The Mega-Haves and the Have-Nots

A 2022 report found that the top 10 percent of Americans hold 60 percent of the country’s wealth, with the top 1 percent nabbing 27 percent for themselves. Donald Trump’s bill would further entrench their advantages and expand their fortunes. To call this “wealth inequality” seems inadequate. It’s certainly unequal, but the scale, the magnitude of the disparity, warrants its own word. At some point, we’ll need to invent one to describe and capture the breadth and depth and perversity of this abomination.

Wealth and income inequality aren’t the same thing, but they track similarly skewed distributions of resources — and power. On both fronts, the United States performs poorly compared to its peer nations. When it comes to income inequality, it doesn’t even compare well to chapters of its own history. Historical parallels give some sense of just how extreme American inequality has become — and how deeply compromised, how utterly in the pocket of the wealthy, its executive and legislative branches now are.

In 2012, researchers found that incomes were “much more equally distributed in colonial America than in America today,” even accounting for chattel slavery. They estimated a Gini coefficient — a measure of inequality where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents total inequality — of 0.437. At the time, the top 1 percent took in 7.1 percent of gross income. In 2023, the US Gini score was 0.47, though some sources have it at 0.41. The data and methods vary, but the conclusion is the same: the United States is a land of entrenched inequality.

For comparison, researchers have estimated that the Gini coefficient for the Roman Empire was 0.46 and the Han Dynasty years in China was 0.48. As a 2011 Business Insider headline bluntly put it, “Even The Ancient Roman Empire Wasn’t As Unequal As America Today.” In contrast, European states tend to have scores in the 0.2 to 0.35 range.

For and by the Few

None of this data should surprise anyone who’s been paying the least amount of attention to the trajectory of the United States in the previous several decades — particularly since the Reagan Revolution went all in on turning the country into a playground for the wealthy. Decades of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich have only deepened inequality in the US, both economic and political.

In 2012, scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page released a paper entitled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” They found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

Gilens and Page didn’t use the word “oligarchy” to describe the US, exercising a measure of scholarly restraint. Still, the word came up in the paper and a few times in the bibliography, suggesting that the theme was quite clearly present. The media, however, has had no such reservations. Coverage of the paper included the term “oligarchy” over and over again. And rightly so. Accounting for wealth and income inequality and the fact that laws quite plainly were being written by and for the few rich and powerful, it was obvious. The United States was — and still is — an oligarchy.

The Road to Unrest

There’s a chance that Trump’s “Big Beautiful” bill could fail — but the battle to secure tax breaks for the rich, as a project, will continue either way. The wealthy in the US write the laws; they own the politicians; they are firmly ensconced in the White House. It may matter whether a Democrat or Republican is president; it may matter whether the Democrats or Republicans hold a majority in the House of Representatives or the Senate; it may matter whether Democrats or Republicans are appointing justices to the Supreme Court; but for the purposes of serving oligarchy, it’s a matter of degree, not of type. The state and its constituent branches are thoroughly captured by and serve the wealthy.

Around the time of the French Revolution, France’s Gini coefficient score was an estimated 0.59, which is high, but not wildly higher than that of much of Europe at the time. Of course, the decades that followed, particularly in the middle of the next century, saw waves of popular revolutions. And while the causes of popular revolution are complex, particularly when sorting the immediate and long-term origins of uprising, there tends to be a common, if not universal, thread among them: namely, that the state doesn’t adequately address the needs of its people.

The United States isn’t on the brink of revolt — but it’s far down the sort of path that has, historically, led to popular unrest, or something far greater. The state has thoroughly abandoned everyday Americans and let oligarchs write its laws and reap the rewards — rewards made possible by the labor and sacrifices of the many. The rise in right populism is a symptom of, and a response to, this reality. Trump is both a beneficiary and cause, though not exclusively, of this populist surge, which is a form of contempt for the people he’s ostensibly meant to serve. His tax bill, which will only make things worse for the workers who support him, is emblematic of this contempt: a policy of extraction, a stress test of just how a people can be pushed before they finally say, “No more.”