What Guilfoyle was asking for was $100,000, which she needed to pay off a credit card bill, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express.” In the next message she just wrote “Please.”

Eric was Eric Deters, a Trump donor who made his money as co-owner of a pizza chain called Snappy Tomato and had become a right-wing talk radio host (he denies sending her the money). Guilfoyle was the former Fox News host and ex-fiancée of Donald Jr, the president’s eldest son. The pair had broken up in 2024, but Guilfoyle remained close to the family; at the time of the text messages Guilfoyle (who had previously been married to Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom, make of that what you will) was preparing for her confirmation hearing to become the US ambassador to Greece.

Deters, a long-time Trump donor, had already promised to pay Guilfoyle $300,000 in “speaking fees.” If the messages are authentic, and Guilfoyle has disputed their accuracy, they paint a remarkable picture of the cash-for-access culture surrounding the Trump administration. Indeed, this is practically the dictionary definition of corruption: Guilfoyle was allegedly directly offering access for cash. “I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” Guilfoyle told Deters, by Deters’ account, as she begged for cash.

And Guilfoyle is really just the tip of the fatberg of profiteering that Trump has enabled and even encouraged through his second term; indeed by the standards of Trump’s inner circle, a mere six-figure sum counts as a fairly contemptible return. It is Trump and his family who are truly raking it in — and the numbers and methods they’re using are extraordinary.

***

At the core of the schemes is often the president himself. Take the case of Nvidia. On April 15th, 2025, Trump posted “big and exciting news” on his social media platform, TruthSocial. The technology company had committed “500 BILLION DOLLARS” to build  “A.I. SUPERCOMPUTERS” in the United States, “EXCLUSIVELY”. The White House later added in an official statement that this was the “Trump Effect in action”. Trump had employed a signature mixture of hospitality — he had invited Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang to dine at Mar-a-Lago earlier in the month — and hostility, waving the threat of tariffs if Nvidia continued to make its graphic processing units in Taiwan. And it had apparently worked.

It wouldn’t be the only time he took an intense interest in Nvidia over the course of the year. In August, Trump overruled US Government security restrictions to allow Nvidia to sell its chips in China. There followed more posts, more closed-door meetings, multiple calls and surprise public appearances with Huang, whose business was meanwhile flourishing. By the end of 2025 Nvidia’s stock price had more than doubled, from $94-a-share in April to $188. Today, it is $225.

It is surely pure coincidence, then, that Donald Trump owned up to $58 million of Nvidia shares at the start of 2025 and bought up to $68 million more according to an UnHerd analysis of his financial documents. The purchases were made through investment accounts that the Trump Organization says are independently managed by third-party financial institutions, with neither Trump, his family nor the organisation involved in selecting individual investments. (The disclosure documents present a range rather than exact figures, and the above figures are based on the maximum; if we take the absolute minimum end of the range, according to our analysis, Trump entered the year owning $12.5 million of Nvidia shares and bought just over $17 million more. So the actual number is somewhere between these two.)

Similarly, Trump purchased up to $11 million of Tesla stock in 2025, and promoted the company on many occasions, even calling its cars “beautiful” — quite the endorsement. Indeed, the list of companies Trump has bought stock in, and which Trump has also posted about and/or given government contracts to includes: Intel, the clothing company American Eagle, Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Comcast, Meta, Apple, US Steel, and Dell, among dozens of others. Except the President’s representiatives insist there is no conflict of interest here. All the investments are managed without the president’s input or knowledge — and when have they ever lied to us?

Further reading

Trump was never the one

By Sohrab Ahmari

Trump’s disclosure documents reveal that he made more than 21,000 stock trades in 2025 — so separating the signal from the noise is practically impossible. But unlike presidents who have placed their assets in blind trusts or other arrangements to manage potential conflicts of interest — Jimmy Carter, for instance, placed his peanut farm in a blind trust — Trump has retained ownership of his investments while allowing his sons to continue running the family business. As he told the New York Times in January: “I let my kids, you know, do business.” They retain their own business interests and access to their father and members of his administration, while operating in sectors affected by government policy. The question is whether the family’s overlapping financial and political interests create conflicts that existing safeguards are ill-equipped to address.

Then there’s the Trump Organization, which Eric and Don Jr run. This is the part of the president’s tangled business empire that does things like license the Trump name to products, meaning the presidency itself provides a useful extra source of revenue. There are Trump sneakers ($299), Trump watches (ranging from $499 to $100,000), Trump guitars ($1,250 or $10,000 for the optional “autographed” model). There is even a Trump Bible. These licensing deals are hugely profitable. Trump’s “Save America” coffee-table book alone netted the then-candidate $3 million in royalties. Putting his name on all these shoes, perfumes, watches, books and so on has netted Trump more than $10 million.

All of this activity has made many of those within Trump’s inner circle extremely wealthy in the last couple of years. Trump has learned from his first spell in office, when he dropped significantly down the Forbes 400 rich list. The financial disclosure document for the year before Trump became president for the second time ran to 234 pages and showed $622 million in earnings. The equivalent document for his first year in office runs to 927 pages. It shows that the president reported more than $2.2 billion in his first year in office.

In December last year, Forbes published an admiring article about how Don Jr’s fortune had increased sixfold to $300 million in just one year, “the kind of fortune that would make his father proud.” Eric fared even better: he had “supersized” his fortune ten times to $400 million (again, according to Forbes), supplementing his stock trades with investments in cryptocurrencies. “Donald Trump has offered a masterclass in turning political fame into personal fortune,” ran the glowing report.

All of this is “on a scale that has never happened before in American history,” says Claire Finkelstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Something quite similar has, however, happened in the Russian Federation in recent years, where Vladimir Putin has used his presidency to accumulate vast personal wealth — and has meanwhile buttressed his political power by ensuring the oligarchs around him are larded with cash too. “Trump has basically hung a for sale sign outside of the Oval Office and said: ‘You can have dealings with me, and I will give you attention if you pay me in some fashion, or allow me to establish a golf course in your country, or otherwise benefit my interests’,” says Finkelstein. “And that means that American diplomacy is basically for sale.”

As if to underscore the growing convergence between the Russian and American modes of government, a ProPublica investigation recently revealed that Don Jr’s wedding, held across two private islands in the Bahamas this May, had been part-funded by a Russian oligarch called Umar Kremlev to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Kremlev is a close member of Putin’s inner circle with a wide range of business interests. He runs the Russian boxing governing body IBA, and is involved with companies that have a near-monopoly on the Russian gambling industry, including the national lottery. And there he is, peeping out of the wedding photos, directly behind the son of the President of the United States — along with a group of other Russians whose presence reportedly mystified the other guests.

And as we have seen this week with Don Jr’s former fiancée Guilfoyle, behind closed doors the relationship between Trump family members and their friends is often explicit in its bare-faced cash-for-access stance. One term for this is kleptocracy — a mode of government in which the prime motivation of those in power is personal enrichment. Another term is state capture. This is when a narrow interest group takes control, dictates the rules and the way they’re implemented, neuters the institutions that are supposed to hold them to account —  and use all of these diverse mechanisms to award themselves privileges and advantages.

“ In some ways it’s a very familiar pattern,” says Elizabeth David-Barrett, professor of governance and integrity at the University of Sussex. “It’s something that we’ve seen in quite a few countries around the world.” The advance of state capture in the US is more shocking, however: “Because it’s the US, because it is faster than anywhere else, and because it is more blatant and open than anywhere else.”

Trump appears to be placing the enrichment of his family as high on his priority list as making America great again. Asked in January why he is allowing all this conflict of interest, Trump straight-out said: “because I found out that nobody cared.”

***

For those who do care, Don Jr, Trump’s eldest son – Kimberly Guilfoyle’s ex-fiance – is a good place to start. In addition to the work he performs with the Trump Organization, Don Jr is works with a firm called 1789 Capital Management, which was founded by Omeed Malik in 2022 to specialize in “anti-woke” investments. Don Jr joined as a partner two years later.

“ 1789 Capital has made remarkable investments in companies that then suddenly get beautiful contracts,” says Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, the CEO of grassroots government accountability group RepresentUs. She points to August 2025, when 1789 made a big investment in Vulcan, a small North Carolina-based startup that manufactures advanced magnets. Three months later, Vulcan received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon.

According to the Financial Times, other companies owned by 1789 Capital that benefited from large government contracts have included BlinkRX, a pharmaceutical distributor in which 1789 has a stake (Don Jr also sits on its board). BlinkRX benefited directly from Trump’s October “TrumpRX” executive order opening up prescription drug direct-to-consumer sales.

In August 2025, 1789 invested in the online betting platform Polymarket, with Don Jr once again also joining the company as an advisor. It was an odd choice, given that Polymarket had been barred from operating in the US in 2022 by the Commodity Future Trading Commission (CFTC) — and that Don Jr was already operating as an advisor to Kalshi, Polymarket’s main competitor. Just eight days after his appointment was announced, CFTC staff issued a no-action letter that helped clear the way for Polymarket’s return to the US market, via an exchange it had acquired. With the rules on political betting loosened, both Polymarket and Kalshi duly exploded in value. In August 2026, 1789 Capital led a $1 billion funding round for Polymarket which valued the company at $21 billion.

Don Jr holds other personal investments too, though he is not required to release details about them so we have no idea of their total scale. We only see it in glimpses, like when a small drone company called Unusual Machines revealed in a securities disclosure that Don Jr held a $4m stake.

Meanwhile, Don Jr was brought into Unusual Machines as a paid advisor, a couple of weeks after Trump’s election victory in November 2024. Less than a year later, in October 2025, the company announced it had won its biggest contract yet with the Department of Defense. Though the exact amount hasn’t been made public, “ there is a pattern of Don Jr getting very wealthy off regulatory decisions and contracting that is in his father’s control, right?” Sanchez-Moreno says.

Then there’s Eric Trump. Like his older brother, Eric has never had any notable successes independent of his father, preferring to operate either within the Trump Organization or close to the US Government when his father happens to be in charge. In this, however, he has demonstrated astonishing acumen. In April 2026, Eric was telling Fox News that Foundation Industries, for which he is an investor and chief strategic advisor, had just signed $24 million worth of contracts with the Department of Defense to build humanoid war-robots.

Otherwise Eric and Don Jr have a lot of ventures in common. Following Trump’s reelection, Don Jr and Eric were both involved in signing real estate deals on behalf of the Trump Organization. One of these involved licensing a Saudi real-estate company called Dar Al Arkan to build half a dozen Trump-branded hotels, residences, golf courses, and more across the Gulf and other places like the Maldives, netting tens of millions of dollars. (Dar Al Arkan is linked to crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, a close professional associate of Don Jr and Eric’s brother-in-law, Jared Kushner).

In February 2025, it was announced that Eric and Don Jr had bought stakes in a private equity firm called Dominari Capital which they were also advising. Dominari helped set up the cryptocurrency mining company American Bitcoin, which went public in September 2025 at a valuation that made Eric’s stake worth almost half a billion dollars (Don Jr’s stake isn’t known).

Because of the nature of cryptocurrencies, the true amount that the Trump family has made from them will likely never be known. The Center for American Progress tracks Trump’s total crypto earnings to the present day at around $2.4 billion, including $636 million from the Trump memecoin $TRUMP. Melania Trump also made $6 million from the sale of NFTs — “non-fungible tokens,” essentially individualized memes linked to a cryptocurrency unit — in her husband’s first year in office.

The Trump family also has a large stake in World Liberty Financial, Inc, the company behind a “stablecoin” pegged to the US dollar, from which they earn interest, estimated at $59 million. In January 2025, an Emirati company backed by a senior royal and government figure (Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of UAE president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the country’s national security chief) signed a deal with Eric Trump to purchase a 49% stake in World Liberty for half a billion dollars. This netted a reported $187 million for Trump family entities. A few weeks later, the Wall Street Journal noted, the Trump administration approved a controversial deal to export AI chips to the UAE. In October 2025 Trump also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, a large partner in World Liberty Financial.

Like stocks, cryptocurrencies are a confidence business. When one of the Trumps boosts it, confidence — and therefore the price – goes up. An investment firm based in Abu Dhabi has bought $2 billion in World Liberty stablecoins. And cryptocurrency companies have rewarded Trump’s support of the industry by donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign super-PAC.

***

And what of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner? Finkelstein points to the $400 million Boeing 747 that Qatar gifted Trump in 2025 as an example of the sorts of dividends that his selfless work in the Middle East is reaping. (Albeit the luxury jet would be “a counterintelligence nightmare”.)

Kushner, who served in Trump’s first term as Middle East adviser, founded a private equity firm called Affinity Partners in 2021. Kushner had never worked in private equity before, but so confident was the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in Kushner’s talents, he immediately invested $2 billion in the company via Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. Qatar and the UAE soon followed suit with $1.5 billion more. Kushner had stoutly supported MBS’s regime, even after its agents murdered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Kushner has been closely involved in Trump’s second administration, too, and while the specifics of his job remain murky he has served in an unofficial diplomatic role in talks with Russia, Israel, and Ukraine, as well as Saudi Arabia — while still controlling Affinity.

It hasn’t always gone well. Backed by Affinity, Kushner and Ivanka, have also been attempting to build a $1.4 billion luxury resort in Albania. But after the Albanian prime minister passed a law changing regulations to allow the gargantuan project to go ahead, local protests began. These spiraled into a national movement, known as the “Flamingo Revolution,” which seems like it might even be on the brink of bringing about the downfall of the Albanian government.

