How Global Capital Is Buying the Death of Democracy

The Ruling Elite's Endgame

The transition is already underway

There’s a moment in every heist movie where you realize the robbery you’ve been watching wasn’t the real crime—it was just the distraction. While you were focused on the vault, someone was stealing the entire bank.

We’re living in that moment. Except the bank is democracy itself, and the vault? That’s just America’s crumbling political theater.

Let’s talk about what’s actually happening while we argue about pronouns and gas prices.

Part I: The Capital Question Nobody’s Asking

Here’s a question that should keep you up at night: Why are the world’s richest people suddenly so comfortable with authoritarianism?

Not quietly comfortable. Actively, publicly, investment-portfolio comfortable.

Elon Musk cozying up to authoritarian leaders. Tech billionaires praising “Singapore-style governance” (translation: efficient dictatorship). Hedge fund managers arguing that democracy is “too slow” for modern markets. CEOs of major corporations refusing to criticize coups, election theft, or the dismantling of civil liberties—not out of fear, but out of preference.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about exit strategy.

For decades, global capital operated under a convenient arrangement: Western democracies provided stable rule of law, educated workforces, and consumer markets. In exchange, capital tolerated things like labor rights, environmental regulations, and progressive taxation. Annoying, sure—but the cost of doing business in a system that protected property rights and contracts.

But something changed. Capital looked around and thought: What if we could keep the stability and property rights... but lose all the annoying rules? Increasing our wealth exponentially.

What if there was a system that protected wealth without protecting workers? That enforced contracts without enforcing accountability? That maintained order without maintaining democracy?

That system has a name. It’s called oligarchy. And it’s already operating at scale.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned over a century ago: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” ^1

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel made the quiet part loud in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He wasn’t confessing a flaw in his thinking. He was describing his business model. ^2

Thiel went further: “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”^2

Read that again. One person. Making the world safe for capitalism. Not democracy—capitalism. That’s not political philosophy. That’s a mission statement for oligarchy.

Part II: The NATO Pivot—or, How to Unlock a Continent

Let’s zoom out to the chessboard.

For 75 years, American commitment to NATO has been the single biggest obstacle to authoritarian expansion in Europe. Not because America is inherently noble—it’s not—but because it had incentives to maintain a stable, democratic Europe. Trade partners. Military allies. A counterweight to Soviet, then Russian, ambitions.

But here’s the thing about incentives: they change when the players change.

The old American establishment—flawed as it was—saw value in a rules-based international order. Predictable alliances. Democratic partners. The whole post-WWII architecture.

The new elite? They see that architecture as a constraint.

Because here’s what happens when America abandons NATO or pivots toward “strongman diplomacy”:

Russia gets a free hand in Europe. Not immediately. Not all at once. But the message is sent: We’re not coming to save you anymore. Which means every European nation has to calculate: Do we resist Russian influence, or do we cut a deal? Do we maintain expensive social democracies, or do we adopt the “efficiency” of managed capitalism?

And here’s the beautiful part (if you’re an oligarch): Russia isn’t the enemy anymore—it’s the model.

Putin’s Russia is what happens when you strip away democratic accountability but keep capitalist extraction. A small circle of connected elites control resources, media, and state power. Everyone else works, obeys, or disappears into the system. Wealth concentrates upward with zero pretense of redistribution.

It’s not communism. It’s not even traditional fascism. It’s oligarchy with borders, and it’s extraordinarily profitable if you’re on the inside.

Now imagine that model spreading. Not through invasion—too messy, too expensive—but through alignment. Through capital flows. Through shared interests among global elites who realize they have more in common with each other than with their own citizens.

Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, put it plainly: Tech billionaires “really don’t believe in democracy or a lot of the values that seem to underpin our country... and feel entitled to be in charge in a way that has really snuck up on us.” ^3

Part III: The Corporate Calculation

Let’s get specific. Why are tech companies, financial institutions, and major corporations suddenly so comfortable with democratic erosion?

Because democracy is expensive.

