Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle coined ‘oligarchy’ as rule by the few, vs. democracy, rule by the people. Most everyone knows Russia’s oligarchs who emerged as powerful owners of former state-owned industries with the 1990s breakup of the Soviet Union. As they gained wealth, they wielded power openly and with impunity, due to relationships with Russia’s President Putin. Today, Russia under Putin and his oligarchs is an autocratic system, akin to organized crime, with no effective legislature, judiciary, or free press. Not a system any of us want to live under, is it?

Over the past 20-plus years, however, our democracy has been sliding towards autocracy, with rise of our own oligarchs, right-wing billionaires. As Scott Stern noted in The New Republic (2/18/20): “Their philosophy is … greed of such a scale and intensity that it led them to take a wrecking ball to the most beneficent American institutions; to destroy any lingering shred of independence within the media or judiciary; and literally to let the world burn–so long as they got richer.”

Many far-right billionaires are well known, especially fossil fuel tycoons Charles and David Koch who fund an alphabet soup of right-wing organizations to advance their selfish aims. In politics, Trump’s flailing 2016 campaign team sold out to hedge fund billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer, in exchange for control over its messaging and ideological orientation. Trump rewarded the DeVos family, who’ve decimated public schools and unions in their home state of Michigan, by installing Betsey DeVos as Education Secretary.

Many others hide as ‘dark money’ donors. As Jane Mayer reports in The New Yorker (3/29/21), the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened loopholes enabling wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. In 2020 $1B was spent by dark-money groups – those ads that flood your TV at election time! Small wonder that dark money groups recently pushed Republicans in the US Congress to stymie voting rights legislation because its provisions limited secret campaign spending.

Another right-wing billionaire-funded organization, Club for Growth, backs some of the most radical and anti-democratic Republican lawmakers in Congress. As Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports in the Guardian (1/16/21), Club for Growth spent $20M supporting 42 right-wing lawmakers who voted to invalidate Biden’s victory. Big beneficiaries included Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, US Senators who led the effort to overturn the election result. Small wonder that Ted Cruz had IRS funding removed from the latest Infrastructure bill – these US oligarchs don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes!

Left unchecked, right-wing billionaires will turn us into a Russian-style autocracy, where the ultra-rich work in tandem with corrupt autocrats for their own benefit. How do we take power back? Besides passing urgently needed voting rights legislation, and voting in droves at every election, we need: rigid campaign finance laws, a political movement that unites the working class against the ultra-rich, and an equitable taxation system that taxes wealth not just income. Hound your legislators at all levels for these measures to protect our democracy. Don’t let us be turned into an oligarchy!