Meanwhile, as Trump’s madcap war with Iran continues to spiral out of control, some of Kushner’s Gulf backers have reportedly started to question whether they are getting a good return on their investment — which shows just how explicitly they saw the deal in terms of cash for access and influence.

***

How did we get here? Throughout his presidency of 1977-81, Jimmy Carter was dogged by questions relating to his family peanut farm in Georgia — an operation worth a fraction of most of the Trump family’s business interests. Carter’s attempts to place the company in a blind trust did little to quell suspicions about a potential conflict of interest; and nor did a special counsel ruling that no irregularities had taken place. In part, the enhanced suspicion was due to Carter’s own promises to raise ethical standards following the Watergate scandal.  

Finkelstein argues that the rot set in with President Ford’s pardoning of President Nixon over the Watergate scandal in 1974, which set a precedent that presidents are beyond accountability. The rule of law was then further eroded after 9/11, when President Bush’s Department of Justice allowed the use of torture in CIA blacksites. But in her view, the real turning point came under President Obama.

Further reading

Is Donald Trump Jr running for president?

By Daniel Kalder

When Obama came into office, he had to make a decision about what to do about the Bush administration’s torture program — and particularly the legal memos that had been used to authorize it. Obama banned the interrogation techniques and released the memos, but also promised that CIA officers who had relied in good faith on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted. For Finkelstein, this was a failure of accountability. “That set the stage for a kind of lack of transitional justice from one administration to the next,” she tells me. “Rather than robustly investigating and prosecuting those who violated the law during the Bush administration, he really decided to give everybody a pass.” In her view, President Biden’s attorney-general, Merrick Garland, similarly “majorly failed” when he didn’t appoint a special prosecutor for two years after the election, which “made it impossible for the Justice Department to meet the timeline required to prosecute Trump.

But Biden further blundered, laying an avoidable trap for any future Democrat or indeed Republican who might hope to hold the Trumps to account. “ Let’s remember that Biden pardoned his own son, Hunter Biden,” she says. “That was a colossal mistake from the standpoint of containing presidential authority and containing corruption, because it set a precedent that will be very difficult for Democrats to object to when it’s used on the other side”.

All of this means that those working to bring values such as honesty, transparency and probity to American democracy are not optimistic. “ In the US, anti-corruption laws are quite weak and have become weaker over time,” says Sanchez-Moreno. ” A lot of things that are corrupt and that other countries would criminalize and treat quite seriously are just allowed to proceed here.” The system of checks and balances that was once the pride of American democracy has not proved much help either. “You have a Supreme Court that ruled that the president has pretty broad immunity, and that has set the stage for an administration that is using its office for the family’s enrichment.”

Things may change, however, if the Democrats take the House back in next month’s midterm elections. The administration is certain to ignore any legal subpoenas — but the private sector companies will not be able to do so without risking prosecution. “So they’re gonna start subpoenaing all these companies,” says Sanchez-Moreno.

The president can issue pardons, but those don’t protect against Securities and Exchange Commission investigations or civil suits. If they start to feel pressure, maybe these companies will also start to reevaluate the value of their investment.

Guilfoyle seems, at least, to be facing consequences. She has been forced to resign her ambassadorship, and there are calls for her to be investigated by members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The Trump family has thrown her under the bus, with the President distancing himself from her on Tuesday.

But the Guilfoyle case was just a glimpse of the raw inside workings of how truly shameless the corruption can be. She has resigned in disgrace – but Trump family themselves will continue to make out like bandits, and there’s not much that can be done to stop them.

Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York agree, and they aren’t leaving the matter to state and local governance. They have introduced a bill to impose a moratorium everywhere in the United States. In a press release, Sanders gives four separate reasons — environmental (“a profound impact on land and water use”), economic (“will drive up electricity costs”), occupational (“eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs”), and apocalyptic: “this revolutionary technology could soon become smarter than humans and escape human control — with potentially cataclysmic outcomes.” You might think that the prospect of a Silicon God enslaving or annihilating humanity, if it were a genuine threat, would be the first item in the list of AI data center dangers, not the last.  

Some Republican supporters of data centers assert that China is responsible for the opposition in the US — a claim as ludicrous as the Democrats’ claim a decade ago that Russia swung the 2016 election from Clinton to Trump.

Today’s opposition to data centers is home-grown, but it is more “astroturf” than grass-roots. The anti-data center movement is merely the latest cause seized upon by a pre-existing coalition of anti-growth environmentalists, anti-corporate progressives, small-is-beautiful populists, and preservationists, who for various reasons want their local landscapes frozen forever as they are now.  

Of the parade of horribles listed as reasons to oppose new data centers, concerns about the environment and electricity prices are legitimate. Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for cooling and electricity for operation. It is both reasonable and necessary to prevent these facilities from exhausting local water supplies or shifting energy costs to local utility bill payers.  How this should be done, and at what level of government, deserve to be important subjects of public debate. The tech accelerationists who oppose all regulation of AI are as misguided as the technophobes.

Suggested reading

The year of cosmic shock

By Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Gasda

But most Americans who oppose data centers do so on the basis of practical concerns, not progressive ideology. According to a Gallup survey in May, 50% of those who opposed data centers in their local areas cited “effects on resources”: water usage (18%), energy consumption (18%), and unspecified environmental impact (14%), with only 13% citing other reasons for opposition, including loss of farmland, threats to wildlife, natural resource consumption, or the fear that the data center would be an “eyesore.” Other concerns included apprehension about higher costs to utility rate-payers and citizens (20%) and concern about pollution (16%).

What about the other concerns raised by progressives like Sanders? Only 12% of the opponents polled by Gallup worried that AI would replace jobs and only 4% agreed with “Scared of AI/Don’t trust it/AI will take over.”  

Most data-center construction is in low-population suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas that tend to prefer Republicans to Democrats in elections. If the anti-data-center movement were really about practical local concerns, we would expect opposition to be greater among small-town and rural Republicans than among big-city Democrats who are not affected by the construction.

Instead, we find the reverse. According to the same survey, Democrats are far more likely to “strongly oppose” data-center construction than Republicans, by a huge gap of 56% to 39%. What is more, there is a gender gap: women are more likely than men to strongly oppose data-center construction, 55% to 43%.

In other words, a Republican man who lives in a rural county where a data center is likely to be constructed is less likely to be worried about it than a Democratic woman who lives in a big city far from the nearest data center. The truth is that the urban female Democrat opposes data centers only because that is quickly becoming the progressive party line.  Her concern about the possible effects on the rural Republican families she otherwise dislikes for their religious and political views is just virtue-signaling and play-acting, like the performative outrage of urban liberals at the thought that the Keystone Pipeline might cross sacred indigenous lands they will never visit but heard about on NPR, or the theatrical alarm among progressive city-dwellers on reading in The New York Times about road-building in the Amazon rainforest.

The debate about data center construction, then, would be boring and technical if the questions most local citizens have about their role in water use, electricity consumption, and pollution were the only issues. In this case, to use the phrase of the 1960s Left, the issue is not the issue. The real objection of many progressive opponents of data centers is not to this particular kind of industrial development, but to industrial development as such. Apart from the dystopian prospect of superhuman computers running amok, every one of the objections listed by Sanders and other supporters of a data center moratorium could be raised — and have been raised in the recent past — against major manufacturing and infrastructure projects of different kinds, including new factories that are built as a result of initiatives to reshore industrial supply chains lost to China, Mexico, and other countries.

Many of the same progressive advocacy groups that are uniting to oppose data center construction have come together in the past to oppose nuclear power, fracking, and offshore oil and gas drilling, using multiple arguments calculated to appeal to “the groups” as the allied single-issue factions on the left are known. Consider the Keystone Pipeline, proposed in 2008 and canceled by President Biden in 2021. (An alternate version is being considered today.) The Christmas tree logic of the anti-development Left is illustrated by an article published in 2022, after the Biden administration canceled the Keystone Pipeline: “this article draws upon environmental, utilitarian, rights and justice ethics in order to explain why the Keystone XL Pipeline extension was unethical and why its permit was revoked by the Biden Administration in 2021. It debunks the common claims that the pipeline would increase jobs and encourage economic growth, as well as sheds light upon the negative environmental effects and risks to indigenous populations, offering ethical guidelines for the future, such as consulting with indigenous communities before embarking on construction projects.”

Much of the passionate opposition to data center construction today is merely displaced hostility toward tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Progressive opponents similarly demonized the Keystone Pipeline as a plot to enrich those important Republican donors, the Koch brothers. In 2011, when a Reuters article reported that the Kochs would profit from Keystone Pipeline construction, two Democratic Representatives, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), demanded that Congress subpoena documents from Koch Industries about their interests in the project, if any. Yet, if the Keystone Pipeline was bad, it was bad no matter who profited from it, and if it was in the public interest, the identity of its investors was irrelevant. Associating Keystone with the Kochs was pure demagogy, like attempts by contemporary progressives to smear all data centers by association with Elon Musk.

In the view of the anti-development Left, technological civilization is bad and nature is good.  From this Arcadian ideology follows the conclusion that not only should the existing human-built environment not be extended, but also some existing infrastructure, like electricity-generating dams, should be destroyed. 

While New Deal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson promoted hydropower dams for their ability to generate cheap electricity, for decades, one of the goals of radical environmentalists in the US has been dismantling these New Deal icons and “rewilding” the rivers they modified. As in the case of the anti-data center movement, today’s anti-dam advocates provide multiple alternate rationales for the policy, each rationale calculated to appeal to a different part of the progressive coalition. A recent headline on the website of nonprofit The Post Carbon Institute seeks to unite conservationists, global warming activists, and those whose virtue-signaling includes performative displays of guilt toward Native Americans: “Removing hydropower dams can restore ecosystems, build climate resilience, and restore tribal lands.”

From the point of view of progressive political coalition-building, that is a good “three-fer” but it it could have been converted into a better “four-fer” by linking dams to sinister Big Business, or by smearing dams by association with the benighted, provincial Republican voters with motorboats and lake houses — who, once re-wilding is complete, will be conveniently punished by the drainage of the dam-created reservoirs they use for recreation.

The same progressive nonprofit-industrial complex and allied politicians who define the ever-changing progressive party line have now decided that data centers are to be demonized as symbols of the evils of corporate capitalism and inequality, as personal automobiles, highways, suburbs, oil and gas drilling, hydropower dams, and nuclear power plants have been demonized by the anti-development Left since the 1970s. If zero-carbon nuclear fusion technology generating cheap electricity were invented tomorrow, this same half-century-old anti-development coalition would immediately mobilize against it. Stop Big Fusion Now!

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Why NGOs love Tom Steyer

By Michael Lind

The good news is that the anti-development coalition in America is fragile and sometimes breaks down. For example, there is a split between neoliberal boosters of solar power and wind power who back the Green New Deal and more radical deep ecologists and degrowthers. The radical Greens at least are consistent. If Big Data Center is bad for the environment, then so are Big Wind, with its massive windmills spoiling views and killing birds; Big Solar, with its rows of rusting, potentially-toxic solar panels wiping out ground cover and wildlife; and, of course, Big Transmission, with its proposed massive new power lines that are supposed to bring “clean” energy from the bird-killing windmills and the wilderness-killing solar farms.

The progressive coalition against modern industrial and infrastructure development also frequently comes into conflict with organized labor. Construction unions in particular have clashed with environmentalists over their opposition to oil and gas facilities, as well as infrastructure and nuclear power. In the debate about the Keystone Pipeline, for example, the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters and the Laborers International Union of North America supported the pipeline’s construction, in the interest of more jobs for their members.  

The anti-development left is also fractured by divisions among Green supporters of industrial-scale renewable energy and the group that might be called “local preservationists” — residents of an area who are not particularly ideological, but oppose construction that would alter a beloved landscape or block a lovely view. In Martha’s Vineyard, a Democratic stronghold, a massive offshore industrial wind project favored by environmentalists has met opposition from citizen groups like Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, citing, in true progressive virtue-signaling fashion, alleged harm to marine life and local fishers. 

In the long run, the non-ideological preservationists may prove to be a greater threat to the future of the US economy than small but noisy minorities like degrowthers and anti-capitalist socialists.  The desire to retain an unobstructed view from your dream house is understandable, and so is the concern about an industrial facility or infrastructure corridor being constructed next door. But all of America’s land is in or adjacent to the “viewscape” or homes of some individuals and families. Giving a few people a veto on further development of the United States on aesthetic or sentimental grounds would be fatal for American prosperity and power.  

A country is not a museum. The occasional quaint historic district is a good idea. Turning an entire nation into a historic district, frozen forever at a particular moment in time and technological evolution, would be national suicide.

We should deal with the practical issues of energy use, water use, and pollution that are raised by data center construction. And we should also deal with the separate issues of excessive wealth concentration and insufficient regulation of numerous industries, of which AI is only one. But a crusade against plutocracy and inequality that takes the crude form of blocking all data center construction is as stupid as a crusade against Gilded Age robber barons would have been if it had taken the form of a moratorium on railroad construction. You don’t have to be a godlike, silicon-based, out-of-control artificial intelligence to understand that.