Think about what democracy requires from capital:

• Labor protections and minimum wages

• Environmental regulations that limit extraction

• Antitrust enforcement that prevents monopoly

• Progressive taxation that funds public goods

• Consumer protection laws

• Data privacy requirements

• Accountability to elected officials who (theoretically) represent public interest

Now think about what oligarchy requires:

• Good relationships with whoever’s in power

• Compliance with selective enforcement

• That’s basically it

The math is simple. In a democracy, you have to negotiate with millions of voters, hundreds of legislators, independent courts, free press. In an oligarchy, you negotiate with a dozen people. Maybe less.

You want to build a factory that dumps waste into a river? In a democracy, you face EPA regulations, public comment periods, lawsuits, media scrutiny. In an oligarchy, you call the right minister, make the right donation, done.

You want to crush a labor movement? In a democracy, you face legal protections, public sympathy, political backlash. In an oligarchy, the state does it for you. Protests become “terrorism.” Organizers disappear into legal limbo. Problem solved.

You want to operate a monopoly? In a democracy, you get broken up (theoretically). In an oligarchy, you are the state-backed national champion.

This is why global capital is funding the erosion of democratic norms. Not because billionaires are cartoonish villains—though some are—but because the incentive structure has shifted. Democracy was useful when it provided stability. Now it’s just providing constraints.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright observed: “Fascism is not so much an ideology as it is a means for seizing and holding power.”^4

The mechanism has changed—less jackboots, more quarterly earnings reports—but the destination remains the same.

Part IV: The Infrastructure Is Already Built

Here’s the terrifying part: The transition is already underway.

Not in some shadowy conspiracy—in plain sight, through entirely legal mechanisms:

Private equity buying up essential services. Water systems. Electricity grids. Healthcare. Housing. When Blackstone owns 10,000 homes in a city, they’re not a landlord—they’re a feudal lord. You don’t negotiate rent; you accept terms or leave.

Media consolidation. A handful of companies controlling information flow. Not through censorship (mostly), but through algorithmic curation, platform monopolies, and the simple economics of attention. Independent journalism dies not because it’s suppressed, but because it’s unprofitable.

The carceral state as profit center. Private prisons. Bail bond systems. Probation services. Electronic monitoring. An entire industry that profits from keeping people entangled in legal systems. And here’s the key: It requires a steady supply of bodies. Which means criminalization expands to meet market demand.

Digital surveillance infrastructure. Built by tech companies, available to governments. Social credit systems that started in China, now exported globally through “public-private partnerships.” Your behavior tracked, your associations noted, your dissent flagged—not by some dystopian future state, but by your phone, your car, your doorbell camera.

The gig economization of labor. Not just Uber drivers—everything. Contractors instead of employees. Apps instead of unions. Work that pays just enough to survive but never enough to accumulate power. A permanent precariat that’s too exhausted to organize and too indebted to resist.

This is the infrastructure of neo-feudalism. And it’s being built by quarterly earnings reports and shareholder returns.

Part IV-B: When the State Becomes a Weapon

But here’s where it gets truly insidious: they’re not just building private infrastructure—they’re capturing public power and turning it into a tool of enforcement.

This isn’t some distant authoritarian future. It’s happening now, in plain sight, using mechanisms that were designed to serve the public good.

Government agencies become selective enforcers. The IRS audits critics while ignoring billionaire tax evasion. Regulatory agencies that should be breaking up monopolies instead go after small competitors. Environmental agencies pursue violations against family farms while giving passes to connected corporations. The law isn’t blind—it’s for sale, and it knows exactly who’s paying.

Courts become clearing houses for power. Judges appointed through captured processes. Cases fast-tracked or slow-walked based on who’s involved. Judges fired and replaced with loyalists. Lawsuits weaponized not to win, but to bankrupt opposition through legal fees. Justice becomes a war of attrition that only the well-funded can survive.

Law enforcement serves private interests. Police breaking strikes for corporations. Protesters treated as terrorists while white-collar criminals get deferred prosecution agreements. Surveillance tools built with tax dollars, handed to private companies, then used to monitor citizens. Your local police department doesn’t work for you anymore—they work for whoever has the contract, the donation, the connection.

