The One Single, Proven Constraint on Oligarchy and Autocracy

By Michael Podhorzer

Elon Musk’s destructive ransacking of our government should have reminded us of what previous generations of Americans understood intuitively: that "we may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both,” as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it. Yet in all the commentary about how to survive the Trump regime, almost no one mentions the single most proven constraint on oligarchy and autocracy: unions.

There’s a reason that taking out unions is one of the first pages in the oligarchic coup playbook—as in Chile, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Indonesia, Spain, Myanmar, and more. It’s the same reason Trump has fired the first Black woman member of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox—clearly violating labor law and denying the board the quorum it needs to conduct business and protect employee rights; fired two commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and asserted in an executive order that he can fire any member of the Senior Executive Service, which includes regional directors at the NLRB who run union elections and investigate and decide whether to prosecute corporations’ unfair labor practices.

It’s the same reason that Project 2025, which has informed the lion’s share of Trump’s early shock-and-awe actions in office, would effectively dismantle union power nationwide by banning public sector unions, eliminating overtime protections, and making collective organization nearly impossible.

And it’s the same reason Musk—who wanted to make the entire NLRB unconstitutional and whose companies have been fined for millions of dollars for labor or workplace safety violations—is reportedly targeting the Department of Labor for the next round of DOGE sabotage. (Of course, Musk’s aims were twofold: defending his coup, and his very real interests in protecting Tesla and Space X from ongoing investigations into their anti-worker efforts.)

And it’s the same reason corporations and billionaires spent decades working to decimate union power in the United States. The reason is: Oligarchs know politics is about power, and they know strong unions don’t just deliver better wages and benefits for their members (though they do that in spades). Unions also build the kind of real democratic power—for all of us, not just union members—that keeps oligarchs in check.

To understand why that is, we must first understand what real democratic power, or “collective power,” means. Voting, though essential, is like going to a restaurant and choosing between entrees on the menu. True collective power means having a say in what goes on the menu in the first place. Some might say that setting the menu is the restaurant owner's job. Exactly. We—not corporations and billionaires—are supposed to be the owners of our democracy.

Unions are the only major civil society institution in this country that give ordinary working Americans reliable access to collective political power. Corporations and billionaires, on the other hand, have boundless options to exercise outsized collective power over our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments, especially after Citizens United.

Unions build democratic power in three crucial ways. First, they offer members the chance to practice democracy in their everyday lives, which leads to higher rates of voting, community involvement, and political participation. Second, although far from perfect in this regard, unions have been at the forefront of pluralistic social change, promoting racial and gender equality and resisting authoritarian tendencies. Third, unions help prevent the translation of economic power into political domination. As Frederick Douglass observed, "power concedes nothing without a demand." But in today's economy, individual demands mean little against oligarchic power. Unions turn individual grievances into organized demands backed by real institutional power.

Americans increasingly understand all of this, even if many elite opinion leaders don’t. For all the talk about how we need to restore public trust in institutions, we ignore that unions are the one institution to have gained public trust since 2008—and across partisan lines. This isn't because of PR campaigns; it's because people have witnessed concrete victories by unions such as the UAW, WGA, and SAG-AFTRA, demonstrating that collective action can still succeed against powerful interests.

Encouragingly, organized labor is already playing a major role in fighting the latest round of oligarchic abuses. The AFL-CIO has launched a campaign called the Department of People Who Work for a Living to call attention to and push back against Musk’s and Trump’s illegitimate power grabs. Unions have also filed critical lawsuits to block Musk’s access to Treasury payment data and to challenge the Trump administration’s shady “buyout” offers to federal workers.

Oligarchs like Musk will continue to have more and more power, and we less and less power, until we heed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s warning that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”

Repeatedly, the power of working people acting through their unions has brought down dictators—think Solidarity in Poland or the COSATU in South Africa—and many more.

Thus, it is for us—as it was for those facing down the robber barons in this country and the rise of fascist movements here and in Europe—to recognize that rebuilding democracy and restoring shared prosperity has to begin with the robust democratic counterweight only unions can provide. There are no shortcuts or workarounds.

This piece has been shortened from its original form and updated since its February 2025 publication. For its full version, please enjoy it here, and be sure to subscribe to Weekend Reading on Substack.