But now, how distant that era seems: the US and China are locked in an apparently existential race for technological supremacy, and instead of becoming liberals, the Communist Party has become even stronger under President Xi. Yet ironically, that may be what it needs to engineer a capitalist transformation to rival the West.

A recondite Marxist debate makes today’s events make curiously relevant. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx argued that the state, in a capitalist society, was merely the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. Many years later, in the Seventies, Left-wing intellectuals argued over whether capitalist states amounted to government by or for the capitalist class. On one side were the instrumentalists, among whom the most famous was Ralph Miliband (father of the Labour politicians David and Ed). On the other were the structuralists. The instrumentalists said that the capitalist state was controlled by a business elite who used it to advance their interests, whereas the structuralists said that if the state was to manage the capitalist economy, it needed “relative autonomy” from the owning class to discipline it and manage its evolution.

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Today, you could hardly ask for a better representation of the instrumental state than the second Trump presidency: run by a real estate magnate, surrounded by oligarchs, staffed by businesspeople — a banker as Treasury Secretary, a fund manager as commerce secretary, an oilman as energy secretary. This has given rise to a curious type of state interventionism. If industrial policy is about picking winners, then the leitmotif of the second Trump administration is that a cabinet of proven winners meddles directly to reward those they see as best placed to win the future.

Yet the paradox of capitalists is that they don’t necessarily like capitalism. Rather than a free market, what is resulting is a form of oligarchic capitalism in which wealth is becoming highly concentrated. America’s richest and most powerful players are able to use the penetrability of the democratic state to capture and shape power, using it to limit competition and secure their position. So, while the US has many more AI startups than China, capital is flowing heavily towards a handful of tech titans.

In contrast to this strategy of maximization, in which the ultimate goal is to secure an uncontested position at the vanguard of a new technology, China seems to prefer an optimization strategy. In its approach, the government first nurtures the development of a large set of players, something facilitated by the structure of the Chinese state. Using open-source technology, China’s provincial governments, competing with each other to meet national growth targets, steer resources to local firms. Then they are cut loose on a fiercely competitive playing field, in which a Darwinian struggle is allowed to rip.

This relentless competition drives a breakneck speed of development. So, for instance, while the US auto industry is dominated by the “three big” firms, along with a number of national champions operating US branches like Toyota and Hyundai, China’s auto sector has over 100 auto firms struggling against one another. It is this fierce competition to survive that has driven the industry’s development to the point that China is now the world’s largest carmaker.

But while the winners of these competitions become national champions of sorts, there is little patience for them trying to manipulate state power to their advantage. On the contrary, whenever oligarchs show signs of becoming too powerful, the Communist regime doesn’t hesitate to cut them down to size. In effect, China enjoys the relative autonomy needed to discipline the market and keep it competitive. China’s ruling class can’t be called capitalist, but it may just be doing a better job than America’s in creating an environment in which competitive capitalism can thrive.

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China’s aim is not primarily the creation of a tech titan at the very frontier of technology, but rather to move quickly to embody existing technology in products and services, achieving a sort of fungibility. Put differently, China is developing AI with an eye to producing usable products at a reasonable cost, dispersing them widely throughout the economy. In contrast, the US is placing a huge bet that it will develop a radical technology that will so transform the economy that the country will own the future.

But how is that future shaping up? If we consider the release of ChatGPT three years ago as the launch of the AI era in America, that revolution seems a little underwhelming. While there are signs that AI has marginally raised productivity in sectors that have adopted it, the increase has so far been well short of the dramatic rise the tech firms say would justify the massive increase in investment going into their companies. Meanwhile, AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the market. While the headlines speak of trillion-dollar investment plans in this emergent industry, in the rest of the economy, capital expenditure remains flat as other sectors are comparatively starved of capital. After peaking early this year, capital expenditure in the US has fallen in the course of 2025, which means that in non-tech sectors, things are going backwards.

Compounding this is the Trump administration’s energy policy which appears to be building a wall beyond which it will be difficult for AI to continue scaling at its current rate. Reflecting both Trump’s biases and the role of oligarchs in shaping policy in the US, the administration is blocking the rise of renewable energy to strengthen the powerful oil and gas industry, going all-in on a strategy of “energy dominance” based on fossil fuels. But one effect of this has been to slow the installation of new electrical capacity to a rate much lower than China’s. Thus, as demand to power energy-hungry data centers surges, electricity prices are rising — up 40% in the past five years and nearly 7% since just the start of this year. Good for the bottom lines of energy companies, perhaps, but not for the economy.

Nor, apparently, for society. One of the impacts of the AI boom in America is that it is stirring a groundswell of opposition, not only because it is helping drive up prices, but also because its benefits seem to flow into the hands of oligarchs alone. In previous technological revolutions, new technology not only seemed to confer broad-based benefits but also lifted wages. Amid the dot-com bubble of the late Nineties, American incomes rose strongly for a few years and everyone was able to do exciting new things on the internet. In contrast, tech oligarchs keep on insisting that AI will destroy millions of jobs — how else to justify the sky-high valuations of their companies’ shares except with a pledge to save loads of money in labor costs? The public is turning against the technology, with very large margins of both Republicans and Democrats more anxious than excited about AI.

China seems like it will avoid this fate, in part because its system enables the government to produce joined-up policy. For instance, the country’s education ministry is encouraging AI use in universities so as to create a ready market for AI products whilst encouraging their more effective use. Moreover, ordinary Chinese people already see the applications of AI in their everyday lives in ways that make things simpler, like biometric turnstiles at train stations, creating a more receptive environment for the technology.

America’s AI revolution may now be running out of time. Investors are growing antsy: they note that the much-promised breakthrough that will turbocharge productivity still remains notional, and there are signs that they are running out of cash. (This shortfall of cash explains why the big tech companies are starting to issue a lot of debt to fund their further expansions). Meanwhile, the public is warming to populist politicians who will campaign against the tech oligarchs. 2026 is likely to deliver a Congress more willing to question Trump’s economic strategy.

If the result is that the AI bubble gets punctured in the US, that wouldn’t be all bad. All the startups doing inventive things by optimizing existing AI innovations, rather like what the Chinese are doing, would have more space to thrive. Nevertheless, a market crash could tip the US economy into recession, just as China’s economy is slowing as it reorients away from investment to consumption.

In short, the euphoria of 2025 may well give way to a global slowdown in 2026. China may emerge in a comparatively favorable position, but any “victory” may prove Pyrrhic. Meanwhile, the rest of us will feel the fallout.

In a new book, The Haves and Have-Yachts, a collection of essays written for The New Yorker over the past decade, Evan Osnos describes Hanley as “a bon vivant, with a fondness for salmon-colored slacks, and a ready checkbook for political ventures”. Hanley inherited, and expanded, a family business in construction supplies and oil. In 1980 he campaigned for Ronald Reagan in Connecticut, developing an approach that, Osnos writes, “uncannily prefigured Trump’s electoral strategy” by assembling “a coalition of conservative elites and the white working class”. Over the next decades he funded numerous organizations and initiatives that promoted a low-tax, small-state conservatism, including publishers, non-profits, and a powerful lobbying firm, Black, Manafort and Stone. (Roger Stone had been one of Reagan’s campaign managers; he would also, along with Paul Manafort, advise Trump.)

Then, after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, Hanley commissioned a pollster to look deeper into the underlying mood in the United States. He was informed that “the level of discontent in this country was beyond anything measurable”. Hanley became convinced that Trump was the only politician capable of channeling this energy in a favorable direction, and set about converting other wealthy donors to the cause. It was a canny investment. Even as Trump gave expression to the anger of Bannon’s “hobbits”, his presidency brought immense material rewards for wealthy Americans, most obviously in the form of tax cuts, deregulation, and financial benefits during the Covid pandemic.

Reflecting on the role of figures like Hanley, Osnos concludes: “The story of Trump’s rise is often told as a hostile takeover. In truth, it is something closer to a joint venture, in which members of America’s elite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power.” That bargain is still paying off today. Trump’s latest budget, which cleared the House of Representatives last month, pledges to entrench and expand the tax cuts passed during his first term. By some estimates, those earning above $500,000 will receive more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts over the next decade, while a similar amount will be cut from government health insurance and food assistance programs. If we add to this the Trump family’s brazen use of office for self-enrichment, the privileges granted in return for financial contributions, and the political powers given to billionaires such as Elon Musk and David Sacks, then surely all but the most gullible can conclude that America’s regime deserves to be called oligarchy — rule by the wealthy few.

How did the US reach this point? And given the country’s increasingly fragile political and financial position — Trump is adding trillions to an already prolific national debt, even as his policies threaten economic chaos — how sustainable is it? Osnos’ book, subtitled Dispatches on the Ultrarich, provides some important answers to these questions. His starting assumption is that “Trump is a creature of the money-world, and, specifically, of a period of American thinking about greed, fairness, liberty, and dominance”. The essays try, in an almost sociological fashion, to draw back the curtain of this money-world, and “to capture the thinking and behavior of some of the world’s most powerful people”.

What these forays reveal is that, over the past five decades, a section of America’s elite has increasingly rejected constraints on their ability to accrue wealth, disavowing the notion that their great resources entail any special responsibility towards their fellow citizens. They have embraced a libertarian ethos which casts them simply as private individuals, responsible for their own fate, and entitled to enjoy their riches as they see fit. They have not, however, forgone the prerogative of using their money to shape government and society. The resulting pattern, traced in The Haves and Have-Yachts, has been a “simple arithmetic of compounding — of money making money, of lobbyists layering on new exemptions each decade, of the cultural amnesia that makes ideas about wealth come to seem normal, honorable, inevitable”. In 1978, the richest 0.1% of Americans controlled 7% of the country’s wealth; by 2023, their share was two-and-a-half times greater. Over the same period, the average tax rate of the top 0.01% fell by more than half.

The transformation of the American elite is illustrated by Greenwich, the Connecticut town where Osnos grew up. Known as “the hedge fund capital of the world”, Greenwich is home to a cluster of ultra-rich financiers, who cleave to the privacy of their high-walled estates and their superyachts. But it was not ever thus. The town was once the bastion of an older WASP elite, whose patrician culture included the beliefs that “showing off your money was déclassé”, and that wealth should “justify itself” in both private and public life. Typical of this milieu was Prescott Bush, a congressman in the Fifties and Sixties, and patriarch of the dynasty that would produce two presidents. The “ludicrously aristocratic” Prescott required his sons to wear a jacket and tie at the dinner table, while his grandchildren addressed him as “senator”. His political positions, including a higher minimum wage and taxation to fund investment, reflected a paternalistic sense of duty to the less fortunate.

Greenwich changed in part because its residents, already rich, became much richer, thanks to the post-Eighties boom in financial services. But this coincided with an ideological shift, led by figures like Hanley, away from the Country Club Republicanism of Prescott Bush and towards an outlook focused on personal liberty and suspicion of the state. One decisive moment came in 1980, when Hanley chose not to back local son George H.W. Bush in the Republican primary, working instead to ingratiate Reagan with the genteel denizens of Greenwich. Hanley’s wife even sourced an emergency replacement for the Californian senator’s “ghastly” brown tie.

In Osnos’ telling, this revolt of the elites and the subsequent decades of rising inequality would ultimately force conservatives into their volatile tryst with Trump, as they sacrificed their integrity to surf the wave of discontent which they helped to unleash. The basic insight here is that, while liberal democracies are in theory predicated on equality before the state, in practice they require the wealthy to play along. Once capital becomes sufficiently concentrated, there is always a danger that the richest will rig the system in their favor to the extent that they destroy its legitimacy. Such a moment almost arrived in the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century, an era of oligarchic power in the US that saw rising class conflict and political violence. It was the fear of revolution, together with the humbling of capital in the Great Depression, that created the opening for Franklin Roosevelt to construct the class compromises of the New Deal. The state expanded massively, and the rich were squeezed: taxes on estates larger than $50 million reached 77% in 1941. In the decades following the Second World War — the heyday of Prescott Bush — rapid economic growth helped reconcile elites to the claims of government.

This contract is now all but dead, its legal basis steadily chipped away. Wall Street discovered “vast new realms of speculation and financial engineering”, but those realms remained to a large extent unregulated. (At the height of the Gilded Age, during the financial crisis of 1907, America’s leading bankers had still assumed personal responsibility for backstopping the system; in 2008, by contrast, taxpayers were forced to take responsibility for them.) Big money moved into tax havens, prosecutions for white-collar crimes declined, and American states began competing to offer the wealthy the most accommodating terms. A proliferation of loopholes around estate taxes have ensured that — contrary to meritocratic justifications for extraordinary wealth — families can keep their fortunes intact from one generation to the next. In 2010, the Supreme Court lifted limits on political donations by individuals, with the effect that “candidates no longer needed large pools of rich supporters; they only needed small pools of ultrarich supporters”.

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The horizons of this moneyed class are, of course, much wider than the US itself. After the Cold War, the Pax Americana provided American business with opportunities around the world, while the wealthy had their playgrounds from the French Riviera to Dubai. In Osnos’ portrait of Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief almost resembles an imperial administrator, struggling to respond to a genocide being orchestrated through Facebook in faraway Myanmar. And the ultimate symbol of 21st-century wealth is the superyacht, “the most expensive objects our species has ever owned”, an artifact designed to flaunt money but also to enable the purest, most solipsistic enjoyment of it. (The fund manager Edward Lampert named his 288-foot vessel Fountainhead, after the Ayn Rand novel beloved of libertarians and defiant teenagers.)

