Collusionism: Part 1

The word “Capitalism” does not accurately describe this monstrosity of an economy plaguing America.

Photo by Adam Bettcher/Getty Images

The last month of 2024 was a rough one for “capitalism” in America. December began with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood on the streets of Manhattan. While corporate media outlets like CNN bewailed the absence of flowers and teddy-bear-filled memorials at the site of Thompson’s murder, the reaction of the average American was not so cloyingly sympathetic. Polling since the murder has shown nearly 7 in 10 Americans assigning some blame to the healthcare industry for Thompson’s murder. The animosity unleashed by Thompson’s murder would not be limited to the healthcare industry. Despite Thompson’s supposed assassin, Luigi Mangione, being an ideological hybrid, outlets like Fox News were quick to sound the alarm that the killing might inspire a new wave of left-wing anti-capitalism unmatched by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2020.

As December wore on into the holiday season and the UnitedHealthcare murder retreated a bit from the national headlines, a new billionaire backlash erupted, one threatening to rip apart the MAGA coalition before Donald Trump was even sworn in for his second term as president. Trump’s directors of the newly hatched Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, took to X over the holidays to defend the appointment of Indian-born Sriram Krishnan to a high-ranking artificial intelligence post as well the H1B visa program that enables highly skilled workers like Krishnan to immigrate to the United States. While defending the H1B program, Musk and Ramaswamy asserted the need to bring in the world’s best and brightest due to the lack of American-born talent necessary to staff top technology firms. Musk and Ramaswamy’s condescending comments about Americans’ anti-intellectualism and lack of work ethic sparked an immediate firestorm in the hardcore base of MAGA who recognized the smug hypocrisy of Silicon Valley elites supporting the immigration restrictions that reserve the lowest paying, least appealing jobs for Americans yet let foreigners in to take higher-paying upwardly mobile jobs in science and tech. Shaken by the rightwing backlash on X, Musk displayed wild mood swings, from the openly combative insults to H1B critics (e.g., “take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face”) to sullenly whining that “I am constantly insulted on this platform.” Musk would only make his problems worse by supposedly suspending and demonetizing MAGA accounts critical of his pro-H1B visa stance. Musk’s reputation as the billionaire champion of the American working man and fearless defender of free speech was dissolving before his eyes. After a heated exchange with Musk on X about his manipulation of her account, Trump ultra-loyalist Laura Loomer stoked the MAGA civil war with the simple, sinister admission, “I understand Luigi Mangione now.”

We enter 2025 with the billionaire class and American capitalism in a very unfamiliar state, vulnerability. Americans have good cause to be angry about the unjust, predatory nature of the economy. Economic inequality has returned to Gilded Age levels. The American dream of owning a home and starting a family seems further and further beyond the reach of the general population. But is “capitalism” the right word to describe a parasitic system that has allowed a few to amass unfathomable wealth as the masses tread along the knife’s edge of financial oblivion? The evangelists of capitalism, men like Adam Smith, Joseph Schumpeter, and Ludwig von Mises praised a dynamic system where entrepreneurs dared greatly, putting their own wealth on the line, only reaping rewards if their businesses fulfilled the needs of informed and empowered consumers at the lowest price. Take a look around at the American economy of 2024 and you will find very few industries resembling this idealized conception of capitalism. Conservative adherents of Free Enterprise fundamentalism will immediately claim that these inefficiencies and inequities are the product of socialism’s corrupting influence. That line of argument falters as soon as we look at countries like Denmark or Finland countries with far more socialist attributes whose citizens are happier, healthier, and more secure than their supposed richer American counterparts. Some other system is at work in the American economy, something wholly separate from capitalism and socialism or a Goldilocks combination of the two, something I call Collusionism.

Collusionism is a system sustained by a self-reinforcing, reciprocal feedback loop between business and political elites. Formed within the carcass of a decomposed democratic and capitalist society, Collusionism develops when (1) the business elite’s best strategy for profitability is to seek favorable treatment from political leaders rather than servicing the needs of their customers, and (2) the political elites’s best strategy for electability is to seek financial backing of the business elite rather than to meet the needs of their constituents. Politicians and business elites collude to insulate themselves from accountability. Politicians help the business elites by suppressing the competition, choice, and information that hold businesses accountable in a properly functioning capitalist economy. Business elites protect politicians from accountability by injecting billions into political campaigns, shaping media narratives, and tweaking social media algorithms to distract and disinform voters until they cannot properly hold their representatives accountable enough to sustain a functioning democracy. Like the parasitic wasp larvae that implant into the brain of a caterpillar to hijack its nervous system, Collusionism implants itself into the highest echelons of politics and business, guiding a society that has the outward appearance of democratic capitalism while parasitically devouring most of the citizens trapped within the body politic.

