It must have been in the late 90s. I was living in Hyde Park, and a friend invited me to a private lecture that Harold Perkin, a distinguished British historian, was giving. Perkin, who died in 2004, was pretty much the father of English social history. He was the very first person hired in the British university system to teach the history of society. His main scholarly work, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, established his interest in how industrial forces impact national characteristics such as class. Perkin’s passion for this subject had burned unabated since the book was first published in 1969.

The Perkin I saw was elderly, but his ideas were fresh and forward-looking. Now at the end of his career, his thoughts were trained on modern capitalism and its capacity to overwhelm political systems, impairing the enhanced freedom and power that individuals have enjoyed since the birth of market economies. Essentially, Perkin believed that contemporary global capitalism and its leaders represented an engrossing, trans-national system that no nation-state could match. He saw the rise of a hyper-wealthy elite as transforming society in ways that would impoverish and limit the majority. This was to be the subject of a book, one that Perkin get to write before he died.

The historical process whose implications Perkin had begun to lay out is now being felt across American society. The internet, the rise of real-estate investment “trusts,” the wealth gap, the economic dominance of a handful of monopolistic tech companies, the growth of cryptocurrencies, and, finally, AI: these developments and the people behind them are dictating the course of the United States. This new capitalist formation runs according to its own rules, which many of us lack the deep expertise to understand or discuss. Since Perkin’s time, this many-sided process has been given a name: corporate neo-feudalism.

Here are the hallmarks of corporate neo-feudalism, according to Google AI:

• Extreme stratification, with a tiny elite commanding many essential resources and a majority owning nothing.
• Rent-extraction and the development of a rentier class: corporations do not transfer ownership of goods or technology to individuals, instead requiring them to rent access to essentials such as software, information, and utilities.
• Coercive legal agreements that blur and erode the individual’s rights of ownership, free speech, and privacy, such as the contracts that come with electronic devices, smart appliances, and cable TV.
• A subversion of democratic power, whereby corporate interests pour so much money into lobbying and other forms of political patronage that citizens’ needs are irrelevant, their distinct interests ignored.
• The privatization of essential “public goods,” such as information, health care, and household utilities, so that, to subsist, citizens must pay what corporations demand or go without, creating a perpetual dependence on self-interested capitalistic entities.
• Arguably, these developments could reduce ordinary people to the status of serfs, by whittling away their capacity for truly “free” expression, upward mobility, or agency. Existence, independent of what corporations supply, becomes impossible, unthinkable. Essentially, tech is birthing new means of capital production–new, wealth-producing “tools” absorbing the resources of all for the benefit of a few.

The paradigm of corporate neo-feudalism is extraordinarily useful, even if it doesn’t hold true in all its details, and even if citizens remain convinced of their undiminished independence—for now. Corporate neo-feudalism gives a name to the changes Americans see taking place around them, as when local governments take the side of deep-pocketed corporations to create AI data centers; or when President Trump talks about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of respecting it as a Palestinian homeland.

In general, we can see how “corporate neo-feudalism” describes the types of people and interests that organize the president’s ambitions, policies, and world-view. He identifies with a hyper-wealthy elite who are birthing a new sort of mass society. He wants to be a respected leader among those “geniuses” intent on engrossing all the world’s goodies and creating new forms of wealth and money, without respect for niceties like Constitutional government, the health of the planet, or the people’s will. Trump is using the presidency not just to add to his fortune (initially based on old-fashioned real-estate), but to catapult himself upward into a nose-bleed social class, where his peers are not republicans but free (rogue) agents like Musk, Altman, MBS, Putin, and Xi. To Trump, enriching himself and cementing his position within this new world order matters much more than his fellow-citizens do. Trump consistently looks past the nation-state, and cares not a jot if, in the eyes of Americans, his actions are thoroughly corrupt. A trans-national miscreant, Trump knows he can easily transcend our rule of law.

This new economic profile of the US matters because our republican form of self-government pre-supposes widespread independence and prosperity. American government has a circular quality, in that a big part of its purpose has always been to create a populace that is educated, capable, and prosperous, because it is from the people that each generation of leaders must rise. Citizens must be autonomous, discerning, and well-informed to be self-governing; if they are consigned to a dependent, servile class instead, the future of American federalism will be bleak indeed.

When Trump promised the nation a “Golden Age” in his second inaugural, was it “corporate neo-feudalism” that he had in mind? This term, along with Trump’s fondness for tariffs and other grandiose qualities, recall the Gilded Age, that glitzy, vulgar period following the end of Reconstruction (1876) and the waning of the idealism of the Civil War. The late-nineteenth century was characterized by revolutionary innovations (think railroad empires, steel manufacture, the birth of oil, the use of telephone and telegraph, and the commodification of agriculture), which, in turn, generated great wealth disparities, political corruption, and a long stretch of low, lost politics. Captains of industry amassed unimaginable fortunes, running roughshod over flat-footed officials and callously exploiting the powerless with impunity. The political mind of America just couldn’t keep up. Will this be the case in the Golden Age, too?

Image: Fred Opper’s 1882 illustration for Puck,
“Monopoly Millionaires Dividing The Country,”
from this source.