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United States, 250 years of democracy
In January 2025, in his farewell speech, Joe Biden warned against “the return of the oligarchy” to the United States, a formula loaded with meaning for a nation which is preparing to celebrate its 250th anniversary. Far from being a simple political declaration, this warning resonates as an echo of the founding fears of the American Republic: that of seeing a minority of economic actors concentrate such power that they end up influencing, or even capturing, democratic institutions.
Because this concern is not new. The United States was built on a founding tension: guaranteeing freedom of enterprise without allowing the emergence of a concentration of economic power capable of threatening democracy.
Dilution logic
From the earliest days, the founding fathers feared that a small group of powerful and wealthy individuals would take over public institutions and compromise republican ideals. Thomas Jefferson feared the emergence of a class of creditors and speculators likely to capture the state for the benefit of private interests.
Behind this criticism, a simple idea: a democracy cannot survive if economic power is transformed into political power. This is why he opposed the financial centralization carried out by one of the founding fathers, the jurist Alexander Hamilton, notably through the First Bank of the United States, which he perceived as the lever of an elite capable of lastingly influencing institutions.
James Madison, 4th President of the United States and “Father of the Constitution,” shared this concern, fearing the domination of powerful “factions” over the government, and saw the sheer size of the Republic as the main remedy. A large number of citizens and competing interests would make it difficult for any particular group to capture power.
To this logic of dilution was added, at the institutional level, a system of checks and balances inspired by the philosophy of Montesquieu: separating powers to ensure a balance between federated states and central power and thus preventing any lasting capture of power – whether political or economic.
The imagination of prosperity driven by big businesses
At the end of the 19th century, the rise of large industrial groups, “the Robber Barons”, gave rise to an unprecedented form of concentration of power. Some railway companies, such as Union Pacific or Central Pacific, go so far as to draw the route of the railways, structuring the territory on their own – at the cost of corrupt practices which closely link private interests and political power.
This historical period known as the Gilded Age (1870-1890) is today rehabilitated: before Congress, Donald Trump welcomed the entry of the United States into a “golden age”, reviving without naming it the imagination of prosperity driven by large companies – at the risk of forgetting the democratic imbalances which had precisely made necessary the adoption of antitrust laws (Sherman Act then Clayton Act) and the dismantling of giants like Standard Oil (1911).
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is a continuation of this sequence. The assumed presence of figures from the business world like Elon Musk alongside those in power, even at presidential dinners, illustrates a new style of governance, more direct, more porous, in which private interests appear at the heart of public decision-making.
Questioning the democratic state
Within part of the Republican movement, this evolution is accompanied by a deeper questioning of the democratic State itself, nourished by radical intellectual currents – from the technological libertarianism of Peter Thiel to the neo-reactionary theses of the influencer Curtis Yarvin – which openly envisage more concentrated forms of power.
A radical vision is emerging on the horizon: that of a State competing with, or even absorbed, by the power of big businesses. The creation by Elon Musk of an entity called United States Of America Inc., with still vague contours but linked to his political activities, offers a disturbing illustration of this.
As the United States prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding, during a ceremony largely financed by the country’s largest companies, the question is no longer only whether it remains the world’s leading power, but whether it still remains a democracy in the sense that its founders understood it.
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