Here is how Rome, one of the worlds first democracies, fell:
First: Ability to vote was restricted in multiple ways.
Second: Rich landowners bought more land.
Third: Land became expensive due to competition.
Fourth: Citizens had to move into rental situations to survive.
Fifth: Rich landowners (citing high demand) raised rent.
Sixth: Citizens regularly went into debt to maintain their ability to survive and pay rent.
Seventh: Rich landowners ALSO became the loan-givers.
Eighth: New “great savings” options were introduced. Citizens could stay in their rentals as long as they did labor for the landowner.
Ninth: The landowners, now among the richest in Rome, bribed Rome's politicians to lower their taxes, and put that tax burden on the middle and lower classes.
Tenth: Middle class disappeared, collapsing into poor.
Eleventh: Poor had no money to tax.
Twelfth: Rome, without tax income, was unable to fund its military.
Thirteenth: “Barbarians” (who were always there before, and more civilized than history leads you to believe. Note, by this point, the average “Barbarian” had a higher quality of life and more freedoms than the average Roman) started catching up with Rome as far as military technology goes.
Fourteenth: “Barbarians” began winning battles.
Fifteenth: Fearmongering, the landowners started conscripted their required workers into defenses for their property. They fearmongered the invading “Barbarians” as savages beyond reckoning (among these were the predecessors to the Vikings, who actually ran under a “Hold & Thing” system, which shared a lot with Democracy)
Sixteenth: Rome itself collapsed, but the landowners remained, with their personal combat forces. These landowners were the first Kings of dark ages Europe and their owned lands the first Kingdoms (so you can look at a historical map and see exactly how much wealth-in-land they had accumulated by that point).
Why this is relevant:The 1% are pushing the U.S. down this exact same path. The wealthy wish to be kings. They're repeating the past pattern to become so.
And if you want to stop them, you must learn what historically actually stopped the royalty scam, nearly a millinea later.
If we fail to stop them, we have another dark age ahead of us.
We're already heavily down this path. Our attempts to stop them may need to be heavy-handed.