Osnos’ subjects would doubtless dispute his portrayal of their self-interestedness. Tributes to Lee Hanley, for instance, noted his commitment to employees at his business, and many wealthy Americans devote large sums to philanthropy — though the preference for such personal largesse over tax contributions tells its own story about changing notions of public responsibility. More importantly, by treating Trump as the ultimate expression of oligarchic power, Osnos underplays a salient aspect of oligarchy in the American system: its presence on both sides of the political divide, Republican and Democratic. Wealthy elites wield plenty of influence among Trump’s opponents, as some of Osnos’ own vignettes suggest. In 2017, a raft of eminent liberals aboard the yacht of media executive David Geffen included Barack and Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey. Or consider the Getty family, heirs to mid-century America’s greatest fortune. Gordon Getty has hosted fundraisers for Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom at his mansion in San Francisco, while the “artist-model” Ivy Love Getty had her wedding officiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2021. A number of the Getty clan are now major donors to progressive causes, even as they energetically shield their vast trust from tax. Alexandra S. Getty has suggested that, while taxes are “very important”, the problem is that “if the wrong government is in control, then they all go to stuff I don’t support”.

In other words, America’s super-rich are not united in a single faction. This is not to say that their involvement in politics is balanced: while Forbes reported on the eve of the 2024 election that Harris had more billionaire donors than Trump (83 versus 52), Trump received more funding from billionaires in total thanks to the enormous contributions of Musk and Miriam Adelson. Moreover, an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness claims that, taking last year’s federal elections together, “over two-thirds (70%) of billionaire-family contributions went in support of GOP candidates and conservative causes”. It also reports that billionaire political spending is now an astonishing 160 times higher than in 2010.

Still, while it may be comforting for New Yorker readers to think otherwise, big money alone cannot explain how Trump won two elections — or how the Democrats lost them. Answering that question would require, among other things, a more rounded picture of America’s class system than Osnos provides. By his own admission, he is giving us “the view from the top”, but this creates the illusion of a society that is straightforwardly divided between the many and the few. In fact, private wealth is just one source of elite status in modern society, albeit the most powerful. There are also managerial, political and cultural elites. These divisions matter, because they are central to the aims and methods of Trump’s wealthy supporters.

Many leading MAGA figures have a particular antipathy to the managerial class that runs corporate America and Washington D.C. Musk has taken a slash-and-burn approach to bureaucracy in his companies and now in the federal government. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the leading MAGA think tank, has written of the need to revitalize US capitalism by systematically diminishing the influence of university-educated corporate managers. Another prominent Trump backer, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has touted something called the “iron law of oligarchy”, derived from the political theorist James Burnham. As Andreessen explained, “there’s no actual system of democracy, because you always end up with a small minority in charge of a large majority in basically every society in human history.” He portrays the Trump-supporting oligarchy as a “counter-elite”, whose goal is to save American liberty and economic dynamism from the rule of “expert technocrats” aligned with the Left.

Of course, Andreessen’s own remarks show that there is some role for democracy even in an oligarchic system: he is discussing a presidential election after all. Intra-elite conflicts can be waged by mobilizing popular anger at institutions perceived to be hostile or ideologically corrupt. This brings us to the Trumpian riddle that Osnos sets out at the start of his book: “to understand why a voter could revile ‘the elite’ and revere the billionaire scion of a New York real estate fortune”. One reason is simply that Trump and his allies do not belong to the same parts of the elite as the people this voter reviles. Yes, when wealthy businessmen with Harvard or Stanford credentials attack elites, it is usually self-serving and often cynical; but what matters politically is that there is a considerable audience which thinks they have a point.

In truth, more than one of America’s elite groupings have helped to pave the way for the chaos of Trump’s second term. Since the election, many on the Left have acknowledged their own part in making voters feel frustrated and insecure, whether through the condescending tone of cultural institutions or the dysfunction of Democrat-governed cities. It is possible for an irresponsible and exploitative super-rich class to coexist with wasteful and ineffective governments; in fact, this now seems to be the status quo in much of the Western world. Osnos is right, however, to observe that the disillusionment created by elites is now forcing them to embrace unpredictable forms of populism to maintain their power. Trump will surely not be the final iteration of this process.

Progressives arguing over whether we should only be talking about democracy and “kings” or the oligarchic power of the super-rich — that’s a stark reminder that our century is growing to resemble the 19th: a world of hyper-exploitation and overweening tycoons; trade protectionism and blatant imperial land grabs; constitutional instability and simmering class conflict. There is no better guide to such a juncture than the 19th century’s greatest dissident thinker, Karl Marx.

Marx’s value as a Virgil-like guide to the darker depths of our condition is highlighted by a pair of recent books: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold, which explores the role of republicanism in shaping Marx’s thought, and Capital’s Grave by Jodi Dean, which seeks to update Marx for a world that Dean thinks is starting to look less like the classical industrial capitalism he wrote about than a kind of high-tech feudalism. Though varying wildly in both style and substance, both books remind us that 19th-century debates about economic inequality remain all too relevant to 2025.

Polls suggest that Slotkin is, in fact, wrong about the limits of the public’s vocabulary. But the issue in dispute between her and Sanders and AOC goes deeper than semantics. Slotkin evidently wants to stick to what 19th-century radicals called the “political question” of democracy and authoritarianism, rather than broaching the “social question” of economic power and hierarchy.

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Putting aside Slotkin’s concerns, the deeper problem with “oligarchy,” popularized by Aristotle in the fourth century BC, is that the term isn’t terribly specific. After all, most societies since the agricultural revolution have been “oligarchies,” in the sense of being dominated by one kind of elite or another. If we want to be precise, the better term hovering just offstage of most popular discourse is capitalism.

At the most basic level, capitalism is a system in which most economic enterprises are owned by private individuals (“capitalists”). The rest of the working-age population, in order to survive and reproduce themselves, are forced to sell their labor power like any other commodity in exchange for a price — wages. Nearly 160 years since it was first published, the most historically important analysis of what’s distinctive about this system remains Karl Marx’s masterpiece Capital.

In it, Marx argued that capitalism is similar to medieval feudalism, ancient slave societies, and so on in that “immediate producers” (whether serfs, slaves, or wage-laborers) have to perform “surplus labor” in addition to “necessary labor.” Necessary labor is the labor you do to meet your own needs and those of your dependents. Surplus labor is the time you spend laboring to enrich a ruling class, whether it’s made up of slave-owners, feudal lords, or modern capitalists.

Capitalism is dissimilar to these other systems in two ways, however. First, unlike feudal nobles who were just trying to extract enough for themselves and their families and retainers to live in luxury, capitalists are engaged in market competition with one another, giving them a bottomless incentive to squeeze every possible drop of labor from their workers. Marx memorably called this capital’s “vampire-like thirst” for surplus labor.

Second, unlike slaves or serfs who are legally bound to their masters, modern wage-laborers are “doubly free,” as Marx taught. They are free in the sense that they’re able to move around and make employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them; they’re also “free” from any alternative means of supporting themselves.

As Marx documented in the last part of Capital, the British working class came to be “free” in this second sense through a long and brutal process of enclosures, whereby peasants were driven from their ancestral lands and forced into urban labor markets — a passage described in much greater detail by the Austrian economic historian Karl Polanyi in his magisterial The Great Transformation, first published in 1944.

Many non-socialist 19th-century radicals shared much of Marx’s diagnosis of the problems with capitalism. But they disagreed sharply with his proposed cure. They dreamed of reversing the process by which the working class had lost access to its own means of production. Bruno Leipold gives us a fascinating look at these debates in Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. The author, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, showcases the ways in which classical republican themes about freedom from arbitrary power influenced Marx’s own thought. Even so, Marx forged his own views in opposition to the leading “republicans” of his time (who played up the republican virtue of small farmers and small artisans and saw this as the basis of the society they wanted to bring about — or revive).

Nineteenth-century radical republicans were far from indifferent to the “social question.” But they worried that collective ownership by workers would turn into the subordination of workers by a tyrannical state. The experience of the deeply flawed and authoritarian experiments in state socialism that played out in the following century shows that this was indeed a valid concern, even if some of us continue to believe that better forms of socialism are possible.

Non-socialist republicans’ preferred alternative was to use various mechanisms, including leasing state-owned land to small farmers and establishing grants for artisans, to turn back the clock and restore small-scale production. Here, Marx’s side of the argument has been vindicated by subsequent economic history.

Factory and network effects involve increasing returns to scale, rendering mom-and-pop production simply irrational, not to say impossible, in the age of the machine. Rather, high-tech modern production involves the collaboration of vast numbers of people (often spread over a vast swaths of territory). There is no way to turn back that clock without a staggering reduction in the standard of living of working-class citizens of developed societies, and it’s difficult to imagine the workers of the world uniting to achieve less than they have under capitalism.

Even so, by the time he was doing his most mature work, Marx had absorbed much of the radical republicans’ point. In the historical sections of Capital, he praised England’s population of independent small farmers as “the proud yeomanry of which Shakespeare speaks,” who became the “backbone of Cromwell’s strength” during the short-lived British republic of the 17th century. But he argued that the only way to recover republican freedom under industrial conditions is for working people to collectively take over and democratically run the factories and large farms that were already becoming prevalent in his era.

Today, parts of this analysis are directly applicable to us. Other parts of Capital, though, can give a contemporary readers the same feeling they might have reading Charles Dickens novels: that they’re getting a lurid glance at an alien world that has, quite fortunately, receded into the past: only think of his harrowing accounts of child workers chained and flogged to keep them going into the 13th and 14th hour of labor, and other horrors of the kind.

The historical successes of the labor movement and the regulatory state in curbing such abuses are so enormous, in fact, that when we see a return of labor practices without these protections, we temporal natives of the 21st century are tempted to take up far older reference points. Discussing proposals for labor protections for Uber and Lyft drivers in 2019, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism all over again.”

Rendon is no economic historian, and he may have been simply reaching for a vivid way of evoking unjust forms of power and domination. But Jodi Dean takes the analogy seriously in her new book, Capital’s Grave: Neo-Feudalism and the New Class Struggle. In it, she argues that capitalism is in the process of giving way not to the collective ownership and workplace democracy Marx envisioned, but to a high-tech form of “neo-feudalism.”

Dean, a political theorist at Hobart and Smith Colleges, doesn’t go as far as to claim that our society today is already neo-feudal. But she does think that’s the direction in which we’re transitioning, and that the capitalist or semi-capitalist order around us already has many neo-feudal elements.

Feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of class society involved a whole lot more direct, non-economic coercion than capitalism: witness the fate of the Hebrews under the Egyptian yoke. Although early capitalism did involve some brutalities of this kind, capitalism for the most part relied on what Marx called the “dull compulsion” of hunger to goad workers into the factory. This was progress, of a kind. Meanwhile, the imperatives of competition at least forced the exploiters to constantly innovate and make production more efficient.

Today, Dean sees the dialectic of history going into reverse. Rather than doing productive labor, the workforce of the 21st century is increasingly concentrated in the service sector, and capitalists are increasingly turning toward “accumulation strategies” that rely not on out-competing other capitalists through greater efficiency, but hoarding wealth through political corruption, rent-seeking, and predation. She sees an analogy to medieval kings enriching themselves through conquest, for example, in the process of “blitzscaling,” whereby wealthy investors pour money into companies like Uber with the understanding that they’ll be unprofitable for years as they undersell and obliterate the competition.

One problem with all of this is that, in seeking to update Marx’s analysis, Dean shows that she misunderstood it. Marx emphatically doesn’t exclude “service workers” in toto from the commodity-producing working class. In explaining the distinction between productive proletarians and unproductive servants, for example, Marx uses the examples of a cook in a hotel and a cook in a private home. The former is helping to generate the revenues out of which his capitalist is paying him. It’s hard to imagine that Marx could have picked an example closer to a Starbucks barista (the archetypal “service worker” in our time) without access to a time machine.

And a deeper problem is that so many of the trends Dean is talking about are reversions not to the pre-capitalist Middle Ages, but to the very form of capitalism Marx was writing about in the 1860s. What is Uber if not a high-tech application to the transportation sector of exactly the kind of casual and insecure labor practices previously tamed by organized labor and the regulatory state?

Nor did the monopolistic robber barons of the 19th century restrict themselves to accumulation strategies that would meet the approval of libertarian economics professors. Andrew Carnegie had no more scruples than Elon Musk about calling in political favors.

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Dean sees “parcellated sovereignty” as loosely analogous to medieval practices of vassalage in everything from the rise of private security contractors to national sovereignty being limited by international treaties. But the Pinkertons that robber barons like Carnegie would bring in to crush strikes were far less hesitant about spilling blood than contemporary security contractors (at least in developed nations); and the most salient shift in recent geopolitics has been the collapse of the postwar system and the re-emergence of the kind of spheres of influence and land-grabs that defined the military and diplomatic histories of the 19th century. We even have a land war where one of the most hotly contested issues is the status of Crimea.

Finally, the 21st century increasingly resembles the 19th in the role of antitrust politics as a popular solution to the problem of economic oligarchy. Witness the enthusiasm of the mainstream American Left (and even portions of the populist Right) for the Biden administration’s crusading antitrust czar Lina Khan. In conditions where the logistics of production have made a quantum leap from those of 19th-century capitalism, though, the limits of this approach are more obvious than ever.