Those on the progressive left fringe will say this so-called “Collusionism” is the inevitable fate of all capitalist societies, a decayed state of “Late Capitalism” crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions, or “Techno-feudalism” a regression backward on Marx’s dialectical progression from Feudalism to Capitalism to Communism. But for most Americans “capitalism” is a term that conjures mixed emotions or even positive connotations. Calling UnitedHealthcare or Tesla “capitalist” operations invokes associations with innovation, hard work, dynamism, and productivity. Calling Brian Thompson a “capitalist” only bolsters the Horatio Alger story of a determined kid rising from a hardscrabble Iowa childhood to help lead one of the world’s most profitable companies. Calling Thompson a Collusionist highlights the fact that UnitedHealthcare is an organization that exists not because it services the needs of its customers but because it funds the campaigns of politicians from both parties, a completely unnecessary and parasitic business arrangement forcing Americans to pay double for healthcare with dismal health results compared to the rest of the world. Calling Elon Musk a “capitalist” bolsters the myth of a modern-day Edison who founded a company that brought EV technology to the masses. Calling Musk a “Collusionist” highlights the fact that he muscled his way into Tesla by pushing out its true founders and that the company only survived through tax credits, low-interest loans, greenhouse gas regulatory credits, a taxpayer-bankrolled “gigafactory” built in Buffalo to assemble solar shingles never brought to mass market and countless other goodies supplied by a government whose operations Musk wants to slash drastically now that he’s amassed the world’s largest fortune. Capitalism as a word fails to convey the truth that the wealth of men like Musk and Thompson was built not so much on out-competing rival firms for customer satisfaction but using political connections to give their companies unfair advantages through legal protections, taxpayer-funded subsidies, barriers to market entry, and suppression of information. Colluding with a bought and sold political class, not competing on the open market is the road to riches in a Collusionist economy.

But why invent a new word? Aren’t there already words in our dictionary capable of adequately describing what is happening in American politics and economics? Do we really need another “-ism” to explain the political and economic structure of our society?

Words like “oligarchy,” “plutocracy,” and “corruption” come close to describing the state of affairs I describe with the word “Collusionism.” But these three words suggest that laws are being flaunted, broken, or unenforced at the behest of the wealthy. Collusion need not be illegal and the power of Collusionism comes from its ability to embed itself into the courts and legislature to ensure that the obscene wealth accumulation by both the business and political elites is fully legal. Unlike in oligarchies and corrupt plutocracies where the masses see laws being broken and are hopeless to stop it, in Colusionism the law itself is rewritten for the benefit of elites, policies dictated by the supposed need to keep economic growth on track and create jobs, or a grudging concession that must be made to the realities of two-party politics. As we will discuss in the coming weeks, words like capitalism and socialism are wholly inadequate to describe the system we live under. If anything once we get a clearer picture of what Collusionism really is, both true capitalists and true socialists will come to recognize it as a common enemy, a threat to both those who want a more dynamic economy and those who want a more humane society.

The need to coin a new term is grounded in the reality that we must name what is plaguing America’s economy and government if we ever hope to rally the popular resistance to stop it. We must name as Collusionists those executives who use our courts, our legislatures, and our tax dollars to earn unnatural profits and then funnel that money back into campaign financing and lobbying to give them an even greater advantage over less politically connected rivals. We must condemn all Collusionist politicians, not only vulgar Collusionists like Donald Trump who see no distinction between their governmental commitments and business interests but also the weak, apologetic Collusionists in the Democratic Party who claim they have no choice but to coddle billionaires out of the need to sustain economic growth, create jobs, woo independent voters and keep the Republicans out of office. When we understand how Collusionism operates as a self-sustaining system we see that the malignant Collusionists like Trump and the seemingly benign Collusionists need each other. Benign Collusionists justify endless concessions to the billionaire class and betrayals of the working class as the necessary if unpleasant steps they must take to win elections and keep the malignant Collusionists out of office. Malignant Collusionists then point to the hypocrisy of the benign Collusionists pandering to the billionaire class to excuse their own more aggressive collusion with business elites.

This seemingly unbreakable monetary feedback loop tying political and business elites together has created a sense of hopelessness and cynicism in the voting public, as more and more Americans are falling further and further behind those at the top of the social hierarchy. Giving Collusionism a name is a crucial first step in creating alliances across party, class, and geographic lines that can push for the campaign finance reform needed to stall and eventually reverse this feedback loop. Only once the Collusionist feedback loop is broken can we hope to pull out of the death spiral threatening both the political and economic future of the United States of America.