People need to read Zygmunt Bauman. He described precisely this in 2000 as the difference between the solid and the liquid forms of capitalism. I still have my very first copy of Liquid Modernity with all the shocked ??? and !!! on the margins because I didn’t believe what he was saying. Then it all started to come true.
Here is a quote from political theorist Roger Foster that I used in my book:
In earlier, laissez-faire variants of capitalism, the entrepreneur symbolized an ideal of self-mastery, but also embodied the notion of sacrifice of self on behalf of duty, honor, and integrity. The entrepreneur’s economic success also served as a symbol of his virtue, evidenced by the capacity to subordinate immediate wants and needs to rational control and planning. In its neoliberal form, the figure of the entrepreneur is stripped of the vertical dimension of moral self-sacrifice, and accompanying notions of honor and duty. In its place, neoliberalism develops a notion of responsibility divorced from submission to collective ideas, as the responsibility for the management of one’s own life.
We still often talk as if we were living in the same form of capitalism that existed before the 1970s and we don’t. The leftist terrorism of the 1970s serves as the wrecking crew to open up space for neoliberalism. It was very successful.
Clarissa's Blog 
Bauman captures it wonderfully.
-ethyl
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Off-topic. Mega-rich conservatives offer zero support for their people, while their liberal counterparts give away billions.
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That’s such a big gripe of mine. And it’s not only in the political space. We keep complaining that the culture has been overrun by the libs. But where are our rich people who donate to conservative publishing houses? Start literary awards for good literature? Support writers whose unpopular identities bar them from getting published? Fund art exhibits?
If you donate to a university, you can put your own detail conditions on it. Establish a grant for scholars who study the history of conservatism, who teach the foundations of conservative thought. Everybody is fixated on the movie industry and since that is mega expensive, the conclusion is that you can’t do anything to fund culture. But culture is far beyond movies. Fund historians, intelligence scientists, geneticists. There are many people who can’t get any funding because they can’t tie it to diversity. There’s a professor in Appalachia who is the only person in the country teaching conservative thought in a positive way. Fund him, help him get published. It will cost peanuts.
Libs get results because they are willing to do all this.
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I don’t know about rich people. They’re like a different species.
But when it comes to charitable giving generally, and there have been studies on this, liberals are more likely to give large one-time sums to political causes. Conservatives, on the whole, give more of their wealth to charitable causes, but instead of one fifty-million-dollar endowment where you get a building named for you and some status points, you’re talking about millions of people giving small amounts, regularly, to churches, religious charities, and disaster relief.
It’s not that conservatives don’t donate. It’s that they’re far less likely to attach their names to donations, more likely to spread the money over multiple causes, and have different priorities and ethics WRT charitable giving.
The right has discovered much more recently, the importance of, and the ability to, fund political things. Not in gigantic rich-people philanthropy, but in crowdfunding. Seemed to really hit its stride with Kyle Rittenhouse. Lots of people on the right, for maybe the first time, realized the importance of financial backing for normal people who had run afoul of a left-owned criminal prosecuting apparatus, and came through on it– since then, crowdfunding campaigns have successfully done legal defense funds, practical financial support for people who’ve been hounded out of their jobs by the cancel mobs, and important local and state political campaigns. The “C&C Army” is a brilliant example of this. So… I think the right is coming around, but it can’t be expected to function in the same way.
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Just to tack onto that, look at the musician George Michael. Famous in the 80s, kind of forgettable music, but he made piles of money at it. After his death, it kind of trickled out that in addition to making piles of money, he’d given away quite astonishing amounts of it, and gone to some effort to keep most of that secret.
I don’t think he was any kind of political conservative, but by all accounts a great human being, and that model of charity exemplifies the conservative/religious ideal of charitable giving.
-ethyl
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The pre 1970s capitalism mostly just means the ’50s and ’60s. People have gotten rich off speculative bubbles ever since 17th century Dutch tulips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
I’d say the current era does seem like a new guilded age, with data centers instead of railroads and Aramco instead of Standard Oil. The US economy seems unlikely to collapse, but it’s very concentrated.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2025/10/12/making-sense-of-the-trump-economy-tariffs-interest-rates-and-the-dollar/
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