How to Contain the Oligarchs

Americans have long had a soft spot for billionaire saviors. Think of Tony Stark, the arrogant but lovable defense-industry scion played by Robert Downey Jr., who helps rescue the world time and again in the wildly popular Avengers series. This admiration of apex wealth is not just a Hollywood concoction. Twice in ten years, U.S. voters have elected a president who is (or has claimed to be) a billionaire.

But something’s changed. Maybe it was Elon Musk gleefully taking a chainsaw to federal agencies as the public face of the DOGE campaign. Maybe it was the FCC approving Skydance’s merger with Paramount after the two companies promised to pay Donald Trump millions of dollars in free advertising, and Paramount agreed to fork over $16 million to settle the president’s meritless lawsuit involving the editing of a 60 Minutes episode. Maybe it was Trump’s “big beautiful” tax cuts that fattened the wallets of the superrich while effectively eliminating health care coverage for millions of ordinary Americans.

Americans are angry about the fusion of money and political power, yet that anger has not translated into systematic measures to separate the two. People sense the problem, but doubt that anything effective can be done about it.

Whatever the reason, Americans sense that something has gone very wrong in the relationship between wealth and power. A Harris poll in November of 2025 found that 53 percent of Americans believe “billionaires threaten our democracy,” up from 46 percent in 2024. In the same survey, 66 percent agreed that “billionaires’ activities contribute to inflation in everyday goods and services,” up 8 points over the year before. And in 2026, Economist/YouGov found that 80 percent of Americans saw the gap between rich and poor as a problem, with 59 percent saying the federal government should try to reduce it.

In other words, the American public is well past complacency. Large majorities believe the wealthy wield too much power, that the system is tilted toward the powerful, and that inequality has become politically and morally corrosive. And they’re right. America is fast descending into oligarchy.

But recognition is not the same as action. Americans are angry about the fusion of money and political power, yet that anger has not translated into systematic measures to separate the two. Part of the reason is structural. Wealth now shapes elections, parties, media, and the legal environment in ways that make coordinated response difficult. Part of it is institutional. The very systems that might discipline concentrated wealth—Congress, regulatory agencies, courts—are often entangled with it. And part of it is cultural. Americans are used to seeing the wealthy as founders, innovators, and benefactors. The line between success and domination has blurred. The result is a kind of learned restraint: People sense the problem, but doubt that anything effective can be done about it—fatalistically believing that the rich are now too rich, too entrenched, and too globally connected to be contained.

The good news is that history shows otherwise. From ancient Greece to the United States, 1930s Scandinavia to postwar Japan, and perhaps now Hungary, oligarchical regimes have given way to more egalitarian democracies. Democratic governance can be protected from the corrosive impacts of extreme wealth, but only when societies build systems and institutions strong enough to separate private fortune from political power. Studying how these transitions happened can provide a blueprint for containing American oligarchs today.

Oligarchs are not just rich people. They are not just billionaires, founders, celebrities with political opinions, or powerful officeholders. Nor does the presence of rich people in politics automatically make a society an oligarchy. An oligarch is a person in whom substantial wealth and substantial power are fused, such that wealth helps make power possible and power helps protect, extend, or reorganize the position of wealth.

As Aristotle observed, oligarchic rule was unstable: it bred rivalries among the rich and resentment among the masses. And sometimes the masses seized power back.

In practice, that fusion is not abstract. Wealth buys access, insulation, and leverage. It shapes who gets heard, who gets regulated, and who gets left alone. It even shapes how we think and act. Power, once gained, then protects and enlarges that wealth through favorable rules, selective enforcement, privileged information, and the ability to tilt entire markets. When the same actors can both write the rules and profit from them, wealth and power are no longer separate. They reinforce one another. No fusion, no oligarch.

Throughout most of human history, this fusion of economic and political power has been hard to overcome. Hard, but not impossible.

