This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 16 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
In 1961, outgoing Republican President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to the nation, as all presidents do. But as a former World War II general and outgoing commander in chief, his included quite a prescient warning:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower said. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”
Oligarchy is not a word that you hear applied very often in this country, at least not by the nation’s most powerful politicians.
I think it’s fair to say history has since vindicated Eisenhower but, at the time, this warning shocked people. The so-called military-industrial complex spent the following six decades consolidating power and influence in Washington to an extent that is, I believe, genuinely damaging to our democracy.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden delivered a farewell address of his own and, in an explicit nod to Eisenhower, offered a scorching warning about the new concentration of power we are seeing unfold before our eyes:
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech industrial complex that can pose real dangers for our country as well.
It was genuinely wild to hear Biden describe an oligarchy from the Oval Office. It’s something that Sen. Bernie Sanders has been talking about for decades. It’s the type of thing you usually hear from the mouths of folks further to the left than Biden.
As journalist Brian Stelter noted, searches for the term spiked after Biden’s speech. The Associated Press even published an explainer of what, exactly, an oligarchy is. In short, an oligarchy means rule by a very small group of very wealthy folks.
It’s not a word that you hear applied very often in this country, at least not by the nation’s most powerful politicians. When Americans do think about oligarchs, they think about what has emerged in post-Soviet states, like Russia, where leaders are surrounded by a handful of obscenely wealthy men who effectively control entire industries and act with total impunity, with the explicit or implicit permission of the actual government.
Those kinds of governments, basically without exception, make the lives of their citizens miserable because they destroy the mechanisms of democratic feedback that allow for flourishing nations.
They concentrate power, which in turn leads to abuses of power, as Biden warned. It’s that very concentration of power, in fact, that many of the most influential framers of our Constitution feared most.
In Federalist 47, James Madison warned: “The accumulation of all powers … in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear he wants to concentrate power around him. His billionaire tech bro buddies appear to be down with this plan as long as they get to be in the inner circle. They want to be the American oligarchs. This week, we got word that Apple CEO Tim Cook will be joining the ranks of the billionaires at Trump’s inauguration. Along with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, among others. To be clear, a handful of unelected tech bros should not be running our country just because they are giving lots of money to Trump. Elon Musk, naturally, will be at the inauguration as well, as he is already operating as Trump’s co-president with his own independent authority. He’s calling the shots on congressional budget negotiations, he will be working within the White House complex, according to The New York Times, and, reportedly, he’s running off-the-books prisoner swap negotiations with Iran. To be clear, a handful of unelected tech bros should not be running our country just because they are giving lots of money to Trump. While all of this might seem abstract right now, there are many things these men — and they are all men — want from this government. The process of governing is about prioritizing competing interests between different people and factions. When it comes down to a scenario where there’s competing interest between what’s good for Bezos or Zuckerberg or Musk and what’s good for you, who do you think is going to win that fight? Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
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