America’s Oligarch Problem

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

In Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill, it's estimated that 57 million households could see their tax bills go up or remain flat, while the top 5% of earners will have their taxes cut.

by more than $1.5 trillion.

$1.5 trillion.

It's been called the largest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the rich in a single law in U.S.

history.

The move here should hardly come as a shock.

Trump's appeal, his style is populist somehow, but all along the reality of his policies have benefited the interests of the wealthy, the extremely wealthy, and billionaires have been granted unprecedented position of access and power in this administration.

From his perch in Washington, staff writer Evan Ostnos has been reporting on the politics and the culture culture of a new oligarchy in America.

And he's been asking this question.

What do you get for spending nearly $300 million on an election?

Not to mention another question.

What's the point of owning a boat that's the size of a football field?

Evan's reporting is collected in a new book called The Haves and the Have-Yats, Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich.

Evan, for years we've been hearing about oligarchy in Russia.

We've been hearing about oligarchic structures in China, your old neck of the woods, and many other places, but never

quite here.

We hear about millionaires and billionaires and all the rest, but not oligarchy.

What is an oligarchy really, and why

are we hearing about it now in American terms?

Aristotle defined it.

He said, oligarchy is when government is in the hands of men with property.

And there is absolutely no way to look at the government of the United States today and not describe it in those terms.

Just in 2004,

in the presidential election that year, billionaires in this country contributed about $13 million with an M, which felt like a lot at the time.

And in the 2024 election, they contributed 200 times as much, so $3 billion.

And of course, what happened in between was a series of Supreme Court decisions that have just ushered us into an entirely new period in American history.

Aaron Powell, so Franklin Roosevelt was, well, on the one hand, a new New Dealer, but on the other hand, he came from the property classes, to say the least.

Why wasn't that oligarchy?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Look, from the beginning, David, this country, after all, only gave the vote to white men with property.

So a civil oligarchy, which is defined by the fact that the very rich and powerful still believe in the rule of law, that that binds them.

Because it's, frankly, it's good for business and it's good for the country overall.

When you get a leader who decides that his personal power is more definitive than the law, you can go from being a civil oligarchy to what's known in a very memorable phrase as a sultanistic oligarchy.

And that's what you saw in Putin's Russia, to some degree in China, and it seems more and more perhaps what's happening here.

Aaron Powell, I recall that really incisive moment when Dave Chappelle gets up on Saturday Night Live and gives his analysis of the debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, in which he basically says,

you you know, Donald Trump admits that he takes advantage of the system.

He knows how the system works.

And the reason that Hillary Clinton doesn't come out for much more radical reform is because all her donors also take advantage of the system.

What separates them?

Just recently, I was talking to a donor who gives a huge amount of money to Democratic causes who was saying, If I could never give another penny again, I would.

But the last thing I'm going to do is unilaterally disarm at a moment when Donald Trump has put at least a dozen billionaires into the highest ranks of his administration and has given over control of the government, not only to Elon Musk, but to people like David Sachs, who is the crypto in AIZAR is a tech tycoon, and is quite openly talking about

creating channels of access.

that really make a mockery of any of the laws that were intended to try to prevent influence in government.

Look, I mean, David, let's remind ourselves, the president's son right now has created a private club called the Executive Branch with an initiation fee of up to half a million dollars, in which the whole purpose of the thing, as they have described themselves, is to insulate themselves from what they call fake news reporters and, as they say, people we don't know and we don't trust.

What happened to the billionaire class ideologically?

People like Mark Andreessen and many others seem to go through a conversion

experience.

What engineered it?

What caused it?

And what effect has it had?

Aaron Ross Powell.

They had come to believe, in many cases, that they were,

as they often say, making a great gift to the country.

Elon Musk, of course, has said that his greatest gift to humankind is being the CEO of Tesla.

These are guys who really believed that they were the greatest example of entrepreneurship, and that all of a sudden they found that, no, they were being called monopolists, that they were being accused of invading people's privacy, that in fact they had been blamed for the degradation of democracy, of our children's emotional health, of our attention spans.

And they suddenly saw that there was a new president who would not only forgive any of those kinds of mistakes and patterns of abuse, but would, in fact, celebrate them and would roll back any of the regulation that was in their way.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You're starting to see this dynamic in the Republican Party, a real split between populists like Steve Bannon and Josh Hawley, for example.

Right.

And the oligarch class, what does it

portend, really, if anything?

The reality is today, David, that half of American adults say that they can't afford a $1,000 emergency expense.

This is at a time when the United States has never been wealthier and is on the cusp of adopting a whole host of new technologies associated with artificial intelligence and robotics that are going to transform the labor force in ways that I think we can all safely predict are not going to be easy for anybody at the bottom of the labor scale.

This divide has become much clearer between the Musks, who imagine themselves in the commanding heights of this new economy and ultimately using government as an instrument for advancing their economic projects.

