America’s ruling class of millionaires and billionaires has never been more visible or devastatingly powerful. Under President Donald Trump, the wholly unaccountable figures that comprise the American oligarchy are robbing our social services, growing wealthier from unearned government contracts, collaborating with federal agencies to eliminate environmental regulations, and orchestrating the deportation of people who denounce the genocide in Gaza. The oligarchs have also targeted agencies that shield Americans from concentrated wealth. For example, one of Trump’s first acts in office was to paralyze the National Labor Relations Board by firing so many board members that the board no longer had enough people to issue decisions and prevent labor rights violations.
It is tempting to consider the oligarchy’s wrath as an anomaly resulting from the personality quirks and emotional instabilities of specific oligarchs like Elon Musk. Even though men like Musk and Jeff Bezos are especially visible oligarchs, they are not the architects of oligarchy—they are merely its most visible beneficiaries. For decades, capitalists of all stripes have fought to reduce the federal government’s capacity to restrain their accumulation of wealth. Not only have billionaires repeatedly beat the government in these contests of strength, they have run up the score so far that America has entered a second Gilded Age. Our modern reprise of Vanderbilt and Carnegie’s song has all the same lyrics as the original. The verses? Stagnant wages and nonexistent regulation.
Since 1979, per-worker productivity has increased by 86.5 percent while the average hourly wage for production and nonmanagerial employees has increased by just 31.7 percent. The Great Society of the 1960s has given way to a Great Siphon, conveying a rapidly escalating percentage of the fruits of our collective labor into the laps of a select elite. An average member of the bottom 90 percent of workers in 2025 makes about 28 percent more than his 1980 counterpart, adjusted for inflation. In contrast, today’s average member of the top 0.1 percent has a paycheck 465 percent bigger than a top 0.1-percenter from 1980. Years of burgeoning income inequality have caused the share of wealth held by the top 0.1 percent (people worth at least $46.2 million) to nearly double since 1989.
Federal laxity in response to perverse capital accumulation has created similar crises for the average American. Speculators are grabbing unprecedented amounts of arable land for investment purposes while leaving it fallow or buying up cities’ worth of single-family housing and converting it into unaffordable rental property. Corporations laugh at the antitrust protections that left Standard Oil in pieces: Nearly 75 percent of American industries have become more concentrated between 1997 and 2012, meaning that the market is shared by fewer and larger corporations. This concentration creates circumstances where crucial sectors of the economy—like cellular service, domestic flights, and even grocery stores—are dominated by oligopolies, where three companies hold as much as 99 percent of the market share.
Even when legislation is passed to officially constrain corporations from enacting injustice, the unrestrained torrent of corporate influence ensures that, over decades, state capacity declines and the mechanisms by which regulations constrain corporate activity are weakened. The strongest rules end up as paper tigers. Oligarchs have thereby altered the market incentives that drive economic planning under capitalism, warping the economy toward coddling narrow corporate priorities and away from the public interest.
The symbiotic relationship between business and government can be traced to the emergence of new organizations representing corporations. In 1971, former Associate Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell issued a document now known as the Powell Memorandum. To defend business from the growing popularity of leftist anticapitalist movements, Powell advocated for business leaders to unify under large umbrella organizations—such as the Chamber of Commerce—to begin aggressively pursuing legislative contacts, exploiting the judicial system through coordinated pro business legal efforts and vociferously criticizing anti business figures through corporate media channels.
The weaponization of Powell’s methods allowed corporations to buy America. Business leaders began to mobilize, currying favor with legislators, assembling cadres of sympathetic lawyers to litigate opposing entities and legislation, and coordinating a media blitz that pinned the ever-escalating inflation on labor unions and government overreach in the 1970s. Within five years, lobbying from a corporate umbrella organization known as the March Group (later renamed the Business Roundtable) defeated expansions to union picketing and helped end Richard Nixon’s profit-constraining price controls. Within 10 years, Business Roundtable members became Ronald Reagan’s cabinet advisors, sculpting the largest corporate tax cut in American history and paralyzing regulatory bodies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Crucially, organized corporate lobbying dethroned organized labor as the most powerful collective entity in American politics. Private-sector unionization collapsed—and with it, the dues that built union political war chests. Weakened unions meant that less and less of the fruit of American labor ended up as wages for American workers, allowing increasingly wealthy corporations to redouble their investment in warping institutions to their exclusive benefit, which handicaps the federal government’s power to do anything about it.
The pervasive government influence corporations have accumulated after decades of federal negligence are the building blocks of oligarchy. The power that billionaires like Musk now wield out in the open has been thrown around by corporations and their proprietors behind closed doors for over 50 years—and both Democratic and Republican administrations have failed to protect us from it.
The oligarchs have corrupted and hijacked our institutions to create a new Gilded Age. Reclaiming control of our society means returning power over governmental authority back to the representatives of the governed—this playbook ended the first Gilded Age. Legislation like the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts broke up industrial monopolies that made a few oligarchs fantastically wealthy, the 17th Amendment affected forced wealth redistribution through income taxes, and the Federal Reserve centralized monetary policy as a government responsibility.
But the responses that ended the first Gilded Age are insufficient to end the second. The trusts of yore could never pervade the press and rarely overcame unions and the court system. Crushing the modern oligarchy requires two durable protections that cannot be eroded by corporate influence: an expanded right to workplace organizing and an expanded role for the federal government in economic planning through corporate nationalization.
These two decisions act as natural counterweights to the power of oligarchy while benefiting Americans in their dual capacities as workers and consumers. Expanding the right to workplace organizing reduces corporate power by directly extracting concessions from employers. Because much of the oligarchy’s political power stems from the degree to which its wealth and influence embed it in the political system, cultivating groups of countervailing organizations animated by millions of workers will dramatically reduce the political range of motion the oligarchy is afforded. Additionally, expanding the right to strike to include political and solidarity strikes guarantees that if the oligarchy is still able to wield power over the government, employees can withdraw their labor and bring society to a halt.
Moreover, the nationalization of corporations that threaten the public good constitutes the simplest remedy to oligarchy. The government, through existing eminent domain rights, can seize the corporate possessions of billionaires, depose them from corporate boards, and reconstitute the leadership of their corporations. Nationalized business functions according to the priorities of the nation. Skill and innovation are not extinguished, but instead, its fruits are prevented from funding initiatives that wear down the ability of government to represent the priorities of society at large. A Sword of Damocles will hang over the head of every proprietor: Play ball—stop stealing from your workers and breaking the law—or lose control.
The political predicament that we inhabit is not a spontaneous crisis—it is an orgy of concentrated wealth that has been developing for decades. The choice is simple: Either return the rights and wages decades of corporate action have stolen and act decisively against the oligarchs that are skimming fat they did not rend, or sign the final surrender agreement ceding authority over America to a group of billionaires with more broken familial relationships than your average season of Maury. We cannot afford to choose the wrong path.