Start with ancient Greece, where the problem was first named and wrestled with. The Greeks knew the dangers of oligarchy. They knew the rich could capture whole city-states, as they did in Sparta, or seize democracies for a time, as happened in Athens. But as Aristotle observed, oligarch rule was unstable: it bred rivalries among the rich and resentment among the masses. So oligarchs who wanted to survive knew they couldn’t encroach too far on the rights of the citizenry. And those citizens sometimes seized power back.

Even in democratic city-states, the ancient Greeks did not bar the wealthy from positions of influence. Pericles, the Athenian leader who deepened the city-state’s democracy and fought against oligarchic power, himself came from a prominent landowning family. Instead, they learned how to fence in the wealthy. Athens used selection by lot for many public offices, making it harder for the rich to buy elections. It paid citizens to serve on juries and in public bodies, so politics was not limited to men wealthy enough to participate for free. It used large popular juries, public audits of officials, and procedures for challenging illegal decrees to make officeholders answerable after they acted. Ostracism allowed citizens to exile men thought too dangerous without permanently confiscating their property. And through liturgies, the wealthy were expected to finance ships, festivals, and other public goods. Wealthy citizens could still lead. But leadership was not supposed to mean ownership and control of the city.

We shouldn’t romanticize these efforts. After all, Greek democracy excluded women and enslaved people. Among Greek city-states for which constitutions are recorded, oligarchy remained common but lost ground unevenly as democracy spread. During the same period, the Greek world became more prosperous—home sizes and lifespans, for instance, steadily grew. And that prosperity was broad-based: the homes of the richest citizens were not vastly larger than those of the poorest (unlike other wealthy civilizations at the time, such as Persia and Egypt, where a narrow ruling elite lived in splendor and the masses in poverty). The ancient Greeks understood something Americans need to recover: the wealthy can remain wealthy, honored, and useful without being allowed to own the government or exercise unchecked power.

It would be another two millennia before a similar experiment in mass democracy arose, this time in the British colonies of North America during the late 18th century. As in the Greek city-states, the leaders of the early U.S. republic were predominantly men of means, but not necessarily oligarchs. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was wealthy and influential. But his wealth did not become the basis for that power, nor did his public authority reorganize or protect his fortune. On the other end of the spectrum, southern plantation owners like South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney displayed many oligarchical attributes. A delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Pinckney used his influential perch to successfully push for the fugitive slave clause and other language in the founding document that fortified his own and his fellow planters’ economic and political power. 

At its founding and for nearly a century afterwards the United States had a far more equal distribution of wealth that England and the rest of Europe. Moreover, the richest Americans, like George Washington, were not nearly as wealthy as their European counterparts.

George Washington illustrates the boundary. He stood at the center of an early American pattern in which large property holdings, social hierarchy, military command, and political authority reinforced one another. He was also a slaveowner. But unlike Pinckney, he did not defend slaveholder rights during the Constitution-making process, and after two terms as U.S. president, he voluntarily stepped down, setting a precedent against permanent oligarchic rule that other presidents would follow.

The early republic preserved concentrated wealth and power through the Senate, indirect elections, property qualifications, and the Three-Fifths Clause. Early America thus had elements of oligarchy, even as it was never only an oligarchs’ project. Its political system also excluded women, enslaved people, Indigenous peoples, many free Black people, and some propertyless men.

Still, the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution created the most broadly representative system of government in the world at the time. And it did so in an economy that was, as in ancient Greece, reasonably egalitarian. At its founding and for nearly a century afterward, the United States had a far more equal distribution of wealth than England and the rest of Europe. Moreover, the richest Americans, like Washington, were not nearly as wealthy as their European counterparts.

The post-Civil War years were a decisive break in the development of oligarchs in the United States. What had been at least contested ground between egalitarianism and oligarchy became, in the Gilded Age, a land of ever-larger gaps between the wealthy and the rest, and of greater power of the former over the latter—setting the stage for the emergence of oligarchs across the country. What had been most naked in the slave-owning South now became a national problem.

