There is a spectacle playing out in American politics that would be comical if the stakes were not so terribly high.
The two great parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, have spent the better part of a generation engaged in what appears to be a furious competition with one another, but is in fact something else entirely.
They are competing, yes, but not so much against each other as for the attention and affection of the same small circle of benefactors, the same handful of men whose combined wealth exceeds the gross domestic product of most nations.
The people watching this spectacle, the ones who work for wages, worry about rent and wonder how they will afford the groceries, have begun to notice that they are not really part of the show.
The numbers tell a story that is hard to ignore.
Since 1975, something like $88 trillion has moved from the pockets of the bottom 90 percent of Americans into the bank accounts of the top one percent. That is not a typo.
That is eighty-eight trillion dollars, a sum so vast that it defies comprehension, transferred from the many to the few through a combination of policy choices, tax code manipulations, and the systematic weakening of labor’s bargaining power.
The RAND Corporation, not exactly a hotbed of radical agitation, documented this transfer in cold, nonpartisan terms. It happened. It is happening still. And the political class in Washington has responded with a collective shrug.
The Democrats have a communications director named Rosemary Boeglin, who recently made an observation that was true as far as it went, but did not go nearly far enough.
She noted that Republicans are hoarding cash from billionaire megadonors and losing anyway. What she failed to mention is that Democrats who hoard cash from billionaire megadonors are also losing, not necessarily at the ballot box but in a more fundamental way.
They’re losing the trust of the very people they say they represent. They’re losing the ability to speak openly about what’s really going on in the country. They’re completely losing the plot.
Establishment Democrats are losing every policy battle waged against America by Trump Republicans, who are trying to dismantle our democracy, putting in jeopardy the health and safety of our people, our families, and future generations.
Cory Booker of New Jersey is a case study in this phenomenon.
He has raised nearly $100 million in campaign contributions from more than four dozen billionaire donors, from AIPAC, from a long list of sources that suggest his loyalties are not aligned with the working people of his state.
For his first two Senate campaigns, he collected more money from Wall Street than any other candidate for Congress. And what has been the result for the people of New Jersey?
Since Booker went to Washington, women lost federal abortion rights. The Voting Rights Act was gutted. Mass shootings tripled. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose from 395 to 427 parts per million. The state’s middle class shrank. PFAS chemicals contaminated the water. An estimated $37 trillion in wages was effectively stolen from workers through stagnant pay. Child poverty more than doubled.
Booker missed 413 votes, nearly 10 percent of his total. North Korea got nuclear weapons. Trump was elected, ousted, and then returned to power without standing trial for his failed coup d’état. Through it all, the money kept flowing.
Lisa McCormick, a New Jersey Democrat who took two of every five votes away from the disgraced incumbent Bob Menendez in the 2018 primary, has a different idea about how politics ought to work.
She talks about capping personal wealth at $100 million, taxing the billionaires out of existence entirely.
This approach sounds radical to ears accustomed to the gentle murmurs of mainstream politics, but as McCormick points out, America operated under something like this system for fifty years, and it built the greatest middle class in human history.
The idea that no private fortune should be allowed to outweigh the common good was once considered common sense. Now it is treated as heresy.
Her proposal would impose a 100 percent wealth tax on fortunes exceeding $100 million, using the revenue to fund the things that working families actually need: housing, health care, education, and infrastructure.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned that a society can have either great concentrated wealth or democracy, but not both. McCormick cites the example of Huey Long and Franklin Roosevelt, who understood during the Great Depression that concentrated wealth was a threat to democracy itself.
They did not solve the problem perfectly or permanently, but they moved the country in a direction that allowed millions of people to climb into the middle class.
The question McCormick poses is simple: if it worked then, why not now?
Pramila Jayapal, the congresswoman from Washington state, has been asking similar questions.
In January, she introduced something called the Defund the Oligarchs, Fund the People Resolution, a piece of legislation designed to combat corporate influence and redistribute wealth.
Jayapal speaks regularly about the crushing affordability crisis facing working families, about the need to force the ultrawealthy to pay their fair share. She is part of a growing wing of the Democratic Party that has noticed the disconnect between what the party says and what it does, between the populist rhetoric of campaign season and the donor-friendly reality of governing season.
The economists have been watching this trend with mounting alarm.
Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, has spent years documenting the concentration of wealth and its corrosive effects on democracy.
Democracy versus oligarchy, he says flatly, is going to be the battle of the twenty-first century. He does not know how long it will take for the Democratic Party to understand that, but the clock is ticking and the stakes could not be higher.
Bernie Sanders, who has been saying these things for longer than most people have been listening, puts it in characteristically blunt terms.
Sanders notes that his Republican colleagues express deep concern about the redistribution of wealth, and they are right to be concerned. The problem is that the redistribution has been going in precisely the wrong direction.
Eighty trillion dollars from the bottom 90 percent to the top one percent. And now the same Republicans want to give another trillion-dollar tax break to that same top one percent by cutting health care, housing, education, and nutrition assistance.
Sanders says the country must do the exact opposite.
The UAW International Union, speaking for workers who have watched their jobs disappear and their wages stagnate while executive compensation skyrocketed, posted a simple message on social media: billionaires are stealing from working families. The core threats to the American dream, they said, are corporate greed and divide-and-conquer politics. The way to stop the takeover is with continued, escalating collective action.
