This article first appeared in Time.
As Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and President Donald Trump’s top campaign donor, rampages through the federal government shutting down agencies and firing workers seemingly without any regard for his own conflicts of interest, the danger of concentrated private interests capturing our political system has never been more apparent.
While the corrupting influence of big money over our government is not new, the specifics of this danger are different today than perhaps at any other time in our nation’s history. Tech billionaires, who already had enormous power, helped underwrite a winning presidential campaign in ways that would have been illegal just a few elections ago. And there are now fewer restraints than ever before on their ability, or the president they helped elect, to break through the checks and balances of our political system. This system, President Joseph Biden recently warned, can best be described as an “oligarchy.” Or, as others have dubbed, a “broligarchy.”
None of this means the situation is hopeless. Musk’s depredations are already encountering legal and political resistance, and it’s likely that the political pendulum will eventually swing back. When it does, those who care about the security of American democracy will need to be ready with fresh, bold solutions that meet the political moment, to ensure that our political system can actually respond to the needs of regular Americans.
Still, the question remains: How did we get to the point of having a tech billionaire campaign donor openly running huge parts of the federal government? And where do we go from here?