How did this happen? Industrial monopolies in oil, steel, and railroads quickly generated vast fortunes, and the oligarchs who designed and controlled these monopolies—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan, among others—used their wealth to buy influence to expand and protect their fortunes. That influence was direct, in the form of campaign contributions and bribery, but also indirect, through efforts to influence legislation on tariffs, labor laws, and efforts to regulate their industries. As a result, between 1870 and 1916, the top 1 percent expanded their share of wealth from 28 percent to nearly 40 percent. These trends reflected the rise of oligarchy in America. They also spurred a robust response.

From roughly 1870 to 1970, the United States built a set of partial, imperfect fences around its oligarchs. Through a combination of institutions and courage, Americans found ways to keep concentrated wealth from swallowing politics whole.

The post-Civil War years were a decisive break in the development of oligarchs in the United States. What had been most naked in the slave-owning South now became a national problem.

The 1890 Sherman Act authorized federal prosecutors to break up trusts controlled by oligarchs, culminating in the 1911 Supreme Court decision that dissolved Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. It was not broken up because Rockefeller was too successful; it was broken up because his company used secret railroad deals, acquisitions, hidden control structures, and political influence to turn business success into domination of an essential market.

Beginning in 1907, Congress tried to keep wealth from walking straight into federal politics. The Tillman Act barred corporations and national banks from contributing to federal campaigns; the Publicity Act of 1910, strengthened in 1911, required disclosure of campaign spending and imposed early spending limits. The rules were incomplete and weakly enforced, but they marked a real attempt to keep private fortunes from dictating elections.

Then came 1913, the annus mirabilis of American oligarch containment. The introduction of an income tax that year simultaneously raised revenue, helped build a federal state less dependent on oligarchs, and began to limit individuals’ ability to accumulate vast private fortunes. That process reached “soak the rich” levels in the 1930s and 1940s. The Seventeenth Amendment, which established the direct election of senators, broke oligarchs’ grip on Congress. And the creation of the Federal Reserve opened the door to modern monetary and financial regulation, giving public institutions levers of control over the private sector.

Then, the 1916 Revenue Act introduced the estate tax, limiting the multi-generational transfer of wealth. The 1916 Act had support not only from progressives but also from oligarchs such as Carnegie, who recognized that estate taxes would encourage greater philanthropy.

After a gap during World War I and the Roaring Twenties—which came to a roaring halt with the Great Crash of 1929—oligarch containment resumed. Under Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1938, the federal government emerged as a durable counterweight to concentrated private wealth. The passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, which codified the right to unionize, also gave ordinary Americans some corrective power from below. And in the latter years of the New Deal, the Roosevelt administration resumed the crackdown on monopolies that had begun decades before and would continue for decades to come.

Aided in large measure by the Great Crash, New Deal reforms created the “great compression” of wealth differentials between rich and poor that lasted from the 1940s to the 1970s. Incomes for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose 83 percent, while incomes for the top 1 percent rose 20 percent. The engine powering the fusion of wealth and power had been deprived of fuel, if not dismantled.

Aided in large measure by the Great Crash, New Deal reforms created the “great compression” of wealth differentials between rich and poor that lasted from the 1940s to the 1970s. Incomes for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose 83 percent, while increasing 20 percent among the top 1 percent.

This American achievement did not come from one hero riding over the hill. It came from a coalition that stretched across political parties, social classes, and walks of life. Journalists and writers like Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens named and shamed. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt provided political will. Judges like Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, and central bankers like Marriner Eccles, helped design the laws and institutions that made containment possible. Labor leaders such as John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and A. Philip Randolph organized countervailing power from below. Bureaucrats, including the Justice Department’s antitrust division head, Thurman Arnold, and agriculture secretary, Henry Wallace, also played a role. This coalition—acting together over time—succeeded in containing the rise of oligarchy in early 20th-century America.

