Back to NewsThe American Oligarchy
THE GIST
The term Oligarchy is being thrown around a lot these days, and while avoiding excited trends can be useful in pulling us all to the table, it’s hard to argue that the term isn’t more appropriate now than ever in discussing the direction of our struggling democracy.
The Oxford Dictionary defines Oligarch as:
noun
- a rulerin an oligarchy.
- a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence (particularly with reference to individuals who benefitedfrom the privatization of state-run industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union).
DISCLAIMER: As a nonpartisan organization dedicated to bringing all Americans together around removing the plague of corporate and billionaire funding from our politics, discussing Oligarchy in this moment is both unavoidable and a dangerous tightrope. For instance, it involves dissecting the hazards of a duly elected president in his hosting of the world’s richest man as his most trusted advisor.
IS THE “OLIGARCHY” THING JUST A PARTISAN BUZZ WORD?
Unfortunately, no. The presence of extreme wealth with very extreme conflicts of interests in our current administration is beyond unprecedented. In every objective analysis, it screams of valid concern for not just a drift, but an about turn into a stage of American oligarchy, through which the very rule of law is already showing strain. As reported by Oxfam, “So far, Trump has 13 billionaires—and counting—in his proposed administration whose total wealth is more than $450 billion. And even without Musk, Trump’s cabinet would be the richest in history.”
Volumes could be written on plot points over the past few decades marking the slow burn to our present predicament regarding the power of extreme individual and corporate wealth over our government today. However, while it might be lazy, it would not be irrational to point exclusively to Musk’s current power in government as all the evidence necessary to prove the concerns about oligarchy to be valid. In spite of shocking conflicts of interest within every department he has attempted to modify or close, the world’s richest man (who arrived at that post largely through massive, taxpayer funded government contracts) now holds the keys to the kingdom, having never run for office.
The hunt for real government waste and fraud is, so far, taking the shape not of careful, calculated surgery performed by elite accountants and economists. Instead, we’ve seen a slash and burn approach with disregard for transparency, data, and the complex, economic ripple effects of removing tens of thousands of Americans from the workforce, without valid explanation, from organizations that just happen to do the work of protecting the average American from the worst instincts of Corporate America.
Beyond Musk, the conflicts of interest within this administration’s cabinet appointees are as alarming as their immense wealth and general lack of expertise, as a group. These facts provide more indication of how much power has been taken by the rich and how much polarization their takeover has caused: with the meaninglessness of today’s congressional cabinet hearings, in which party loyalty now guarantees the confirmation of any nominee regardless of experience or conflict, we’ve seen the destruction of yet another check and balance intended to ensure that key roles in government are filled by strictly nonpartisan experts in their fields.
Sadly, the buzz around the word oligarchy is more than justified.
WHAT’S THE BACK STORY?
Well, while we’re hearing the term now more than ever, unbiased experts from around the world have been increasingly referring to the U.S. as a country drifting toward “oligarchy” for some time. Already in 2014, in his world-renowned book Capitalism in the 21st Century, economist Thomas Picketty warned that in America “the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism.”
In his review of Picketty’s book, economist Paul Krugman explains the reason for this by pointing out that 6 of the 10 richest people in America inherited their wealth, and that the GOP leaders of the time were already committed to protecting and expanding their power, as evidenced in then House Speaker Paul Ryan’s income tax road map which aimed to eliminate tax on dividends, interest, capital gains and estates. “Under this plan,” Krugman explains, “someone living solely off inherited wealth would have owed no federal taxes at all.”
In other words, according to leading economists, by 2014 our elected politicians had already abandoned the priority of protecting and enriching the majority or using policy to fuel financial equity over doing the bidding of an increasingly powerful, increasingly small number of elites. That is, by definition, an oligarchy.
“Why is this happening,” Krugman continues. “Great wealth buys great political influence — and not just through campaign contributions. Many conservatives live inside an intellectual bubble of think tanks and captive media that is ultimately financed by a handful of mega donors. Not surprisingly, those inside the bubble tend to assume, instinctively, that what is good for oligarchs is good for America.”
In a July 30, 2015 interview with Thom Hartmann, former President Jimmy Carter said this in discussion of the Supreme Court allowing unlimited money in politics:
“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members.
So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. …
The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody who’s already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an avid contributor than somebody who’s just a challenger.”
In short…the warnings and signs of this shift are not new.
WHO’S TO BLAME!?
A great deal of time could be spent discussing which party has done more to bring about the age of extreme financial inequity and the extreme takeover of government by our country’s wealthy elite over the past 40-50 years. It is fair to say that the disastrous Citizens United ruling of 2010, which gives corporations and special interest groups the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns without disclosure, was designed and executed almost exclusively by conservatives. It is also fair to say that this reversal of century-old campaign finance restrictions is largely to blame for the explosion of dark money in our elections over the past 15 years.
