Democracy is rule of, by, and for the people; oligarchy is rule of, by, and for the rich.

This book details how oligarchs have unsuccessfully tried, twice, to replace democracy in America with oligarchy. Today, they are nearly finished with not only attempting a third time to change the American experiment from a democracy to an oligarchy, but pushing to then transition our nation from oligarchy to outright tyranny. It also lays out the steps necessary to stop and reverse the process, to restore democracy in our republic.

The transition from democracy to oligarchy usually starts with the very wealthy acquiring political power by buying influence with elected officials. They typically justify this with a belief that oligarchy is more stable and less messy than democracy, and that their success demonstrates that a sort of Darwinian process has chosen them to lead.

From there, they begin to so completely control the mechanisms of information (the media) and campaigns (financing campaigns directly, as well as indirectly via third-party groups) that their agenda overwhelms the governing agenda.

In the final stages, oligarchs themselves—or people so tightly aligned with them that they could only be called agents of particular oligarchs—rise up through seemingly democratic processes and take complete or near-complete control of government.

From there, oligarchs typically begin to, as Steve Bannon said was the main goal of the Trump administration, “deconstruct the administrative state,” seizing control over and corrupting every subordinate agency of government, from those responsible for enforcing the laws and the courts, to regulatory agencies, to those controlling the nation’s currency and economy.

America has been badly corrupted by oligarchy several times in our past, most famously when the pre–Civil War South, after the invention of the cotton gin, became a rigidified oligarchy that eventually challenged the power of the nation itself, leading to the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans. The oligarchs lost in that battle, although their legacy remains in an impoverished South and deeply ingrained structural and cultural barriers to Black advancement and supports for white rule.

The second major brush with oligarchy in the United States came toward the end of the 1800s as the industrial revolution spawned a new group of American oligarchs, who in 1920 reached the pinnacle of their power and seized control of much of the federal government. Their removal of the guardrails of democracy led to the Roaring Twenties, when the very rich got much richer and everybody else got poorer, a widespread American fascist movement was birthed (complete with rallies), and the oligarchs’ rule collapsed with the Republican Great Depression.

We are living through America’s third struggle with oligarchy. It began in 1971, when Lewis Powell, himself a proud agent of the tobacco oligarchs, laid out in a famous memo to the US Chamber of Commerce a plan for the various oligarchs of America to stop competing and organize to take over the US government.

By 1980, the plan was in full flower, and by the late 1990s, the oligarchs directly or indirectly controlled a majority of the states, the entire Republican Party, and, at the federal level, well over half of the Democratic Party. By 2005, oligarchic control over the executive branch of our federal government was largely in place, and it was cemented with the Trump administration.

When Donald Trump—himself an oligarch—came to power in January 2017, he and his agents embarked on a campaign to destroy the institutions of America that had been so carefully built up over more than 240 years. They succeeded in damaging and corrupting every single federal regulatory agency and turned the foundational departments within the executive branch into full-fledged agents of the Trump oligarchy.

The Justice Department, whose first head, Edmund Randolph, was one of the authors of the Constitution, was taken over by William Barr, a man who’d engineered two cover-ups for the Reagan/Bush crew back in the 1990s, proving his loyalty to corrupt oligarchy and his disdain for democratic institutions. During his reign, white-collar prosecutions dropped to levels not seen for decades as wealthy corporate criminals skated, while Trump’s financial and political dealings with Russia and sketchy oligarchs were purposely hidden from the American people. ¹

This wasn’t because the American people wanted the Justice Department to serve the oligarchs; it was because the oligarchs wanted it.

The State Department, first led by Thomas Jefferson, ended up in the hands of Mike Pompeo, a corrupt toady of the Koch network, who repeatedly lied and covered up his own crimes in office, as well as Trump’s. The American people didn’t ask for this (or the “criminal justice reform” that made it harder to prosecute corporate CEOs); it was because the oligarchs wanted it. ²

The Defense Department, first headed (as the War Department) by Henry Knox, who started his military career with the 1776 battles of Lexington and Concord and fought in the Revolutionary War to create America, ended up in the hands of Mark Esper, a former lobbyist for the oligarchs running one of America’s largest defense firms. ³ Average Americans never asked for a defense industry lobbyist to run the Pentagon; the defense industry oligarchs wanted him.

