Great quote about the orientation of US society and politics

 From "Elon Musk's Politics Are About As Complicated As Trump's," New York Magazine:

American liberalism is multifaceted. It has a welfarist component (which aims to shave the hard edges off the market economy by financing social insurance through progressive taxation), a pro-labor aspect (which aims to mitigate the power imbalance between workers and owners), a social-justice element (which aims to equalize the social status of marginalized groups), and a developmentalist ethos (which aims to promote economic modernization through public investment and subsidies to private industry).

Although it's overlaid with neoliberalism ("Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems," Guardian) and its strong market anti-government focus, and what I call the anarcholiberatarianism of conservatives, which believes in individualism and is almost completely anti-government in terms of public investment, public goods, and communitarian action (like public health).

And for businesspeople like Musk and Trump, it's all about self interest.  From the article:

This last dimension drew both Trump and Musk into the Democratic orbit in the early chapters of their careers. In the Reaganite 1980s, real estate was one of the few industries to maintain strong support for the Democratic Party, as the political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers documented. This was partly because Democrats retained political dominance in the major cities where development promised the highest returns. But it was also because urban developers like Trump stood to benefit from federal investment in cities and mass transit, which would increase the valuation of their properties. As a result, Trump bankrolled many Democratic politicians and maintained warm relations with liberal power brokers before his entrance into conservative politics.

Musk also benefited greatly from liberalism’s interest in guiding economic development. The Democratic Party has long been committed to expediting the maturation of the electric vehicle and renewable-energy sectors through public subsidies. And that made Tesla’s rise possible. As of 2012, conservatives were deriding Musk’s company as “a prodigious harvester of government favors and handouts,” while the GOP’s presidential nominee was deriding Tesla as a bad investment on national television. It is therefore unsurprising that Musk was a Democratic voter in the Obama era, one whose political donations tilted left.

If Musk and Trump appreciated liberalism’s commitment to public investments that aided their private interests, however, they had less enthusiasm for the creed’s other components. Neither mogul has much fondness for progressive taxation or workers’ rights. For decades, Trump was one of our nation’s most creative tax avoiders and wage thieves.

das