Public resources prosecute enemies, protect friends. See someone with power actually face consequences? Look closer—they didn’t break the law, they threatened the wrong people. They went after someone more connected. They forgot whose protection they needed. Meanwhile, the truly connected operate with impunity. Insider trading by members of Congress. Obvious fraud by politically-aligned businesses. Blatant corruption by those who’ve bought the right relationships. The law doesn’t apply—it selects.

Senator Elizabeth Warren documented this shift: “Regulatory capture is a big deal. It is one way in which powerful corporations rig the system to work for themselves—and the rest of America pays the price.” ^5

But it gets worse—because it’s not just about weaponizing the state. It’s about looting it.

Remember all those programs you paid for? The ones your grandparents fought for, that Congress passed, that were funded by your tax dollars for generations? Infrastructure. Education. Research. Social safety nets. Public health. Public Media. The entire framework of programs designed to build a stronger country?

They’re being systematically dismantled and redirected into private hands.

Your taxes used to build roads, schools, and hospitals. Now they’re subsidizing billionaire vanity projects. Tax credits for corporations that don’t need them. Bailouts for banks that gambled and lost. “Public-private partnerships” where the public pays and the private profits.

The research your tax dollars funded at public universities? Privatized and patented. The infrastructure your community built? Sold to private equity firms who’ll charge you tolls on roads you already paid for. The social programs that kept people from desperation? Cut to fund tax breaks for people who could buy a small country.

This is the grand theft of the commons. They’re not just refusing to contribute—they’re converting your contributions into their profit streams while convincing you the problem is that government doesn’t work.

And when those programs fail because they’ve been starved of funding or deliberately sabotaged? They’ll tell you it’s proof that public services are inefficient. That privatization is the answer. That billionaires are the solution to problems they created by looting the system that worked.

You paid for the foundation. They’re selling you back the rubble and calling it innovation.

And here’s the brilliance: You’re funding your own oppression. Every tax dollar you pay goes into a system increasingly used not to provide services, but to enforce compliance and punish resistance.

Roads and schools? That’s the PR. The real budget goes to surveillance infrastructure, militarized police, expanded detention facilities, and legal machinery designed to crush dissent before it can organize.

They’ve figured out how to make you pay for the boot on your neck.

This is the transition point. This is where oligarchy stops being an economic arrangement and becomes a political reality. When public power is indistinguishable from private interest, when the state enforces not law but hierarchy, when your tax dollars are used to punish you for demanding accountability—

You’re not living in a democracy anymore. You’re living in a protection racket that forgot to pretend otherwise.

Part IV-C: The Surveillance Economy—You Are the Product

But there’s another mechanism at work, quieter and more insidious than state capture or infrastructure privatization: you are being mined.

Every search query. Every click. Every purchase. Every location ping. Every “like,” scroll, pause, and keystroke. All of it collected, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Not sold to you—sold about you. To advertisers. To data brokers. To insurance companies. To employers. To anyone willing to pay.

This is surveillance capitalism, and it’s not a side hustle—it’s a trillion-dollar industry built on a simple premise: if the service is free, you’re the product.

Google doesn’t make money because you search. It makes money because it can predict and influence what you’ll buy, click, or believe based on the data exhaust you generate. Facebook doesn’t profit from your connections—it profits from knowing exactly how to manipulate your attention and sell access to it. Amazon doesn’t just want to sell you things; it wants to know what you’ll want before you do, and charge other companies for that insight.

The wealthiest companies in the world—the ones driving that 45-year upward wealth transfer—are built on data extraction. Your behavior is the raw material. Their algorithms are the refineries. And the product they sell is you—your preferences, your vulnerabilities, your predictability.

But it’s worse than that.

Because the same infrastructure that sells you targeted ads also enables targeted political manipulation. The same tools that predict your shopping habits can predict—and influence—your voting behavior. The same data trails that help corporations optimize profit help authoritarian governments identify dissent.

This isn’t theoretical. Cambridge Analytica proved you could weaponize personal data to swing elections. China’s social credit system proves you can use behavioral data to enforce compliance. The infrastructure exists. The data is already collected. The only question is who gets to use it, and for what.

And here’s the connection to oligarchy that most people miss: data monopolies are power monopolies.

