THE WASHINGTON POST: What is an oligarchy? The warning Joe Biden issued in his farewell, explained

President Joe Biden, in his farewell address to the nation Wednesday, warned that American democracy is being threatened by a burgeoning oligarchy.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” he said.

Is he on target with that criticism, and also what is an oligarchy? Here’s what to know.

Oligarchs are a subset of the very, very wealthy

Being rich doesn’t necessarily make you an oligarch. An oligarch is someone who influences politics outside the formal system, explained Brooke Harrington, who studies this at Dartmouth University. She spoke with The 5-Minute Fix in 2022 when U.S. sanctions were targeting Russian oligarchs at the outset of the war in Ukraine.

“It’s someone who isn’t an elected representative or Cabinet member,” she said, “but who has the ear of the president.”

She pointed to the late Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino tycoon and Republican megadonor who did work on U.S.-Israeli relations, as an example of an American oligarch.

Elon Musk almost certainly fits the definition today: The tech billionaire has taken calls with foreign leaders, stopped a government spending bill in its tracks and seemingly hasn’t left President-elect Donald Trump’s side since the end of the campaign. He’s an unofficial leader in the Republican Party; some Democrats have derisively called him “co-president.”

Why Trump tends to attract oligarchs

Harrington argues that there have always been American oligarchs. But why are they getting attention now?

Trump has a lot to do with it, good-governance experts say. Many in the business community view him as a transactional president, in that you get what you give, and so oligarchs and potential oligarchs are growing in influence and number.

And as he prepares to again take office, several tech titans are making an almost dizzying amount of business moves that could easily be perceived as being for Trump: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ending fact-checking on his social media platforms; Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post, spiked a Kamala Harris endorsement from The Post’s editorial board. TikTok’s CEO will be at Trump’s inauguration Monday, a day after the platform is expected to be banned in the United States.

Actually, they’ll all be at Trump’s inauguration - including the heads of Google and Apple - and have donated millions to it.

“We’re witnessing tech CEOs scrambling to curry favor, and the Trump administration has not even begun,” Maximillian Potter, a journalist with the anti-authoritarian group Protect Democracy, said in a recent interview with The 5-Minute Fix about the state of media and democracy.

Trump also appears to be integrating his wealthy allies into government, not unlike his first term, when many of his Cabinet members were millionaires or billionaires. Musk and billionaire biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will lead an initiative tasked with cutting government spending and waste, with Republicans in Congress following their lead. The Washington Post reported that Trump wants Ramaswamy to serve in the Senate.

An oligarchy can be hard to stop once it’s in motion

It has long been the case that big money controls politicians, said Meredith McGehee, a governmental ethics expert who used to head Issue One, a nonprofit that focuses on fixing what’s broken in the government, particularly money in politics.

But Musk’s and other billionaires’ growing influence on the system could be a product of Americans’ dissatisfaction with how responsive government is to their concerns, she said.

Trump and the billionaires with whom he’s aligned himself are seen among his supporters as the outsiders who will disrupt the status quo in Washington. “Democrats became associated with the elite, with political correctness,” McGehee said, explaining that the party came across during the campaign as more interested in the causes of higher-educated, urban communities than the rest of America. “Nobody in the establishment was able to capture that dissatisfaction with the system - except Trump.”

Russia is the poster country for oligarchs, Harrington said. There, oligarchs are “fully embedded” in politics and culture, serving in high-profile government jobs, for example, she said.

Harrington previously argued that this concentration of wealth and power in the United States could get worse before it gets better because there aren’t many guardrails for something like this.

“There are no laws against a president and his super-wealthy Cabinet using their power to benefit their own class,” she wrote at the beginning of Trump’s first administration. “There is nothing that compels them to look beyond their privilege to address the needs of the citizenry.”

In other words, it’s up to voters to hold leaders accountable for putting the rich first.

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