New book exposes the grip of greedy parasites on American democracy

A new book published by Mehring Books delivers a sweeping indictment of American political life, arguing that the United States has fallen under the control of a corporate-financial oligarchy that has cast aside democratic forms of rule in pursuit of unprecedented wealth and global dominance.

“Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy” details how a financial aristocracy seized control of the United States.

Edited by David North, “Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy” collects lectures and essays originally published on the World Socialist Web Site from 2015 to 2026.

The book offers a real-time chronicle of what its authors describe as the systematic dismantling of American democratic institutions, tracing the rise of Donald Trump not as an aberration but as the logical political instrument of a ruling class whose fortunes depend on financial plunder.

The analysis begins with a stark accounting of wealth concentration.

Roughly 900 billionaires in the United States command a combined fortune of $8.2 trillion—nearly double the total wealth of the bottom half of the entire population, according to the book—while working people are crushed by the costs of housing, health care and food.

The richest ten percent of Americans own more than twice as much wealth as the other 90 percent of the population, $118.26 trillion versus $55.75 trillion. The poorest half of the population owns only $4.27 trillion, roughly half as much as the combined assets of America’s billionaires.

The oligarchy as a class has swung behind authoritarian rule, financing Trump’s return to power in 2024, with its leading figures seated in places of honor at his second inauguration.

The book identifies Elon Musk as the most direct expression of oligarchic rule. The richest human being in recorded history and, according to the book, soon to be the world’s first trillionaire, Musk spent more than a quarter-billion dollars to return Trump to the White House and was rewarded with command of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, from which he set about destroying federal agencies and social programs wholesale.

Musk was not alone. The tech oligarchs lined up behind the candidate the book characterizes as representing dictatorship: Peter Thiel, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and magnates such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who had long cultivated liberal reputations, all calculating, according to the book, that an authoritarian regime would defend their fortunes more reliably than the decaying forms of democracy.

Trump, the book argues, is the political representative of these interests and of nothing else.

“The criminalization of American political life that he personifies is rooted not in the pathology of one man but in the existence of a ruling layer whose fortunes rest on financial plunder and whose methods grow more lawless as the social ground beneath it narrows,” the text states. “Trump, in short, is a manifestation of the oligarchy’s rule, not its cause.”

The Democratic Party establishment as enabler

The book reserves particular condemnation for the Democratic Party, which it portrays not as a genuine opposition but as an accomplice in the erosion of democratic rights. The analysis points to President Barack Obama’s statement the day after Trump’s 2016 victory—that Democrats and Republicans were members of a single team and that the election had been no more than an “intramural scrimmage”—as evidence of the party’s fundamental accommodation to the oligarchic order.

Two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, President Joe Biden declared: “We need a Republican Party. We need an opposition that is principled and strong.”

The Democratic select committee investigating the attack dragged out its proceedings for 18 months, according to the book, only to portray the conspiracy principally as the work of one man, while the Justice Department prosecuted Trump’s foot soldiers but left what the authors describe as a broader network of officials, operatives and financiers untouched.

The Biden years, the book contends, were not a rupture but an interregnum—devoted not to defending democratic rights but to securing bipartisan backing for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and what it describes as the genocide in Gaza. On every question bearing on the fundamental interests of the ruling class—the distribution of wealth, the power of finance capital, the prosecution of war and the building of the surveillance state—the continuity between the parties held unbroken, according to the authors.

The analysis extends to individuals and groups that the authors argue falsely claim to be socialist. Bernie Sanders, having appealed to millions in 2016 with denunciations of the “billionaire class,” capitulated without a struggle, endorsed Hillary Clinton and, after Trump’s victory, pronounced himself “prepared to work with” the new president.

When Jan. 6 came, the book argues, pseudo-left tendencies hastened to deny that a coup had occurred at all. Jacobin, the journal associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, maintained what the authors characterize as an editorial policy of saying as little as possible about the assault on democratic rights.

A decade of resistance

The book also documents the continuous social opposition that has characterized Trump’s ascendancy—from the millions who filled the streets on the first full day of his first term, through the mass, multiracial protests following the police murder of George Floyd, to the “No Kings” demonstrations of 2025 and 2026, described as the largest single-day protests in American history.

The objective basis for a mass socialist movement exists, the authors argue; what is lacking is its conscious political leadership.

A call to action

“Oligarchy” concludes by placing the struggle against dictatorship and war within the framework of the 250-year legacy of the American Revolution and the Civil War. The volume argues that “the democratic principles established by the first two American revolutions can be defended and expanded only by a third, socialist revolution” and that the conflict between what it describes as a criminal oligarchy and the moral consciousness of the masses is assuming an increasingly explosive character.

“Today, it is the struggle for socialism by the international working class [that] is not merely politically necessary,” the foreword states. “It is the indispensable expression of all that is humane, decent, and emancipatory in modern civilization. The survival of humanity depends upon its victory.”