The Oligarch Era: Is democracy finally fighting back in the Land of the Free?

With all that’s been happening around the globe – at greater speed and with more brazenness - since US President Donald Trump made that stupefying comeback, many observers have come to the realisation that we are now firmly living in a world of oligarchs.

The runner-up to Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020, Bernie Sanders, provided a good analysis of what’s happening in the US and around the world.

“I do not often find myself in the habit of thanking Elon Musk, but he has done an exceptional job of demonstrating a point that we have made for years — and that is the fact we live in an oligarchic society in which billionaires dominate not only our politics and the information we consume, but our government and economic lives as well.”

In an “update” last month the veteran senator argues that these oligarchs simply don’t care about ordinary people, but just want power and wealth. He then he asks some pertinent questions, and  gives a very simple but plausible – and terrifying - answer.

What are these billionaires after? What do they really want? What is the end-game?

“It is what ruling classes throughout history have always wanted and have believed is theirs by right: more power, more control, more wealth. And they don’t want ordinary people and democracy getting in their way.”

If this is correct, then we are in for a hell ride. We are hurtling to hell in a handbasket. The aid cuts, tariff wars – unleashed this week on Trump’s “liberation day” – and so on are just the beginning.

Unless we stand together and push back. And in this case the “we” refers not to the royal plural but to those of us who believe in democracy and all those wonderful things in our Constitution.

But a glimmer of hope emerged in that Land of the Free this week indicating that the times are a-changing. In the first real electoral test of his polarising presidency, Trump and Musk’s efforts to lodge a new Republican on the Wisconsin Supreme Court fell flat. Instead, a progressive judge, Susan Crawford, beat a Trump-backed one.