Shall the people rule? Some thoughts on our new Gilded Age

Yesterday, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States. You may have heard something about this.

But don't worry, I am not here to talk at length about Donald Trump - oceans of ink have been spilled about him, psychoanalyzing, criticizing, contextualizing. And in the case of conservative media, disgorging rationalizations for his unhinged behavior that sound reasonable to them and absurd to the rest of us. He remains a wretched human - that's a given.

I am mostly here to talk about the man who, in many ways, is our actual president right now: Elon Musk - and what his power says about the state of democracy in the United States of America. The new administration is surrounding itself with tech barons: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and others have been eager to cozy up to Trump, seeking favor in his second administration. They were also given the remarkable honor of being seated next to Trump at his inaugural ceremony. They have donated millions of dollars to his inauguration fund, in addition to contorting the organizations they control to be more Trump-friendly.

To me, this is reminiscent of America's Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to the early 1900s when men of great wealth casually threw their weight around the country's politics. Unabated capitalism reigned supreme. It was an age of steel and smokestacks. Coal mines peppered the landscape, while railroads ran steely spines across the United States. Workers toiled and sweat for long hours in frightful conditions, often for a pittance of pay.

While 2024 is in many respects different than say, 1880, it still feels as if we are entering a new Gilded Age, which we have been perhaps approaching for the past few decades. Wealth has been consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, power accrued into fewer companies. The events of the past few months seem to be the culmination of where we have been tending as a country - and a world - for quite some time.

And if you want another example of these men currying favor with Trump, Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon who owns The Washington Post, killed the Post editorial board's Kamala Harris endorsement last fall. This caused a furious rebellion among the liberal subscriber base of the Post, resulting in 100,000s of subscription cancellations in mere days - about 10% of their total subscriber base. Several high profile figures at the Post have also since resigned in protest of Bezos's meddling.

Mark Zuckerberg has also recently announced changes to Meta - the company that owns Facebook and Instagram - moderation policies, saying that hate speech against gay or trans people can be treated as just an expression of an opinion instead of... well, hate speech.

And then of course there is Elon Musk himself, the owner of X (formerly known by the much superior name Twitter), who spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting Trump elected last fall. That's chump change for the world's richest man. More than any of the other tech barons who have toadied up to Donald, Musk has been particularly obsequious. His takeover of Twitter, which he stupidly renamed X, has meant he has vast control over one of the largest information ecosystems in the world. He has retooled X's algorithm to be biased in favor of pro-Trump, Republican content, and has been "advising" the Trump transition when he's not busy replying "true" to Neo-Nazis on his website.

And let's not forget he performed what looked like a very clear Nazi salute at the post-inauguration rally he spoke at yesterday. It should also be noted that Musk has spoken favorably of Germany's AFD Party - their Neo-Nazi party - saying that only they can save Germany. Seems bad!

Musk also now has an office in the Eisenhower Building, which is right next to the White House - thus why I put advising in quotation marks earlier. Musk doesn't appear to be just in an advisory role; he is himself exerting significant control over Trump and the Republican Party. There's also the fact that his net worth has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars since the election, further entrenching his position as the wealthiest man on the planet.

To further elucidate Musk's influence: during contentious budget negotiations last December over the bill to fund the government and prevent vital services from shutting down, Musk weighed in using Twitter, demanding changes to the deal that had been worked out between the Democrats and Republicans. This threw the negotiations into chaos, and resulted in - among other things - $190 million in childhood cancer research funding being stripped from the original bill (the bill, the Gabriella Miller Act, was later thankfully passed as a standalone bill) As the fact-checking, bullshit-debunking website Snopes notes,

"Just before the bipartisan bill was presented to the House, Musk began posting his opposition to it on X, writing 'Kill the Bill' and 'Stop the steal of your tax dollars!'

Soon after Musk shared his views on X and riled up Republicans who opposed the bill, Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance rejected the measures, saying they contained too many concessions to Democrats and too much wasteful spending."

Does this sound like Trump was calling the shots here - or that the tail was wagging the dog? Elon Musk's name was on no ballot; nobody voted for him. Why is he the one Congressional Republicans were taking their cues from to begin with? I recall Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noting on an Instagram live she did that many of her Republican colleagues were genuinely unsure what to do when Musk started inveighing against the bill. They didn't seem to know who to listen to - Trump or Musk. Who's advising whom?

There's a word for this kind of government - where the rich, consolidated in their hives of wealth and power, try to subvert any semblance of democracy in order to gain further riches still. It's oligarchy - rule by the rich. The dictates of a few unfathomably wealthy oligarchs usurp the will of the people. And Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest man whose wealth has increased by 100s of billions of dollars since the election, is trying to buy the American government. This leaves us facing a basic question about the future of the United States: shall the people rule?

For now, it seems an open question.

For those unaware, I have spent much of my life studying Eastern European politics, with a particular focus on Russia and Ukraine. One notable thing about Russia over the past 30 some years has been the immense power of the oligarchs (олигархи, oligarkhi) - a word used openly by Russians and others to describe them. These are men who gained incredible wealth after the Soviet Union collapsed, owing to the privatization of previously government-owned companies and assets. These men had powerful incentives to cultivate cozy relationships with the ruling powers in Russia in order to keep their business empires firmly in their grip. Indeed, these men form a strong base of support for the dictatorship of Russian President Vladimir Putin - Putin allows them to keep their vast wealth, in exchange for their political support. You want to be a crook and shamelessly loot the country? Very well. Just don't criticize the big man himself.

Does this sound familiar?

People will want to focus on the figure of President Trump, but don't get it twisted: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other lesser-known oligarchs are absolutely attempting to exert influence on Trump and the broader Republican Party that Trump controls. They do this at the expense of democracy and the integrity of our information ecosystems, because they are - as Teddy Roosevelt once put it - malefactors of great wealth. They want to get even richer than they already are, they want to act like the rules and laws don't apply to them, and they seem content to flaunt this fact in our faces.

I do think that this has a vast potential to backfire, particularly for Musk, who is seemingly incapable of shutting up. If there's one thing we know that Trump loves, it's having the spotlight stolen from him, all the while being shown to not be firmly in control of things. A stormy, operatic breakup seems inevitable.

But even if Musk and Trump do part ways, that won't change the fact that Musk represents perhaps the greatest threat to democracy not just in the United States, but in the world over. His website is regularly used by fascists to spread lies and misinformation - it played a critical role in feeding xenophobic riots by fascists in the UK last summer. Musk might seem just like an annoying loser, and he may well be that, but annoying losers paired with ungodly sums of money can still pose a formidable threat.

Ultimately, our present crisis can be summarized with the simple question I asked earlier in this article: Shall the people rule? Or shall this be a government of oligarchs, with the rest of us subject to the whims of their voracious appetites for ever more wealth?

I am firmly of the opinion that we can push back against this takeover of our government by America's billionaire class - our oligarchs - but only if we fight back ferociously against these dark interests. Only in this way can we begin to right the disastrous course these men have selfishly set us on. Only in this way shall the people be able to again rule.