Such is the happy problem that may soon be facing MacKenzie Bezos, one-half of the richest couple on earth. She and her husband, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, recently announced plans to divorce after 25 years of marriage.
With half of the family fortune, Bezos would be worth about $70 billion, solidifying a title she may already hold — the richest woman in the world.
We don’t know her politics or her intentions. The Bezoses have spent money supporting same-sex marriage, early education and help for homeless families. Jeff Bezos is a quirky libertarian, and his Washington Post has been a scrappy counter to a president who has made a punching bag out of the Constitution.
But it’s crucial that the Democratic Party, now going through another torturous fight between its soak-the-rich side and the progressive pragmatists, remain open to enlightened people of wealth.
“No to the billionaires,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in the first days of her campaign for president. “We are the Democratic Party and that is the party of the people.”
Her brushback pitch was aimed at candidates rich enough to self-fund their campaigns, like Michael Bloomberg. But this kind of binary thinking is a slight to history. The best president of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt, was a product of dynastic family wealth, as was John Kennedy. The Obamas, with their newfound riches from books and ventures into the entertainment industry, will soon have the kind of money to draw snark from the socialist wing of their party.
And Warren may have missed the announcement of another rich guy running for president as a Democrat, the venture capitalist Andrew Yang. He’s campaigning on a plan to guarantee every American aged 18 to 64 a basic income of $1,000 a month, paid for by a new tax on companies benefiting most from automation.
I know, I know: The last thing a country struggling with Neo-Gilded Age inequality needs is more influence from billionaire supercitizens. It’s bad enough that the Koch brothers bought themselves a budget-busting tax cut and an energy policy hatched in their corporate boardroom. An 85-year-old casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, now has more influence on U.S. foreign policy than even the secretary of state, the Koch tool Mike Pompeo.
But the Kochs pay for politicians in order to enrich themselves and to gut regulations affecting the polluting industries that made them billionaires. Adelson got a similar tax windfall for the millions he put into electing Republicans, with the added benefit of controlling the State Department’s view of Israel.
The progressive billionaires — Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett — are a different breed of fat cat. Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has been saying “Tax me more” for years — or at least, “Tax me at the same rate as my secretary.” Like Bill Gates, who is the second-richest man in the world, he has pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune.
Last year, Tom Steyer spent more than $100 million of his own money helping Democrats get elected, and he says he will drop another bundle on Senate races in 2020. Look what he got for his Democratic House: new members calling for a 70 percent tax rate on earnings over $10 million. Steyer, Gates and Buffett are going to get soaked for their political passions. And good for them.
The same goes for Bloomberg. He also spent more than $100 million last year on behalf of Democrats, and ballot initiatives on gun regulations and climate change. This got him a kick in the teeth from the Warren crowd.
God knows why George Soros continues to pour millions into promoting democracy abroad and going after hate speech at home. For that, he’s a target of crazed bombers and a victim of verbal poison from the likes of people such as the actor James Woods. Just a few days ago, Woods called Soros a “grizzled old Nazi prick” in a tweet. As a Hungarian Jew, Soros the boy had to hide from the Nazis.
The ideal financing model is one perfected by Beto O’Rourke. He raised $80 million, without sucking up to PACs or corporate donors, and nearly knocked off the most hated man in the Senate, Ted Cruz of Texas.
But we don’t live in an ideal world. Which brings us back to MacKenzie Bezos, a novelist of some acclaim. She may well follow the lead of Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the Apple co-founder, whose political spending has been aimed at recruiting Democratic female candidates.
I would bet that the time Bezos spent studying creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison did not make her want to build a wall or turn a blind eye to climate change. If her heart is open to benevolence for the greater good, then the least the Democrats can do is not close the door.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.