The US has an oligarchy problem in that capital has slipped the leash of democratic accountability and control.
All of America’s problem flow from this reality. For the Republicans this represents a triumph, driven by large tax reductions for the wealthy and deconstruction of government, and for the Democrats something they would rather not discuss. The political reality is such that when capital comes into conflict with democratic aspirations, capital is supreme, and the rest of it purely perforative theatre. Like I’ve written repeatedly–voting remains useless as long as there aren’t meaningful differences.
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 discredited capital, FDR enacted the New Deal reforms that leashed the wealthy. But they bitterly resented this state of affairs and set out to take back control of our country. Of course, this is nothing new. Democratic control of capital is a Sisyphian task requiring eternal vigilance. At the beginnings of the 20th Century, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”
The 2008 Wall Street Crash should have provided political space to re-leash capital but Barak Obama was installed in the White House precisely to prevent this. Obama is hardly an oddity. The modern Democratic Party has been reengineered to prevent any sort of New Deal response to the capital regime.
But things, as they say, can’t go on forever. The capital regime has produced malign domestic effects, from the extreme inequality, to the monopolies astride our economy, to housing shortages and explosion in homeless Americans, to the burgeoning surveillance state, to the healthcare crisis and deaths of despair. Once the capital enhancing processes of neoliberalism were put in motion, everything inevitably moved in the direction of short-term rent extraction.
There’s also the injurious effects on American foreign policies, where the US has since WWII worked to ensure governments friendly to American capital and opposed to communism remain in power. The dirty little secret is that US foreign policy deters democracy in favor of capital, which is why the CIA overthrows any government that is faintly socialist or indigenously nationalistic, while enthusiastically supporting corrupt dictators.
Even though the corporate media has labored mightily to obscure much of these realities, thanks to Trump, the oligarchical nature of the American state has become impossible to deny. Americans are not happy.
Trump and Republicans are bleeding working-class support for obvious reasons, but the discontent has now spread throughout much of the white-collar workforce too. After decades of neoliberal policies that have undermined workers’ rights and standards of living, employment has now grown more precarious for college graduates and white-collar employees as well. At the same time, wealth has grown ever more concentrated at the very top. These trends have only accelerated in the second Trump era: while America’s billionaires saw their wealth soar by more than 30 percent over the past year, labor’s share of business output fell to its lowest level on record at the end of 2025.
The cost-of-living crisis has progressively worsened over the past two years thanks to Trump’s own harebrained policies, while the GOP’s signature legislative achievement–tax cuts–is perceived by voters as helping the billionaires rather than average Americans. Trump’s overt corruption and clear favoritism toward the wealthy have further alienated many working-class Americans.
Watch closely as the midterms approach. The opposition to the capital regime should be the defining issue and if it isn’t pay particular attention to the lies used to justify the poisonous status quo.
Update: And, no, AI, or super-intelligence, as the Trumpster refers to it, will not fix our oligarchy problem.
Caitlin Johnstone makes the obvious point–“Humanity’s problems are not caused by a lack of intelligence, our problems are caused by greedy plutocrats like Zuckerberg. It’s like a serial killer telling us we can stop serial killing by making serial killers smarter.
We’ve long had the ability to end extreme poverty, to stop destroying our biosphere, to stop waging wars, to stop pillaging the global south at unfair prices, to stop imposing starvation sanctions, to end genocides, to remove money from politics, to institute true democracy, to create a well-informed electorate free from propaganda brainwashing, and to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. This hasn’t failed to happen due to our lack of super-intelligence, it has failed to happen because the people with the power and the money actively stop it from happening.
No amount of added cleverness is going to make plutocrats less greedy, make warmongers less bloodthirsty, make politicians less corrupt, make empire managers less tyrannical, make imperial propagandists less deceitful and manipulative, or make capitalists less exploitative and ecocidal. Give them artificial super-intelligence and they’ll just use it to grab up more money and control, just like they’re doing with the AI of the present day.”
