Dollarocracy

A “dollarocracy” means rule by those people who possess dollars. The term “dollarocracy” was used in the New York (NY) Leader in 1855 and the New York (NY) Ledger in 1860. Dollarocracy: an American novel by Oliver Herbrand Gordon Leigh was published in 1891.
 
The term was popularized in a book title, Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex Is Destroying America (2013), by John Nichols and Robert Waterman McChesney.
 
 
25 August 1855, Defiance (OH) Democrat, pg. 1, col. 4:
OUR DOLLAROCRACY.
We are not cursed in this country with those hereditary locusts called nobles, but have nevertheless a privileged order—the dollarocracy.
(...)
—N. Y. Leader.
 
22 September 1860, New York (NY) Ledger, “Re-Migration of the Fashionables,” pg. 4, col. 2:
Symptoms of their return may be described, by the observant, in the localities appropriated to the uses of the dollarocracy.
 
4 May 1861, New York (NY) Ledger, “May-Day,” pg. 4, col. 1:
Of course, these resplendencies are only for the dames of the Dolloracracy; but every fair “motor” expects to make some addition to her household plenishing, and rejoices in the expectation.
 
OCLC WorldCat record
Dollarocracy: an American novel.
Author: Oliver Herbrand Gordon Leigh
Publisher: New York, J.A. Taylor & Co., 1891.
Series: Broadway series, no. 7
Edition/Format:   Book : Fiction : English
 
Chronicling America
2 July 1891, The Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), pg. 6, col. 7:
A NEW THING IN NOVELS.
DOLLAROCRACY
An American Story of
SOCIO-POLITICAL LIFE
(NOT PARTY POLITICS.)
 
OCLC WorldCat record
Dollarocracy : how the money-and-media election complex is destroying America
Author: John Nichols; Robert Waterman McChesney
Publisher: New York : Nation Books, 2013.
Edition/Format:   Book : English
 
Moyers & company
Preview: How Dollarocracy is Destroying America
November 6, 2013
The money and power behind this week’s elections results confirm that democracy is under siege. We, the people, don’t control our leaders; instead moneyed interests get their way. Corporations are free to buy politicians, judges and elections with virtually unlimited cash, while big media conglomerates reap billions from political advertising.
 
We idealize the notion of political equality in the voting booth but eviscerate it in practice, caught in the clutches of a “money-and-media complex” not unlike the vast “military-industrial complex” President Eisenhower warned us about more than half a century ago.
 
No one knows the dangers better than John Nichols and Robert McChesney, who speak with Bill this week on Moyers & Company. Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and a pioneering political blogger. McChesney is a leading scholar of communications and society and a professor at the University of Illinois.