The Bernie Sanders vs. Elon Musk debate
Privilege has its obligations
In 1787, Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis inherited a dukedom. He was only 23, the beneficiary of a noble title created as a reward to his father, a Marshal of France who commanded troops on both sides of the Atlantic. But the elevation of the young de Lévis, also a soldier, was not to last.
Three years later, as the regime of King Louis XVI was being dismantled, the newly created National Assembly declared that “hereditary nobility is for all time abolished.” No one could use “the titles of prince, duc, comte, marquis, vicomte, vidame, baron, chevalier … or any other similar title.” Family coats of arms and liveried servants were banned.
It was quite a comedown, given the nobility’s vast privileges. Simon Schama wrote in his book Citizens of one nobleman who owned 10 coaches and dined on fine food, served on “Sèvres porcelain laid on a green marble table … beneath a Bohemian crystal chandelier,” surrounded by paintings by Watteau and other masters.
The nobility was exempted from conscription, could demand to be tried in special courts and didn’t have to pay the onerous tax on land that funded the royal family, according to historian William Doyle.
Most nobles survived the tragic bloodshed of the French Revolution, but many of their special powers and privileges didn’t. The ordeal would prompt de Lévis to suggest an enlightened view of nobility that still echoes today.
While the contemporary gap between the rich and poor hasn’t reached the grotesque levels of pre-revolutionary France, the gulf is growing. The number of billionaires is on the rise, with their wealth increasing from $13 trillion to $15 trillion worldwide just in the last year alone, according to Oxfam International. “Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990, according to World Bank data,” the organization said.
And in Washington, President Donald Trump and mega-billionaire Elon Musk are slashing government programs that provide aid to the poor, endangering the safety net that helps mitigate inequality and pushing tax policy that rewards the rich.
Power and poverty
Under King Louis XVI and his predecessors, the nobility controlled all of the non-royal positions of power in France, from ministers to judges to bishops to military commanders.
The contrast with the lives of the masses was stark. “Poverty was France’s most visible social problem,” wrote Doyle, in The Oxford History of the French Revolution. “Nobody could overlook it. All travellers noticed the misery of rural housing, and the poor appearance of the peasantry... Over the century prices rose three times faster than wages.” Meanwhile, Doyle noted, “Monasteries were cutting back on bread doles under criticism that indiscriminate charity fostered idleness.”
Members of the nobility steered the revolution in its early days, but they would soon lose control.
The results were devastating for many, including de Lévis. His mother, two of his three sisters and two cousins were sent to the guillotine in 1794, two years after he fled France and began fighting to restore the monarchy.
After the revolution
And then came the counter-revolution. Upon Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power in 1799, De Lévis was able to return to his country, buy a chateau outside Paris and begin a writing career.
The French noble families sought to reassert the social position they once held. In 1807, jewelers “on fashionable streets in Paris” were doing a thriving business of fashioning more than 150 family seals for aristocrats such as de Lévis, as historian David Higgs noted. In some regions of France, the nobility had gained more riches: “fat cats got fatter,” Schama wrote.
Yet the scars of the Terror, with its execution of more than 16,000 people, could not have been far from the mind of de Lévis. He sketched out some thoughts on how the wealthy could secure their role in a nation that had flirted with democracy and endured a violent revolution.
His 1808 book, “Maxims and Reflections on Different Subjects,” coined the phrase, “Noblesse oblige.” He argued that nobility has its obligations and that those with high positions can overcome the envy of others by practicing generosity and other virtues.
Giving back?
“Giving back” is the moral challenge that should confront today’s billionaires, including the richest of them all, Elon Musk. Yet, for many, concern about the fate of low-income Americans often seems furthest from their minds, as they battle for power and influence.
In league with President Donald Trump, Musk advocates a kind of reverse “noblesse oblige” — shrinking government programs that aid the poor and sick and cutting taxes in a way that bestows the biggest rewards on those who have the most money. Campaign promises to reverse inflation are being downplayed by the administration. Trump has seemed to accept that a recession might result from a “period of transition” sparked by his imposition of widespread tariffs.
As Zach Montague reported in the New York Times, “Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual, suggested on Monday that his government cost-cutting team would scrutinize Social Security and other entitlement spending, describing the expenditures as rife with fraudulent transactions and repeating a conspiracy theory that Democrats were using the programs as a ‘gigantic magnet to attract illegal immigrants and have them stay in the country.’” In his eyes, Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.”