When a handful of companies control the data on billions of people, they don’t just control markets—they control behavior, information flow, and ultimately, political outcomes. They know what you’re afraid of, what you’re angry about, what you believe, who you trust. That’s not just market advantage. That’s functional omniscience in the hands of unelected billionaires.

The surveillance economy does three things simultaneously:

First, it transfers wealth upward. You generate the data. They monetize it. You get nothing—or worse, you pay them with subscription fees while they sell your data anyway.

Second, it creates unprecedented control mechanisms. Behavioral prediction enables behavioral manipulation. If I know what makes you angry, afraid, or compliant, I can engineer your choices while you think you’re deciding freely.

Third, it merges corporate and state power. Governments don’t need to build surveillance infrastructure from scratch—they just partner with companies that already have it. “Public-private partnerships” in data sharing mean your private information flows seamlessly between corporate profit centers and state security apparatus.

This is why data privacy laws get gutted. Why encryption is under constant attack. Why “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” gets repeated until it sounds reasonable. Because comprehensive surveillance is the ultimate insurance policy for concentrated power.

You can’t organize resistance if every communication is logged. You can’t build solidarity if algorithms keep you fragmented into micro-targeted rage bubbles. You can’t challenge power when that power knows more about your behavior patterns than you do.

The surveillance economy isn’t a separate issue from oligarchy—it’s the nervous system of the machine. It’s how they know where resistance is forming before it coalesces. It’s how they monetize your existence while neutralizing your agency. It’s how they make you complicit in your own control by offering convenience, connection, and dopamine hits in exchange for total transparency.

And the truly elegant part? You carry the tracking device voluntarily. You pay for it. You upgrade it. You panic when you forget it at home.

The ruling class doesn’t need to force surveillance on you. You’ve already built the panopticon yourself, one app download at a time.

Part V: The Endgame

So what’s the actual endgame here?

A global ruling class that operates above national law. They hold multiple passports. Their wealth is distributed across jurisdictions. They move between aligned nations—whether nominally democratic or openly authoritarian—based on convenience. They’re not American or Russian or Chinese; they’re capital.

The rest of us become subjects, not citizens. Your rights depend not on constitutional protections, but on your economic utility. Useful workers get basic stability. Redundant workers get managed poverty. Dissidents get criminalized, not for what they do, but for the threat they represent to order.

Nations become franchises. America, Russia, China—these aren’t competing systems anymore. They’re different management styles of the same global extraction operation. Some allow more local color than others. Some maintain the aesthetic of democracy. But the fundamental relationship is the same: capital commands, labor complies, and the state enforces.

Senator Bernie Sanders laid it bare in February 2025: “We are seeing a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class. And it’s not being done secretly. It’s right out there for all to see.” ^6

And here’s the genius: Most people won’t even notice the transition. Because it doesn’t happen as a dramatic coup. It happens as a thousand small adjustments. Rights you didn’t realize you had disappearing. Protections you took for granted eroding. Systems that once served public interest quietly reorganized to serve private profit.

You don’t storm the castle when you can just buy it, renovate it in gold leaf, and charge admission.

Part VI: Why America Matters (Or Mattered)

Which brings us back to America.

For all its flaws—and they are legion—America was the weight on the scale. Not because it was virtuous, but because it was powerful enough and democratic enough (barely) to maintain some version of the post-WWII order. Rule of law. International institutions. The idea that might doesn’t always make right.

Take America off the board, and the scale tips.

Not toward China. Not toward Russia. Toward a model where national governments become middle management for global capital. Where strongmen and oligarchs partner with corporate interests to create systems that are stable, profitable, and utterly indifferent to human dignity.

This is why the dismantling of American democracy isn’t just an American problem. It’s the removal of the last major obstacle to a global realignment that most people don’t even see coming.

And the beautiful irony? Americans are cheering it on. Because they’ve been convinced that democracy is the problem—too slow, too divided, too corrupt. They’re begging for “strong leadership” while the infrastructure of their own subjugation is being built around them.

Albright warned that “fascism can come in a way that it is one step at a time, and in many ways, goes unnoticed until it’s too late.”^7

By the time most people recognize what’s happening, the mechanisms of resistance have already been dismantled.