Oxfam released a report in January 2026 called Resisting the Rule of the Rich that lays out the case in excruciating detail. About 60 percent of billionaire wealth comes from one of three sources: inheritance, cronyism and corruption, or monopoly power.
The idea that extreme wealth is a reward for extreme talent, so pervasive in American media and popular culture, is not rooted in reality. Most of these fortunes were not earned in any meaningful sense. They were taken. They were inherited. They were accumulated through the exercise of market power so complete that it amounts to a private tax on everyone else.
The monopoly men, Oxfam calls them.
Billionaires who lead corporations that shape and control markets, set the rules and terms of exchange with other companies and workers, and raise prices without losing business because there is nowhere else to go.
Jeff Bezos built the Amazon empire that accounts for 70 percent or more of online purchases in several European countries.
Aliko Dangote holds a near-monopoly on cement in Nigeria.
Elon Musk became the first person whose net worth passed half a trillion dollars.
The number of billionaires topped three thousand for the first time in 2025, and they are passing their fortunes along, largely untaxed.
For the first time in 2023, more new billionaires got rich through inheritance than through entrepreneurship.
Over the next three decades, more than a thousand of today’s billionaires will transfer more than $5 trillion to their heirs. Two-thirds of countries do not tax inheritance to direct descendants at all.
Half the world’s billionaires live in countries with no inheritance tax on the money they will give their children. The aristocratic oligarchy is not coming. It is already here.
The Trump administration has made no secret of its priorities.
One year into his presidency, the billionaire president has surrounded himself with billionaires and shaped his policies to serve their interests.
The so-called Big Beautiful Bill moving through Congress would reduce the tax bill of those in the highest-earning 0.1 percent by more than $300,000 each, while increasing taxes on households making less than $15,000 annually.
It slashed vital safety-net programs to pay for these giveaways, completing a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that has been underway for half a century.
There is also the matter of the planet itself. Oxfam calculates that a person from the richest 0.1 percent produces more carbon pollution in a single day than the poorest 50 percent emit in an entire year. If everyone emitted like the richest fraction of the world, the carbon budget that keeps the planet habitable would be exhausted in less than three weeks. The very richest individuals, as Oxfam’s executive director put it, are funding and profiting from climate destruction while leaving everyone else to bear the fatal consequences.
Small businesses, meanwhile, continue to be the primary engines of job creation in the United States, accounting for more than 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019. These are not the businesses of billionaires. These are the shops and restaurants and service providers that line Main Streets across the country, the ones that have been struggling against monopoly power and concentrated wealth for decades. They are the ones that create jobs, not the monopolists who extract wealth. And they are the ones being squeezed by a system designed by and for the people at the very top.
McCormick, who is running for the Senate again, says the response to all of this must be proportionate to the problem.
A hard cap on personal wealth, $100 million, is more than enough for any individual’s life.
McCormick would foment a restoration of balance. A breaking of the plutocratic stranglehold. A reassertion of the democratic principle that no private fortune should outweigh the common good.
She says Americans deserve a life they can afford, and she says the political establishment is failing to deliver that life because it is too busy courting the donors who benefit from the current arrangement.
The question is whether enough people are ready to hear this message. The polling suggests they are.
Eighty-four percent of Americans say the rich have too much political power. Eighty-one percent say the gap between rich and poor is a serious problem. More than half support government efforts to reduce wealth inequality.
The sentiment is there, waiting to be organized and mobilized and directed toward something more than vague discontent.
But the parties remain trapped in their donor dependencies, unable or unwilling to break free.
The Republicans have become the party of billionaire donors, with more than half their 2024 budget coming from contributions of one million dollars or more. The Democrats are not as far gone, but they are far enough that 18 percent of their budget comes from the same source.
The difference is one of degree, not kind. Both parties have learned to speak the language of the people while serving the interests of the few.
Zucman says he does not know how long it will take for the Democratic Party to understand that democracy versus oligarchy is the battle of the century.
The party of the people has been slow to learn, resistant to change, protective of its relationships with the very donors who are bankrolling the inequality that is destroying the middle class.
But the pressure is building. The insurgents are organizing. The numbers are becoming impossible to ignore.
The billionaire class has had a good run.
They have accumulated more wealth than any group in human history. They have shaped the rules of the economy to their benefit. They have purchased influence in both parties and ensured that their interests are protected no matter who wins the election.
They have also made themselves vulnerable by succeeding too completely. They have concentrated so much wealth in so few hands that the imbalance has become visible to everyone. They have created the conditions for a backlash that could, if properly channeled, undo much of what they have built.
The question is whether the political class will get out of the way long enough for that backlash to find its target. The donors will not give up their advantage without a fight. The incumbents will not surrender their fund-raising networks without resistance. The consultants will not abandon the system that pays their bills.
But the people are waking up, and when people wake up, strange things begin to happen.
In the meantime, thousands of stores close, the rents rise, the planet warms, and the billionaires get richer. The machinery grinds on, indifferent to the human cost.
McCormick says machinery can be stopped. It can be dismantled. It can be replaced with something better. The only question is whether enough people will demand it, because they must replace politicians who claim to represent them but will never listen.
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