The corporate class takes over America

Comment: If you’ve ever wondered how Omni Consumer Products became the government in the 1987 Paul Verhoeven film, Robocop, you’re about to find out. As Donald J. Trump, a convicted felon and a man who tried to violently seize power through a failed coup in 2020, begins his second term as US President, all the conditions are present for the corporate takeover of the US government and the supplanting of democracy by oligarchy.

Here are six reasons behind what is happening.

First, we need to understand just how fragile US democracy already was. We might say its high point occurred in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act in which some of the substantive barriers preventing people of colour enacting their formal right to vote were challenged. However, this needs to be tempered with the fact that in 1961 President Eisenhower had already warned Americans of the takeover of US democracy by the Military-Industrial Complex, a warning echoed in Biden’s farewell address where he specifically mentioned the threat of oligarchy.

Second, US democracy was already plutocratic. Where democracy literally means the power of the people, plutocracy is the power of wealth. To deny that the US has been a government steered by money would be ludicrous. Yes, it has retained some democratic norms in order to retain a semblance of legitimacy, but it is a country—like every large capitalist country—run by the influence of money.

Indeed, there is no path to the presidency without accumulating massive wealth donated by corporate sponsors. Any candidate must then pass muster under the eyes of corporate media who will certainly not provide viewers with any sustained analysis challenging the interests of their owners. Here, another democratic norm, the free press rings a little hollow and fully exposed as owners and anchors of various ‘liberal’ newspaper publishers and broadcasters have kissed the ring following Trump’s victory.

Third, 45 years of neoliberalism has ensured that more public assets and utilities have been placed under private ownership. In a functioning democracy, the people ought to have a stake in many of the elements essential to a properly functioning society and they should have a say in how they are run via the representatives they elect. In conjunction with the rolling back of regulation and oversight, another central aspect of the neoliberal political project, the transparency and accountability needed for a properly functioning democracy have also been undermined.

The fourth consideration is related to this. As corporations have taken more control of social assets and enriched themselves at an exponential rate (a new Oxfam report notes that billionaire wealth increased by $2 trillion in 2024 while the rate of those in poverty has not changed since 1990) their ‘success’ has been taken as a sign of their ‘merit’. This is a secular version of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, where material success is deemed a sign of being chosen by God.

Alongside this is the return to favour of aristocracy (the power of the best). A belief deeply held in much conservative philosophy, aristocracy lost its dominance throughout modernity largely due to the democratic revolutions but also because the violent result of aristocratic attitudes were seen not only in colonial and imperial ventures but also in the horrors of World War II, where specific peoples were deemed inferior.

Today, with the mainstreaming of Alt-Right rhetoric we have seen the return of this discourse in the shape of the once defunct race science, white supremacy, virulent misogyny, and the self-portrait of billionaire entrepreneurs as supermen (a vulgar version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch).

We might consider this as a shift from neo-liberalism to neo-illiberalism because it has also gone hand in hand with a shift in who counts as the People. Where neo-liberalism had previously used the unemployed, the single mother and the public servant as their scapegoat or out group, the emergence of neo-illiberalism came with the specifying of the out group in racial and ethnic terms. Most clearly manifesting as Islamophobia, it later became a more general distrust of the foreigner, migrant and refugee.

This was a smoke screen that said: “Do not look up at those with power when searching for someone to blame for your precarity, look down at the powerless, it is all their fault.”

The fifth feature is that in this class war in which an unimaginable amount of wealth was transferred upwards, a small group of people have become extraordinarily powerful and can do almost anything they want. These people literally do want to be able to do anything they want, and they desire no law, government or social obligation to stand in their way.

This contemporary version of libertarianism so prevalent amongst the Alt-Right more broadly, is also embedded so deeply within the culture of Silicon Valley and the cult of the digital entrepreneur to be known as cyberlibertarianism. This philosophy can be summed up in Peter Thiel’s claim that democracy and freedom (by which he means his absolute freedom) are incompatible.

Sixth on the list is the fact that these digital entrepreneurs have completely polluted and degraded our knowledge and information systems such that it is difficult for people to know fact from fiction. This has largely been achieved via social media, a problem only to be exacerbated now that Mark Zuckerberg has joined the MAGA cult and removed moderation and fact-checking (as well as any diversity policies, which he blamed on a woman) from all Meta products. To this, we must of course add AI through which tech companies have assumed even greater control over access to knowledge and continue to blend the unreal with the real.

While the US corporate class has been pursuing a political project for the past 45 years in which they increasingly take control of more and more assets, resources and wealth they have never had a figurehead like Trump to finally seize control of government and establish fully fledged oligarchy.

The media and social media magnates have all bent the knee, and the Supreme Court has placed him above the law while also supporting his nation transforming legislation.

This means that as the corporate class become the government, as they go to war on government departments, public services and what little regulation remains, opposition, dissent and resistance will be subdued via the strongman methods associated with fascism.

When Musk, the CEO of Tesla, amongst other companies, gave ‘Nazi’ salutes at Trump’s inauguration, don’t dismiss it as the antics of a clown or a troll.