Google cofounder Sergey Brin says he knows what socialism looks like. He was born in Moscow in 1973 and left the Soviet Union with his family at the age of six, an experience he recently invoked to attack California’s proposed tax on billionaires. “I fled socialism with my family in 1979,” he said, warning that he did not want California to “end up in the same place.” He has spent at least $57 million fighting the tax.

But Brin is looking at the wrong Russia.

The danger facing the United States is not that California will become the Soviet Union because one of the richest men on earth is asked to pay more tax. The danger is that America is drifting toward something far more familiar from Russia’s recent history: an authoritarian oligarchy in which vast private fortunes coexist with weakened democratic institutions and a corrupt political leader who rewards wealthy loyalists and punishes dissenters.