The Job is Not to Defend Democracy, It is to Restore It

Oligarchy is nothing new in America, but the threat to our freedoms is getting worse

If there's one thing I hate on social media it is the I-told-you-so game. But I can't help but note to all those who are celebrating the “revelatory” and “stirring” warning from Joe Biden in his valedictory address about the rise of oligarchs in America, that people have been writing about them and warning about their influence for literally centuries. Or, as one person who follows me on Bluesky wrote, for millennia…since Cicero.

An American oligarchy has been the focus of journalists since the muckrakers. If you want to start with the work of one, may I suggest Ida Tarbell (who was born in 1857) and whose history of Standard Oil was first published in 1904.

If you like presidents who warned of their power, may I suggest you start with Teddy Roosevelt. If you like Supreme Court justices who recognized it, perhaps look to Louis Brandeis. You might find the story of Gen. Smedley Butler entertaining. (Look it up.)

But certainly Eisenhower was warning of something similar when he spoke of the military industrial complex. Since then, especially the aggressive, systematic power grab of the current crowd began 30 or 40 years ago, there have been plenty of book and articles on the subject.

Even marginal characters like, well, me, have written about it. ("Superclass" came out in 2008, "Power, Inc." a history of the power struggle between business and government came out in 2012.) So, yes, be alarmed. But, the answer is not speeches announcing what we already knew.

The answer is new aggressive leadership--a new generation of leaders who are not afraid of embracing progressive ideas and ideals and of fighting not to preserve democracy where it no longer exists, but to restore it. That will take bold ideas. It will take strong leadership.

It will take a willingness to criticize our system, recognize its flaws, understand that companies were originally chartered by governments to serve society and that it is a perversion that they and their owners should somehow be tailoring society to serve them.

It will take a willingness to consider that many other societies understand this problem and have arrived at better more equitable solutions than we have. It will not be easy. But the defense of the interests of the vast majority of us versus that of the few who seek to exploit society is the single most critical job we face as a society. (And failing to stop the incoming crowd who seek to pervert our system to serve a tiny minority among us has been a great failure of many leaders in whom we may have placed great hopes. It is also, of course, a failure of the American people.)

But we cannot begin the work of resisting that change and restoring the ideal of a system that serves society as a whole soon enough.