Ro Khanna is exactly what Democrats have become, and I mean that as the kind of insult that leads to bar fights.
The Silicon Valley congressman is an optical illusion come to life, a man who appears to be standing on both sides of any cultural or political valley you can identify. Lavishly funded by tech CEOs and venture capitalists, representing a district full of extraordinary wealth, and personally an extremely wealthy man, Tim Cook’s congressman now spends his days denouncing personal wealth and tech billionaires. He’s a member of all the clubs he says he hates. But there’s some evidence that suggests the meaning of his increasingly strange performance.
Before you consider his politics, consider his background. The son of Punjabi immigrants, Khanna grew up in the affluent Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was all the high-status things: high school valedictorian, econ major at the University of Chicago, Yale Law grad, clerk for a circuit court judge, political appointee in the Obama administration, box-checking big law attorney with a side gig at Stanford. He was exactly what the writer Chris Arnade calls a “front row kid,” a credentials-focused urban striver. When you meet people like this at parties, they ask you where you went to school before they decide if they want to talk to you.
When Khanna married, he made one of those alliance-with-the-neighboring-dynasty transactions that aristocrats make. His wedding announcement in The New York Times is a classic of the form, Chicago and Yale marrying Georgetown and Columbia: “Until April, Mrs. Khanna, 36, was a product marketing specialist in New York for Bulgari, the Italian jewelry and accessories company. She graduated from Georgetown and received a master’s in strategic communications from Columbia … The bride’s father is the chairman of Mura Holdings, an investment firm.” We’re getting married, STATUS STATUS STATUS. We have formed a love-bridge between two exceptional sets of credentials, and will now proceed to manufacture high-status progeny.
Marrying a marketing specialist for a luxury jewelry company who was the daughter of the chairman of a an investment firm, Khanna shored up his net worth. Famously, the financial disclosure forms he files as a member of Congress run to the hundreds of pages, because he has to disclose so many assets in so many categories that are held in such complicated ways.
With all that wealth distributed across a long list of investments, Khanna’s stock trading activity is eye-watering. A financial website that tracks congressional trading reports that the Silicon Valley congressman has racked up over $630 million in personal trade volume during his career in elected office.
Now, politics: Khanna is a Bernie Bro, and he’s very angry at rich people.
Take a moment. Just sit with it and let it percolate.
Recall that Bernie Sanders, on the thing he actually, literally called his “No Oligarchy” tour, flew to all his tour dates on private jets, and when confronted about it said what the hell do you want me to do, stand in line at the airport?
This one is also a classic of the form:
The classic group biography of the Old Bolsheviks is titled The House of Government, because that’s the luxurious apartment building on the bank of a river in Moscow where the Soviet elite lived with their maids and cooks and nannies. They weren’t always there, because they also spent a lot of time at their vacation homes. (Until Stalin purged his political rivals by murdering them, and the building kept getting new tenants.)
The gentry socialist ritual of denouncing wealth and status from your seat on a Gulfstream 550 on the way to Davos is a crenellated castle wall that sits behind a moat. It’s a defense mechanism, an “anti-privilege” ritual performed in pursuit of privilege.
So the constant appearance of absolute disingenuousness from Khanna isn’t an accident or a glitch: It’s the thing itself, the routine operation of the front row kid who’s reading from the power-seeking script that says he opposes power. He’s a performer, basically at the cellular level, reciting the demagoguery that Democrats believe to be the tool to victory.
If you have the stomach for it, an early profile of Khanna from the thumb-sucking leftist website Vox accidentally makes all the fakery pretty obvious. It features a bunch of sentences like this one, describing a tool of rich tech bros who publicly declares his fondness for anti-capitalist allies in Congress: “Khanna is walking a delicate path between two sides that are not, in the long term, natural allies.” That’s one way to put it, yes.
I’ll let you read the rest for yourself, because it’ll be like finding diamonds on the ground, but here’s just one more of those descriptions, made in apparent earnestness, about the way Khanna is both one thing and completely the other thing at the very same time: “The origin story is almost too perfect. There are politicians who run to be the establishment and politicians who run to topple the establishment. Khanna, unusually, is both.”
Uh-huh.
If you find yourself sitting near Ro Khanna in an airport, watch your wallet.
