Tech titans and political influence emerges as a defining condition in 21st century American politics

AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool

By Cliff Hamill

Was anyone else struck by the collegial atmosphere of tech titans (the “broligarchy”) at the inauguration? I felt a restrained celebration in the air.

For me, this new oligarchy differs from the Russian oligarchy in that, in Russia, the deal is that the oligarchs can make as much money as they want, but they need to stay out of politics. To this point, Putin made an example of one who was perhaps the wealthiest oligarch, Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, who stood up for transparency and human rights in Russia and almost paid with his life. He ended up spending close to 10 years in a Russian jail, losing almost all his wealth, and having his assets seized.

Trump hasn’t delineated a "do-not-cross" line that I have seen, but perhaps has signaled or even communicated to the broligarchs: “Okay, you are in the driver’s seat; do what you want with it.” My suspicion is that DOGE, which is outside of the government and therefore has no ethical and few legal constraints that typical U.S. federal agencies would have, and therefore is not subject to an Inspector General audit, is a shady deal.

In the past, our oligarchs would use their power to resist being regulated and taxed—they just wanted to get rich. But these new oligarchs are different in that they have a fairly specific political agenda—one that exudes anti-democratic ideology. It was a very eye-catching, audacious, and troubling display.

It appears the new oligarchs want all the power minus the oblige that typically accompanies vast wealth. That is, it appears their goals are to have no obligation to give back to the people or their nation. Their goal is simply to become richer, which is to transfer wealth from American labor to their coffers. They feel free from any obligation to the nation from which they got their wealth.

This ‘new’ Gilded Age appears unlike the old. Back then, it was stigmatized, looked down on, and reputation-scarring to hoard your wealth. To maintain their reputations, we saw things like Rockefeller National Park and Carnegie Hall dedicated as a thank-you to the people. But in today’s broligarchy, you can hoard all your wealth and return nothing to the nation, as was the way in the old Gilded Age.

For instance, when the EU tried to impose its own laws on Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, not yet Vice President, told the EU to drop their instigation against Musk or the U.S. would withdraw from NATO, according to Brooke Harrington, author of the book Offshore. Elon donated $270 million to purchase his influence with the President. His payoff was up to $210 billion—crony capitalism finally has a price tag attached to it. We can see in this example that Musk invested $270 million into Trump’s campaign, which ended up gaining him $210 billion. Actions like this one show that the new oligarchs feel unrestrained and unregulated, empowered to accumulate as much wealth as they can while being assisted by the government.

Don’t get me wrong and mistake this piece as simply an anti-Trump rant because the broligarchs gained trillions during Biden’s four years in the Oval Office. When one examines this fact, it appears that this is our nation’s new reality.

We, the people, need to find a way for American workers (the source of all the nation’s wealth, including the wealth of the tech titans) to capitalize on this fact and return more power to the workers where it belongs.

This is a new challenge for the American people. We face a wall of money and political power, as was the case in the Gilded Age, but we must also be keenly aware of the fact that, in today’s society, social media is being used to divide us and to draw our attention away from what’s happening. The same people who are hoarding the nation’s wealth supply free-to-the-public, algorithm-driven social media platforms that are engineered to keep us divided and fighting amongst ourselves, and it appears they stumbled upon the strategy that keeping the people divided serves their interests.

About a week ago, a scholarly article from the Netherlands, submitted by Dutch political scientists, was released. It draws the conclusion that there is an asymmetric creation of misinformation across social media platforms. The article concludes that almost all of the disinformation originates from right-wing populists, exposing the very real possibility that this is not an accident but a strategy—a strategy to keep us outraged, divided, and misinformed.