Antitrust may well deliver enough benefits to ordinary people as consumers to be worth the candle. But it can’t do much about the conditions in which the vast majority of the population spend their working lives. We can make firms as small as they can be consistent with the conditions of modern production, and it would still be mathematically impossible for most adults to make their living as owners, rather than workers. If the republic of labor Marx wanted can feel impossibly utopian given the current state of the Overton Window, a republic of small farmers and small artisans has long since become a technological impossibility as a matter of cold fact.

Whether a powerful workers’ movement of the kind that emerged around the world in the 19th century will coalesce in 21st-century conditions is an open question. The future isn’t settled. What’s certain is that, if labor doesn’t find new ways to assert itself, whatever comes next is going to be bleak.

The amount of wealth hoarded by Russian businessmen is staggering. Forbes estimates Akhmedov’s 2025 net worth at $1.6 billion. To put that into perspective, imagine an immortal being, perhaps a vampire, traveling to the New World with Christopher Columbus in 1492. Every day since then, the vampire somehow acquires the equivalent of 1,000 contemporary American dollars. He never spends any of it. Perhaps he just stacks the money in coffins. The vampire will become a millionaire by sometime in 1495. In 2025, though, he’ll still be less than a fifth of the way to having a billion dollars.

Akhmedov is clearly very wealthy. Yet if he were an American, he wouldn’t even make it into the list of the 400 wealthiest US citizens. Why, then, does Russia have “oligarchs” while America apparently only has rich people?

Occasionally, Bernie Sanders will use the o-word to describe people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, each of whom have hundreds of times the net worth of Farkhad Akhmedov. When this happens, the most common rebuttal is that Russian oligarchs typically owe their wealth (at least in part) to their political connections, whereas American billionaires became wealthy through the power of the free market.

It’s true that plenty of Russian oligarchs owe much of their wealth to a particularly brazen form of corruption. In the Soviet era, economic resources were, in theory, the collective property of the whole population, though in practice they were controlled by an unaccountable state bureaucracy. After the collapse of the USSR, no one asked the Russian people whether they wanted to enter an era of capitalism or experiment with some form of democratic socialism instead. There was no popular referendum on whether to privatize public assets. Instead, in many cases, canny bureaucrats simply turned state enterprises into their own private fiefdoms, while the population at large underwent economic shock therapy.

There are three big problems, however, with the idea that America’s ultra-wealthy capitalists aren’t oligarchs because they made their fortunes the “right way”: in the private sector. The first is that the distinction between the two systems is less clear than it might seem at a quick glance. In post-Soviet Russia, private-sector actors grew astoundingly rich off the state, as one economic order was surpassed by another. But many ultra-rich Americans also benefit plenty from political connections, and none of them are too proud to accept government handouts.

The richest man in the United States, Elon Musk, has earned tens of billions of dollars directly from government contracts. That’s many times more than the total wealth of a typical Russian “oligarch”. And that’s not to mention SpaceX and Tesla, which, as Chris Isidore writes, both “got started” (and “survived their early days”) thanks to assistance from state and federal policies, government contracts and loans. That’s the foundation on which Musk’s fortune was built.

More generally, the American tech sector, often celebrated as a powerhouse of private-sector innovation — and certainly the source of a great many billionaires — has benefited dramatically from the blurred lines between private wealth and state policy. The only TED talk I ever recommend that people watch is one by the economist Mariana Mazzucato, who goes through the components of an iPhone one by one and discusses where they come from. Pretty much everything that makes a smartphone “smart”, from the GPS to the touchscreen to Siri to the internet itself, stems from public-sector innovation. The breakthroughs happened in the Department of Defense or in public universities or via researchers in labs funded by grants from the federal government. In a less explicit way than the Russian oligarchs, America’s tech oligarchs have found ways to convert state investment into private profits.

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By Ben Burgis

The second and deeper problem with the denial of American oligarchy is that an oligarch isn’t just someone who gets rich the wrong way. “Oligarchy” is government by a small group of powerful individuals. What makes someone an oligarch is that they exercise great power, not that they benefit from association with those who do.

The power of American plutocrats plays out on multiple levels. First and most obviously, American business magnates have direct power over the lives of vast numbers of employees. Musk or Bezos can replace any particular Tesla or Amazon worker far more easily than that worker can replace the source of their livelihood, and so these men run their businesses like miniature dictatorships. This economic power translates in turn into massively disproportionate political influence.

These days, in fact, America’s billionaire corporate overlords exercise more oligarchic power over the political process than their counterparts in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As Larson writes, when Vladimir Putin consolidated his personal rule, his “mandate was to bring” the oligarchs “back under control”. The informal “entente” held that Russia’s ultra-rich would scale back their interference with politics, and not “complain too much when Putin’s state locked up political opponents”. In exchange, a more stable regime would secure their property and wealth.

American oligarchs have made no such compromise. When Musk is mad about a potential spending deal in Congress, for example, he can spend all day rage-posting about it on X, and explicitly threaten to finance primary challenges against any Republican congressmen who votes for the deal. Few politicians would dare ignore such a threat. Even the billionaire who currently serves as President of the United States hesitates to butt heads too directly with Musk on contentious issues. After all, Musk’s riches put Trump in the White House. Compared to Musk’s $455 billion, Trump’s fortune of $6.61 billion is almost cute.

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Trump's American utopia doesn't exist

By Terry Eagleton

Nor are the oligarchs confined to the Republican side of the aisle. Kamala Harris had 83 billionaires donating to her campaign. According to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness, Harris received $143 million in billionaire donations — though this looks modest compared to Trump’s $450 million. Even so, those 83 billionaires would almost certainly have exercised real political influence in a Harris administration.

The relentless concentration of private wealth, and with it the political influence of the wealthy, has metastasized in recent decades under Republican and Democrat presidents alike. American oligarchs have shot into the financial stratosphere, at least in part, due to the decades of market-fundamentalist public policy first popularized by Ronald Reagan but continued by the likes of Bill Clinton (who gave us Nafta and a grimly Dickensian “welfare reform”) and Barack Obama (who responded to the 2008 crash by bailing out banks and leaving homeowners underwater). Even Trump, who campaigned as a “populist”, spent much of his first term pushing lower taxes for the wealthy and slashing the regulatory state. And the somnolent administration of Joe Biden wasn’t prepared to reverse this trend.

If this process has been slower and less dramatic than the birth of the Russian oligarchs at the close of the Soviet era, its results have been far more striking. Four Americans (Musk, Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison) are expected to become trillionaires within the next five years. And following a decades-long, highly effective business offensive against union organizing, the vast majority of American workers are unorganized. America’s labor laws are vastly less favorable to union organizing than regulatory regimes in otherwise comparable nations. “Sympathy strikes”, for example, where one group of workers joins a strike to help another win their demands, are illegal. But it is perfectly legal to “permanently replace” striking workers. This leaves us with no political force that could meaningfully stand up to the power of America’s oligarchs.

We could at least start by acknowledging that American oligarchs exist. It is an act of moral evasion to insist on using morally neutral terms to describe “very rich” Americans while we call their comparatively poor cousins in hostile nations “oligarchs”. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

In 2021, PayPal blocked GiveSendGo, an evangelical crowdfunding site, after it helped raise money for January 6 defendants. In Canada, truckers resisting Covid vaccine mandates faced similar bans. Across the Atlantic, Nigel Farage was debanked. As Chopra told me, “just because someone disagrees with corporate executives, that’s no grounds for losing their fundamental rights”.

Chopra also spearheaded Team Biden’s crusade against corporate “junk fees” (ordering a concert ticket online? That’ll be a $5 service fee, plus a $15 processing fee and a $3 convenience fee). He also sought to wipe medical debt from credit records and to protect veterans’ privacy against data brokers. Trumpian America would have been the chief beneficiary of these measures: lower-income consumers with little to no bargaining power against Big Finance and Big Tech.

Yet in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, powerful tech barons vented rage at Chopra’s agency. Most notably, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg — who previously oversaw the censorship of pro-Trump content on Facebook but is now making nice — complained about CFPB oversight on Joe Rogan’s show: “We had the CFPB looking after us. I didn’t even know what that is. It’s some financial institution that Elizabeth Warren set up.”

Elon Musk was more forthright: “Delete CFPB”, he posted on X on 27 November. That seems to have done the trick. As of last week, visitors to the CFPB website encountered a “404: page not found” error. Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is dramatically remaking the federal government, gloated about the agency’s apparent demise with a tombstone emoji, adding: “CFPB RIP”.

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By Saturday, Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, said he would be taking over as acting head of the CFPB. Given Musk’s “RIP” message, however, and the sheer power he wields in the new administration, the future of the agency is far from certain. CFPB lawyers have been ordered to stand down in all lawsuits, including one challenging financial institutions’ right to debank Americans. “Oh, and Musk now has access to all this confidential CFPB info about his competitors”, a current CFPB staffer told me.

Less than a mile away, in Washington, the National Labor Relations Board, another agency tasked with leveling the economic playing field, is in similar disarray. Last month, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the board, and Jennifer Abruzzo, its general counsel. While Abruzzo’s dismissal was no surprise — Biden did the same thing to Trump’s NLRB general counsel upon taking office — Wilcox’s firing is a different matter.

In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the president can only remove a member of a bipartisan board like the NLRB for good cause, such as neglect or malfeasance. The National Labor Relations Act, the law that created the NLRB, likewise requires notice and good cause for removing board members. Wilcox received no notice, and by all accounts, she has a sterling record (whether Team Trump disagrees with her views on labor law is irrelevant).

Wilcox’s removal might be a first step toward overturning the high-court precedent that limits presidential power over bipartisan, multimember boards, a question over which reasonable people can disagree. But it also deprives the board of the quorum needed to uphold collective-bargaining rights. That has the effect of “creating chaos and disruption and making this agency inoperative”, said Wilma Liebman, who served 14 years as a member of the board under presidents of both parties, the final two as chairwoman.

Rendering the NLRB inoperative in this manner serves the interests of pro-Trump tycoons, Musk foremost: even before the election, he filed a lawsuit attacking the constitutionality of the New Deal-era board. Now, it seems, Musk the efficiency czar has achieved what Musk the employer had long desired. Said Liebman, “The fact that it is Musk is glaring”.

Unless Team Trump changes course, the plutocratic, self-dealing policy choices will become impossible to ignore. And the Trumpians will end up betraying the millions of working-class and union households who pulled for them in last year’s election seeking immigration sanity and economic protection — not to make it easier for Big Finance to surveil and debank them, or for Musk to use his new government job to stymie organizing efforts at his firms.

So far, the GOP’s activist base feels no danger, only joy. (This, even as Musk’s influence on Trump has already become much less popular, even among normie Republicans.) Among Right-wing activists and intellectuals, the mood is retribution, and TrumpElon the avenging dagger. As one Right-of-center operative told me, describing an attitude he himself disavows, the thinking is: “Now it’s our dicks that are hard, and we’re gonna f–k you in the ass.”

It’s understandable. Who on the Right could have lived through the political and cultural turmoil of the recent past, and not feel some version of the same sentiment, even if expressed in less vulgar terms?

From the #Russiagate hoax to Trump’s first impeachment on the flimsiest grounds; the Big Tech suppression of the lab-leak theory to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop; the pandemic-era banning of Catholic masses and Jewish funerals (even as George Floyd protests were encouraged) to the unlawful altering of election rules in Pennsylvania in 2020; the winking permission granted to Left-wing rioters setting fire to a federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., compared to the hammer dropped on Right-wing rioters who stormed the Capitol; and so much more besides — Democrats and their allies in the media, Silicon Valley, and the security forces subjected the other half of the country to a lot of mishigas over the past decade.

As I say, who on the Right — or even the non-woke Left — could have lived through all that and not feel a jonesing to burn down all their works?

Then again, politics isn’t only about enmity and payback, even if it would be foolish to deny a place altogether to these primordial urges in the affairs of fallen human beings. Politics is also the art of prudence, especially when dealing with a state apparatus as large and complex as the federal government, overseeing an even larger and more complex society and economy.

It shouldn’t require the insights of Aristotle or Weber to know that the state isn’t a tech startup. The danger in unleashing Musk and his team of Groyper whizz kids is that, in slashing and burning, they might bring about not just efficiency and an end to DEI nonsense, but careless enshittification.

If some drug-approval process is short-circuited, and lots of people end up being harmed; if critical entitlements payments are withheld from senior citizens needing medical care; or if some official unit gets axed whose job it was to alert decision-makers to this or that natural or manmade hazard, and something somewhere goes boom; or if… In any of these scenarios, it won’t be Musk left holding the bag, but the politically accountable men who empowered him. Musk insists he is the soul of caution, of course, and so far nothing of that sort has taken place. But these things take time to ramify through a delicate system.

Then, too, the slash-and-burn mentality represents a reversion to the neoliberal model that Trumpism promised to counter. Recall that Trump won the first time around by rejecting the GOP’s Reagan-Bush-Romney orthodoxies. He pledged to protect social insurance, and he even hinted at a public option in health care. The 2024 Republican platform reiterated his entitlements pledge.

