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The most striking images from Donald Trump’s second inauguration were not of the president himself. Rather, they featured the array of tech billionaires who occupied some of the best seats in the crowded Capitol rotunda. There was X’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—all sitting alongside one another, their proximity to Trump sending a decidedly unsubtle message about the new power structure in America. The scene set up the possibility of “a new kind of American oligarchy,” my colleagues Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker wrote in The Atlantic that afternoon. Trump’s empowerment of Musk, the world’s richest man, to rampage through the federal bureaucracy in the weeks since has only deepened the sense that in America right now, a wealthy few are governing the many.

Since its earliest editions, The Atlantic has been preoccupied with the specter of oligarchy. The word appeared in this magazine’s endorsement of Abraham Lincoln in 1860—its only presidential recommendation for more than a century—when James Russell Lowell, The Atlantic’s first editor, wrote: “Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers.” Two years later, in the midst of the Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson contrasted America’s “two states of civilization”—the free, “democratical” North and the South, “a lower state, in which the old military tenure of prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a few hands, makes an oligarchy.”

For decades thereafter, The Atlantic’s writers occasionally referred to the postwar southern political and economic hierarchy—wealthy, white landowners who dominated a disenfranchised Black population—as an oligarchy. In the early-20th-century trust-busting era of Theodore Roosevelt, oligarchy became a byword for the threat of corporate power. “The corporation has subverted law and honesty between individuals,” the writer Robert R. Reed warned in 1909. “It can and will, if unrestrained, subvert the basic ideal of American government, the happiness and welfare of unborn generations of American people.”

A generation later, Arthur E. Morgan, the first chairman of Tennessee Valley Authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt, approached the idea of American oligarchy with a slightly more open mind. Writing in 1934, he noted that some institutions that Americans held in the highest regard were hardly democracies. Henry Ford, then the revered titan of the automobile industry, was both an “economic dictator” and a “popular hero.” Harvard University, governed by a “selfperpetuating” board of wealthy trustees, was essentially an oligarchy. “The American people has sized up this situation and is not worried about political theories,” Morgan wrote. “It tends to give its loyalty to the institution which best serves the public good, whether it be controlled by a democracy or by an oligarchy.”

Only around the turn of this century, as economic inequality increased to the point of crisis, did warnings about the dangers of an American oligarchy reemerge in these pages. Some appear quite prescient. A 1990 cover story profiling the economist Lester Thurow described a speech he addressed to members of the Washington, D.C., “establishment,” warning that they risked becoming an oligarchy of greedy profiteers that could bring economic ruin to America. Surveying the global landscape in 1997, Robert D. Kaplan wrote that “democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before … Many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington.”

Perhaps Thurow was presaging the financial collapse of 2008, which helped spawn a revival of anti-government populism that propelled Trump and his wealthy allies to power. And maybe Kaplan, writing in the relatively halcyon period of 1990s economic expansion, had people like Musk and his fellow tech tycoons in mind when he warned that the accumulated concentration of wealth and the “productive anarchy” of the technological revolution would need to be supervised—“or else there will be no justice for anyone.”

As South by Southwest returns to Austin from March 7-15, 2025, the festival once again promises to be the nexus of technology, creativity, and cultural transformation. This year’s edition feels particularly significant as conversations around sustainability, AI ethics, and the future of mobility take center stage —…

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Among the official White House records housed in the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, in Atlanta, is a photograph of the late president shaking hands with an 80-year-old Black schoolteacher, Septima Poinsette Clark. The photo was taken in February 1979 at a White House ceremony honoring Clark with a “Living Legacy” award, in recognition of her work as a voting-rights educator and civil-rights activist.

I intended to use this photo to illustrate my talk next week at the Carter Library discussing my new book, Spell Freedom, which tells the story of Clark and her work training Black citizens to assert their constitutional rights. The venue seemed to be a perfect match for the theme. But late last month, I found out that I wouldn't be speaking at the Carter Library after all. My publisher informed me that my book event had been canceled, and I subsequently learned from other sources that all programming at the library, which is operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, now needs to be approved by the new administration in Washington.

I was confused. My presentation had been arranged back in the fall and had already gone through NARA’s routine vetting process, usually a pro forma confirmation that affiliated programs are of high quality and based on research using the National Archives’ rich resources. Spell Freedom is my third book of narrative history, and I’ve given numerous presentations at NARA locations before. The event was already up on the Carter Library website. Clearly, the criteria for “approval” had changed.

