How Oligarchy Works: Who Wins, Who Loses?

How Oligarchy works to turn power over to billionaires and leave you behind…

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters. — President Grover Cleveland

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. — President Theodore Roosevelt

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

President Musk and his sidekick Donald Trump are demanding that Republicans in the House and Senate cut funding to numerous programs that help average Americans (including food, medical, and even child cancer research) and raise the debt ceiling to pave the way for the federal government to borrow another $5 trillion to hand to billionaires in the form of more tax cuts.

You won’t hear about what they’re doing, or how we and our children will pay for it, on billionaire Murdoch-family-owned Fox “News,” of course, nor on billionaire-owned rightwing radio stations, or from podcasts supported by billionaires. But that’s exactly what’s happening and it’s no secret.

This is called oligarchy, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class. It’s a very different form of government from democracy, which is what most Americans believe we still have.

In a democracy, the people elect representatives who then execute laws, systems, and policies that reflect the people’s needs and wants.

It was that way in America in the 1930s-1980s era when we got the right to unionize, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nearly-free college, the Environmental Protection Agency, and dozens of other programs and policies beloved by working class people.

And democracy is still what most Americans want. For example, 2023 polling by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that Americans’ top priorities for government for 2024 were:

1. Increased infrastructure spending — 83% support funding for roads, bridges, and ports.

2. Tuition-free community college — 81% support a federal program providing two years of free tuition.

3. Maintaining or increasing Social Security benefits — 79% believe Social Security benefits should not be reduced.

4. Tuition-free four-year public college for families earning below $125,000 — 72% support this proposal.

5. Government-ensured health care coverage — 62% believe the government is responsible for ensuring health care coverage.

6. Increased spending on education — Approximately 60% say the government spends too little on education.

7. Increased spending on assistance to the poor — Approximately 60% say the government spends too little on assistance to the poor.

8. Increased support for Medicare — Approximately 60% say the government spends too little on Medicare.

9. Increased spending on Social Security — Approximately 60% say the government spends too little on Social Security.

10. Increased child care assistance — Over 50% say the government spends too little on child care.

11. Increased federal spending on drug rehabilitation — Over 50% say the government spends too little on drug rehabilitation.

12. Increased federal spending on the environment — Over 50% say the government spends too little on the environment.

This list broadly lines up with the priorities of the Democratic Party (and some of the accomplishments of the Biden administration), so it’s reasonable to say that’s the “party of democracy.” Democrats generally do what the majority of the people want.

But when you examine the top legislative priorities of the GOP, based on the legislation they’ve proposed and/or passed at the federal and state level, you see an entirely different priority list which shows the Republican Party’s exclusive embrace of the goals of big corporations and the morbidly rich.

This is, quite simply, an oligarchic agenda with little support among the general population:

1. Tax Cuts for billionaires and giant corporations — Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017: This significant legislation overhauled the tax code, reducing corporate tax rates and altering individual tax brackets.

2. Extending billionaires’ tax cuts after 2025 — Republicans have prioritized extending provisions from the 2017 tax cuts set to expire at the end of 2025.

3. Deregulation of environmental, financial, and food safety protections for average Americans to increase corporate profits — Example: Financial CHOICE Act: Passed by the House in 2017, aimed to roll back aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act, reducing regulations on financial institutions. Republicans cut back environmental protections by a crippling 39% during the last Trump administration, and tried to force through massive cuts to the FDA and IRS.

4. Repealing Obamacare and cutting access to Medicaid to increase health insurance company profits— Affordable Care Act (ACA) Repeal Efforts: Republicans have repeatedly attempted to repeal the ACA, though comprehensive repeal efforts did not succeed thanks to Senator John McCain.

5. Building a wall on the Mexican border and increasing deportations — Border Security Measures: Republicans have consistently advocated for increased funding for border security, including the construction of a border wall and stricter immigration enforcement.

6. Hundreds of billions more for defense contractors and private prisons — National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAA): Republicans have also supported increased defense spending and massive appropriations for private, for-profit prisons.

7. Voter suppression and gerrymandering for political gain — Voting Regulations: Republican-led state legislatures have enacted laws making voting harder, fine-tuning gerrymandering, and purging tens of millions of Americans from voting rolls in the years prior to major elections including 2024.

8. Criminalizing abortion — Abortion Legislation: most states with Republican majorities have passed laws imposing restrictions on abortion access and criminalizing getting an abortion, helping a person get an abortion, or even advising people about how or where to find a healthcare provider offering abortion. Republicans in several states are now promoting “personhood” legislation, which would mean women getting abortions could be charged with murder and in some states face the death penalty.

9. Preemption laws — These laws are typically imposed on Blue cities in Red states outlawing their ability to raise their minimum wages, have their own stricter environmental rules, tighten gun control laws, or protect women seeking healthcare.

This transition from democracy to an authoritarian form of oligarchy in America was largely facilitated by rightwing billionaires funding a decades-long effort to seize control of the US Supreme Court and then send test cases to their captive Court to get the results they want.

The most important of these began with the Buckley case in 1976 when the Court ruled that billionaires could spend unlimited amounts of their own money on their own elections (which is why Republicans often recruit really rich people like Rick Scott to run for office), and that billionaires giving massive amounts of money to political campaigns in exchange for loyalty and favors wasn’t any longer considered bribery but, instead, merely First Amendment-protected “free speech.”

Two years later came the Bellotti decision, authored by Lewis Powell himself, in a 5-4 decision with every Republican appointee voting yes and every Democratic appointee voting no. In Bellotti, Powell wrote that corporations are “persons” for purposes of the Bill of Rights and thus entitled to human rights protections, including the ability to contribute to political campaigns just like those rights given human billionaires in Buckley.

The coup de grâce came in 2010 with the 5-4 all-Republican Citizens United decision, finally overturning most of the last of the good government laws passed since the 1890s (see Grover Cleveland above) to limit the power of big money in elections. It created PACs and SuperPACs, allowing, for example, Elon Musk to throw over $277 million into the 2024 election to successfully buy the White House for himself and Donald Trump.

So, here we are.

As I’ve noted before, the biggest problem with oligarchy is that it’s a transitional form of government. Because oligarchy’s obscene level of corruption eventually arouses outrage among the citizenry, it’s either turned back into democracy — as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s — or turns into full-blown tyranny (Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, etc.), as Trump, Musk, and Vance seem to be promising for America now.

The main weapon oligarchs use to convert democracy to oligarchy is political money, which is why big money must be stripped out of the political process if democracy is to survive. America is the only developed nation in the world where virtually unlimited money can purchase both elections and politicians.

The billionaires who brought us to this point clearly hope we won’t be able to stop them from carpet-bombing us with their money and the advertising and social media trolls it can buy. And the next two years will be very, very difficult in this regard.

But if America is to survive as a republic — and return being to a nation where the will of the majority of voters is turned into law and policy as it was in the 1930s-1980s era — we must get big money out of politics.

Congress has the power to overrule the Supreme Court in this regard, so it’s imperative we all remain engaged in the political process, speak out, and wake people up to what’s going on so we can vote out the oligarchs in 2026 and return America to democracy in 2028.

The consequences if we fail are unthinkable.

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here.