Musk, meanwhile, has vowed to trim as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of total outlays. There simply aren’t enough silly expenditures — programs funding research into transgender monkeys or musicals about Ireland’s black roots — to get him to that amount. If Musk really means it, and if Trump isn’t prepared to restrain him, then entitlements will end up on the chopping block. An eccentric billionaire cutting Grandpa’s Social Security payments: the 2026 and 2028 electoral kill shot Democrats are rubbing their hands for.

And what about state capacity? Trump won in 2016 and then again in 2024 by promising to restore the battered manufacturing sector. Tariffs are one important tool for doing so, with origins in the American tradition going back to Alexander Hamilton. But a manufacturing revival also requires a competent workforce and long-term research and development on a massive scale — tasks that have proved too big for any entity but the state.

None of this is to defend waste or entrenched bureaucrats who’ve grown accustomed to defying the president’s will, especially when the president happens to belong to the Republican Party. But de-Baathification is unlikely to work any better for the US state than it did for Iraq, and the Right, especially, should be wary of Year Zero delusions: the utopian dream of starting totally anew, unencumbered by the past — heedless of why our institutions took the shape they did.

Which brings us back to those crippled agencies, the CFBP and the NLRB. Both emerged in the wake of market emergencies: one fairly recent, the 2008-2009 financial crisis precipitated, in part, by banks’ risky home lending and the securitization of those loans; and the other much older, the Depression, brought about by a demand crisis in the economy resulting in turn from a brutally lopsided distribution of the social income (low-paid workers unable to afford the goods they produced).

Trashing these agencies would do nothing to address the structural power imbalances which bedevil Trumpian America and which compelled it to vote for him in the first place. On the contrary, it would exacerbate the imbalances. A regulation such as the CFPB’s anti-debanking rule is the best defense against people being arbitrarily cast out of the financial system, whether it’s over a belief that there are only two sexes or 107 genders. Likewise, collective bargaining, upheld by the NLRB, gave rise to the American middle class and such blessings as paid vacation time, health insurance, disposable income, and, yes, a measure of protection for what workers think and say off the job.

Is it not telling that, say, Jeff Bezos — who, three years ago, marched at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter column — has now joined the anti-woke ranks? Is it not obvious why the Amazon boss, notwithstanding his ownership of an anti-Trump #Resistance newspaper, The Washington Post, has teamed up with Musk in challenging the existence of America’s basic labor law? Does anyone believe that Zuckerberg has undergone a profound change of heart about online censorship, now that a new administration is prepared to remove barriers against his power in the name of owning the woke?

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Elon Musk: neo-feudal prince

By Mary Harrington

There is no denying that parts of the federal government fell in thrall to the same wacky and unpopular ideologies taken up by professional classes in the private sector. But abuse doesn’t negate the proper use of something. And as time goes on, it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.

The cynic might respond that the American state has always sought the favor of the rich: better to get rid of the meddling institutions of the New Deal and have the class antagonism out in the open. The successor state is here. Get with the times.

Maybe that’s right. But the populist Right should be clear that this could entail enormous pain for the working and lower middle classes and galling self-dealing by Musk & Co., the likes of which we haven’t seen since the late 19th century. Once the dust settles, and the next reforms take hold, the political rewards will redound not to the neo-Gilded Age party and politician — there is a reason Trump had to drag William McKinley out of obscurity — but to the transformative reformer.

If Trump himself wants to earn that mantle, it behooves him to apply his signature motto to Elon Musk: You’re fired.

In truth, though, I think the speech matters. For in its populist appeal to Main Street over Wall Street, it reflects the revival of something we haven’t seen in years: class politics. Rather than appealing to racial subgroups, or sex or gender identity, Biden instead spoke, however fleetingly, to those many millions of Americans who care more about their paychecks than the color of their skin.

Nor, of course, is the 46th president alone. Increasingly, both main parties realize that to win at the ballot box, they must appeal to the middle- and working classes, as proven by Trump’s roughly 10-point lead among those two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. Yet, if that speaks vividly to radical shifts across US socioeconomic makeup, it remains unclear if politicians on either side of the aisle are truly willing to back blue-collar workers — especially when the oligarchs continue to have such a grip over them all.

For all Biden’s warnings about oligarchy, the elite did very well during his tenure. Consider the numbers, with the wealthiest Americans increasing their collective net worth by a remarkable one trillion dollars over his time in office. The monopolists, for their part, have been generous in their turn. In 2020, to give one example, Biden received 25 times as much funding from tech companies than Trump, and over three times as much from Wall Street. Among electronics manufacturing firms, many of whom build their products outside the country, the margin was a remarkable $68 million to $4 million.

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All the while, American business continued to consolidate, just as it has for a generation. The Review of Finance notes that three quarters of industry has become more concentrated since the late Nineties. This has been most notable across finance, where big banks have doubled their market share since 2000. The same is true elsewhere: a coterie of tech firms now account for a record 35% of market cap. No wonder only 22% of Americans were optimistic about the economy by the end of Biden’s term, even as confidence in his economic leadership had fallen to just 40%.

Taken together, then, Biden’s fall stemmed from an enormous miscalculation. Elected as a moderate, he ignored polls that suggested most Americans were more concerned with their economic prospects than issues like climate change and foreign affairs, let alone social justice manias around trans rights. Nonetheless, the Democrats followed the lead of their oligarchic funders, many of whose biggest contributions have been focused on exactly these side issues.

When the election came, no wonder so many blue collar Americans tried their luck with Trump: including a remarkable number of minority voters. Once again, the statistics here are clear, with 40% of Asians voting for him, well above the 30% in 2020, even as some African Americans headed to the GOP as well. Blue-collar Latinos went heavily for Trump too. The point is that this realignment largely happened on economic grounds, with minorities ignoring Trump’s past litany of racist comments because he offered them a more expansive economy, particularly in blue collar professions. All the while, they saw little promise in the tsunami of promises offered by Harris and her bozo vice-presidential partner Tim Walz. Knowing a winner when they see one, America’s billionaires duly came out for the Republicans too. That included Elon Musk, of course, but also prominent investment bankers like Bill Ackman.

Taken together, what does this revolution show? That class and economics now play a greater role in American politics than skin color or national origin. If you want to secure minority voters, the new President clearly understands, you appeal to them not as identity groups but as individual people, and families, looking out for their own self-interest. Nor is this really revelatory. America’s working-class remains more aspirational than those in other Western countries. That’s equally true of non-white voters, many of whom appreciate that the politics of race is an impediment to the American Dream. Most of the middle-income people who lately lost their homes to fire, in the minority LA suburb of Altadena, hardly benefited from a city government more obsessed with race and gender than protecting property. No less telling, Democratic policies on water and climate have created what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls a “green Jim Crow” — where working-class minorities face increasing headwinds in terms of jobs and housing.

This matters: and not just morally. Minorities, after all, encompass over 40% of working class Americans, and will constitute the majority by 2032. To win back the White House, then, Democrats will need to ditch all their woke baggage and focus on addressing the everyday concerns of working-class people, especially the non-white variety. In practice, that’ll involve focusing on bread-and-butter issues. When it comes to education, for instance, this could include expanding charter schools, or else developing skill academies for well-paid blue-collar jobs. When it comes to crime, meanwhile, just enforcing the law would help. That’s clearly a novel idea for some progressives, but would have a real impact on the security of inner cities.

Rhetorically speaking, the Democrats also have that new pro-Trump oligarchy to fall back on, with progressives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez increasingly railing against a corrupt cabal of kleptocrats goose-stepping America towards fascism. Never mind that Democrats didn’t seem concerned when the tech elite marched in lockstep with Biden four years ago. (Probably the more egregious hypocrite here is Chuck Schumer, who tried to reposition himself as an anti-oligarch radical despite serving as an unofficial consigliere for varied Wall Street ghouls).

At any rate, how likely is it that the Democrats can change course? Backing such things as legalized drug injection sites near schools, as just happened in deep-blue Denver, suggests that not all progressives are ready to take the plunge just yet. As they face the reality of working-class desertions, in fact, the progressive wing of the party will likely move even further to the Left. People like AOC already don’t distinguish between “good” billionaires and “bad” ones. They just think billionaires shouldn’t exist at all, even as they push for even more redistribution, a program that ultimately looks suspiciously like American Peronism. It hardly helps, of course, that the loudest proponents of radical economic change are often the very same Democrats pushing for unpopular shifts on transgenderism or reparations.

An arguably even bigger problem for liberals is that, their new populist guise notwithstanding, they’re still reliant on many of the oligarchs that Biden now denounces. That’s clear enough in the figures. The Elons of the world have kissed Donald Trump’s greasy ring, but when it comes to “dark money” from the ultra rich, Democrats have tended to be greater recipients. Just as important, the Democrats have become so dependent on affluent professionals, including across the vast government apparatus, making any appeal for redistribution tricky. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, has explicitly said Democrats should avoid “true economic populism” because it “is bad for our high-income base.”

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By Joel Kotkin

The Trumpistas face a different class challenge: though one where those troublesome oligarchs still feature heavily. Having won over much of the middle- and working-classes, gaining even in outer borough New York, they now have to find a way to build a common agenda with the billionaires. The recent brouhaha over H1-B visas — essentially allowing for the import of temporary tech workers — revealed the gap between an oligarchic elite addicted to procuring cheap foreign labor and those countless Americans who might want such jobs for themselves or their offspring.

One thing is certain: most oligarchs are not social democrats. Rather than a competitive economy, they represent what Aldous Huxley called “a scientific caste system” where the highly credentialed and technologically dominant have almost total reign. Artificial intelligence, the crack cocaine of the digital age, will accelerate this process, eliminating both high- and low-paid jobs, as power gravitates to those who control the algorithms. This new aristocracy, whatever its current political affiliation, already regards itself as intrinsically more deserving of their wealth and power than the old managerial elites, let alone grubby corporate speculators. Coming from the ADD tech world, they tend, if anything, to be more followers of Ayn Rand than any populist theoretician.

Trump’s dilemma, in short, will be how to please these nabobs while preserving his working-class base. Expect continued battles between populists — including JD Vance and Josh Hawley — and more libertarian, profit-driven Trump whisperers. In particular, expect conflict over Social Security, which Trump has pledged to preserve, and tariffs, despised by most libertarians and their billionaire funders. Then again, in a land where class is king, such bickering is surely to be expected.

While ostensibly addressing an important issue — concentrated wealth and power — Biden ultimately offered a shallow and pettily partisan account in a way that embodied his political failure as he exits the stage of history.

As many have noted, there was plenty of irony to be found in the address. Democrats, not Republicans, have recently been favored — in donations and votes — by corporate America, including Big Tech, a few prominent defectors notwithstanding. But the issue with Biden’s speech wasn’t that it was hypocritical given his party’s fundraising prowess and increasingly upscale base. Ike himself, after all, had overseen the expansion of the very military-industrial complex he decried, but at least he ended his presidency with a memorable articulation of the problem that pointed the finger at an institution with which he was closely associated.

Biden, in contrast, followed up his comments on a real crisis that has been mounting for decades — a rising oligarchy — with some indications that the main such people he’s concerned about aren’t oligarchs writ large, so much as a few in particular: Donald Trump and his cronies. In this respect, he showed little understanding of why his presidency is ending in such lousy fashion: a governing vision that has vacillated between a broad critique of concentrated wealth and a far narrower one focused on the crisis represented by Trump.

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Your awokening isn't special

By Geoff Shullenberger

“Never let a good crisis go to waste”: This phrase, attributed to Winston Churchill, was notably repurposed by Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama. Emanuel’s reference was to the 2008 financial crisis, which brought an end to two decades of bipartisan optimism about the US economy. But as former Obama adviser Reed Hundt argued in his 2019 book, A Crisis Wasted, Obama failed to seize on the opportunity to remake the economic order. Infamously, he bailed out the banks but left homeowners underwater; he also initiated quantitative-easing policies that juiced the markets but redounded heavily to the benefit of the asset-rich; and presided over a dramatic worsening of inequality. Trump’s successful defiance of GOP economic orthodoxies around free trade and entitlements and his defeat of Hillary Clinton amounted to a belated verdict on Obama’s inability to deliver real reform.

The Biden presidency, which began amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic, offered the possibility of a do-over. Many saw the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, enacted under two months after Biden’s inauguration, as proof his administration had discarded the excessive caution that got in the way of Obama’s hope to be a transformative president. After campaigning mostly as a moderate with the modest goal of helping lead the nation out of crisis, Biden entered office promising to be the “most progressive president since FDR,” whose portrait he hung above the fireplace in the Oval Office.

If we didn’t know Biden’s party had lost decisively after his ignominious withdrawal from the campaign, his farewell address might have sounded like a victory lap. To be sure, he can’t be faulted for an unwillingness to “go big”, between the stimulus packages, the revival of a trust-busting agenda targeting big corporations, and the industrial policy aimed at, as Biden put it, “creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products”. Congressional progressives are happy to give him credit for all this. So why weren’t working-class voters, who not only didn’t bring back the FDR-era Democratic supermajority, but drifted even further from the party?

Many plausible answers have already been offered to this question: Biden couldn’t overcome the global anti-incumbency wave fed by inflation; he failed to control the border; the industrial and infrastructure projects he subsidized will take too long to come online to generate immediate benefits; his own senility and Kamala Harris’s inept candidacy doomed them; and so on. But Biden’s farewell address highlighted something more fundamental. Despite his administration’s sweeping economic reforms, it remained wedded to the Democratic Party’s main post-2016 sales pitch, which is roughly: whatever we are, at least we aren’t Donald Trump.