With a lobbyist in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, private prison companies whose political action committees (PACs) and employees donated millions to Trump and the GOP received billions in bloated contracts to house asylum seekers. Americans didn’t ask for this; private prison oligarchs did. ⁴

At the Department of the Treasury, Trump put “foreclosure king” Steve Mnuchin in charge, the man who’d thrown more than 36,000 people out of their homes during the Bush Great Recession of 2008 and raised $169 million to get Trump elected. Americans didn’t ask for a grifter banker to be in charge of our economy; the banking oligarchs did. And he delivered to them, repeatedly, passing out a half trillion dollars in taxpayer money to his oligarch buddies, then refusing to tell Congress or the American people who got the money. ⁵

Over at the Department of Commerce, Trump put the man who Forbes magazine called “one of the biggest grifters in American history” in charge. Wilbur Ross lied about his wealth, made decisions that helped his own investments, and tried his best to rig the census to diminish Hispanic and Black political power. The people of this country didn’t want a con man running the international end of our economy, but billionaires who made money offshoring jobs were very happy with him. ⁶

At the Department of the Interior, responsible for our federal lands and national parks, oil and mining lobbyist David Bernhardt put at least 25 former lobbyists from his industries in charge, along with more than 35 former oil and mining executives. Drilling and mining rights, from sacred Indian lands to offshore marine sanctuaries, were sold off at fire-sale prices. ⁷ The American people never asked for their parks to be despoiled, but the fossil fuel oligarchs sure did.

The list goes on and on, and by the end of the 2017–2021 Trump term, every single cabinet department and regulatory agency was corrupted and bent to the will of America’s industrial and inherited-wealth oligarchs.

Thousands of years of history tell us that oligarchies are unstable systems. They tend to either collapse from their own internal rot, as happened in 1929 in the United States, or fall to uprisings from their own people or their own overreach, as happened in the United States in the 1860s.

When they don’t collapse, though, they most often morph— usually within a single generation—into tyranny, a form of government that entirely abandons even the pretense of the rule of law and reigns through police-state terror.

And that is the direction in which Trump and the oligarchs he represents have been pushing this country, an effort that continues to this day in multiple venues.

In this book, I lay out what oligarchy is, how it metastasizes, how it has transformed through American history, how the Trump oligarchy was the logical outcome of the Powell Memo and the Reagan presidency, and, most important, how we can stop it now.

If we fail to break up the various parts of the Reagan/Bush/Trump oligarchy, America will degenerate into tyranny.

So much damage has been done to America in the past 40-plus years that stopping tyranny and dismantling oligarchy will be a huge undertaking.

The good news in that regard is that, typically, major shocks bring about rapid and major change. The financial panic of 1770 helped precipitate the American Revolution; the great crash of 1856 brought the Southern oligarchy to a head, leading to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery; the Republican Great Depression of 1930 led straight to the New Deal and major anti-oligarchic reforms.

Much as the shock of the 1929 crash woke America up to the ongoing theft of American democracy by that generation’s oligarchs, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has laid bare how extensively Reaganista oligarchs have looted our nation’s economic system and stolen the wealth of the formerly middle class.

The danger is that such shocks can turn a society in one of several directions. The Great Depression not only empowered Franklin D. Roosevelt; it also helped Adolf Hitler gain and consolidate power. Leadership during a time of crisis is extraordinarily consequential. As is the will of the people.

My previous book, The Hidden History of Monopolies, showed what happens when economic power is concentrated into the hands of a few massive corporations: monopoly. This book exposes what happens when political power is concentrated into the hands of a very few: oligarchy.

And, as in The Hidden History of Monopolies, this book offers a set of political solutions to rein in the oligarchs and restore our democracy. However, before addressing the solutions, we must first understand the history and the nature of the problem.

The first part of this book exposes why oligarchy is a crisis. Following that, we explore America’s revolutionary history of combating oligarchy and how oligarchy has again seized power in America since the 1970s. Part 5 shows how a political system ruled by oligarchs can lead to tyranny. Finally, part 6 shows how oligarchy has been successfully controlled in the past, along with how we can reclaim our democracy today and restore America’s revolutionary guiding principles.

These are grave times, but history tells us that a new America is on the verge of being born. If we act now, we will have a say in the outcome of this birth: brutal tyranny or renewed democracy.