Around the same time in a faraway place, 1930s Scandinavia offers a different lesson.

Before the 1930s, Scandinavia had its own oligarchs, even if they did not look like Russia’s or America’s. In Denmark, which was heavily dependent on farm exports, large landowners, agricultural exporters, banks, and industrial employers captured politics through parties—both conservative and liberal—and control over credit. In Sweden, prominent industrial-financial families like the Wallenbergs sat at the center of banks, export industries, and boardroom networks. At the same time, employers’ associations fought unions and shaped the terms of industrial life. In Norway, shipping magnates, banks, timber interests, and large employers held similar leverage over public policy governing finance and trade. These were not absolute rulers. But they were oligarchic actors: since the 19th century, private wealth had given them political access and command over economic life, and that influence helped protect the structures from which their wealth flowed.

The Nordic countries were not born egalitarian miracles. In the early 20th century, concentrated wealth and income inequality were substantial. In the 1930s, however, liberal parties won across Scandinavia and changed the terms on which private wealth could exist and exercise power.

The Nordic countries, in other words, were not born egalitarian miracles. In the early 20th century, concentrated wealth and income inequality were substantial. In Denmark and Sweden, the wealthiest 1 percent earned roughly 27 percent of total income during World War I. Poverty, rural distress, and unemployment were the realities for most others. Scandinavia’s later equality was not given but built.

Denmark gives the story its most vivid scene. In January 1933, as the Great Depression deepened the country’s unemployment and farm crises, Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning and other party leaders negotiated through the night in his apartment on Kanslergade in Copenhagen. The resulting Kanslergade Agreement joined Social Democrats, Social Liberals, and the Liberal opposition in a bargain that devalued the currency, aided farmers, stabilized labor relations, and advanced social reform. The Agreement provided enough support for farmers, security for workers, and public authority over the crisis to keep private wealth from dictating the terms alone.

Sweden followed its own path. Voters put the Social Democrats in power in 1932, and they struck a 1933 bargain with the Farmers’ Party that directed state support to employment projects; agricultural regulation, subsidies, price regulation, export equalization, and import restrictions; and economic recovery. Then, in 1938, employers and unions reached the Saltsjöbaden Agreement, giving Sweden a framework for collective bargaining that helped make labor a durable counterweight to capital.

Norway’s Labour Party, which entered government in 1935 under Johan Nygaardsvold through a bargain with the Agrarian Party, also pursued unemployment relief, higher direct taxation, and farm price support. Private wealth was not abolished across Scandinavia, but the 1930s reforms forced it into a democratic bargain: Through the organization of labor, progressive taxation that helped reduce the material base by which oligarchs could dominate politics, the development of welfare, and the will of the political parties in power, wealth was made to negotiate rather than rule. Norwegian oligarchs could no longer unilaterally impose improvements in their businesses’ finances by lowering wages, crushing unions, starving farmers of relief, or keeping the state fiscally weak. Across Scandinavia, reforms contained oligarchs by changing the terms on which private wealth could exist and exercise power.

The results were real. In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the top 1 percent’s income share fell from roughly 10 to 14 percent around 1940 to roughly 4 to 6 percent by 1980.

Sweden, Norway, and Denmark were, and still are, smaller societies, with stronger labor organization and fewer veto points than the United States. Their experience cannot simply be imported into a vast, federalized, racially divided republic. But that is no reason to ignore it.

The lesson for Americans is not that the United States can become Denmark. It cannot, and should not, pretend that scale, race, federalism, and political culture do not matter. The message is narrower and more useful: oligarch containment does not require violence, confiscation of wealth, or foreign occupation. It can be negotiated, democratic, durable, and socially legitimate. But, as a sub-lesson, Scandinavia also shows that crises can help: It was the Depression that first forced oligarchs to the table.