Consider the “real dangers” of the “tech-industrial complex” highlighted in Biden’s speech: not, for instance, the immense power wielded over employees by companies such as Uber (whose general counsel, as it happens, served as one of Kamala Harris’s main advisers in the 2024 race), but an “avalanche of misinformation and disinformation”. He went on to lament that “social media is giving up on fact-checking”, an allusion to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that he would retire Meta’s fact-checking program in favor of community notes.

The notion that the gravest crisis affecting the country is “misinformation”, to be countered by fact-checking, can be traced back to the frantic postmortems that followed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. That Biden is sticking to this message up to his final day in office suggests his party has hardly evolved since then, even though the misinformation narrative has been widely disputed and the eight-year war on “fake news” utterly failed to achieve its main objective: preventing Trump’s return to office.

It is unsurprising that constant warnings about these supposed threats failed to turn many voters against their nemesis, and may have done the opposite. Misinformation worries political and media elites, but barely registers for most people — for good reason. The circulation of unapproved ideas, stories, and messages is symptomatic of gatekeepers’ loss of control. If you’re a gatekeeper, that’s a crisis for you; if you’re not, it isn’t. Not only that, the misinformation narrative exudes contempt for the ordinary citizen, who is treated as an ignorant rube in need of constant supervision. No wonder this message’s resonance barely extends outside a few small precincts.

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No less than Obama, then, Biden let a crisis go to waste. But part of the reason for this was he and his party, for self-interested reasons, misrecognized what the crisis was. A whole series of threats — Vladimir Putin’s Russia, fake news, authoritarianism, Covid — were conjured up or made to stand in for the crisis ostensibly represented by one man. Yet while Trump has been a crisis for the political class, most of the public hasn’t viewed him that way; even many who didn’t vote for him were unreceptive to the Democrats’ “saving-democracy” messaging. Moreover, in 2024 even more than earlier cycles, many saw his disruptive presence as a necessary response to crises they do care about, and the political class doesn’t: affordability, crime, out-of-control immigration.

The concentrated wealth of a man such as Elon Musk, who has now used it to buy himself a place in the president-elect’s inner circle, is a genuine concern — a crisis, perhaps. But Biden and his party have spent most of the past eight years claiming not that they will confront such influence-peddling, but posturing as the defenders of an establishment we all know was corrupted by the wealthy long before Trump first took control of the GOP.

In his 1936 re-election campaign, FDR could declare that “business and financial monopoly” were “unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred”. In 2024, Kamala Harris could say no such thing — and on the contrary, she regularly cited the plaudits she received from Goldman Sachs and other corporate interests as the ultimate proof of her competence. To anyone who remembers this, Biden’s warnings about oligarchy ring hollow.

Yet amid this bonanza, Volodymyr Zelensky faces a looming threat: the prospect of paying out millions of pounds in damages to companies and individuals who argue their assets were illegally nationalised by the Ukrainian government. More than that, opposition lawmakers worry that, unless corruption is addressed, the money of generous Western donors risks being syphoned off and diverted by officials.

Even before the war began, in February 2022, corruption had long been a problem in Ukraine. Yet the situation has arguably worsened since then: earlier this year, to give one example, evidence emerged of a $40 million corruption scheme involving the purchase of arms by the military. Funds earmarked to buy weapons were allegedly stolen by officials and company executives, with some of the proceeds transferred to foreign accounts. Not least given the importance of foreign aid to Ukraine, procurement fraud is a sensitive issue: wartime profiteering could present an obstacle for future funding by the USA and EU.

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Yet these accusations pale next to the seizure of commercial assets by the state. At least 17 Ukrainian companies and 1,611 citizens have been sanctioned by Zelensky’s administration, after the Kyiv government invoked special military laws allowing it to take control of private firms. The fear among Ukrainian businesspeople is that this is being carried out as a ploy to nationalise their assets without compensation.

“Nobody is safe,” says Julia Kiryanova, CEO of Smart Holdings, an investment conglomerate, which has been targeted and subjected to police raids and seizure of assets. Kiryanova claims sanctions are being used to force fire sales of profitable banks and firms, which will then be exploited by politically connected Ukrainian businessmen to enrich themselves. Certainly, the alleged redistribution of corporate assets — under the guise of sanctions, and absent the rule of law — is eerily reminiscent of the notorious privatisation of state assets in Russia in the Nineties.

Nor are Ukrainians the only ones to suffer here. As UnHerd can reveal, last month Zelensky received a letter from a Dutch finance company, accusing him of violating international law and claiming it had lost its vast investment in Ukraine’s biggest bank. The letter, a request for arbitration by a Dutch financial company called EMIS Finance BV, suggests the Zelensky government breached a bilateral investment agreement. The treaty supposedly protects Dutch investors in Ukraine — but in 2023, the Kyiv government nationalised Sense Bank without offering any compensation.

In particular, EMIS Finance claims it lost £420 million in non-performing loans to ABH Ukraine Ltd, the majority shareholder of Sense Bank. Thanks to these indirect investments, EMIS Finance argues it has the status of a protected investor.

A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice confirmed the government had received EMIS Finance’s letter about commencing proceedings. “In accordance with the standard practice of the Ministry of Justice,” a spokesperson said, “we do not comment on pending or potential legal matters which may affect the interests of Ukraine.”

The state takeover of Sense Bank can be traced back to October 2022, when the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation allowing the government to nationalise insolvent banks. But that left a hitch: Sense Bank was solvent. Even the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) admitted as much, stating that despite losses and outflows, the institution was healthy. As Katerina Rozhkov, the chairperson of the NBU noted in January 2023, there were “no factors” that threatened the bank’s solvency.

Not to be dissuaded, the Kyiv government promptly changed the law, last May passing new legislation allowing banks to be declared insolvent if some of its shareholders were sanctioned. In the case of Sense Bank, three of its indirect shareholders had indeed faced sanctions from both the UK and Ukraine, with the latter imposed by a body called the National Security and Defence Council. That, in turn, meant the bank could be declared insolvent, despite the state of its accounts and the positive noises from regulators.

A month later, on 5 June 2023, President Zelensky duly signed a bill authorising the sale of 100% of Sense Bank’s stock to the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance — with no compensation for shareholders. It was now officially owned by the state, and a few days later the Economic Security Bureau seized hundreds of assets belonging to Sense Bank, encompassing everything from shopping centres to apartment blocks. A new CEO and board of directors were swiftly installed too, with the transformed Sense Bank due to be reprivitised next year. The IMF, for its part, is currently choosing an internationally recognised financial advisor to prepare the bank for sale.

Not that the alleged victims here are quietly accepting their fate. Beyond EMIS Finance’s letter to Zelensky, ABH Holdings, the Luxembourg-registered former owner of Sense Bank, has filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Ukraine in the international arbitration court. Based on the bilateral investment treaty between Ukraine and Luxembourg, ABH Holdings seeks compensation for what a spokesperson calls the “illegal expropriation of Sense Bank by the authorities through enforced nationalisation done in an arbitrary, disproportionate, and discriminatory manner. By combining methods of corporate raiding and war profiteering, the Ukrainian authorities have unlawfully taken the bank from its rightful owners”.

Once the case is heard in court, Zelensky’s role will likely become clearer. The president, after all, is also head of the very National Security and Defence Council that enacted sanctions against key Sense Bank shareholders. Zelensky also nominated the National Bank of Ukraine’s governor, who strongly supported the nationalisation of Sense Bank and rejected a proposal to sell the institution to independent non-sanctioned investors.

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This lawsuit is progressing, but the Ukrainian government is anxious for the court hearings to be held in secret, and for the evidence to remain confidential. ABH Holdings rejected this suggestion, insisting that Ukraine abides by the international arbitration rules stating that “confidentiality is neither agreed nor envisaged”.

In the meantime, the EMIS lawsuit against Ukraine is proceeding — nor do experts expect the legal cases against illegal nationalisation to end there. “This conflict has one primary consequence,” argues Baiju Vasani, a UK barrister who specialises in Ukrainian investor state cases. “It increases the number of arbitration cases against Ukraine brought under international investment treaties for breaching international law. I expect these cases to pile up in the next few years, as foreign nationals and companies seek billions of pounds in damages for their stolen property.”

Together with the latest news from across the Atlantic — with Donald Trump potentially poised to cut off aid to Kyiv and even impose a peace treaty on the country — the next few months could be rocky indeed for President Zelensky. For the moment, though, Sense Bank belongs to his government.

Whether Roosevelt’s Republic properly ended with the social chaos of the late Sixties or with America’s victory in the Cold War, and whether we are therefore currently living in the Fifth, Sixth or arguably even the Seventh American Republic, is the type of question that future history students in Beijing or Singapore are bound to contemplate on their final exams. The more immediate point is that another American Republic is collapsing, and also that we’ve been here before. In recent years, as in the Sixties, we’ve seen the take-over of large sections of American cities by armies of drug-addicted zombies, riots in Washington, dirty political tricks by the FBI and the CIA, the capture of universities by militants obsessed with race and gender, dire warnings about the fate of the planet, and the wholesale abandonment of American military allies. The difference between now and the Sixties is that today the people with Angela Davis posters on their walls are living in gated communities, rather than communes.

More troublesome, however, than the sight of America once again shedding its skin, is the shape of the American Republic to come — and the question of whether it will be a republic at all. Since the end of the Cold War, America has transformed itself from a country in which most citizens proudly imagined themselves to be “middle class” into a bi-coastal oligarchy. The hallmarks of this new republic’s politics are the sorts of pathologies that used to be associated with the countries to America’s south: a wildly unequal distribution of wealth, choking bureaucracy, paranoid mass politics, the weaponisation of the security apparatus, and the merger of monopoly capital and invasive state bureaucracies.

The beginning of the current crisis can be dated to the election of 2016, in which a large majority of voters expressed their rejection of the American socio-political order by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump over the neoliberal establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. Trump’s election was followed by coordinated attacks on his flailing presidency by large sections of the American power structure, including the national press, corporate monopoly internet platforms, and a security apparatus that used the press as a megaphone for a series of conspiracy theories and lies that were often spread under cover of anonymity. The media’s already-tattered credibility with the public was plunged into the toilet.

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This toxic combination of widening political polarisation and institutional failures was contaminated further by the country’s disastrous response to Covid-19, which crushed small and medium-sized businesses while padding the profits of large investors and internet-based monopolists. The result was the largest single transfer of wealth in American history since the Civil War, and the disenfranchisement of a significant portion of the American middle class — accompanied by a steady drum-beat of “woke” discourse that gleefully demonised the losers as “white supremacists” and “insurrectionists”.

The election of Joe Biden in 2020 was supposed to restore the legitimacy of the American political system and bring a measure of social peace. Instead, President Biden went in the opposite direction, attacking his opponents as “white supremacists” and “fascists”, setting the FBI on domestic foes, and endorsing a banana republic-style raid on Trump’s home.

Yet to blame America’s woes on either the 79-year old Biden, who strikes even sympathetic domestic observers as senile, or Trump, who continues to be a font of ugly and delusional politics, is to dangerously mistake the nature of the crisis. America’s toxic partisan politics are a symptom of deep changes in the American socio-economic structure that date back to the early Nineties, in the aftermath of America’s victory in the Cold War — when President Bill Clinton set out to take Reaganomics global with a series of trade deals that included NAFTA and GATT, and destroyed the American middle class that Roosevelt and his successors created.

From the standpoint of the Democratic Party of the Nineties, Clinton’s trade deals were a huge success, bringing major sectors of Wall Street and large American corporations into the party camp. For traditional Democratic constituencies such as industrial labour unions and their members, they were a disaster, permanently depriving millions of Americans of their jobs and turning large swaths of the country’s industrial base into rubble-strewn reservations for zombified meth-heads.

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Among the writers, thinkers, and reporters who tried to analyse the travails of the American working and middle classes during Bill Clinton’s presidency, perhaps the most acute was the Pentagon-linked geo-strategist Edward Luttwak. For Luttwak, the problem with America wasn’t market capitalism or the failure of American workers to compete with their peers in Mexico and China. Rather, it was the unholy conjunction of Right-wing libertarian Reaganomics with selfish Left-wing baby boomer mantras about free trade, technology, and open borders.

What both the Left and the Right shared, in Luttwak’s analysis, was their disdain for the kinds of Bismarckian social bargains that keep states strong. Luttwak called the unholy alliance of the libertarian Left and Right “Turbo-Capitalism”, and he warned of its disintegrating effects on the American middle class, which he saw as the foundation-stone of American stability, prosperity, and geo-political dominance.

In his concern for the disintegrating American middle class of the Nineties, Luttwak was hardly alone. The troubles of middle-and-working-class Americans were a common theme during that era among a cohort of perceptive American thinkers including Robert Bellah, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Lind, Robert Putnam, and Robert Reich. What made Luttwak a rarity among his peers, Lind excepted, was his embrace of European-style welfare state capitalism in the context of an overtly nationalist politics — ie the American status quo before the Reaganites and the Clintonites set out from different directions to destroy it.

