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A new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)
Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.
Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Along Came Anduril
Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).
From the start, Luckey and his associates sought to shoulder aside traditional defense contractors to make room for their high-tech startups. Those two companies and other new-fledged tech firms often found themselves frozen out of major Pentagon contracts that had long been written to favor the MIC giants with their bevies of lawyers and mastery of government paperwork. In 2016, Palantir even sued the U.S. Army for refusing to consider it for a large data-processing contract and later prevailed in court, opening the door for future Department of Defense awards.
In addition to its aggressive legal stance, Anduril has also gained notoriety thanks to the outspokenness of its founder, Palmer Luckey. Whereas other corporate leaders were usually restrained in their language when discussing Department of Defense operations, Luckey openly criticized the Pentagon’s inbred preference for working with traditional defense contractors at the expense of investments in the advanced technologies he believes are needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.
Such technology, he insisted, was only available from the commercial tech industry. “The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need,” Luckey and his top associates claimed in their 2022 Mission Document. “These companies work slowly, while the best [software] engineers relish working at speed. And the software engineering talent who can build faster than our adversaries resides in the commercial sector, not at large defense primes.”
To overcome obstacles to military modernization, Luckey argued, the government needed to loosen its contracting rules and make it easier for defense startups and software companies to do business with the Pentagon. “We need defense companies that are fast. That won’t happen simply by wishing it to be so: it will only happen if companies are incentivized to move” by far more permissive Pentagon policies.
Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, it received a small Marine Corps contract to install AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at bases in Japan and the United States. A year later, it won a five-year, $25 million contract to build surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexican border for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In September 2020, it also received a $36 million CBP contract to build additional sentry towers along that border.
After that, bigger awards began to roll in. In February 2023, the Department of Defense started buying Anduril’s Altius-600 surveillance/attack drone for delivery to the Ukrainian military and, last September, the Army announced that it would purchase its Ghost-X drone for battlefield surveillance operations. Anduril is also now one of four companies selected by the Air Force to develop prototypes for its proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones.
Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. In July 2020, it received fresh investments of $200 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and prominent Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion. A year later, Anduril obtained another $450 million from those and other venture capital firms, bringing its estimated valuation to $4.5 billion (double what it had been in 2020). More finance capital has flowed into Anduril since then, spearheading a major drive by private investors to fuel the rise of defense startups — and profit from their growth as it materializes.
The Replicator Initiative
Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.
“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”
As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th. According to the Department of Defense, that batch included funding for the Army’s purchase of Ghost-X surveillance drones, the Marine Corps’ acquisition of Altius-600 kamikaze drones, and development of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, of which Anduril is one of four participating vendors.
Just as important, perhaps, was Hicks’ embrace of Palmer Luckey’s blueprint for reforming Pentagon purchasing. “The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” she affirmed in November. “We are creating opportunities for a broad range of traditional and nontraditional defense and technology companies… and we are building the capability to do that again and again.”
Enter the Trumpians
Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.
In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.
Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.
Named by Trump to direct the as-yet-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, fought the Department of Defense to obtain contracts for one of his companies, SpaceX, and has expressed deep contempt for the Pentagon’s traditional way of doing things. In particular, he has denigrated the costly, generally ill-performing Lockheed-made F-35 jet fighter at a time when AI-governed drones are becoming ever more capable. Despite that progress, as he wrote on X, the social media platform he now owns, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” In a subsequent post, he added that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.”
His critique of the F-35 ruffled feathers at the Air Force and caused Lockheed’s stock to fall by more than 3%. “We are committed to delivering the world’s most advanced aircraft — the F-35 — and its unrivaled capabilities with the government and our industry partners,” Lockheed declared in response to Musk’s tweets. Over at the Pentagon, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had this to say: “I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk as an engineer. He’s not a warfighter, and he needs to learn a little bit more about the business, I think, before he makes such grand announcements as he did.” He then added, “I don’t see F-35 being replaced. We should continue to buy it, and we also should continue to upgrade it.”
President Trump has yet to indicate his stance on the F-35 or other high-priced items in the Pentagon’s budget lineup. He may (or may not) call for a slowdown in purchases of that plane and seek greater investment in other projects. Still, the divide exposed by Musk — between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment — is bound to widen in the years to come as the new version of the military-industrial complex only grows in wealth and power. How the old MIC will address such a threat to its primacy remains to be seen, but multibillion-dollar weapons companies are not likely to step aside without a fight. And that fight will likely divide the Trumpian universe.