Japan after World War II is a case of containment by rupture. The old order was not negotiated into a democratic cage but defeated and subsequently broken apart by an occupying force: the United States.

Before World War II, Japan’s great zaibatsu families, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, sat near the center of a system in which their companies, banks, mines, factories, shipyards, and political influence reinforced one another. Rather than merely owning firms, these families—through pyramids of control and privileged access to finance—were deeply entangled with Japan’s industrial economy, military, and imperial ambitions. Before World War II, the major zaibatsu accounted for a significant share of the capital invested in Japan’s corporations.

The U.S. occupation did away with all this. In 1946, the Holding Company Liquidation Commission, the U.S. occupation agency charged with breaking up Japan’s zaibatsu holding companies, began dismantling the family-centered structure. The scene was almost theatrical. On October 8, 1946, commissioners arrived at the Mitsui and Mitsubishi offices in Tokyo and loaded sealed boxes of stock and bond certificates onto trucks. They moved them under armed guard for storage and eventual disposal. What had looked permanent only months earlier was disassembled within two years.

Japan after World War II is a case of containment by rupture. The old oligarchic order was not negotiated into a democratic cage but defeated and subsequently broken apart by an occupying force: the United States.

General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, whose administration oversaw the Liquidation Commission, dissolved some of the holding companies, ordered the transfer of roughly half of all zaibatsu family corporate stock to the Liquidation Commission, and made the other half available for public sale. Interlocking directorships were restricted. Family control was attacked directly. The point was not to punish wealth, but to sever the family-centered circuit through which wealth, finance, industry, and political command had reinforced one another.

Japan’s land reform attacked another foundation of concentrated power. Between 1947 and 1950, roughly 38 percent of Japan’s farmland was redistributed to tenants, reducing landlord-controlled property from around 46 percent to 10 percent. A rural regime that had tied landownership to power in villages was transformed into a much broader class of owner-farmers. While MacArthur went after the largest industrial families, land reform took aim at how concentrated wealth dictated life at the local level.

The results were dramatic. Japan’s top income shares had already collapsed during the war: The top 1 percent went from earning about 20 percent of the total income in 1938 to about 7 percent in 1945. Japan did not abolish concentrated business power, and under Cold War pressures—such as anti-communism, constraints on the power of labor, and reduced appetites for radical trust-busting—the occupation’s early radicalism was softened. Some former zaibatsu families retained significant assets. Containment was therefore partial. But the prewar fusion of family wealth, command over industry and finance, and political influence was fractured and forced into a different relationship with the state. Japan’s lesson for Americans is not that oligarch containment requires catastrophe (although in this case and others, catastrophes can help), but that even centuries-old systems built around wealth-power fusion—systems that appear natural, inevitable, and untouchable—can be broken apart.

And then there is Hungary, which reminds us that this is not all ancient history or mid-century memory. In April 2026, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party was defeated in a landslide after sixteen years in power. Moreover, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party—which eventually secured 141 of 199 seats in parliament, enough for a two-thirds majority—did not win on anything resembling a level playing field: By the time voters removed Orbán’s government, Hungary had spent years under a system in which state power, media access, public contracts, European Union funds, and private wealth had been bent toward the prime minister’s personal circle and the corporate networks around it. Through family members, loyal businessmen, favored foundations, and state-dependent firms, Orbán exercised effective control over assets and income streams that we estimate conservatively at $100 million. Much of the wealth in his network was not earned in ordinary markets. It grew through public contracts, EU-funded projects, state-favored acquisitions, regulatory pressure, and procurement systems tilted toward the prime minister’s personal contacts. Since Orbán’s defeat, that network has lost its most important protection: direct control of the Hungarian state.

But the wealth-power networks built around his rule did not evaporate on election night; they will all have to be unwound or forced into a different relationship with democratic authority. Magyar has promised anti-corruption measures, institutional repair, and a National Asset Recovery and Protection Office. Whether those tools can actually separate public power from private fortunes remains to be seen.