But the blame should extend to both sides of the aisle. Even at times when Democrats have held the Whitehouse and both houses of Congress, no significant legislation was passed regarding increased taxing of the rich, changes in campaign finance, changes to fundraising obligations, or significant changes to the ways in the which members of Congress enrich themselves through insider stock trading and leaving office for lucrative lobbying contracts at the very companies who funded their elections. Adding more political parties to better reflect the real nuances of our voting public, implementing ranked choice voting, eliminating the electoral college, and making federal election days a national holiday are barely discussed by either party, and are examples of tools used by those democracies ranking higher than our own globally. In casting blame it is also important to note that virtually all members of congress from both parties take corporate and super PAC money either during or after their campaigns, making them vulnerable to influence.
Many economists also blame the failure of the Obama administration to adequately punish banks and properly manage the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Erik Sherman, a senior contributor to Forbes wrote in 2019 “The actions taken by central bankers—which doesn’t seem to have done what they initially said they wanted to do, which was to get more money invested and in circulation—had the effect of shifting increased wealth from those who had the least to those who had the most, increasing income inequality.”
A SMOKESCREEN FANNED BY LIES
However shameful the near total sell out of state and federal leaders to big corporate and billionaire influence has been, it is to some degree an age-old tale of those with a little power succumbing to the temptations of greater power and greed, over the virtues of actual civil service. What may be more difficult to understand is the ease with which those in power- both the uber rich and our bought and sold politicians- have convinced many of us voters that America’s blatant shift away from democracy toward something closer to oligarchy is either not happening, or isn’t that bad an idea.
The running excuse for giving the reins of government oversight to an unelected official is the stance that rampant government fraud and waste must be weeded out. Yet by all data driven accounts and testimony thus far, what waste there is to clean up in government has not been accurately pinpointed and largely does not exist in the organizations being targeted by Musk.
In a recent PBS interview, Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at George Washington University stated “Nothing they have identified is, to my knowledge, evidence of ‘fraud’ or ‘corruption.’ Fraud and corruption are crimes. This administration simply has different spending priorities than the last administration. But to label all of it as fraud or corruption is extremely misleading.”
In a recent 60 Minutes interview, conservative Republican Andrew Natsios stated “We are creating a system that violates the separation of powers, and the checks and balances that are intended in the constitution.” When asked why he feels Republicans in Congress aren’t speaking up, Natsios replied “Musk has said that he would spend 100 Million dollars on primaries on anybody who opposed the president on anything. So, I think there’s a lot of fear in [Washington] right now…I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but it does appear we may be headed toward some sort of a constitutional crisis.”
What Natsios is describing is the textbook definition of how an oligarchy works- the elite rich control government directly through their personal wealth and influence. The voice of the people be damned.
The former U.S. administrator of USAID under George W. Bush, Natsios said of claims of rampant waste at the organization: ”It’s utter nonsense. The most accountable aid agency in the world is USAID…every line item in the USAID is approved by three different bodies, the F office, the OMB, and the Congressional Oversight Committee, of which there are four. No one caught all these [alleged] horrible abuses? That’s just not believable.”
Like any massive governmental body, there are always instances of fraud and waste to be tracked down in the U.S. government. However, general claims of a lack of government transparency in spending by Musk and the Trump administration fly in the face of reality: with websites such as https://www.usaspending.gov/, accessible to anyone with an internet connection, the broad strokes of government spending have never been more transparent.
Ironically, the very product (the internet) which brought us the most transparent federal budget in history has also allowed bad actors to dupe our population into believing the opposite. A greater irony still is that the world’s richest man, largely through a communication platform he paid $44 billion to own (X, formerly Twitter), has duped us into allowing him to erase food and aid to the world’s poorest people.
SO…HOW CLOSE ARE WE TO REAL COLLAPSE?
Because we’ve really never been here before, we should all be a little suspicious of anyone claiming to have an answer to that question. As usual, the best place to look to in uncharted territory is history.
In the recent study Frontiers in Political Science, Gary Feinman, the MacArthur curator of anthropology at Chicago’s Field Museum, and Richard Blanton, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Purdue University, researched common contributing factors to the demise of the best governments of pre-electoral history. “[In the study] we refer to an inexplicable failure of the principal leadership to uphold values and norms that had long guided the actions of previous leaders, followed by a subsequent loss of citizen confidence in the leadership and government and collapse,” says Blanton.
The study and its authors cite issues like gross inequality, failing infrastructure, evasion of taxation by the powerful, a concentration of political power, a decline in public services, and the diminishment of bureaucratic institutions as ways in which struggling democracies today mimic the failed, great democracies of the past in their last, dying breaths.
“What I see around me feels like what I’ve observed in studying the deep histories of other world regions, and now I’m living it in my own life,” says Feinman. “It’s sort of like Groundhog Day for archaeologists and historians.”
WHAT CAN I DO?
No one flees a well-functioning democracy for authoritarian or oligarchical states such as North Korea, Russia, China, or Hungary. Regardless of who you vote for or admire, if you would prefer to preserve and bolster our core values of individual freedoms, the rule of law, and equal say in government, you certainly won’t be doing anything but good by contacting your representation in state and federal congress to make it clear that you will not stand idly by while the billionaire class removes what’s left of the power of your vote.