The promise and possibility of ending poverty, reclaiming democracy, and advancing peace and justice remain closer than any of us may think.
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, advocates for peace, social justice, racial and economic equality, fair immigration policies, climate renewal, trans rights, and other movements for change are bracing for hard times. The new administration will be doggedly opposed to so many of the values we hold dear, as well as programs that have helped keep millions of Americans above the poverty line.
Only recently, newly reelected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) reaffirmed his commitment to an “America First” agenda, which distills the most harmful aspirations of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 into 10 priority areas, including slashing social welfare, healthcare programs, and public education; supporting increased military spending to promote “peace through strength”; unleashing a nightmarish version of immigration enforcement; and restricting voting rights.
Many of us are now asking ourselves, how did we end up here? Part of the answer is simple enough: The status quo, regardless of which party has been in power, simply hasn’t been working for all too many Americans. Research compiled by our colleague Shailly Gupta Barnes of the Kairos Center indicates that some 140 million of us live either in poverty or one financial emergency away from joining the ranks of the poor. One out of six children in this country now lives below the official poverty line, and the families of nearly half of all kids are in a state of economic precarity or food insecurity. Meanwhile, the average life span of white American males is actually declining, while more than 20 million people lost their access to healthcare in 2024 alone.
This is no time to blame those who are going to be hurt by Trump’s draconian policies, nor is it a moment to get in a defensive crouch to fight off only the worst policies in the making without also putting forth a vision of the world we’d actually like to see.
All of this is, of course, a far cry from the conventional wisdom that America’s economy is doing well, based on statistics like the unemployment rate or the rate of economic growth as a whole, none of which capture the lived experience of so many of us. Indeed, the head of Moody’s Analytics recently told the Financial Times that, while “high-income households are doing fine, the bottom third of U.S. consumers are tapped out.”
Although the system isn’t working for millions of Americans, a business-as-usual, market-based approach remains what’s on offer in official Washington. This has been the governing modus operandi across party lines for the past 30 years and continues to enjoy bipartisan support, even as faith in government declines in the country as a whole. Without a viable plan that could change the basic living conditions of people in need, it’s easier for right-wing populists to offer false promises of change or, even worse, provide scapegoats like undocumented immigrants to “explain” declining living standards and the outright desperation so many people now feel.
Of course, this propaganda is fueled by countless millions of dollars contributed by rich donors, often enough billionaires, who, for starters, want more tax cuts, more deregulation of business, unfettered access to government contracts, and free rein for cryptocurrency. It’s reinforced by proponents of religious nationalism who organize around single issues like opposition to abortion, while falsely portraying moves towards racial and gender equality as “threats” to Christian values. Over the past several years, such interests have combined forces to usher Donald Trump back into the White House and dozens of “Christian nationalists” into the judicial and legislative branches of government, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Contrary to mainstream accounts that put the responsibility for Trump’s rise and then return to power on working-class voters (some of whom did indeed press the lever for him), the real victors in the November elections were the wealthy and powerful, many of whom used their public profiles and deep pockets to help propel the Trump-Vance ticket to victory. They and their corporations are now ready to receive ample government contracts and benefit from the erasure of corporate regulations. Meanwhile, religious extremists will welcome further encroachment on reproductive and LGBTQ rights.
Case in point: On the day that Donald Trump was pronounced victorious in the 2024 election, the eight richest men in the world were instantly worth another $64 billion. Nevertheless, much of the analysis surrounding the 2024 elections continues to emphasize the notion that Trump’s victory was primarily due to decisions made by the working class and the poorest Americans.
So, what is to be done? This is no time to blame those who are going to be hurt by Trump’s draconian policies, nor is it a moment to get in a defensive crouch to fight off only the worst policies in the making without also putting forth a vision of the world we’d actually like to see, a world where people’s needs are met with real programs, not diversionary rhetoric and false promises.
