Bluesky

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Bernie Sanders is harnessing a mood of public anger to mobilize insurgent voters, and elite commentators are rushing to dismiss it as wrongheaded. Last week, Sanders launched a barnstorming tour through a pair of Midwestern swing districts in Nebraska and Iowa. At both stops—in Omaha and Iowa City—the “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies drew overflow crowds, with the opening Omaha event relocated to a bigger venue to accommodate the turnout. 

Yet among our terminally savvy Beltway cognoscenti, a chorus of tutt-tutting took hold. Atlantic writer Jemele Hill promptly fired off a viral X post declaring, “A lot of the people you’re trying to reach don’t know what oligarchy means, certainly not within the context of their everyday life.” Politico published a dispatch suggesting the whole idea was to grant the aging socialist crusader a vanity send-off in the twilight of his career. “A core tenet of Bernieism is that he likes talking to crowds,” a former Sanders aide caviled. “He likes spreading his message, and he likes being adored.” 

The broader contention that America is basically allergic to oligarchy (regardless of how many of us understand the word) has long been catnip to respectable pundits. After President Joe Biden warned of the troubling influence of tech oligarchs in his farewell message, The Economist published an off-the-rack commentary contending that America’s tech monopolists are at odds with one another in a way that more tightly networked conventional oligarchs in Russia and Hungary aren’t, and the resulting scrum for influence dilutes their power, rather than concentrates it. “America’s economy, including its technology industry, is too unwieldy and dynamic to petrify into an actual oligarchy, whatever diplomats and departing presidents say,” the editorial concluded in a gaseous release of agitprop worthy of the University of Chicago Business School.

For his part, The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker offered a twist on such hoary protestations of American exceptionalism, announcing that he welcomes our new MAGA oligarchic overlords, since they so stoutly disown the “unholy ideological trinity” that transfixed the previous leaders of the American social order: “borderless globalism, environmental eschatology and puritan wokery.” He approvingly cites the conversion narrative of one Silicon Valley master of the universe: “In a fascinating interview in the New York Times, Marc Andreessen, who once hunted with the Silicon Valley Democratic hounds but now rides with the Trumpian foxes, explains how growing alarm among technology innovators at the authoritarian and ideologically intolerant tendencies of Democrats has turned him and many tech people against the ancien regime and in favor of the new order.” Yet even Baker is driven to tone down the cheerleading by the end of the column: “I exaggerate about American oligarchy of course. This nation’s genius has always been in its people, who delegate their governing authority to leaders.” 

What’s striking in all this holding-pattern punditry is that the actual people it professes to speak on behalf of not only know the meaning of oligarchy and understand how it affects their everyday lives, but they are also seeking out robust political repudiations of it. In addition to his Midwest tour, Sanders has released a series of videos addressing the oligarchy threat that has netted millions of views. One TikTok primer on the subject has clocked more than 10 million views.

This surge of interest is plainly grounded in the widespread struggle to get by in a political economy that remorselessly redistributes wealth upward and hoards access to affordable housing, education, and healthcare. Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign was on its strongest footing when it addressed such issues head-on with straightforward proposals to rein in wealth inequality—and tanked at precisely the moment that consultants and donors pushed that agenda aside in favor of milksop appeals to bipartisanship and procedural talk of preserving our formal democracy. Rather than being over the head of ordinary Americans, anger toward the oligarchy is a major source of movement energy across the ideological spectrum. Sanders himself recognized as much back in December, when he placed an opinion piece on the oligarchic takeover of our economy at Fox News. And now with Elon Musk—the richest man in the world—amassing power and throttling government operations to serve his own interests in the White House, the popular appeal of an anti-oligarchy movement is reaching new heights. That’s especially the case since the never remotely plausible dividends of the Trumpian economic agenda are failing to materialize.

As for the descriptive salience of the O-word, the naysayers again have things completely backward. Pace The Economist, the lack of close coordination of interests within the oligarchic caste is a feature, not a bug: What’s far more decisive, in advancing the interests of oligarchs, is a prostrate regulatory state—the very thing that Musk and Trump are engineering at warp speed under the counter-constitutional mandate of DOGE. The claim that the word “oligarchy” is somehow too recondite and obscure to land with its intended mass audience is not only refuted by the response to the Sanders tour and video; it’s also disarmed by the MAGA movement’s embrace of the phrase “deep state” as a catch-all term of political demonology. That expression has its origins in the 1960s student left, and later in conspiracy tracts on the Kennedy assassination; it was, if anything, a far more obscurantist and specialized term than oligarchy has ever been. Yet it has been transformed, in both its recognition and fundamental meaning, by politics, as the Trumpian right transformed it into a synonym for the permanent government in Washington—and then into a casus belli for the Elon Musks, Kash Patels, and Pete Hegseths now prosecuting the interests of the oligarchy in plain sight.

This left-to-right migration of key terms and ideas is more than a merely academic proposition. As it happens, when a magazine I formerly edited, The Baffler, stirred back to life after a brief hiatus in 2011, we published a probing essay by Michael Lind on the advancement of oligarchic rule. In it, Lind laid out a prescription for facing down the forces of oligarchy that now reads as a Sanders-esque call to arms:

Today, as in previous eras, a too-feeble government faces an economic oligarchy that can threaten to shut the whole system down if it does not get its way. What else does “too big to fail” mean? The Obama administration has argued that the federal government lacked the manpower and resources to supervise the bankruptcy of major Wall Street funds and other financial institutions.

If the problem is a lack of government capacity and not merely political will, then the solution should be obvious: Create that capacity. The crash of 2008 provided an opportunity to right-size America’s financial regulatory regime, while downsizing and trimming an out-of-control financial industry.

Unfortunately, the capture of the Obama administration and both parties by Wall Street already may have ensured that the political system has missed that opportunity. It is increasingly likely that there will be insufficient reform, followed in time by another debacle—and, perhaps, another opportunity for reform. If the next opportunity is not to be missed as well, then reforms that go to the root of the problem—such as a new Glass-Steagall-style division of retail banking from investment banking and speculation, along with the replacement of revolving doors with firewalls between the financial industry and its regulators—must be at the center of the debate and not on the sidelines.

The essay also cited as a prime instance of the cognitive power of oligarchic influence the remarkable pile-on that the financial press marshaled in response to the breakdown of Goldman Sachs’s central role in the 2008 meltdown that Matt Taibbi published in Rolling Stone. This all seems like a warning signal sent up from a galaxy far, far away—especially because Lind and Taibbi, while prone to their share of ideological idiosyncrasies, are both MAGA fellow travelers today. Yet it should also serve as a reminder that another key feature of oligarchic rule is the domestication of its critics into apologists—and the pillaging not merely of our country’s political economy but also its moral imagination.