Commentary: The enemy of my enemy is a billionaire. Get over it

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As soon as enough votes were counted to officially knock Tom Steyer out of the California governor’s race, the anti-billionaire schadenfreude kicked in.Social media and legacy media, conservative and liberal, all seemed to have a rare melding of the minds, delivering endless variations of, “How dare he try to buy elected office! We showed him.” “I hope you received the message from California that a power-hungry communist billionaire cannot buy the state!” wrote one detractor on social media.“How much money did you waste spamming Californians? Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars you wasted?”“What a waste,” screamed a New York Times headline, slamming Steyer for not donating that money directly to building houses or funding Planned Parenthood — one-off actions that prop up broken systems instead of changing them.

I get it.Business SpaceX shares rose 19% in the first day of trading Friday after the rocket company’s historic IPO.In an age when income inequality is reaching serf-lord levels, hating the rich seems easy and reasonable.

You could take several zeros off the $200 million Steyer spent on his campaign and it would still be more than most of us make in a lifetime.That’s a rage-inducing reality for many, if not most of us, for whom pairing a full tank of gas with a restaurant dinner seems like careless luxury these days.

I’m not here to defend the nine-zeroes class.But maybe we should take a beat and make sure our outrage is working for us, not against us.

While Steyer has spent the last few months advocating for universal healthcare, better pay and protections for workers, and putting curbs on out-of-control corporations from the energy sector to AI, other billionaires have spent that time actively undermining democracy and our financial system.Heck, some even seem to be undermining humanity.

Why aren’t we raging at them?Take,...