Image: The Hartmann Report
Image: The Hartmann Report
What elite isolation reveals about the fragility of modern democracy and the cost of unchecked billionaire power.
Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann
As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.—President Grover Cleveland
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.—President Theodore Roosevelt
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.—President Franklin D. Roosevelt
In a recent Wall Street Journal report, “The Ultrarich Are Spending a Fortune to Live in Extreme Privacy,” reporter Arian Campo-Flores pulls back the curtain on a disturbing new reality: our country’s wealthiest citizens now inhabit a parallel America of private jets, members-only restaurants, “sky-garage” condos, and luxury wellness centers they can rent out entirely for themselves.
These aren’t just perks; they’re a full-blown escape from public life. The ultrawealthy no longer wait in lines, navigate public institutions, or share community space with ordinary Americans.
And that’s the real danger: once the richest begin living outside the civic sphere, they stop caring whether the rest of society works at all. A nation where the wealthy secede into a private realm is a nation confronting oligarchy.
America has experienced this crisis before. Every few generations, a class of greedy oligarchs rise to power who are so intoxicated by wealth, so determined to hoard more, more, more, that they become a threat not just to our economy but to our democracy itself.
- It happened in the 1850s when the plantation aristocracy rose up, destroyed democracy in the South, and then tried to conquer the entire nation.
- It happened again when the Robber Barons of the
- And it’s happening today in the aftermath of the Reagan/Bush/Trump Revolution, as billionaire fortunes have exploded over the past 44 years and the American middle class has collapsed.
What’s different now is that modern oligarchs aren’t just accumulating money; they’re disappearing into a privatized world where only the ultrawealthy (and their servants) exist.
The WSJ article shows us how: private jet portals that bypass public airports and the TSA, restaurants where only the chosen enter, wellness centers rentable like personal playgrounds, condos where your car rides up the elevator with you, curated social clubs guaranteeing you never encounter an unfamiliar (or less wealthy) face.
This isn’t luxury. This is withdrawal, an intentional retreat from democratic society.
But beneath the marble floors and private butlers lies something even more sinister: wealth hoarding as a form of pathology. As I’ve argued before, extreme wealth accumulation often mirrors a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder called “hoarding disorder” in the DSM-5.
Ordinary hoarders afflicted with this mental illness fill their homes with newspapers and empty tin cans; billionaire hoarders fill offshore accounts and investment portfolios with billions they can never use, driven by the same compulsive “more, more, more” impulse.
Historian Michael Parenti described this perfectly: wealth becomes an addictive, monomaniacal hunger that consumes every other human concern.
When people suffering from this pathology then also use their wealth to seize vast political power, society pays the price. And thanks to Supreme Court decisions like Bellotti and Citizens United (as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America), these damaged hoarders can now use their fortunes to buy politicians, distort laws, functionally stop paying taxes to support the public good, and reshape our entire society just to serve their addiction.
They construct or acquire vast media properties solely to convince ordinary people that deregulating toxic businesses and cutting taxes on billionaires will somehow benefit them. They then invest millions in politicians who repay them with billions in tax cuts, deregulation, and subsidies.
As a result, Americans suffer the consequences: collapsing wages, millions without healthcare, skyrocketing poverty, underfunded schools, rampant gun violence, crumbling infrastructure, deadly pollution, poisons and chemicals in our food and water, and a middle class that’s been gutted and left gasping.
The WSJ article then reveals the final stage of this sickness: once the morbidly rich have extracted so much from society that it begins to crumble, they abandon society entirely.
When the richest Americans want nothing to do with public spaces, those spaces begin to deteriorate. Public airports, public hospitals. Public lines. Public restaurants. Public parks and neighborhoods. Public transportation. Public institutions of any kind.
A democracy can’t survive when its wealthiest citizens refuse to share a common world with the people they govern.
We’ve defeated oligarchs before. President Grover Cleveland warned of corporations using their “iron heel,” to become “the people’s masters.” President Teddy Roosevelt condemned the “invisible government” of the morbidly rich. FDR denounced the “economic royalists” who tried to overthrow democracy for profit.
All confronted their eras’ mentally ill hoarders, broke their power, taxed their fortunes, and built the foundations for a middle class that became the infrastructure of American stability.
Now that responsibility falls to us.
Members of today’s billionaire class are richer than any kings or pharaohs in history, and—thanks to decades of Republican deregulation, four corrupt Supreme Court rulings, and Reaganomics tax-slashing—are far more politically powerful.
They’ve used corrupt Supreme Court rulings to twist America’s laws so that their wealth is protected, their taxes are minimal, their influence is enormous, and their responsibility to the public is nonexistent.
This WSJ article isn’t just a window into their private world, it’s a warning flare. A democracy where the powerful live above and beyond the public realm is no democracy at all.
The path forward is the same one that saved us in the 1890s and 1940s:
name the crisis, confront the hoarders, break up monopolies, end billionaire-funded political corruption, restore progressive taxation to put the country back together, and rebuild the middle class.
We can do it. We’ve done it before. In future posts I’ll be detailing many of the steps that have worked in the past here in America and succeed today in other countries.
Tag, we’re it. Spread the word.
Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.
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