Confirmation hearings rarely cut to the heart of an existential question about the nature of our society. But Thursday’s hearing for Scott Bessent, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, did just that when Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont tried to get him to admit that the United States is becoming an oligarchy, a question that ought to be the subject of far more public debate.
Quoting from President Biden’s farewell address to the nation, which warned against the unchecked power of tech moguls, Sanders asked if Bessent agrees that the concentration of so much wealth and political and media power in the hands of three men — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos — is a danger to democracy.
Bessent, himself a billionaire hedge fund manager who has never served in government before, gave all the answers one would expect: Musk and the others made their money fair and square. Biden has been friendly with some billionaires, too.
“Forget how they made their money,” Sanders pressed. “When so few people have so much wealth and power, do you think that is an oligarchic form of society?”
Bessent replied that it depends on whether people have the ability to move up, implying that social mobility inoculates the country from the detrimental effects of extreme inequality. It felt like an answer for the 1980s, not the inequality of today. Sanders disagreed, but moved on. He had limited time and wanted to get to other issues, like raising the minimum wage and capping credit card interest rates.
But the question still hung in the air, begging to be taken up by the American people at a time that wasn’t limited to the five minutes that Mike Crapo, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee chairman, assigned to each committee member. Are we an oligarchy yet?
The fact that Zuckerberg and Bezos have been falling over themselves to suck up to Trump, who was — like it or not — elected by voters, suggests that ordinary people still wield important power. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe Bezos and Zuckerberg are just waiting for their invitation to Trump’s billionaires’ ball, where our country will get divided up like the spoils of war. Maybe Musk, an early investor in Trump, is the one who will be doing the divvying. Maybe Bessent will help him do it. Maybe the rest of us will have a hard time organizing our protest marches on social media this time around.
I fear that by the time we get around to talking about oligarchy, it will be too late.