The most dangerous mistake now would be to confuse difficulty with impossibility. Oligarchs are not invincible. They are only betting that we will act as if they are.

Taken together, these examples show how oligarchs emerge in unique ways, operate in specific contexts, and, consequently, require tailor-made containment. Ancient Greece points to civic architecture: rules, norms, and civic obligations designed to keep wealthy citizens from controlling cities. The United States shows long institutional struggle: antitrust laws, tax reforms, labor power, regulation, and coalitions built over generations. Scandinavia shows containment by democratic bargain, in which oligarchs were forced to negotiate with labor, political parties, and the state. Japan shows containment by rupture, in which defeat and occupation made systemic reorganization possible. Hungary, if it belongs in this list at all, represents a live test: electoral defeat can puncture an oligarchy’s aura of inevitability, offering an opening for reform.

But across the strongest cases, three conditions recur. First, the negative societal impacts of oligarchy became visible. That’s where America is in 2026. Second, societies built counterweights strong enough to force great fortunes back inside political limits. These were organized counterpowers outside or alongside the state: unions, parties, journalists, courts, reform coalitions, farmer parties, civic institutions, and voters. And finally, governments reduced the ability of private wealth to command public institutions through state actions that changed the rules: antitrust, taxation, campaign-finance rules, regulatory independence, land reform, corporate breakup, and public procurement reform.

Oligarch containment requires leaders on the inside willing to discipline their own. In ancient Greece, “class traitors” like Pericles led the fight for democracy and against oligarchy. In the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Andrew Carnegie were all wealthy men who, however imperfectly, advocated for limits on concentrated wealth.

With this history in mind, what can we do to contain oligarchs in America today? We see six big lessons.

First, crises open the door, undermining oligarchs’ legitimacy and creating political space for institutional redesign. The Great Depression and World War II did not automatically contain oligarchs in the United States, Scandinavia, or Japan, but without those shocks, much of the old order might have remained in place. Oligarchs thrive when their dominance feels natural, and crisis can interrupt that story—giving societies a chance to renegotiate the relationship between wealth and power.

It is possible that the next catastrophe could be upon us. The war with Iran has disrupted the world economy in ways that are still becoming clear. Combined with the unsustainable artificial intelligence investment bubble, the crises brewing today could crash the U.S. economy. 

Second, inequality is the oxygen oligarchs breathe. Inequality creates dependence, deference, and institutional vulnerability. It gives oligarchs more clients, more social authority, more leverage, and, of course, fewer effective counterweights from down the wealth pyramid. Serious oligarch containment, therefore, requires serious action against extreme wealth concentration. At some points in history, shocks have done part of that work. In others, governments have acted directly through progressive taxation; tougher enforcement of tax, antitrust, campaign-finance, procurement, disclosure, and anti-corruption rules; and new rules that make it harder for the wealthy to shelter immense fortunes. The implication here is that wealth concentration must be attacked directly with these same instruments and more: Today’s globalized economy necessitates effective cross-border efforts so that oligarchs don’t simply skitter away from places where these tools are deployed.

Third, oligarch containment requires leaders on the inside willing to discipline their own, meaning fractures within the billionaire class. Defectors don’t need to be saints or morally pure. Rather, these can be leaders who simply recognize America’s current circumstances for what they are: dangerous and unstable. In ancient Greece, “class traitors” like Pericles led the fight for democracy and against oligarchy. In the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Andrew Carnegie were all wealthy men who, however imperfectly, advocated for limits on concentrated wealth. But oligarch containment also requires other leaders on the inside who are not oligarchs at all: politicians with enough institutional power to force private wealth to comply with public rules. Sweden and Norway found such leadership in figures like Per Albin Hansson and Johan Nygaardsvold. Hungary’s new prime minister, Péter Magyar, had been a member of his predecessor Victor Orban’s illiberal government before breaking away in protest over corruption two years ago. History suggests that at least some people with privilege, power, and institutional access have to decide that the stability of the republic matters more than the present comfort of their own class.

