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The most striking images from Donald Trump’s second inauguration were not of the president himself. Rather, they featured the array of tech billionaires who occupied some of the best seats in the crowded Capitol rotunda. There was X’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—all sitting alongside one another, their proximity to Trump sending a decidedly unsubtle message about the new power structure in America. The scene set up the possibility of “a new kind of American oligarchy,” my colleagues Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker wrote in The Atlantic that afternoon. Trump’s empowerment of Musk, the world’s richest man, to rampage through the federal bureaucracy in the weeks since has only deepened the sense that in America right now, a wealthy few are governing the many.
Since its earliest editions, The Atlantic has been preoccupied with the specter of oligarchy. The word appeared in this magazine’s endorsement of Abraham Lincoln in 1860—its only presidential recommendation for more than a century—when James Russell Lowell, The Atlantic’s first editor, wrote: “Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers.” Two years later, in the midst of the Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson contrasted America’s “two states of civilization”—the free, “democratical” North and the South, “a lower state, in which the old military tenure of prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a few hands, makes an oligarchy.”
For decades thereafter, The Atlantic’s writers occasionally referred to the postwar southern political and economic hierarchy—wealthy, white landowners who dominated a disenfranchised Black population—as an oligarchy. In the early-20th-century trust-busting era of Theodore Roosevelt, oligarchy became a byword for the threat of corporate power. “The corporation has subverted law and honesty between individuals,” the writer Robert R. Reed warned in 1909. “It can and will, if unrestrained, subvert the basic ideal of American government, the happiness and welfare of unborn generations of American people.”
A generation later, Arthur E. Morgan, the first chairman of Tennessee Valley Authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt, approached the idea of American oligarchy with a slightly more open mind. Writing in 1934, he noted that some institutions that Americans held in the highest regard were hardly democracies. Henry Ford, then the revered titan of the automobile industry, was both an “economic dictator” and a “popular hero.” Harvard University, governed by a “selfperpetuating” board of wealthy trustees, was essentially an oligarchy. “The American people has sized up this situation and is not worried about political theories,” Morgan wrote. “It tends to give its loyalty to the institution which best serves the public good, whether it be controlled by a democracy or by an oligarchy.”
Only around the turn of this century, as economic inequality increased to the point of crisis, did warnings about the dangers of an American oligarchy reemerge in these pages. Some appear quite prescient. A 1990 cover story profiling the economist Lester Thurow described a speech he addressed to members of the Washington, D.C., “establishment,” warning that they risked becoming an oligarchy of greedy profiteers that could bring economic ruin to America. Surveying the global landscape in 1997, Robert D. Kaplan wrote that “democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before … Many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington.”
Perhaps Thurow was presaging the financial collapse of 2008, which helped spawn a revival of anti-government populism that propelled Trump and his wealthy allies to power. And maybe Kaplan, writing in the relatively halcyon period of 1990s economic expansion, had people like Musk and his fellow tech tycoons in mind when he warned that the accumulated concentration of wealth and the “productive anarchy” of the technological revolution would need to be supervised—“or else there will be no justice for anyone.”
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