Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

America has been backsliding into kleptocratic territory for years now, but this may finally be it.

A kleptocracy is literally “rule by thieves.”

It is a form of government in which a network of ruling elites “steal public funds for their own private gain using public institutions.” As analyst Thomas Mayne explains, it’s “a system based on virtually unlimited grand corruption coupled with, in the words of American academic Andrew Wedeman, ‘near-total impunity for those authorized to loot by the thief-in-chief’—namely the head of state.”

One could fairly say that a kleptocracy was always going to be the end result of the oligarchy that was America.

The signs were visible long before now: power and wealth have been trading places for decades.

Indeed, it has been more than a decade since researchers at Princeton and Northwestern concluded that the U.S. is a functional oligarchy in which “political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups,” while the influence of ordinary citizens was at a “non-significant, near-zero level.”

So now we find ourselves in this present moment where billionaires are running the show.

The optics are undeniable: while the country suffers through a government shutdown, with welfare programs shuttered and inflation, healthcare and basic cost-of-living expenses skyrocketing, the elite are living it up.

In the White House, President Trump is redecorating, transforming what had been known as “the people’s house” into a palace fit for an American king, complete with marbled bathrooms and a sprawling, gold-fitted ballroom. The rest of the administration, taking its cue from their leader, are........

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