Fourth, oligarchs are not contained by outrage alone. Protests, rallies, and inflammatory social media posts are not going to get this done. They are contained by institutions. Antitrust law, progressive taxation, labor power, financial regulation, campaign rules, investigative journalism, and stronger state capacity all mattered in earlier periods of containment. Their modern equivalents will matter now. The fences that once constrained railroad, oil, and banking oligarchs will not be enough by themselves against today’s rulers of platforms, data, AI, cloud infrastructure, and digital communications. If modern oligarchs increasingly control the pipelines through which information flows, then containment will have to reach those pipelines, too.

Anyone waiting for one election, one law, or one charismatic leader to solve the oligarch problem is not thinking historically enough. This is generational work.

Fifth, this is generational work. America’s last great cycle of anti-oligarch politics began in the 19th century and did not truly mature until the New Deal. One generation names the problem. Another builds countermeasures. Another tries to defend them from erosion or capture. Anyone waiting for one election, one law, or one charismatic leader to solve the oligarch problem is not thinking historically enough. Not every victory will be at the national level, and not every victory will be legislative. Instead, the work now is preparatory, educational, legal, and organizational.

And that brings us to the sixth lesson. In America today, oligarch containment is likely to begin outside Washington. Whatever the real efforts to contain some aspects of oligarchs’ wealth during the Biden Administration might have been, the federal government is now too deeply penetrated by the superrich and their allies to be relied upon, at least for now, as the sole engine of containment. Should Democrats secure control of one or both houses of Congress in November 2026, they will be in a better position to mount investigations aimed at some degree of oligarch containment. Legislation may also be passed in this direction, but we are skeptical that much will be done to implement these measures until Trump and his Supreme Court pass from the stage.

The United States is not only Washington. It is 50 states, thousands of cities, public pension systems, universities, prosecutors, attorneys general, procurement offices, labor organizations, and local media ecosystems. Each is a place where the fusion of wealth and power can either be allowed to deepen or be forced back inside limits.

A republic that cannot yet contain its oligarchs from the center must begin by building counterweights wherever it can: in states, cities, universities, pension funds, prosecutors’ offices, and local media.

The work should start where the fences can be built now. States can enforce their own antitrust laws, tax great fortunes more aggressively, and rewrite procurement rules so public money does not become another subsidy for oligarchs’ firms. To avoid the problem of private wealthy scurrying to another jurisdiction, states can band together in these efforts. Public pension funds can stop feeding the asset base of companies whose owners are converting wealth into political power. Universities can set harder rules for donations that buy influence over research and teaching. Cities can treat essential digital infrastructure less like a toy of private founders and more like a public utility. Local journalism can follow oligarchs’ wealth where it actually lands: in housing markets, school boards, police technology, subsidies, zoning, contracts, and local monopolies. None of this is enough by itself. But together these measures can begin the work that Washington will not yet do, naming, shaming, and separating great private fortunes from the institutions through which public life is governed.

Local action may not be sufficient, but it is currently available. And while oligarchs aren’t themselves local, their wealth and power touch local lives and institutions every day. A republic that cannot yet contain its oligarchs from the center must begin by building counterweights wherever it can.

Taken together, these lessons suggest that oligarch containment is possible but not inevitable: it is a dynamic process that requires continuous rebuilding, with a realistic understanding of how ruthless and clever oligarchs can be. Partial containment is fragile and often temporary. And failed containment is historically common: Russia, Mexico, and South Africa are all useful reminders of how contemporary oligarch containment has been derailed. History suggests hope and realism, not optimism. But the most dangerous mistake now would be to confuse difficulty with impossibility. Oligarchs are not invincible. They are only betting that we will act as if they are.

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