This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

For most of human history, trying to identify an oligarchy has been difficult. Part of that has to do with the definition of the term “oligarchy” in the first place. Aristotle first popularized the word thousands of years ago, pointing out that an oligarchy — which literally means “rule of the few” — is indeed all about a small number of individuals steering a given country, nation, or empire. But even then, Aristotle added, it wasn’t just about the number of individuals that mattered, but also about how much wealth they controlled. In order to have an oligarchy, a state had to be run not just by the few, but by the wealthiest few. 

The other part that’s made “oligarchy” such a tricky thing to define is that, for centuries, oligarchic figures tended to operate out of sight, or by playing down their impact on politics. Not always, necessarily; the so-called “robber barons” of the Gilded Age — oligarchs by another name — were front and center in American society in the late 19th and early 20th century. But by and large, oligarchs tended to downplay their influence, and even their wealth. Since they could operate as the powers behind the throne, they tended to keep themselves (and their wealth) out of the spotlight, making it even trickier to nail down who an oligarch actually is, or what oligarchy looks like when it’s taken over a democracy. 

Those two factors — the difficulties in defining “oligarchy,” and the struggles in identifying oligarchs themselves — made analyzing the topic, let alone writing a book about it, an uphill battle. 

And then, in January 2025, all of that changed. Because there, in the U.S. Capitol, as President Donald Trump once more swore the oath of office for the presidency, stood a suite of men, just off to the side, all standing in a row. They looked out over the audience, smiling in their suits. In that moment, those figures — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a small number of others — made oligarchy impossible to miss. Looking out at a man they’d propelled back to office — at a man who would usher in not only the most corrupt administration in American history, but who is himself oligarchy made flesh — they forced Americans to an inescapable realization. We’d once, as a country, had a Gilded Age. But now, with more wealth inequality than ever prior, and with more power concentrated in the hands of a small number of select men, we have something else: the Age of Oligarchy. 

All of which is why I wrote my new book, United States of Oligarchy, which is out in bookstores now. As a former Talking Points Memo alum (and as someone who met my wife at TPM all those years ago!), I’m exceptionally excited to share an excerpt with you today. The snippet below looks at not just how we got here, but on what it will take to bring these oligarchs to heel and to escape this Age of Oligarchy while we still have time. 

There was a moment, sometime back in the early 2020s, when it felt like the US had finally turned a corner in its fight against a nascent oligarchy. That for the first time since the post-Watergate period, or perhaps even since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, a new era of reform was dawning.

Truth be told, there were many moments that made it seem like that new era had arrived. There was, for instance, the passage in early January 2021 of something called the Corporate Transparency Act.

The text itself was a jumble of legalese, clauses and subclauses running page after page, tucked in the middle of a far more sprawling defense bill. But the core of the legislation was simple: For the first time in American history, the US would finally outlaw anonymous shell companies, which had been for years the key ingredient in money-laundering networks both near and far—and the key tool for oligarchs to build out their empires of........

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