While people like billionaire Elon Musk are busy hatching schemes to dismantle large parts of the federal government, we need to push for an agenda in which the government actually works for everyone. Shifting federal budget priorities toward improving lives and away from war spending and tax breaks for the rich would be a central element of such a program. Pouring resources—more than a trillion dollars a year—into the war machine and the national security state starves other priorities, ranging from public health to environmental protection. In fact, defunding such programs, an essential part of Trump’s second-term plans, risks another pandemic or the “quad-demic” that health officials have been warning about, as well as increased hunger, untreated medical conditions, and dirtier air and water. The problems to come won’t just involve an imbalance on a spreadsheet. There are all too many lives at stake, as surely as lives are at stake in a shooting war.
Imagine how starkly different this country would be if we were to invest in the lives of people rather than filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex. Take the expanded (and fully refundable) child tax credit, or CTC. Created in March 2021 through the American Rescue Plan, this federal policy granted modest monthly cash payments to families with children, including poor families, independent of their work or tax status. Families making less than $150,000 received regular cash infusions they could use to pay daily expenses or shore up slim to nonexistent savings.
Imagine a country where everyone could exist free of the fear of poverty, hunger, homelessness, or lack of access to quality healthcare.
The results were staggering. By December 2021, that program had reached more than 61 million children, nearly 4 million of whom had been lifted above the official poverty line. In its first and only year, official child poverty witnessed a dramatic decline, the single largest drop in American history, including a 25% decrease in poverty among Black children, narrowing the overall racial gap among poor kids. At the time, Moody’s estimated that the impact of the CTC on the economy was comparable to, if not greater than, the jobs created through military spending.
Despite its success, the expanded CTC was abandoned as 2021 ended. Two Democrats and 49 Republicans voted to end it, with West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin claiming that poor families might be using the money to buy drugs. The CTC, of course, hadn’t failed. The failure was that of an impoverished democracy, increasingly captive to the interests of the rich and powerful and willing to leave nearly half the population living hand to mouth, despite proven policies that could help lift the load of poverty.
And consider that the real danger of the second Trump administration, which has already appointed a record 13 billionaires to government posts, is its debt to the enormously wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. You need look no further than Trump’s cozy relationship with future trillionaire Elon Musk. As head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with business interests in the very institutions he’ll have some authority over, Musk will also, it seems, have an undue influence on future federal budgets, priorities, and programs. Indeed, before the inauguration, Musk and former DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy had already set their sights on shutting down the Department of Education and cutting about one-third of the federal government’s annual budget, or $2 trillion.
We’re preparing for this and more in the coming weeks and months, but it doesn’t need to be this way.
In 1968, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing against the triple evils of racism, militarism, and poverty in what would be the last crusade of his life, he said, “Power for poor people will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when they may be desirous to say no.” His theory of change was to turn those most adversely impacted by poverty into a political force powerful enough not to be denied, even by the greatest economic and military power in the world.
Under the second Trump administration, there will be a torrent of emergencies to deal with, including threats of mass deportation, the shredding of the social safety net, and attacks on efforts to promote racial and economic justice and gender equality. Some of this will be new to us, including potentially massive immigration raids on schools and churches, while much of it has already been unfolding at a state level. For example, in 2024 alone, more than 650 bills were introduced nationwide to restrict the rights of trans people. Because such bills were massively unpopular, well over 600 of them failed. This may change, however, if they’re taken up at the federal level in 2025.
What’s needed is a coordinated series of campaigns that could change the conditions that produce poverty for good.
As people of conscience fight back against such assaults, we should connect that resistance to calls for a government that reflects our deepest values and commitments to justice. To fight for such a future means making demands that are far beyond what’s politically possible now. Simply resisting what Donald Trump’s government tries to do won’t be enough. We need to build public support for a robust, carefully crafted plan for public investment that will be a viable stepping-stone toward a more equitable, peaceful, and just world.
During the first Trump administration, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival produced an ambitious social and economic agenda, “The Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody’s Got a Right to Live.” It called for the right to living-wage jobs, affordable housing, debt cancellation, strong anti-poverty programs, guaranteed adequate income, and much more. It made clear that, through far fairer taxation and the shifting of funds from bloated military budgets to programs of social uplift, it would be possible to “lift from the bottom” in America.
