Trump’s America isn’t an oligarchy: it’s much worse than that

When faced with the shock of the new, men and women reach for the familiarity of the old. The alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, which is to say between the most powerful man in the world as of next January and the richest man in the world as of today, has liberals reaching for the most damning label they can find – “oligarchy”.

The billionaires have taken over. They have bought the political system and the media and now they will run society in their interests. Explaining the ills of the world as a plot by the rich is immensely appealing – and not only on today’s political left.

“Everywhere do I perceive a certain conspiracy of rich men, who, on the pretence of managing the commonwealth, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible,” said Sir Thomas More in his Utopia of 1516. He might have been writing about the United States in 2024.

For More’s “certain conspiracy of rich men” has always had a disproportionate influence in US politics. The claim now is that an oligarchy is in place. Vox, a US news site, said that Musk was showing the American superrich a brazen alternative to their traditional attempts to manipulate politicians in private. There was no need for discretion now that Trump was giving billionaires a seat at the table.

Vox quoted Jeffrey A. Winters, a professor who researches inequality, saying that we were now in an era of shameless “in-your-face” oligarchy. Twenty years ago, it was a challenge to get his students to understand that there were oligarchs in the US. “Today, I have a very hard time getting students to accept the idea that there’s democracy’”

Winters was repeating received wisdom. Musk and Trump show that an “oligarchy is taking hold in American democracy,” says Oxfam. “Trump’s next term could see America’s first true oligarchs arrive,” says Gary Kasparov. A “corrupt cabal of billionaires” is threatening to create a “Trumpist oligarchy,” warns a writer for the Atlantic. I could go on. The Financial Times repeatedly describes the US as an oligarchy, as does every other serious liberal outlet.

It’s not that they are wholly wrong. In egalitarian times, the wealthy hide their riches for fear of provoking the peasants into burning their chateaux and the proletariat from slinging ropes over lampposts.

Now, as Prof Winters says, we must not only endure their conspicuous consumption of luxury goods but also their conspicuous domination of politics, as exemplified by Musk giving the Trump campaign a quarter of a billion dollars and receiving government posts and contracts in return.

But denunciations of an American oligarchy are neither politically useful nor true. Trump is not a representative of an oligarchy any more than Vladimir Putin is. He is far more dangerous than that.

As it is always best to understand rather than hate you enemies, seeing them clearly matters.

Let me deal with the dubious propaganda value of the insult first. I doubt if Musk or Trump are remotely troubled by the cries of “oligarch,” assuming they take any notice at all. They base their appeal on their supposed brilliance as business leaders. (A justifiable boast in the case of Musk, to be fair.) Meanwhile Trump poses as a master deal maker.

Their admirers love them for it, and believe that, if they can run a successful business, they can run a successful state.

Because they come from actual businesses and not business-as-usual politics, they are seen as outsiders who can challenge a discredited elite.

They are tough guys who will look after you just as they looked after themselves. They will stand up to foreigners and stop them from ripping off Americans. And they will stand up to liberals, too, when they say your kid must be discriminated against because he’s white, or that you must suffer if you deny that a man can become a woman.

Do progressives not know this? After all we have been through since 2016, do people on the centre-left still think it good enough to point their fingers at the superrich and bellow about their wealth?

They would do better to describe the world accurately. Real oligarchies do not produce leaders like Trump, Putin or Orban.

Oligarchy means the “rule of the few”, it comes from the Ancient Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía), and as Aristotle said, the few were always the rich.

Naturally, they kept a wary eye on the lower orders. But true oligarchs keep even warier eyes on each other for fear that one of their number would establish himself as a king or a tyrant. The ancient historian Matthew Simonton says in his Classical Greek Oligarchy, that oligarchs prevented extravagant displays of their wealth that might impress the gullible masses into lining up behind a showy leader, and used secret ballots and consensus building practices to keep the ruling elite united.

The aristocratic families that formed the oligarchy which governed the Venetian republic were very careful to keep Doge under control. “He had no executive, legislative or decision-making power, nor was he allowed to perform any governmental function on his own.” Hardly a Trump-like figure, then.

Incidentally, the Venetian Republic called itself La Serenissima ("The Most Serene"). Not even its few remaining admirers would describe the American republic as “serene”.

There’s a fair case for saying Georgian England with its dominant aristocracy and rotten boroughs was an oligarchy. Its great Whig magnates nevertheless believed that they were the true defenders of liberty against the ever-present threat of an overpowerful monarch.

The dangers of misreading the world is in front of our eyes in the killing fields of Ukraine. We used to call Roman Abramovich and the other Russian billionaires “oligarchs”. This was not just an overheated cliché for journalists. After the invasion of Ukraine, western governments placed sanctions on the oligarchs in the belief that they would push the Russian rich into restraining or overthrowing Putin.

But the supposed oligarchs had no hold over Putin. Russia is not an oligarchy, and Putin had asserted his control over the rich when he jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003 and stole his Yukos oil conglomerate.

Neo-liberals as much as leftists need to understand that politics can always supersede economics.

A focus on the corruption of the Russian economy and its concentration of wealth missed how Putin and the security elite were driven by motives that had nothing to do with money: greater Russian chauvinism, stab-in-the-back myths, and delusions of imperial grandeur.

Trump is a figure Aristotle would have recognized, He is not an oligarch, but a demagogue. However rich Elon Musk is, Trump can dispose of him if they fall out. He has the power, just as Putin has the power in Russia. There is no American oligarchy to restrain him as the Venetian aristocracy restrained the Doge.

Trump is surely proving my point right now as he lines up his creatures to take personal control of the coercive arm of the American state. No real oligarchy would tolerate that.

To beat him and all he represents, Americans must first understand who he is and what they are up against before Trump forces them to learn the hard way.

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