No Kings, No People, Only Oligarchs

There’s no doubt that the revolutionary spirit of 1776 animated the “No Kings” marches of June 14, 2025. The protests aimed to resist the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump administration. Demonstrators rightly drew attention to instances where executive overreach has threatened the balance of power among the legislative, judicial, and executive branches. However, their rhetorical fixation on “kings” betrays an anachronistic understanding of modern political power. Since the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century, sovereigns in the West have mostly reigned in a symbolic capacity without truly governing. The real power has shifted elsewhere—specifically, to bureaucrats and technocrats who have tended to administer public policy under the guise of intellectual expertise and moral authority.

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Yet this modern displacement of political power has by no means been limited to kings alone. In liberal democratic theory, “the people” are presumed to be the wellspring of legitimate authority. In practice, however, the people are as ceremonial as any modern monarch. Periodically, they are invited to the ballot box to lend legitimacy to a process over which they exert no control. Once elections are over, governance is handed back to professional politicians, lobbyists, and career bureaucrats who claim to act in the people’s name but rarely in their interest. In this way, the people too have been divested of the intellectual power and moral independence needed to govern themselves. At best, “We the People” play a pitiful role in the performance of democracy; but otherwise, we are excluded from it.

This double exclusion of king and people is no historical accident; to the contrary, the architects of the U.S. Constitution deliberately created a political system that would truly include only men like themselves. Their grievances with Britain, encapsulated in the slogan “No taxation without representation,” were as much about economic self-determination as they were about political ideals. When they invoked the idea of “self-government,” they meant the rule of men like themselves—literate, property-owning elites—rather than the undifferentiated mass of men. The Founding Fathers, despite their revolutionary credentials, were deeply suspicious of democracy. To them, democracy represented a descent into mob rule, and their constitutional design sought to curb its influence. The checks on direct democracy—such as the Electoral College, the Senate, and the limited suffrage of the early republic—reveal the fundamentally aristocratic impulse at the heart of the American political project.

The transformation of this would-be aristocracy into an oligarchy was perhaps inevitable. Having eliminated both the monarch and the people, America’s would-be aristocrats celebrated themselves as an exclusive source of political virtue. Over time, this elite has degenerated into a ruling class concerned less with republican virtue and more with economic self-preservation. Today, we find ourselves mired in an oligarchic age—one where financial power seamlessly turns into political influence and vice versa in an endless whirl of the proverbial revolving door. The U.S. system has become a machinery of legalized bribery, a plutocracy governed by and for millionaires and billionaires. Elections are less about representation than about capital deployment; governance is indistinguishable from lobbying; and the coercive power of the state ensures this arrangement is enforced.

In the end, the slogan “No Kings” misses the mark. Not only do we not have a king, we also don’t have a people. What we do have is a well-entrenched oligarchy that governs without accountability and enriches itself while invoking the rituals of democracy to mask its rule. The true sovereign in modern America is not a president with regal aspirations, but the billionaire class that underwrites elections, owns media platforms, funds think tanks, and steers public discourse. These are the modern oligarchs, unelected and unaccountable, yet deeply influential. They operate behind the façade of constitutional checks and balances, shaping policy through lobbying, campaign contributions, and backdoor influence. Meanwhile, presidents and legislators—whether Republican or Democrat—often act as their functionaries. The Founders feared both kings and crowds; today’s citizens must learn to fear—and confront—the class that rules without ruling, the new sovereigns of the plutocracy.