My little cancellation drama was not unfolding in a vacuum. Just a few weeks into Donald Trump’s second administration, the president fired the archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, who was the first woman to lead NARA, and pushed out most of the senior staff. Trump made no secret of his special animosity toward the National Archives, which protects presidential records and had played a role in exposing his improper handling of files from his first presidency.

Trump has also purged the governing board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, and installed himself as board chairman. Speaking of his new side gig, the president promised “no more woke” and “no more anti-American propaganda” on Kennedy Center stages. He also signed executive orders ending all diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities revised their funding guidelines to align more closely with the administration’s ideology.

[Read: America now has a minister of culture]

Sitting at my desk, I tried to channel my suspicion and anger into action. I’m a journalist, so I went to the press. Reporters at The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that other events had been canceled at the Carter library: Joining Spell Freedom on the chopping block were Mike Tidwell’s The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street and Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Other events went on as scheduled; it seemed obvious that books on race, poverty, and the climate had failed the new administration’s ideological test—though we can’t know for certain, because government officials declined to answer reporters’ questions.

Stifling inconvenient discussions is dangerous business, and it goes far beyond book talks. The Trump administration has flaunted its contempt for many of the country’s cultural, scholarly, scientific, medical, and educational institutions while announcing its intention to defund and destroy them. Investigation and expression on vital topics disfavored by the White House is being squelched. As many writers have already warned, these moves represent a frightening step toward autocratic rule and an erosion of democratic values. The core value that defines NARA, as well as the many libraries under its management, is the notion that the United States is ruled by laws—and that the office of the president matters more than whichever party or person happens to occupy it.

NARA has always been a proudly nonpartisan institution; it holds and protects sacred historical documents, and it is our nation’s collective memory bank. From the Declaration of Independence to the files of the tiniest bureau of the federal government, it’s all there, neatly filed. The presidential libraries chronicle the policies and proclamations of Republican and Democratic presidents alike, providing the essential primary-source material for analyzing their impact on the country and the world.

In recent decades, the archives have been open to all researchers, and therefore to all stripes of historical interpretation. Public programs, including book talks, bring the documents to life, expanding our understanding of the national story and fortifying our collective ownership of our nation’s past—its triumphs and its mistakes. They serve an educational function, which is why it makes sense that they are under attack. Another of the president’s executive orders promotes “patriotic education” in the country’s K–12 schools, threatening to withhold federal funding from those that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” That cuts out a lot of history.

Under the new administration, the National Endowment for the Arts has declared that its most urgent priority is funding projects that honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Our foundational document, held and displayed in the National Archives building on the National Mall, insists that all men are created equal and rails against the tyranny of despots and kings. It is certainly patriotic; it is also revolutionary in every sense of the word. The president is right to recognize its monumental importance, and he should also honor the principles written into it.

[Read: Control. Alt. Delete.]

Septima Clark was dedicated to making her country live up to its democratic ideals, to honor in practice—not just in words or flag pins—the historical principles outlined in the Declaration and the Constitution. A widowed grandmother who stood up to local tyrants, she lost her job and 40 years of pension benefits in 1956 when she refused to renounce her membership in the NAACP, which the southern states had outlawed as “subversive” and “Communist.” She took her teaching talents to the emerging civil-rights movement, developing hundreds of “citizenship schools” across the South that trained tens of thousands of Black citizens to read, write, and reclaim their voting rights. She stared down the Klan, knelt in prayer before a southern sheriff’s tanks, guided the hands of the poor and unlettered so they could hold a pencil and sign their name at the voter-registration office.

In this new culture of cancellations, it seems—though no official will admit it—that this story does not fit into the administration’s definition of “patriotic” narratives of American history. I would argue that the story is absolutely one of fierce patriots—Black citizens who so loved and believed in the promise of the United States, in the constitutional right to vote, in the Declaration’s claim of equality, that they faced down suppression, violent reprisals, economic ruin, imprisonment, and death to participate in their own government and assert their rights as Americans.

I think Clark would have some sharp words for the current administration, with its callous attempts to bend language, art, science, and history to its liking. “I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth,” Clark proclaimed. “We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.” This may not fit the current government’s definition of patriotism, but to me, it’s the right spirit in which to honor the history and guard the future of the United States. It’s the kind of patriotism we need right now.

Video shows the moment a South Korean fighter jet accidentally bombed a civilian area during a training exercise.

The incident happened shortly before the US and South Korea are due to start joint military drills.

Seven people are injured, four seriously, during the incident in a city near the border with the North.