the right wing, including right wing moderates like Barty, consider any understanding of politics that rest on the wealthy 'specifically engineering' anything whatsoever is inherently conspiratorial.
I think one potentially fruitful approach to take would be the in-between here,
neither that the wealthy engineer reality,
nor that they play no hand in doing so.
One in-between (which would be bordering on theological, again) could be that they try to do so, and that they partially succeed in doing so, but the system is too complex for them to orchestrate its ramifications as robustly as they would want to. However, while the complexity may be too vast to navigate/manipulate, with enough of a platform and enough resources, the tides can be turned. You don't need to reach infinity to exert near total control, you just need to get ahead of the pack.
But the changing of the tides wouldn't be reducible to the intentions and executions of the wealthy. Rather, it would be as if they were
unintentionally, yet
effectively, tapping into some larger energy. Which is how we
work things beyond our reach: partially, indirectly, with gradual mastery.
Sort of how in working a machine you don't understand, your actions are predicated upon vague feelings of what works and what doesn't. That is how we are in relation to our own neuro-machinery, no? Because we don't have an exhaustive and proven systematic understanding of how belief systems work, and how precisely belief systems correlate to materiality, we can only blurrily (perhaps even superstitiously) press buttons that have, in the past, gotten us what we want.
But the gaps are being closed in on, even if they are being supplanted by new gaps - in science, that is, no?