Oligarchy Everywhere
Both Biden and Bannon are warning about oligarchs — but for wildly different reasons.
It’s not every day that Joe Biden and Steve Bannon are saying the same thing. But don’t get confused: Their means don’t have the same ends.
In his outgoing speech to the nation, Joe Biden warned us that America is sliding into an oligarchy, while, the same week, Steven Bannon also called out “tech oligarchs” for being too cozy with the Trump administration. I suspect that millions of Americans have now Googled the term.
Derived from Ancient Greek, oligarchy means that few command. In this case, it is the few with money, the rest of us be damned.
Both Biden and Bannon are seeing the same thing. The inauguration couldn’t have made it more plain: Trump’s family was joined not by civil rights leaders, statesmen, or small-town heroes, but by millionaires and billionaires chomping at the bit for their profits to rise. My son and I counted them on the screen: Bezos, Zuckerburg, Pichai, Ramaswamy, and the ever-present Elon Musk, who spent at least a quarter billion dollars to help Trump get elected, were all there. The wealthy corporate owner class joined Trump on the stage, not public servants or other elected officials — they sat below.
How I feel about either of these Bannon and Biden aside, Biden at least has put our federal dollars where his mouth is by moving legislation to reinvest in infrastructure and jobs that every American can have access to. He’s worked to tax the rich and make them pay their fair share. Bannon, on the other hand, is a former Wall Street guy and Harvard grad who has spent almost 30 years trying to pit America’s working class against each other by fueling culture wars, not pushing for economic policy. So when they call out the “oligarchy,” I’m looking at their track record here.
Both of them are sensing — and naming — a real problem. For Biden, it’s a concern that money and power will continue to consolidate in Washington (something he and his party have done little to curb) and that historic inequality will continue to grow. Inequality in the United States today mirrors that of the 1920s, with the concentration of annual income at the top growing at rates that dwarf any growth at the bottom. Data shows that the least wealthy 50 percent of Americans hold less than 4% of the nation’s wealth, while the top 10% hold two-thirds.
For Bannon, a strategist and a key figure behind the base-building activities of the far-right, it’s a numbers problem. He knows that the 90% of Americans who own very little, will tire of the billionaire showmanship and instinctually rebuff it. Bannon, who was arrested on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht and booked on charges of defrauding Americans of $15 million for his bogus We Build the Wall charity, knows that Trump needs to work harder to keep what working-class support that he has. He is saying that he cannot be tasked with both rallying the working class and making us believe that Musk is on our side.
Both Biden and Bannon have seen the election numbers from November 2024 and get that the largest source of power in the United States is within the working class. To win elections one needs to keep the truckers, nurses, journalists, teachers, farmers, laborers, postal workers, and mechanics with you. It’s math.
No matter which party has held power in the United States, the wealthy and the corporate class have always been in the shadows. At the founding of our country, only wealthy, white, male landowners were allowed to to vote and a century later, industrialists and robber barons hovered like mosquitos around Washington, DC. Our “revolts” have also been run by the wealthy, with slaveowners and the plantation class running the Confederacy. Everyone else has, historically, been hung out outside of politics to dry.
The business class is one of the greatest threats to democracy because autocracy will always be better for their bottom line. In the early 1930s, a group of Wall Street bankers — including JP Morgan and Prescott Bush — plotted and funded a fascist coup against Roosevelt, who had promised to make things more equal. Luckily, this coup was foiled but the point remains that we’ve never lived far from oligarchy here.
When talking about oligarchy, Biden and Bannon are naming the same thing but for remarkably different reasons. They are recognizing the same trend and knowing the same truth: Working-class people have banded together historically and can defeat oligarchies, plutocracies, and fascism. Both are sending up reminders of this fact and issuing warnings. For Biden, his warning is to the people and perhaps to his party: Bringing together working-class people across race, place, and gender is a real strategy to win by. For Bannon, his message is for Trump: Don’t flaunt your adoration of the billionaires, because the people will smell a rat and jump ship.
