Change, Actually

The Washington Post affords a glimpse of an oligarch’s ambition

In his Farewell Address last month, President Joe Biden recalled the warning of President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961, when he cautioned about “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” in the hands of “the military industrial complex.” After defeats in three wars since then – Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – and the prospect of defeat in a fourth, in Ukraine, Eisenhower’s concern has pith.

Biden was worried that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy….” Indeed, fifty years have passed since the junk-bond craze ignited an astonishing blaze of wealth-creation. Fabulously rich and inordinately powerful individuals have become something new on the American scene. In the Nineties they were called entrepreneurs; today, following the adoption of a term in Russia, they are called oligarchs. For at least the next two years, they have the upper hand in Washington, D.C.

It seems much too soon to tell whether the banking-technology complex of today will evolve to become anything like a fully-fledged oligarchy. The word means the governance of the many by a relative handful of extremely wealthy individuals. After all, in its Gilded Age, America, had had many disproportionately wealthy citizens, some of whom who turned to philanthropy, late in life and whose children slowly blended in with all the rest as coupon clippers, still voting, one way or the other, for the two major political parties.

On the other hand, it is not too soon to pay attention to the ambitions of the oligarchs themselves: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Powell Jobs, Peter Thiel, Sergei Brin, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, and the Trump and Kushner families, to name only the most prominent among them. Take the latest venture of just one of them, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.