And then this other quite raucous and let's be blunt,

quite frightening elements associated with people like Bannon who are able and quite deft at using populist power

to

also turn parts of the population against each other.

There is an old idea that goes back really to Rousseau, which is that when there is a huge gap between rich and poor in a society, very often you'll see that the political practitioners at the top will encourage those people at the bottom to turn on one another around issues of race or of immigration.

And this is very much the pattern that we see today.

I'm speaking with the New Yorkers Evan Osnos.

More in a moment.

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In American politics, the politics of calling out this phenomenon, writ large,

so far has had limited success.

As a literal fact, last year there was a poll that showed that 59% of Americans believe that billionaires are making the country less fair, and a nearly identical share of Americans who say they themselves want to become billionaires.

But what's really important within that, David, is that people don't necessarily respond to the idea of villainizing wealth.

Or even oligarchy.

Alyssa Slotkin was on the show recently, and she said that Bernie Sanders and AOC and their stop oligarchy messaging is, yes, it attracts crowds.

It has some popularity.

But overall, nationally,

at least in Alyssa Slotkin's view, who's coming from the state of Michigan, who herself, by the way, is not coming from a poor family, thinks it has limited appeal in this country.

Aaron Trevor Aaron Trevor Barrett, well, one thing that does have appeal is unfairness.

This is the big blinking finding that you see across a whole host of different measures of American.

But how the hell can you count?

How can you count Trumpism as a politics of fairness?

Absolutely can't.

And I think that's the point.

I think what Slotkin and Lawrence are saying.

And he's done nothing but carry out what he said he would carry out.

He appeals to both sides of that American ambivalence.

People say,

I think that Donald Trump imagines more of me than the Democrats do.

You can't pretend that this attitude doesn't exist, which is that Americans on some level voted for a billionaire who is the son of a real estate fortune in New York City.

precisely because he was running against elites.

I mean, the idea back in 2016 that we had somebody who clearly frustrated the usual tools of political analysis.

He was not a political person.

He was a creature of the money world and a creature of how we think about money in this country.

And he manipulated that very successfully and still does.

I think from a strategic perspective, it may be that for Democrats, the key is not persuading people to give up the dream of being rich.

It's to give them the information and the tools to help them understand why they're not.

Aaron Trevor Brewery: We all heard about Trump's plane from Qatar

and his private meme coin dinner.

And yet the House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that these aren't examples of corruption as long as Trump is doing it, quote, out in the open.

Do you think voters agree with that?

I think are you willing to hazard a guess?

Aaron Powell, there are all kinds of slush funds in politics that receive less scrutiny than typical campaign finance.

Take the inauguration fund.

You know, this is something that was a kind of backwater of money in politics until Donald Trump raised a record-setting $250 million in his most recent inauguration fund.

And

the largest gift came from a poultry processing company.

And lo and behold, a couple months later, the administration announced that they're not going to be adding new testing for salmonella.

They're getting rid of what they call unnecessary bureaucracy.

And look, there may be nothing untoward there, David, but if you're the American public, enough examples of things like that, things that are as visceral as the safety of the food on your plate, at a certain point, that's when it begins to chafe against what we imagine is the right role of government.

Look, I have to say,

there was an amazing observation by Louis Brandeis, who went on to become a member of the Supreme Court.

He said, there comes a point when fortunes become so large that they become essentially sovereign, and they are immune at that point to the ordinary pressures and controls of politics.

He had no idea.

He had no idea.

It was that kind of recognition.

that led to changes in the progressive era and the New Deal that ultimately gave rise to the 20th century that was the most prosperous period in American history, the most innovative period.

And so it's actually a false choice to imagine that we either give Silicon Valley and other entrepreneurs free rein to do what they want, or we'll somehow be seeding America's great advantage.

No, on the contrary, history tells us that when we keep the balance between

money and democracy in some reasonable proportion, that's when the United States is at its strongest.

Aaron Powell, your book is titled

with the yachts being the central metaphor of this whole thing, and you were able to taste a little bit of this.

Is it so super fantastic that you can see how people betray every shred

of shame, restraint, and moral discipline for that?

Aaron Powell, I think like so many subcultures, this begins to take on an interior level of competition.

There was a yacht captain who told me about the owner of the boat that he worked on who used to limit the number of newspapers on board because he liked to see his guests, all of whom captains of industry, fighting over the newspapers in the morning.

So I think you have to just call this what it is, David.

This is pathetic.

It's juvenile in many cases.

It is quite a telling fact that the single most dominant fact about a yacht is what's known as length overall, L-O-A.

That, in the end, is the coin of the realm.

Venastos, thank you so much.

My pleasure, David.

Thank you for having me.

The New Yorker's Evan Osnos.

His new book is called The Haves and the Have Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultra Rich.

And you can read Evan at newyorker.com.

And you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well.

New Yorker.com.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today.

Thanks so much for listening.

See you next time.

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