It is not an accident that Sen. Bernie Sanders has been drawing large crowds in the Midwest with his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. His message: “These people, who are already enormously wealthy, cannot control themselves. Think about a heroin addict who needs more and more and more — that's what their body is craving. They have billions, they want more billions, and they do not care about who they step on in order to become richer.”
The Gospel of Wealth
The term “noblesse oblige” was new, but de Lévis didn’t create the doctrine; the idea that members of a privileged class owe much to the rest of society went back to feudal times, to the gospels of Jesus and the ancient Greeks. And it would inform “The Gospel of Wealth,” Andrew Carnegie’s influential 1889 essay that provided a template for how the robber barons of the late 19th century could rebrand themselves as the philanthropists of the 20th.
The son of a weaver, Carnegie emigrated to the U.S. from Scotland and began work in a cotton factory at the age of 12. He built a hugely profitable steel company and sold it when he was in his mid-60s to devote himself to charitable giving.
Carnegie vigorously defended inequality: “Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produce it.” But that wealth shouldn’t sit idle, or be passed along from generation to generation. Instead, Carnegie wrote strongly in favor of what Republicans call “death taxes”:
“By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.”
Enlightened millionaires should put their excess wealth to work for the public good, he argued:
The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise—parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the public taste, and public institutions of various kinds, which will improve the general condition of the people; in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good.
There was more than a whiff of paternalism in Carnegie’s vision of charitable works, with millionaires using their superior judgment to deploy wealth “for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself…”
Still, he expressed contempt for those who didn’t give back:
The man who dies leaving behind many millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away ‘ unwept, unhonored, and unsung,’ no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: ‘The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.’
Carnegie himself gave away $350 million. “The scale of his giving is almost without peer: adjusted for inflation, his donations exceed those of virtually everyone else in the nation’s history,” according to the Philanthropy Roundtable. Carnegie created more than 2,800 lending libraries round the world and numerous other institutions.
Giving Pledge
Carnegie’s example helped inspire the Giving Pledge, created in 2010 by Bill and Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett and 37 other billionaires. Elon Musk signed it two years later. The signers commit to giving the majority of their fortunes to charity.
Writing for Mother Jones, Michael Mechanic noted that “The Giving Pledge is only Carnegie-lite, however, because its members are allowed to fulfill their promise—or not—in either life or death, and hang onto half of their hoards. Carnegie, who followed his own counsel by building universities and research institutions and thousands of libraries in the United States and abroad, would no doubt consider the pledge weak tea.”
Musk has generously endowed his private foundation, which saves him real money in taxes, but has yet to make a seismic impact with charitable giving to outside organizations. Meanwhile he is talking of donating $100 million directly to Trump-supporting political action committees, on top of the hundreds of millions his own political fund spent to back Trump and other Republicans last year.
Another signer of the Giving Pledge, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also has funded many political causes. But in terms of charity, he gave away the most of any American last year, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy: $3.7 billion.
The 83-year-old media entrepreneur told the Chronicle, “I’ve never understood people who wait until they die to give away their wealth. Why deny yourself the satisfaction?”
Noblesse oblige
Unlike Andrew Carnegie, Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis never developed a full justification of his concept of “noblesse oblige.” His special skill was in crafting aphorisms that provoke conversation, rather than articulating an extensive system of thought.
Among his memorable phrases: “To govern is to choose.” And “It is easier to judge a man by his questions than his answers.” Also: “Boredom is an illness for which work is the remedy.”
When Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and the Bourbon monarchy was restored in France, De Lévis regained his status as a noble. In 1816, he was elected to the Académie Française.
He died at the age of 65, leaving it to others to provide a fuller account of what is meant by “noblesse oblige.” Even though the phrase lives on in dictionaries of quotations, it isn’t being taken seriously by many of those in power.
Excellent reporting, as usual. If Trump would read the Bible, instead of selling them, he'd learn that it's pretty tough on rich folks who tread on the poor.
Great wealth does not protect the individual from illness, despair or, more to the point, personality disorder. Has there ever been a more profound test of American institutions? We are in the grasp of an erratic president and deluded billionaire enabler who, it appears, fancies himself master of the universe. Say something reassuring, Rich, please. And thanks for another amazing effort.