Jeffrey Winters: I describe the period we’re in as “in your face” oligarchy. Whatever illusions people may cling to about how democratic the system is, it’s hard to sustain those ideas and the legitimacy of democracy itself when you’re faced with the clear, visible expression of oligarchic power by a few very visible people.

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Alex Lovit: A small group of billionaires had a massive impact on last year’s election between Trump and Harris, and they’re continuing to push for policy changes that don’t always align well with the will of the people. So if money can buy political influence, does that mean that U.S. democracy is a sham? My guest today says it’s not so simple. You’re listening to The Context. It’s a show from the Kettering Foundation about the past, present, and future of democracy. I’m your host, Alex Lovit.

Today I’m speaking with Jeffrey Winters. He’s a political scientist at Northwestern University, and he’s a leading expert on the interplay between wealthy elites and government in other words, oligarchy. He’s going to tell us why oligarchs won’t leave politics alone and go count their gold coins or whatever, and he’ll share some wild ideas for getting money out of politics that are so crazy they just might work. That’s today on The Context.

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Alex Lovit: Jeffrey Winters, welcome to The Context.

Jeffrey Winters: Alex, it’s a pleasure to be able to talk to you.

Alex Lovit: So I want today to talk about the relationship between oligarchy and democracy, and that’s something you’ve written a lot about. But before we get there, let’s just define some terms. What’s an oligarchy?

Jeffrey Winters: It’s a very ancient word, “oligarch” and “oligarchy,” and the definition I’m giving really goes back more than 2,000 years. Oligarchs are those people throughout history who enjoy massive power because they have massive fortunes. Wealth is something that can be used in politics. It is a form of political influence.

And then oligarchy is about the politics of that wealth, its use, and something I call “wealth defense.” Oligarchs are obsessed with defending their fortunes. You’ve got all this money, and one of the things you’re very concerned about is threats to it. Someone is trying to take your fortune, redistribute, and so on.

And I want to add there that I don’t really use “oligarchy” as something which is a kind of regime like a republic is. Oligarchy is a kind of expression of power. It is the use of wealth for wealth’s defense.

Alex Lovit: So as you’re saying, oligarchy as a concept and as a reality dates back prior to at least modern democracy. I think one way to get into the interaction of democracy and oligarchy is to consider oligarchy outside of democracy. If I’m a medieval rich guy, and I just have a bunch of gold coins, then it makes sense for me to build a castle and hire an army and protect that. And I’m using my wealth to defend the wealth. Do I have that basically right?

Jeffrey Winters: Yes. In fact, the core problem of wealth defense is: Who will defend it? And on what terms? And it turns out that in history, unless you have something like the modern state which exists today, which is armed and protects your property and your claim to property, you had to defend it yourself which meant that historically oligarchs have had to be armed. They’ve actually had to be coercive actors. And not just that. They had to rule directly.

And so think of oligarchs as in a very sort of non-state context, one of the first threats that oligarchs faced was horizontally, laterally, from each other. And if you were not armed, you would be overtaken, and all of your wealth would be now taken by someone else. That’s a great way, historically, to get rich: to take over people laterally.

Alex Lovit: One of the things you write about is this idea of the disarming of oligarchs or the taming of oligarchs. So what do they get out of that bargain? Why would I want to give up my castle and my army and direct control over that?

Jeffrey Winters: First of all, there is greater security in having a system of protection instead of doing it yourself. A lot of oligarchs in the ancient world, as the saying goes, didn’t die in bed. They died on battlefields. They died horrible deaths. And so having a system in place that basically protects your property, protects your wealth, and then all you have to do is dominate and control that system to make sure that it works to your benefit, is a much more peaceful life. That certainly is a great benefit.

And also, if you are the richest person, and you also rule, and you are also an armed actor, there’s an enormous amount of focus on you. And that also, historically, was a threat for oligarchs. So it wasn’t just that oligarchs were predatory toward each other, which they certainly were, but they had to deal with uprisings from below. And you knew who to come at with pitchforks and so on. And so there are all kinds of benefits to, as it were, being able to be behind the screen.

