Our Sultanistic Oligarchy -- Digby

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https://digbysblog.net/2025/05/26/our-sultanistic-oligarchy/



Damn. Digby's on a roll these last few days. Hard to keep up. Please read the site for many more of their great posts:

In this absolutely fabulous article by Even Osnos in the New Yorker about Trump’s corruption we finally see the best modern example of Trump style oligarchy. I can’t believe I didn’t see this myself:

The nascent United States had its own share of oligarchs, as voting was reserved for white men who held property. But it was a “civil” oligarchy, in which the wealthiest citizens supported the state, because it protected their interests and because they profited more under the rule of law. If the rule of law collapses, though, a civil oligarchy can become a “sultanistic” oligarchy, in which the ultra-wealthy consent to be ruled by one of their own—an “oligarch-in-chief,” in Winters’s phrase.

A prime example of a sultanistic oligarch is Ferdinand Marcos, the President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. Marcos was a dogged kleptocrat, estimated to have stolen as much as ten billion dollars during his tenure. On an official salary of $13,500, he secured for his family at least four skyscrapers in Manhattan and a set of Old Master paintings. His wife, Imelda, was known for amassing thousands of pairs of shoes—a habit so distinctive that few people recall she also tried to buy Tiffany & Co.

As Winters notes, oligarchs of this category govern through “fear and rewards.” Marcos subdued the business community by strategically deploying permits and broadcast licenses. He made a special example of Eugenio Lopez, the country’s richest man and the owner of the Manila Chronicle, by breaking up an empire estimated at four hundred million dollars. After a few years, there was little boundary between the President’s financial assets and the nation’s. Marcos gave the sugar industry to one of his former fraternity brothers, and turned over the banana business to another friend. As Marcos’s pals mismanaged their holdings, the country sank into its worst recession since the Second World War.

Oligarchs-in-chief don’t like to retire, because civilian life leaves them vulnerable to retribution from those they ejected from their club. But in 1986, after three years of public protests, the Marcoses fled into exile, with a planeload of jewels, cash, and gold bars. In time, their allies rewrote enough history that, after Ferdinand died, Imelda was able to return home and eventually got elected to Congress. In 2022, after a relentless disinformation campaign that cast the Marcos years as a “golden age,” their son became President. Their perfidy is memorialized in the English language, though. Alfred McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me, “Marcos’s corruption led to the creation of the term ‘crony capitalism.’ It’s a useful term to describe the Trump era.”

Needless to say, the consequences for the world of having Ferdinand Trump running things are far more dangerous. The Philippines is a great country but it wasn’t the world’s only superpower when it succumbed to this kleptocratic chaos. But Trump sure seems like a modern Marcos, down to the cheap and gaudy ersatz palace.

If you have the chance to read the whole thing do it. It’s the best, and most entertainingly written, piece on this subject that I’ve read.

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1. There are so many good sections in Osno's piece in the New Yorker. Here's one

In a matter of weeks, the flood of cash swirling around the White House swamped whatever bulwarks against corruption remained in American law and culture. There have always been wealthy donors, of course. But a decade ago no one on earth had more than a hundred billion dollars. Now, according to Forbes, at least fifteen people have surpassed that mark. Since Trump first took office, Musk’s net worth has grown from roughly ten billion dollars to more than four hundred billion.

The ultra-rich have captured more of America’s wealth than even the nineteenth-century tycoons of the Gilded Age. Scholars who study inequality as far back as the Neolithic period struggle to find precedents. Tim Kerig, an archeologist who directs the Museum Alzey, in Germany, told me, “The people who built the Egyptian pyramids were probably in a less unequal society.” He suggested that today’s richest people are simply accumulating too much wealth for the system to contain. “The economic and technical evolution is much faster than the social, mental, and ideological evolution,” he said. “We had no time to adapt to all those billionaires.”

Oligarchy, in Aristotle’s formulation, is “when men of property have the government in their hands.” It is a pattern as old as civilization. In ancient Mesopotamia, those who mastered irrigation amassed more crops and consequently more power. Later, the coin of the realm was livestock; in Old English, the word feoh meant both “cattle” and “wealth.” (You can still hear a trace of that history in the English word “feudal.”) Early oligarchs did not enjoy sedate life styles. As the anthropologist Timothy Earle writes, leaders of this type “rarely died in bed; they were killed in battles of rebellion and conquest or were assassinated by their close affiliates.”