Germany’s latest far right surge is not merely another European political convulsion. It is a warning that concentrated wealth, democratic decay, and authoritarian politics can reinforce one another with frightening speed.

In Magdeburg, Alternative für Deutschland figure Ulrich Siegmund told cheering supporters they were “taking our country back.” His party captured 44 percent of the vote in Saxony Anhalt, according to the account, doubling its support from five years earlier.

The party’s agenda combines immigrant expulsions, hostility toward the European Union and NATO, closer relations with Russia, and attacks on climate, energy, and technology rules. That is a convenient package for fossil fuel barons, technology moguls, and every aspiring autocrat who finds democracy irritating.

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin’s spokesman quickly celebrated the showing. Their enthusiasm was hardly mysterious, since the German party’s rise advances a vision in which wealthy patrons dominate politics while angry voters are encouraged to blame immigrants and other vulnerable people.

China is often presented as the central threat to liberal democracy because its economic success shows that capitalism can thrive without elections. But the most immediate danger to American democracy is coming from billionaire networks in Wichita, Silicon Valley, and Mar a Lago, assisted by Republican judges in black robes.

Capitalism works like a professional sports league. It can generate extraordinary results when rules are enforced, but if the richest team can buy the referees, field extra players, and punch opponents without penalties, the competition becomes a rigged spectacle.

China understood that successful capitalists must not be allowed to capture the state. When billionaire Jack Ma challenged regulators, officials blocked the Ant Group public offering, fined Alibaba $2.8 billion over monopolistic conduct, and reminded the business elite who actually controlled the rulebook.

Nobody should romanticize China’s authoritarian government. Yet its leaders recognized a basic danger that American conservatives deliberately ignored, namely that economic winners allowed to write their own rules will crush competition and eventually purchase the government itself.

Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the same threat in democratic terms. In 1936, he warned, “For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. …”

Roosevelt continued, “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.” He understood that extreme wealth does not remain politely inside corporate offices when political power is available for purchase.

FDR confronted those “economic royalists” through banking regulation, securities oversight, labor protections, antitrust enforcement, a minimum wage, and steep taxes on enormous fortunes. Republicans screamed socialism, as they reliably do whenever democracy asks rich people to contribute anything beyond a campaign check.

Roosevelt answered them directly: “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” Then came the democratic thunder: “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

Those policies helped create a vast American middle class and restrained oligarchic power for decades. The arrangement began unraveling as Lewis Powell, Ronald Reagan, and billionaire funded institutions recast government itself as the enemy while directing working class anger toward Black families, immigrants, unions, women, and queer Americans.

Citizens United accelerated the rot by allowing billionaires to pour staggering sums into elections. In 2024, just 100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion on federal contests, while Musk alone spent $278 million before receiving extraordinary access to Trump’s government.

Peter Thiel had already written in 2009 that freedom and democracy were no longer compatible in his view. That chilling belief sits comfortably beside the authoritarian systems admired by Putin and Xi, where vast wealth remains possible and troublesome voters can be controlled.

Europe’s own decades of privatization, austerity, and deregulation created fertile ground for the same scam. Communities abandoned by government are told that immigrants caused their pain, while billionaires, propagandists, and Kremlin linked influence operations quietly help the far right harvest the rage.

Regulation is capitalism’s immune system. Campaign finance limits, strong antitrust laws, financial transparency, unions, public health care, affordable education, and progressive taxation prevent the wealthiest players from purchasing the league, rewriting the rules, and declaring themselves champions.

Roosevelt’s warning has arrived again with sirens blaring. Democracy can survive this oligarchic assault, but only if voters reject Trump, Musk, and their Republican servants, overturn the power unleashed by Citizens United, and rebuild a government strong enough to tell billionaires no.