Part VI-B: How We Got Here

This didn’t happen overnight.

For roughly 35 years after World War II—from 1945 to 1980—America experienced what economists call “the great compression.” Wealth inequality decreased. Middle-class wealth grew faster than top-tier wealth. Workers’ productivity gains translated into wage increases. The system, for all its flaws, maintained some relationship between economic growth and broad prosperity.

Then, around 1980, something changed.

Income disparities began widening sharply. The top 10% started pulling away from everyone else at an accelerating rate. Pew Research Center

By 1989, the top 1% held 23% of all wealth. By 2022, they held 27%. The top 10% went from 56% to 60%. Congressional Budget Office

Meanwhile, the bottom 50%? Stuck at 6% in both 1989 and 2022—unchanged despite 33 years of “economic growth.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

The period from 1998 to 2007 saw the most acute upward tilt: the richest 5% saw their wealth increase 88% while families in the second quintile—one tier above the poorest—saw only a 16% increase. Nine Charts about Wealth Inequality in America

Then came the 2008 financial crisis. From 2007 to 2016, only the wealthy recovered. The top 20% increased their wealth by 13%. Everyone else lost ground.

This is a 45-year trend. Not a natural evolution. Not an inevitable outcome of technology or globalization. A choice—embedded in policy, reinforced by power, accelerated by capture.

What changed in 1980? Tax policy shifted dramatically in favor of the wealthy. Union power was systematically dismantled. Regulatory frameworks designed to prevent monopoly and protect workers were gutted or abandoned. The revolving door between government and corporate interests became standard practice rather than scandal.

Research shows rising income inequality has a “snowballing effect” on wealth distribution: top incomes are saved at high rates, pushing wealth concentration up; rising wealth inequality generates more capital income, which further increases top income and wealth shares. NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES WEALTH INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1913: It’s a self-reinforcing cycle that, left unchecked, doesn’t plateau—it accelerates.

The mechanism is elegant in its brutality: those with wealth generate income from that wealth, which they save at higher rates than wage earners, which generates more wealth, which generates more income. Meanwhile, those relying on wages see their purchasing power stagnate or decline, their ability to save eroded, their wealth—if any—increasingly precarious.

Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts - Wealth Distribution 1989-2024] Interactive Graph on Site

We’ve been watching this for 45 years. Long enough that younger generations have never known anything else. Long enough that it feels like gravity rather than policy. Long enough that the people who remember when it was different are dying off.

And here’s the critical point: the institutions that might have reversed this trend are the same ones being captured and dismantled right now.

The regulatory agencies that could break up monopolies. The tax systems that could redistribute gains. The labor protections that could shift bargaining power. The democratic processes that could demand accountability.

They’re not failing by accident. They’re being systematically neutralized by the same forces that benefited from 45 years of upward wealth transfer.

This is the endgame of that trend. When wealth concentration reaches a certain threshold, it converts into political power. Political power rewrites the rules. The new rules accelerate concentration. And the cycle becomes nearly impossible to break from within the system.

The Question That Remains

Can this be stopped?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But it starts with seeing it clearly. Not as a conspiracy, but as a logical outcome of incentive structures. Not as a betrayal, but as a business model.

Democracy was never guaranteed. It was always an agreement—fragile, expensive, requiring constant maintenance. And the moment the powerful decided the maintenance wasn’t worth the cost, it became a countdown.

We’re watching that countdown in real-time.

The question isn’t whether global capital is coordinating the erosion of democracy. The question is: What are we going to do about it?

Because the ruling elite already know their answer.

Do we know ours?

Welcome to the endgame. Hope you brought more than hopes and prayers.

What You Can Actually Do (And Why It’s Not Hopeless)

Now we get to the hard part. The part where diagnosis has to become decision.

Level 1: Personal Preparation—Build Resilience Against the System

This isn’t defeatism; it’s strategic. If the infrastructure of neo-feudalism is being built through debt, dependence, and desperation, then reducing your vulnerability to those pressures is resistance.

Get out of debt. I know—easier said than done. But debt is control. Every dollar you owe is leverage someone has over you. It limits your ability to take risks, speak up, change jobs, move, resist. Even small progress here expands your freedom of action.