Imagine a country where everyone could exist free of the fear of poverty, hunger, homelessness, or lack of access to quality healthcare. Of course, trying to shift this country’s priorities in such a way would pose a major political challenge, but social and political organizations and movements have succeeded in the past, even in the darkest of times. The organizing of the Citizen’s Army during the Mine Wars in West Virginia early in the last century and the birth of the labor union movement successfully pressured both corporations and the government for better wages and working conditions that workers still benefit from today. In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, military veterans in the Bonus Army Encampment in Washington, D.C., demanded that the government pay those promised “bonuses” and won. The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Programs fed more children in the late 1960s than any other institutional entity. It paved the way for free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools across the country, while calling out the failures of the government to provide life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people. During those same years, welfare rights leaders formed the largest poor people’s organization of the time and secured essential benefits for tens of thousands of people, while more than doubling the amount of federal support flowing to the poorest Americans.
Because they did it then, we can do it now.
This is not to suggest that shifting funds from the Pentagon to domestic programs is a magic solution to America’s economic problems. Even cutting the Pentagon budget in half would not be enough to meet all this country’s unmet needs. That would require a comprehensive package, involving a major shift in budget priorities; an increase in federal revenues; and a crackdown on waste, fraud, and abuse in the expenditure of government loans and grants. It would, in fact, require the kind of attention and focus now reserved for war planning.
Imagine a real war on poverty, not the “skirmish” (as Dr. King called it) of the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s effort that would be cut short by the war in Vietnam. What’s needed is a coordinated series of campaigns that could change the conditions that produce poverty for good.
Now, let’s be real: 2025 is going to be a truly hard year for the poor and vulnerable in our society. But the promise and possibility of ending poverty, reclaiming democracy, and advancing peace and justice remain closer than any of us may think. What’s needed is to begin to build something better, with, as Dr. King suggested, “the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness” to make it so.
The inaugural ceremony featured America’s three richest men—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—seated prominently in attendance, alongside other billionaires, as Trump addressed the nation.
Over three score years ago, former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had a warning for America.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower exhorted in his 1961 farewell address. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
“We must never let the weight of this combination,” Ike continued, “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
Our wealthiest have never enjoyed a greater direct presence at our government’s highest levels.
Sadly, Eisenhower’s warning went largely unheeded. In the years since, the “military-industrial complex” has morphed into an even more worrisome concentration of wealth and power.
In his own farewell address, former President Joe Biden gave that concentration a grim label. An “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power, and influence,” Biden intoned, now “literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
We now face a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people,” a reality that Biden warned is eroding our “unity and common purpose” and fomenting “distrust and division.”
The end result? We stand today unable to adequately confront the challenges that face us.
America’s oligarchs, Biden explained, are wielding “their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis.” By resisting safeguards over artificial intelligence—“the most consequential technology of our time”—they’re also opening the door to “new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation.”
Perhaps most ominously of all, these oligarchs are burying Americans “under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation.”
”Participating in our democracy,” the departing president lamented, has become “exhausting and even disillusioning” for average Americans. They no longer “feel like they have a fair shot.”
But Biden also stressed that by working together, average Americans can shear our new oligarchy—and its “tech-industrial complex” core—down to democratic size. We can get the “dark money” of billionaires out of our politics. We can ban members of Congress from making stock trades while they’re legislating. We can tax the richest among us and make sure they’re paying their fair tax share.
In the days right after Biden’s farewell address, progressives added more specifics to Biden’s list of antidotes to oligarchy. We could and should, as former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich pointed out, either bust up giant, billionaire-owned tech media platforms like X and Facebook or start treating these platforms as public utilities.
We could even ban our wealthiest from owning critical media properties.
But realizing any of these reforms won’t be easy. Our wealthiest have never enjoyed a greater direct presence at our government’s highest levels.
Nothing symbolized the reality of this oligarchic power like President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The inaugural ceremony featured America’s three richest men—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—seated prominently in attendance, alongside other billionaires, as Trump addressed the nation.
“Everybody,” a satisfied president-elect Trump mused last month at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, “wants to be my friend.” Well, no, not everybody. Just everybody with a grand fortune that our new president—and his Republican controlled Congress—can zealously safeguard and grow.
So what can the rest of us do? With Trumpism locked in federally, we can challenge our oligarchs at the state and local level.
Maryland’s governor, for instance, has proposed a series of tax changes that would raise the combined state and local income tax rate on most Marylanders making over $1 million a year to 10.7%. But Maryland, one of the nation’s richest states, could do better. Rich Californians are already paying taxes at a 12% rate.
But that won’t happen more broadly unless average Americans organize—and confront our oligarchs at every opportunity.