America’s Oligarch Problem

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Speaker 17 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Speaker 18 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 $1.5 trillion.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 From his perch in Washington, staff writer Evan Osnos has been reporting on the politics and the culture of a new oligarchy in America, and he's been asking this question.

Speaker 18 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?

Speaker 18 Evan's reporting is collected in a new book called The Haves and the Have Yachts, Dispatches on the Ultra-Rich.

Speaker 18 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

Speaker 18 quite here. We hear about millionaires and billionaires and all the rest, but not oligarchy.
What is an oligarchy really, and why

Speaker 18 are we hearing about it now in American terms?

Speaker 19 Aaron Powell, Aristotle defined it. He said, oligarchy is when government is in the hands of men with property.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And in the 2024 election, they contributed 200 times as much, so $3 billion.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 Aaron Powell, Franklin Roosevelt was, well, on the one hand, a new dealer, but on the other hand, he came from the property classes, to say the least. Why wasn't that oligarchy?

Speaker 19 Aaron Ross Powell, Look, from the beginning, David, this country, after all, only gave the vote to white men with property.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Because it's, frankly, it's good for business and it's good for the country overall.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 Aaron Trevor Barrett, 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 know, Donald Trump admits that he takes advantage of the system.

Speaker 18 He knows how the system works.

Speaker 18 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?

Speaker 19 Aaron Powell, Jr.: 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.

Speaker 19 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 AI czar, czar, is a tech tycoon, and is quite openly talking about

Speaker 19 creating channels of access that really make a mockery of any of the laws that were intended to try to prevent influence in government.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 Aaron Trevor Barrett. What happened to the billionaire class ideologically? People like Mark Andreessen and many others seemed to go through a conversion

Speaker 18 experience.

Speaker 18 What engineered it? What caused it? And what effect has it had?

Speaker 19 They had come to believe, in many cases, that they were,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 Aaron Ross Powell, you're starting to see this dynamic in the Republican Party, a real split between populists like Steve Bannon and Josh Hawley, for example.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 18 And the oligarch class. What does it

Speaker 18 portend, really, if anything?

Speaker 19 The reality is today, David, that half of American adults say that they can't afford a $1,000 emergency expense.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And then, this other quite raucous and let's be blunt,

Speaker 19 quite frightening elements associated with people like Bannon, who are able and quite deaf at using populist power to

Speaker 19 also turn parts of the population against each other.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And this is very much much the pattern that we see today.

Speaker 18 I'm speaking with the New Yorkers Evan Osnos. More in a moment.

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Speaker 7 It provides an effective clean is gentle on skin while removing impurities like dirt and body oil without leaving irritating residues.

Speaker 5 Plus, All-Free Clear Liquid is Safer Choice certified by the US EPA.

Speaker 8 For a clean you can feel good about.

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Speaker 11 Welcome to Walgreens. Looking for a holiday gift?

Speaker 12 Sort of.

Speaker 13 My cousin Freddie showed up to surprise us.

Speaker 11 Oh, sounds like a real nice surprise.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 13 So now I have to get him a gift, but I haven't gotten my bonus yet.

Speaker 14 So if we could make it something really nice, but also not break the bank, that'd be perfect.

Speaker 15 How about a Keurig for 50% off?

Speaker 13 Bingo.

Speaker 16 Savings all season. The holiday road is long.
We're with you all the way.

Speaker 1 Walgreens.

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Speaker 18 In American politics, the politics of calling out this phenomenon writ large

Speaker 18 so far has had limited success.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But what's really important within that, David, is that people don't necessarily respond to the idea of villainizing wealth.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 It has some popularity, but overall, nationally, at least in Alyssa Slotkin's view, who's coming from the state of Michigan, and who herself, by the way, is not coming from a poor family, thinks it has limited appeal in this country.

Speaker 19 Aaron Trevor Aaron Trevor Barrett,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 But how the hell can you count? How can you count Trumpism as a politics of fairness?

Speaker 19 Aaron Powell, you absolutely can't. And I think that's the point.
I think what Slotkin and

Speaker 1 Regina are saying.

Speaker 18 And he's done nothing but carry out what he said he would carry out.

Speaker 19 He appeals to both sides of that American ambivalence. People say,

Speaker 19 I think that Donald Trump imagines more of me than the Democrats do.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 He was a creature of the money world and a creature of how we think about money in this country.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It's to give them the information and the tools to help them understand why they're not.

Speaker 18 We all heard about Trump's plane from Qatar

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 1 Do you think voters agree with that?

Speaker 18 Are you willing to hazard a guess?

Speaker 19 Aaron Powell, there are all kinds of slush funds in politics that receive less scrutiny than typical campaign finance. Take the inauguration fund.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 They're getting rid of what they call unnecessary bureaucracy.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 to chafe against what we imagine is the right role of government.

Speaker 1 Look, I have to say,

Speaker 19 there was an amazing observation by Lewis Brandeis, who went on to become a member of the Supreme Court.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 He had no idea.

Speaker 1 He had no idea.

Speaker 19 It was that kind of recognition.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 No, on the contrary, history tells us that when we keep the balance between

Speaker 19 money and democracy in some reasonable proportion, that's when the United States is at its strongest.

Speaker 18 Aaron Powell, your book is titled

Speaker 18 with the Yachts Being the Central Metaphor of this whole thing, and you were able to taste a little bit of this.

Speaker 18 Is it so super fantastic that you can see how people betray every shred

Speaker 18 of shame, restraint, and moral discipline for that?

Speaker 19 I think like so many subcultures, this begins to take on an interior level of competition.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So I think you have to just call this what it is, David.

Speaker 1 This is pathetic.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 That, in the end, is the coin of the realm.

Speaker 18 Evan Osnos, thank you so much.

Speaker 19 My pleasure, David. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 17 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louie Mitchell.

Speaker 20 This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer.

Speaker 20 With guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barrish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Decken.

Speaker 17 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 3 Did you know that skincare can start in the laundry room?

Speaker 4 All-Free Clear is the number one laundry detergent brand recommended by dermatologists, allergists, and pediatricians for sensitive skin. All-Free Clear is 100% free of dyes and perfumes.

Speaker 8 It provides an effective clean is gentle on skin while removing impurities like dirt and body oil without leaving irritating residues.

Speaker 5 Plus, all-free clear liquid is safer choice certified by the US EPA.

Speaker 8 For a clean you can feel good about, all you need is all-free clear.

Speaker 11 Welcome to Walgreens. Looking for a holiday gift?

Speaker 12 Sort of.

Speaker 13 My cousin Freddie showed up to surprise us.

Speaker 11 Oh, sounds like a real nice surprise.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 13 So now I have to get him a gift, but I haven't gotten my bonus yet.

Speaker 14 So if we could make it something really nice, but also not break the bank, that'd be perfect.

Speaker 15 How about a Keurig for 50% off?

Speaker 13 Bingo.

Speaker 16 Savings all season. The holiday road is long.
We're with you all the way.

Speaker 1 Walgreens.

Speaker 16 Offer valid November 26th through December 27th. Exclusions apply.