Build local networks. Know your neighbors. Not in a doomsday prepper way, but in a “we-used-to-call-this-community” way. We The People. Mutual aid. Skill sharing. The people within walking distance are your most resilient safety net when systems fail or turn hostile.

Reduce dependence on platform monopolies. You don’t have to go off-grid, but diversify. Learn skills that don’t require apps. Support local businesses. Use cash sometimes. The goal isn’t purity; it’s reducing the number of choke points where you can be controlled.

Stay healthy. A sick, exhausted population is easier to control. Sleep. Move. Eat real food when you can. This isn’t self-care Instagram bullshit—it’s maintaining your capacity to act when it matters.

Realize that what you’re seeing on TV and social media is designed to manipulate you. Not inform you. Not educate you. Manipulate you. The outrage, the fear, the constant state of emergency—it’s not accidental. It’s engineered to keep you reactive, divided, and too emotionally exhausted to think clearly.

Take responsibility for fact-checking the bullshit designed to make you afraid and angry. Yes, it takes work. Yes, it’s inconvenient. That’s the point. The truth requires effort, and they’re counting on you being too tired to make that effort.

Cross-reference sources. Follow the money on who’s funding the message. Ask who benefits from you believing this particular narrative. Understand that algorithms don’t show you truth—they show you what keeps you scrolling. Every minute you spend in manufactured outrage is a minute you’re not organizing, building, or resisting.

Information warfare is real, and you’re the target. The best defense is skepticism, verification, and the willingness to be wrong when evidence demands it.

Level 2: Economic Power—Starve the Beast

Support worker power. Join a union if you can. Support strikes even when they’re inconvenient to you. Understand that labor organizing is the most direct counter to capital consolidation. Every Amazon worker who unionizes is a tiny brick removed from the oligarchy’s foundation.

Move your money. Credit unions instead of mega-banks. Local businesses instead of Amazon when possible. Ethical funds instead of index funds that include private prisons and surveillance companies. Yes, it’s inconvenient. That’s the point—convenience is how they bought compliance.

Support independent media. Subscribe. Pay for journalism. Fund investigative reporters. The information ecosystem is the battlefield. If all news is owned by six companies or algorithm-driven platforms, truth becomes whatever serves power.

Tax resistance at scale. I’m not advocating individual tax evasion—that just gets you crushed. But politically supporting aggressive taxation of wealth, closing offshore loopholes, and eliminating the carried interest loophole? That’s not radical; it’s returning to the pre-oligarchy norm.

Level 3: Political Engagement—Defend the Infrastructure

Vote in EVERY election. Yes, even when it feels pointless. Especially local elections—school boards, city councils, state legislators. This is where policy actually affects your life, and where your vote has the most leverage. Oligarchs win when you’re too demoralized to show up.

Support politicians who refuse corporate money. They exist. They’re rare. Fund them. Volunteer for them. The system is designed to make them lose, which means they need disproportionate support to survive.

Defend boring institutions. Libraries. Public schools. The postal service. Local news. Municipal broadband. These are the infrastructure of democracy that’s being privatized piece by piece. Every one you save is territory the oligarchy doesn’t get.

Primary incumbents. The DNC and RNC are captured institutions. You won’t fix them from the top. But primaries are where leverage exists—low turnout, high impact. One motivated person can swing a primary in many districts.

Oppose surveillance expansion. Facial recognition. License plate readers. Social media monitoring. “Public-private partnerships” that are just government surveillance laundered through corporations. Every surveillance tool built now will be used by whoever comes to power next.

Level 4: Direct Action—Make It Expensive

Protest still works—peacefully, constitutionally. Not because it changes minds, but because it imposes costs. Logistical costs. Reputational costs. Opportunity costs. When thousands of people shut down a city center, that’s not symbolic—it’s economic disruption. It makes authoritarianism less profitable.

Boycotts at scale. Individual consumer choices are mostly meaningless. But coordinated campaigns that actually hurt quarterly earnings? Those get attention. The trick is picking achievable targets and maintaining pressure long enough to matter.

