An authoritarian’s power is bolstered by military might and (often plundered) wealth, but most of his power is given freely to him by the people who surround him, and who want to please him. In the same way, the hold that the current crop of tech-bro billionaires has over the global consciousness at this moment in history has been largely given to them by us, the horrified/fascinated public. (We have also handed them an unregulated digital space in which they can make their own rules, as well as their fortunes.)
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The billionaire bride and groom are giving us a show because they know we will watch it. And MAGA wealth exists to be seen as much as it exists to be enjoyed.
On a geopolitical level, the MAGA crowd is hostile to Europe – Trump is always kvetching about the European powers not spending enough on their defence, and in leaked Signal messages from the “Houthi PC small group” group-chat, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed “loathing” for “European free-loading”, which he said was “PATHETIC”.
In an interview on Fox News, Vice President JD Vance famously dismissed the UK as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.
But all such quibbles are pushed aside when it comes to MAGA celebrations that must project wealth and glamour. That’s when European class is required, and thankfully, it can easily be bought.
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Sanchez had her hen do in Paris, and it included an open-top boat ride down the Seine with the gals, as well as the attendance, reportedly, of one billionaire’s wife in an Issey Miyake bronze-effect breastplate-top recently bought at auction for $54,000.
For the actual wedding, the guest list was reported to be about 200. They can’t all be famous people, of course. Some of them must be cousins and siblings and siblings’ spouses who have been fighting off considerable anxiety about what on earth to wear to such an event.
Thankfully, the couple relieved guests of the anxiety of choosing a wedding present. They specified that no gifts were expected, and instead, they would make donations to several Venetian charities.
The people of Venice were not altogether happy with the takeover of their city, with local groups organising protests that caused at least one of the wedding parties to be relocated. Venice has become prohibitively expensive for ordinary people, they complained, and such spectacles only drive up prices further. Some of the protesters contended that Bezos should pay more tax. Their activism was a welcome gesture of resistance, from which the US Democrats could learn a lot.
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Because now vulgarity is in, and if it is accepted, for example, that the United States president will use profane language in public when speaking about a US ally, as Trump did this week, then there is no longer any value in restraint. The Gatsby-esque Bezos nuptials are proof-positive of that, attended by the kinds of “careless people” that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about it in his 1925 masterpiece. People who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”.
In the words of a Venice resident quoted in a Reuters report: “There’s only one thing that rules now: money, money, money, so we are the losers.
“We who were born here have to either move to the mainland or we have to ask them for permission to board a ferry. They’ve become the masters.”
Jacqueline Maley is a columnist.
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