Inequality, Part IV: Oligarchs

The rise of mega-fortunes

Share of the top 0.01% in total wealth, from the GC Wealth Project

Who said this?

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.

No, it wasn’t Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s a quote from The New Freedom, Woodrow Wilson’s campaign platform in the 1912 presidential election.

Wilson was a vile racist, even for his time, and his reputation has suffered appropriately. But he was also a progressive on economic policy. And I’ve always been struck by the fact that in the early 20^th century a politician could declare that great concentrations of wealth were a threat to democracy without being considered a radical, un-American Marxist. Wilson won that election!

Politicians, even progressives, are far more timid these days. Yet we are once again living in an era in which there are men big enough to own the U.S. government — and to a large extent they do. For a while Elon Musk exerted more power over the operations of the U.S. government than any cabinet member or elected official short of Donald Trump himself. Musk is currently on the outs, but the Trump administration is stuffed full of billionaires and people who take their marching orders from billionaires. Congress appears to be about to enact legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that billionaires love even though the broader public hates all its main provisions.

How did we get here?

This is my latest entry in a series of primers on inequality; here are Part I, Part II, and Part III. Today my focus will be on extreme wealth concentration — the rise of an American oligarchy. Beyond the paywall I will address the following:

1. Tracking the rise of extreme wealth

2. How did our modern oligarchs get so rich?

I’ll eventually want to talk about the political and social consequences of extreme wealth concentration, and how it undermines democracy. But that will have to wait for later posts.