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Bernie Sanders has been railing against the oligarchy for much, much longer than Donald Trump has been a politician, but I think it’s safe to say that the thing he had in mind when he began warning the country about the formation of an American oligarchy wasn’t exactly what’s taken shape since.
Here he is in 2014 telling ABC News [ [link removed] ], “You have today in America more income and wealth inequality than any time in this country since 1928 and more than any major country in the world. So, you got the top one percent owning 38 percent of the wealth in America. Do you know what the bottom 60 percent own? 2.3 percent. You know what that is? That’s called oligarchy.”
He said basically the same thing on the House floor in 1994 [ [link removed] ]! “I think that the most important trends within our economic system are in fact not honestly addressed or faced and that is that to a very great extent the United States of America today is increasingly becoming an oligarchy. An oligarchy. A nation in which a small number of people control a significant part of our wealth and also control a great deal of the power in our country.”
Here’s a sharper version of the same warning, from an appearance at the Brookings Institution in February 2015 [ [link removed] ].
It appears that one family, the extreme right wing Koch brothers, are prepared to spend more money than either Democratic party or the Republican party in the coming elections. In other words, one family, a family which is worth about $100 billion, may well have a stronger political presence than either of our major parties.
I know that people are not comfortable when I say this. But I want you to take a hard look at what’s going on, take a deep breath, and you tell me whether or not we are looking at a democracy or whether or not we are looking at an oligarchy when you have one family that has more political power than the Democratic Party, than the Republican Party, which can spend unlimited sums of money not only on campaigns, but on think tanks and media, I worry very, very much about the future of democracy in this country.
You don’t hear all that much about the Koch brothers these days—or their dark money spending, or their lavish underwriting of think tanks and pseudo-think tanks. And that speaks to the way Trump represents a break with the status quo ante, or (at the very least) a rapid accelerant and intensifier of something that was barely detectable a decade ago. I think it’s fair to say that Sanders has been spectacularly vindicated in the broad sense, but not in the specific sense.
What he was concerned about, before Trump took over the GOP, was something structurally different than what’s emerged: a combination of economic inequality and unregulated political influence that would result in ideologically or selfishly motivated billionaires buying elections and transforming government it into a marionette show. They and their senators, congressmen, presidents and judges would proscribe industrial regulation, but across industry. They’d crush the tax base and flatten the tax code, but up and down the income spectrum.
That would be bad whether or not you think the right term for it is “oligarchy.” And things were already headed in that direction when Sanders began issuing these warnings. Fifteen years ago, the Rich Guy Community (then centered most densely in and around Wall Street) played an outsized and destructive role in shaping post Great Recession economic policy. They were a big part of the reason why Democrats got fixated on budget deficits rather than stimulus, and why Republicans decided to hold the global economy hostage to a policy of huge social spending cuts and no tax increases. Total lunacy, under the circumstances—but rich guys owned the Republican Party and dominated elite discourse, and so that’s what we got.
Sanders was alarmed and rightly disgusted by, e.g. regulatory capture of the Treasury Department, and that Republican congressional leaders were essentially handmaids of hedge-fund billionaires. But I don’t know that Sanders was particularly worried that, say, Paul Ryan’s buddy Stanley Druckenmiller [ [link removed] ] might spend $500 million to deliver Republicans a governing trifecta, in exchange for Ryan allowing him to write all House legislation, and deliver himself government contracts, and benefit personally from a lawless tariff policy.
That kind of thing required a level of gangsterism unique to Trump.
What we got instead was an exceptionally partisan, criminal oligarchy, much more like the Russian oligarchy than an American “legal corruption” vintage.
I think there’s basically no denying that Elon Musk is an oligarch. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Donald Trump (in apparent violation of campaign-finance law, at times) and now sits above the law and the market. His donations, his control over the social media platform X, and his ability to wield his money and influence as both threat and bribe, bought him a six-month stint as shadow president—a role he apparently abused to steal reams of sensitive data about Americans in order to build his personal wealth and power. He does not fear committing crimes. He does not have to worry about regulation. When he violates the law in ways that destroy the environment in poor communities, the federal government of the United States intervenes on his behalf [ [link removed] ] not just to protect him in this case, but to strip the entire American public of the ability to vindicate their legal right to environmental protection in court. The biggest threat to Musk’s power came when he had a spat with the president and observed that Trump was in the Epstein Files. But the two chose to reconcile rather than embark in a power battle that would leave both men damaged and weaker.
We have an oligarch, ergo we have an oligarchy. But Musk isn’t the only one. The Ellisons are oligarchs. The billionaires and centimillionaires in Trump’s cabinet are oligarchs, largely free to shape policy in their self interest rather than the public interest. Musk’s crew of pathetic yes-men and hangers-on are at least oligarch-ish. Below them, you have centibillionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos who would love to be Trump oligarchs, but are too pathetic (and were too thick, in the past, with liberals) to be invited into the inner circle. They do favors for Trump sycophantically, but get little in return.
Then at the lowest-but-broadest tier, you have the organized-crime culture that the Trump oligarchy has created, or at least allowed to fester. Where super rich people who aren’t part of the inner sanctum buy pardons or business favors; where all of Wall Street says nothing as Trump privatizes and trades on market-moving presidential communication [ [link removed] ] for personal gain, then sells professional investors early access to that insider information so that they can rip off chumps.
What Sanders has been decrying as “oligarchy” for the past several decades still exists below the Trump oligarchy. The old Koch-funded institutions limp along. The aughts-era machinery of political influence is still in place, humming quietly, but poised to snap back into full effect if the Trump regime collapses. And then below that there’s a big population of extremely rich people in America who either aren’t terribly politically active, or contentedly free-ride off their class peers.
I think this taxonomy is important, because, to meet the moment, post-Trump reform will entail serious conflict with the entire class, including those who could credibly plead innocent as to the erosion of democracy in America. And it will be helpful to the political cause to draw fine distinctions.
So let’s try to distinguish between Trump oligarchs; the “oligarchs” Sanders had in mind; and the ultra-wealthy most generally...
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