Whistleblow within legal bounds. If you work inside these systems—tech companies, financial institutions, government agencies—and you see the infrastructure being built, document it and get it to journalists. Anonymously if necessary. Sunlight isn’t a panacea, but darkness is where oligarchy thrives.

Civil disobedience—nonviolent, always. When legal channels fail, make the system ungovernable. Gum up the works. Overload the courts. Refuse cooperation. This is high-risk, so it requires calculation—but historically, it’s how entrenched power gets dislodged when it thinks it’s untouchable. Violence isn’t resistance; it’s the excuse they need to crush you.

Level 5: Systemic Change—The Long Game

Fight for structural reforms:

• Ranked-choice voting to break the two-party stranglehold

• Public campaign financing to reduce the cost of entry to politics

• Aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up monopolies before they become ungovernable

• Wealth taxes and inheritance caps to prevent dynastic accumulation

• Corporate charter revocation for companies that violate public interest

• Worker representation on corporate boards (standard in Germany, radical in the US)

• Strong privacy laws that treat data extraction like pollution

• Universal basic services (healthcare, education, housing) to reduce desperation-driven compliance

None of these are new ideas. Most exist somewhere in the world already. The fight is making them politically viable against massive, organized opposition from those who profit from the current system.

Why This Still Matters

Here’s what I can’t sugarcoat: Individual action alone won’t stop this.

The forces we’re describing operate at the level of global capital flows, geopolitical realignment, and institutional capture. You can do everything on this list perfectly and still watch oligarchy consolidate.

But that doesn’t make action meaningless.

Because the alternative—passivity, demoralization, retreat into private life—guarantees the outcome. At least resistance imposes costs, creates friction, builds alternative infrastructure, and keeps the memory of democracy alive for whatever comes next.

And here’s the thing about systems that look unstoppable: they’re often more fragile than they appear. Oligarchy is efficient but brittle. It requires constant enforcement. It generates resentment. It’s vulnerable to coordination failures among elites and unexpected shocks to the system.

The Soviet Union looked permanent until it wasn’t. Apartheid looked unshakeable until it crumbled. The Berlin Wall stood until it fell.

None of those systems were defeated by individual action alone. But they also weren’t defeated without it.

The Real Answer

Here’s the most serious one:

You can refuse to pretend this is normal.

You can refuse to accept that democracy was a temporary experiment. You can refuse to let exhaustion turn into surrender. You can refuse to let your children inherit a world where freedom is a commodity instead of a right.

You can organize. You can build. You can resist.

And you can remember that every authoritarian system in history has eventually faced the same problem: people don’t stay obedient forever.

The ruling elite are counting on us being too tired, too divided, too demoralized to fight back.

Prove them wrong.

The Part We Don’t Like to Admit

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed—just not for you anymore.

Every “dysfunction” you see—the gridlock, the corruption, the wealth transfer, the erosion of rights—isn’t a bug. It’s the desired outcome for those who’ve captured the levers of power. They want you to think it’s broken so you’ll beg for someone to “fix” it. And when you do, they’ll offer you a strongman who makes the trains run on time while dismantling what’s left of your agency.

Democracy isn’t dying by accident. It’s being murdered. With your pension fund.

Every time you see a billionaire hedge their bets by kissing the ring of an authoritarian—whether domestic or foreign—that’s not cowardice. That’s portfolio optimization. They’ve run the numbers. They’ve decided oligarchy is more profitable than democracy. And they’re positioning accordingly.

Your 401(k) is funding this. Your Amazon purchases. Your Netflix subscription. The infrastructure of your own subjugation is being built with your microtransactions and convenience choices, and they’re counting on you being too comfortable to care until it’s too late.

It might already be too late.

Not “might” as in fearmongering. “Might” as in: when you control the money, the media, the technology, the surveillance infrastructure, AND you’ve convinced half the population that freedom is oppression and oppression is freedom—you’ve basically won. You’re just running out the clock.

The ruling elite don’t fear your vote. They fear coordination.

As Brandeis also observed: “The power and growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others.”^8

Your retirement fund isn’t yours anymore—it’s leverage in a game you didn’t agree to play.