The America of the Obama-Trump-Biden years now looks a lot worse than the America that alarmed Luttwak and Lind in the Nineties. At the top of the narrowing social pyramid is a tiny class of mega-billionaires who personally own and control a staggering percentage of the country’s wealth, resources, and power, and make their money from the globalised economy. Then comes the professional class that services the billionaires, ranging from highly paid lawyers and investment bankers to chefs and fashion designers and real estate salesmen. Below them is the servant class of bureaucrats, teachers and other lower-status employees whose salaries are paid by the state or non-governmental organisations and foundations, who funnel money back to their political patrons in the Democratic Party in the form of free campaign labour and contributions.

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Finally, there are the working poor, many of whom formerly considered themselves “working class” or “middle class”, but who are now forced to rely on government programs and subsidies covering everything from rent, to school tuition, to health care, to food. The glue that holds this power vertical together is the Democratic Party, which now regularly outspends the Republican Party — an incoherent mix of Trumpists, Christians, and other socio-economic losers — by margins of three or four to one.

In addition to being an oligarchy, the new American social pyramid is also a gerontocracy, in which both political power and wealth are wildly skewed in favour of people above the age of 60. Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82) lead the Democrats, while Trump (76) and Mitch McConnell (80) lead the Republicans. Where the average American over the age of 55 has a net worth of somewhere between $1.2 and $1.5 million, the average American adult under the age of 35 is worth approximately $75,000, with the vast majority having no significant assets at all.

Understanding the new America as a decaying oligarchy run by old people is essential to understanding the increasingly bizarre mutations of Left and Right in American politics. The “Left”, in the United States, now represents the new oligarchy and its dependents. The resulting “Left-wing” preferences for free trade and open borders in turn make it impossible for American workers to earn a living wage. The fact that the new American Left is funded by billionaires such as George Soros (92) and Warren Buffet (91) ensures that Left politics is focused not on decent pay for workers but on the ever-mutating math of woke identity politics.

In place of tangible goods, such as a living wage and the chance to buy a home, groups of dispossessed Americans are offered official “recognition” of an ever-expanding set of “identities” rooted in race, gender and sexual preference, which pits them against other groups of Americans who suffer from much the same woes. Wokeness, as an ideology, can be seen as a function of the ascendent Turbo-Capitalist order — a means for controlling the working and middle classes to ensure that they can’t unite against their increasingly all-powerful masters.

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The digital technologies on which the new American mega-fortunes are based offer historically unprecedented opportunities for surveillance, censorship, and social control — and have allowed the oligarchs who own them to merge with the state. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, for example, owns the Washington Post, which the security apparatus used as a megaphone to spread the Russiagate conspiracy theory to undermine Trump. Amazon also holds a lucrative cloud computing contract to manage all the CIA’s data, which it administers from a centre in Northern Virginia where over 20,000 people work, many of whom were formerly employed by the government. While tech giants such as Oracle and Palantir have large contracts with the US security apparatus, public-facing companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter regularly censor news and opinions at the behest of the White House while funneling private user data to the security services for free.

If techno-monopolists have merged with the security bureaucracies in Washington, the human instrument of elite control is the “professional-managerial class”, which forms the backbone of the lay Democratic Party. But how did this relatively narrow group of lawyers, professors, teachers, nonprofit workers, bureaucrats, and lower-level editors gain the power to anathemise, exclude, condemn, and generally lord it over much larger sectors of the population?

One answer is its ability to leverage digital tools, particularly social media — a medium in which small numbers of activists can wreak havoc on hundred-billion-dollar corporations or prestige institutions. By this logic, the Woke is a vanguard movement that seized control of a new technology and used it as a force multiplier to discipline and terrorise the larger institutional landscape.

A more subtle version of this answer is that woke-ists use the threat of reputational damage to impose uniformity of opinion on the class of people like themselves, whose careers exist only insofar as they are backed by sufficient reputational capital. Unlike previously dominant forms of capital (like, say, land and cows), the reputational capital that is the professional class’s stock in trade — the ticket to the next job or fellowship — can be vaporised by a single tweet. In turn, the uniformity of opinion that the woke imposes within its own cohorts allows it to control those cohorts, and use them to bend powerful institutions to its will.

This explanation of wokeness, though, is to imagine that the tail is wagging the dog. But, media companies have stockholders, just as universities have wealthy and powerful trustees to answer to. These stockholders and trustees should be more powerful than broke 20-somethings with Twitter accounts. Surely, at some point, market forces should begin to punish institutions that chose to ignore reality. If Princeton University, say, were to embark on a programme of persecuting faculty who dissent from faddish doctrines, then those faculty members — and the donors who support them — could migrate to Harvard, which would accumulate money and prestige at Princeton’s expense. But that never happens. Not just institutions of higher education, the entire professional layer of society — from the professions, to corporate management, to non-profits, to media and publishing — moves in lock-step.

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So who does control the new American system? The answer isn’t broke woke-ists. It’s the monopolists who own the platforms where the woke-ists live. Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and Sergei Brin and Larry Page and Lorraine Jobs don’t care about mean tweets. They care about the hundreds of billions of dollars in their bank accounts, their lavish mansions and private jets, and pursuing rich person hobbies like colonising Mars. Their primary political goal, as a class, is to prevent the state from ever getting strong enough to tax their fortunes, break up their monopolies, or interfere with the supplies of cheap immigrant and offshore labour from which they profit. The more fractured, dejected, and heavily surveilled the America public is, the less likely a strong state is to emerge.

In the contest between the oligarchs and the fading Rooseveltian state, the woke are a useful tool— not an independent power. They are the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party, whose job it is to organise the dispossessed into groups that are narrow, factional, and divided enough that they can’t come together into a force that threatens oligarchical control. Discontent with the Turbo-Capitalist order can be usefully turned against anyone who refuses to follow the ever-changing party line — beginning with the “deplorables” who are now regularly portrayed as murderous, undemocratic racists and fascists, and extending to JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood. The result is a closed circuit in which Turbo-Capitalist oligarchs and Woke activists make common cause against formerly independent institutions like universities, professional associations, and the press. All of these institutions rely on guarantees of individual and collective rights by the state, which the Turbo-Capitalists and the Woke seek to capture and use as an instrument to enforce their own privatised social bargain: everything within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party.

The unprecedented reach of the technologies that the new oligarchy commands has already destroyed the press and replaced it with a government-corporate censorship regime that has no parallel in peacetime America. Combined with what appears to be a healthy appetite for humiliating others, this power does not bode well for the future of social peace in America, or for the health of the next American Republic.

The menace of Putin’s kleptocracy seeped into Britain long before he started stacking up armoured divisions on the Ukrainian border. Yet the money has kept flowing, Britain has kept fencing his cronies’ stolen wealth, and repeated promises to tackle the problem have achieved nothing.

This failure is a national embarrassment, and has fuelled a mess of conspiracy theories: that the Tories are bought and paid for; that the Kremlin has kompromat to keep ministers in line; that the City of London has a special hotline into the heart of parliament.

The real story, however, is far more alarming, but requires some telling, because you can’t understand London’s love affair with Russian money without understanding the story of how the City was reborn as both a financial centre and the engine of our national economy. They are, in fact, the same story.

Once you understand this, you can see why government after government has been so reluctant to drive the oligarchs’ money away. They’re like doctors watching a cancer grow bigger and bigger in a vital organ: operating will cripple their patient, so they leave it in place, even though — eventually — it will kill him. But this choice can’t be postponed much longer. If we want to save British democracy, we need to take a scalpel to a tumour that was seeded all the way back in 1955.

Back then, the Soviet Union had a problem. Its great rival the United States had ended World War Two as the undisputed centre of the world’s economy; if the USSR wanted to trade with the world, it needed dollars. The global financial system was less globalised in those days. In order to secure democratic control over wealth, governments imposed limits on money in ways that are hard to comprehend now. They restricted how much money you could move across borders, for instance, or what interest rates you could charge on loans you made.

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That meant that, if you had dollars, you kept them in the United States, where they were subject to the scrutiny of the Federal Reserve. But Soviet officials worried that, if Cold War tensions became more tense, and if their dollars were in New York, the US government might seize them, thus cutting Moscow off from international markets.

The City of London had a problem too, albeit a very different one. Britain was broke, with a huge hangover of debt left from funding its war effort. The capital flows that had sustained financiers’ incomes had shrivelled, and sterling had lost its role as the world’s leading currency. Banks were moribund, and ambitious young Brits preferred to work in academia, industry, or government.

The solution to the two powers’ problems came thanks to two banks: the Moscow Narodny (MNB), which was Soviet-owned but London-based, and the Midland, a scrappy challenger unable to attract the deposits it needed to compete with its more established rivals. MNB lent its dollars to the Midland, which used them to buy pounds, with which it could grow its UK business.

It may not sound like much, but these two banks had invented the most consequential financial invention of the second half of the twentieth century: the Eurodollar. By transacting with dollars outside of the United States, they kept the American currency’s upsides — its strength and convenience — while removing its downside: the heavy hand of the US government.

As sterling declined further, more London banks began to appreciate this new form of currency, which could move across borders unimpeded, could be traded easily, and was completely unregulated. They used pounds for domestic transactions, but kept different accounts for the Eurodollars, which they described with a word borrowed from maritime law to describe something outside the reach of government: offshore. Soon other banks noticed the innovation too, arriving from Japan, from continental Europe and from the United States to take advantage of the new discovery.

The Eurodollar could have appeared almost anywhere, and embryonic versions did appear in Canada, in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe. But in those countries the governments recognised the threat that footloose currency posed to their sovereignty and snuffed it out. Memories of the Great Depression, and of the misery and war that followed it were still raw, and democratic politicians wanted to make sure they could always put people before wealth.

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In the City, however, the Bank of England loved the idea of setting money free, so it did. “It is par excellence an example of the kind of business which London ought to do both well and profitably,” a Bank official wrote in 1963. “If we were to stop the business here, it would move to other centres with a consequent loss of earnings for London.”

At that time, the market was worth around $5 billion. Within four years, it was worth $13 billion. By the end of the Sixties, it was worth $40 billion. That was when other countries started to surrender, to scrap their own efforts to stop their banks from leaving, and the market really took off. Now, it’s the biggest in the world: all dollars are offshore, so are pounds, euros, Swiss francs and — with a few exceptions — pretty much every other currency in the world.

This business model did not stop there. Our financial professionals looked for countries whose governments were imposing limits on wealth that its owners found onerous, and undercut them. In the Cayman Islands, Americans found a ready haven for all the money they didn’t want to pay taxes on, and this once-obscure turtle-fishing archipelago is now a world class financial centre. In the British Virgin Islands, tycoons from China and criminals from Latin America found cheap, opaque shell companies to hide their ownership of assets behind. And in Britain itself, generations of oligarchs — from the oil-rich countries of the Gulf, from the ex-colonies of Asia and Africa and, of course, from the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe — found a warm welcome.

What we offer them is a haven: not just a tax haven, but an everything haven. They can buy property here and they don’t need to tell anyone about it, because they can hide their ownership behind a shell company. They can manage their liquid wealth here too, either in a discreet bank or a boutique private office. They can send their children to one of our world-class schools, buy their art at one of our auction houses, and meet their friends at a ritzy restaurant while their wives and/or mistresses shop at Harrods (because, let’s be honest, these oligarchs are pretty much all men).

If a business rival complains about them, they can settle the dispute in our commercial court, thanks to our world-leading legal sector. And if they want to keep an eye on how their adopted country is run, they can dine with a minister for not much more than they’d spend on a holiday. They can buy anything in London and, thanks to the way politicians have starved our enforcement agencies, no one with the power to do anything about it will ever know if the wealth was honestly acquired.

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Politician after politician has stood up in parliament to insist there is no place for dodgy money in London. But then the lobbying starts. Every one of these sectors — finance, law, estate agencies, auction houses, education — starts arguing for exceptions and loopholes, and nothing gets done. In 2014, for example, after it was revealed that specific shell structures called Scottish limited partnerships had been used to launder money stolen from Moldova, politicians from the Scottish National Party campaigned for the law to be tightened. Not only did this not happen, but the Treasury actually deregulated the structures further, so as to protect the competitive advantage of the City.

This is a supercharged version of that same business model cooked up by Moscow Narodny and the Midland back in the Fifties. It is reliant on British regulations, enforcement and oversight being weaker than those of other countries, so wealth comes here, and we can earn fees from it. It is not just oligarchs that benefit from our offshore services, but corporations too: the City earns fees from any wealth, whether honestly or dishonestly acquired.

The risk is obvious. If it isn’t enough that Britain is depriving other countries of money they need, and driving down levels of tax and regulations everywhere by providing a haven for the wealthy, we are also acting like a giant Florida for an magnified version of Al Capone’s gangsters, and giving them a playground from which to threaten the world. We are privileging the interests of the few over the wishes of the many, whether those happy few are evil, naughty, or just publicity-averse.

This is not a revelation. Multiple parliamentary enquiries have revealed the seriousness of the problem in recent years, including the Intelligence and Security Committee’s (ISC) 2019 probe into Russian wealth in the UK. Truss should be commended for saying she will do something, but let’s wait until the laws are on the statute books before congratulating her. After all, Boris Johnson battled to prevent the ISC’s Russia Report being published at all — and that is not the action of a man looking to put democracy before money.