“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936
Franklin Roosevelt’s warning was not merely a historical footnote. It was an unvarnished diagnosis of American power: when private wealth organizes itself politically, democracy becomes a façade, a performative ritual masking elite control.
He was speaking at a moment when popular pressure forced capital to retreat - temporarily - and when the state could still be wrestled, however incompletely, into serving the public good. His words today are an indictment of how thoroughly we have reversed that progress.
In our era, only grassroots movements alienated from power and a tiny faction within the Democratic Party remains willing to contest the dominance of organized money. The majority of both parties in the United States has institutionalized their control over society and the levers of government.
For decades, the two major political parties have functioned less as opposing visions of society and more as rival management teams serving overlapping concentrations of corporate and financial power. Their ideological branding obscures a shared commitment to maintaining systems of wealth and hierarchy.
The Democratic Party presents itself as the responsible steward - offering moral rhetoric, moderate social reforms, and a technocratic polish.
It speaks the language of inclusion and progress, and does indeed offer some critical checks on polluting and predatory industries, yet it remains structurally dependent on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the consulting-class networks that mediate elite power.
Its economic interventions tend to be symbolic or marginal, tinkering with capitalism’s sharpest edges rather than confronting its core logic. Cultural progressivism becomes a substitute for substantive economic democracy, a way to claim moral high ground while leaving the fundamentals of concentrated ownership untouched.
The Republican Party dispenses with subtlety.
It embraces what might be called gangster capitalism - a celebration of hierarchy, wealth accumulation, and punitive social policy.
It weaponizes resentment and nationalist mythology while shielding the most predatory forms of corporate power from scrutiny.
Its anti-woke crusade is not a cultural rebellion; it is a branding strategy, an ideological smokescreen designed to redirect public anger away from oligarchs and toward scapegoats. This is class warfare disguised as culture war, serving the same interests Roosevelt warned against with less shame and more spectacle.
Both parties therefore perform a critical function: they discipline the political imagination. They limit the range of acceptable policy, debate, and economic structure.
They tell the public that our crisis - ecological, economic, social, democratic - can be resolved without challenging concentrated power. They uphold the fiction that voters are choosing between fundamentally different futures, when in reality they are choosing between two versions of elite rule: a polite, incremental one and a ruthless, theatrical one.
Roosevelt’s insight - that “government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob” - anticipated this moment.
The true danger he referred to was not the street rabble that often gets invoked whenever ordinary people demand a say in their own lives. It's the business interests who treat government as their private office.
In his day, they were industrial barons and financiers. Today, they operate through global finance, tech platforms, private equity firms, and image-manufacturing machines capable of shaping public perception so effectively that many people no longer recognize where their ideas come from.
Roosevelt’s point leads to an unavoidable conclusion: unless there is a counter-force rooted in public life - in unions that aren’t controlled by party leadership, in workplace democracy, in neighborhoods where people still know one another, in cultures of mutual aid and political literacy - then politics becomes reduced to choosing which faction of the ruling class manages things for another cycle.
That means we cannot outsource hope to party strategists or wait for charismatic saviors. It means building civic strength within a culture that remembers its own agency. A culture that refuses to be loyal foot soldiers for one political party or another, and stands independent from both.
We don’t need grand slogans about revolution to challenge the monied interests that have captured our government. We need the slower, steadier work of building institutions, habits, and relationships that prepare people to govern their own communities rather than cheer for power as spectators.
Call it democracy, or simply adulthood in political form.
There’s nothing inevitable about oligarchy, and there’s nothing automatic about democracy.
What decides the outcome isn’t sentiment - it’s whether ordinary people recover the capacity to act together in their own interests, and refuse to be spectators to their own dispossession.
Films For Action was founded in 2006, by director Tim Hjersted and a few friends. The organization and its free library of over 10,000 videos and articles is dedicated to supporting the people and movements working to create a more free, democratic and sustainable world.