One person can’t stop this. A thousand people probably can’t either. But millions acting in concert? That’s the nightmare scenario for concentrated power. Which is why they spend billions ensuring you never coordinate.

They divide you by race, by geography, by generation, by every fracture line they can find or create. They keep you arguing about bathrooms while they’re buying legislation. They keep you exhausted, indebted, and scrolling while they’re consolidating control.

And it’s working.

Most people won’t resist. They’ll adapt.

That’s not cynicism; it’s history. Humans are extraordinarily adaptable. We normalize the unthinkable with shocking speed. Your grandchildren will grow up in a system where democratic participation is a quaint historical curiosity, like feudal peasants who couldn’t imagine life without lords.

They’ll have never known privacy. They’ll accept surveillance as the cost of security. They’ll work gig jobs with algorithmic managers and think that’s just how employment works. They’ll live in corporate towns, shop at company stores, and the fact that this was once considered dystopian will be forgotten.

Because that’s what happens when you lose.

The good news—if you can call it that—is that oligarchies eventually collapse.

Not peacefully. Not quickly. And usually not in ways that benefit the people living through the collapse. But they do collapse, because systems built on extraction and oppression generate their own contradictions.

The question isn’t whether this system is sustainable—it’s not. The question is: What comes after? And who gets to build it?

So What Do You Actually Do?

You fight anyway.

Not because you’ll win. Not because it’s fair. Not because you’ll see the results in your lifetime.

You fight because the alternative is choosing to live on your knees, and that’s a choice you can’t unmake. Once you accept it, once you internalize it, you’ve already lost something more valuable than the fight itself—you’ve lost the part of yourself that knew it mattered.

You fight because someone has to remember what was possible. Someone has to keep the receipts. Someone has to refuse to let history be rewritten by the victors. And if that someone isn’t you, then who?

You fight because even if you lose—and you might—you make it expensive. Every dollar they spend crushing resistance is a dollar they don’t spend consolidating power. Every person who refuses to comply is a crack in the facade. Every act of defiance is evidence that consent was never actually given.

You fight because fuck them, that’s why.

Because they’re counting on your exhaustion. Your demoralization. Your cynicism. Your rational calculation that resistance is futile.

And maybe it is futile.

But they don’t get to take your compliance for free.

The Last Thing

Here’s what I know: every authoritarian regime in history has looked permanent—until suddenly it wasn’t.

The Soviet Union. Apartheid. The Berlin Wall. The Marcos regime. Decades of absolute control, ended in months or weeks or days because the right combination of factors aligned and people decided they’d had enough.

It always looks impossible until it isn’t.

So you do what you can. You build what you can. You protect what you can. You connect with others who refuse to accept this. You create pockets of resistance, islands of alternatives, proof that another way is possible.

And you wait for the moment when the system’s contradictions become too obvious to ignore, when the emperor’s new clothes are so transparently absent that even the most dedicated subject can’t pretend anymore.

That moment is coming. Because systems this extractive, this unequal, this hostile to human dignity—they don’t last. They can’t. The math doesn’t work.

The only question is whether, when that moment arrives, there’s anyone left who remembers what democracy looked like. Who knows how to rebuild it. Who has the tools and the networks and the muscle memory of collective action.

Be that person.

Not because you’ll save the world. But because when the world is ready to save itself, it’ll need people who never forgot how.

Albright left us with this challenge: “The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price.” ^9

The question is: which instinct wins?

That’s it. That’s all we’ve got. It’s not much. But it’s not nothing.

And sometimes, in the space between tyranny and freedom, “not nothing” is enough to keep the spark alive.

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Sources:

1. Louis D. Brandeis, quoted in The Morrow Book of Quotations in American History (1984); Brandeis on Democracy (1995)

2. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, (2009)

3. Jacob Silverman, interview with Newsweek, October (2025)

4. Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning (2018)

5. Elizabeth Warren, “Corporate Capture of the Rulemaking Process,” The Regulatory Review, June 14, (2016)

6. Bernie Sanders, Senate floor remarks, February 4, (2025)

7. Madeleine Albright, interview with NPR, April 3, (2018)

8. Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914)

9. Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning, Quotes on Goodread (2018)

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean