice of the MAGA rank-and-file to a wide coalition. The broader goal echoes Rev. William Barber’s call for a “Third Reconstruction”: to build a new governing power from the bottom up, rather than merely restoring the pre-Trump status quo.
Advisory Take-Away: Share widely with friends.
Stay Informed—but diversify your information sources to avoid falling into a single faction’s narrative.
Engage Locally—city councils, school boards, and union drives are less influenced by billionaire feuds and offer concrete avenues for change.
Support Institutional Reforms—ranked-choice voting, independent redistricting, defending DEI, and setting court-term limits can widen democratic participation and reduce the payoff from elite brinkmanship.
Build Broad Coalitions—effective resistance to authoritarian currents will require cooperation among progressives, moderates, and disaffected conservatives who still value democratic norms.
Elite fractures are real and consequential, but they do not guarantee progressive outcomes. The future will be shaped by how decisively—and how wisely—ordinary people organize in the space those fractures open up.
Well put Carl