Alex Lovit: Some of what you’re writing about historically and in more recent history are examples of government being dominated by a single very wealthy dictator or by a group of oligarchs, but in the U.S., the wealthiest people in the country don’t necessarily directly participate in government.

So Trump is the only billionaire we’ve ever elected president. Forbes lists him as the 319th-richest American, so he’s not quite at the top tier of wealth in this country. So if oligarchs aren’t directly involved in running the government, to what extent is the U.S. still an oligarchy?

Jeffrey Winters: Now we need to talk about how oligarchy then blends with democracy. Let’s define what democracy is first. Think of democracy, in one sense, as a set of important laws and procedures. It is rights of people to participate. It is the right to vote. It is protections of persons. It is the right to mobilize. It is the ability to stand in front of the White House and speak and not be in fear.

Democracy is all of those things. And we have [a lot of] abundance of evidence that when people struggle for things, when they are marginalized and they struggle to be included, that the democratic process is extremely important to be able to achieve those things.

At the same time, we have a system which has all of that participation and is, in some way, representative of the people and what they want, and yet does not represent them at the material level. That same democratic system produces greater wealth concentration than we’ve ever seen.

The explanation for that is that democracy is not just about a set of procedures, rights, institutions, but it’s also when you have oligarchic power in the form of wealth that is able to flow into that system in ways that others in the system don’t have. Oligarchs have a disproportionate kind of power which is unique to them.

And so let me just put it this way: It would look very different to us if we had an idea of one person/one vote but we gave oligarchs a million votes. Suddenly oligarchy and democracy would look very incompatible. But if we have one person/one vote, but in effect oligarchs have the equivalent of a million votes, then we see how it is possible to have both exist simultaneously and not necessarily clash.

Alex Lovit: What are some of the ways that oligarchs can translate their monetary wealth into political power?

Jeffrey Winters: Let’s start with something very simple and obvious, which is campaign finance. In order to be a candidate in the U.S. political system, you have to have resources. And so immediately the question is: Who is financing the system? And what do they get for the role that they play in the financing?

One of the biggest transformations we’ve experienced in that regime is the Citizens United decision in 2010. Prior to Citizens United, we had many, many efforts at what was called campaign finance reform, where we would limit how much any particular individual could give, and tried to level the playing field that way.

What Citizens United does is it eliminates virtually all controls on the role of wealth power in American democracy. That isn’t inevitable. It doesn’t have to be that way. The power of oligarchs directly intervening in the system can be reduced. We just happen to be in a moment of virtually no restrictions on the expression of wealth power in the United States.

Alex Lovit: So you’ve just mentioned Citizens United. Can you give some sense of the impact of that? How has that impacted the scale of political spending and donations in the United States since 2010?

Jeffrey Winters: Well, this most recent election cycle is in some sense, we are now at sort of epic oligarchic power. Let me give you an example: just the presidency. Kamala Harris raised roughly $2 billion, and Trump raised just under 1.5 billion in order to run. More than one-third of Trump’s donations came from three people that is, 500 million of the roughly 1.4 billion that he raised came from Miriam Adelson, 100 million; Timothy Mellon, 150 million; and Elon Musk, round figure 250 million.

Three individuals funded a third of Trump. And on the Democratic side, it was spread more widely, but major oligarchic figures also donated massive amounts of money. So that kind of scale of financing the political process, it’s been going on for a long time, but it really has never been that focused in that few hands to have that much influence.

Alex Lovit: You’re arguing that what oligarchs are trying to do is defend their own wealth, and they’re trying to do that through political influence, including through campaign donations. So why should we believe that Adelson and Mellon and Musk are trying to buy influence for that? Maybe they’re just well-intentioned people with great ideas who happen to have a lot of money.

Jeffrey Winters: We need to understand the way that oligarchs influence the system, and that is not only its politics but the distribution of who has what and who gets what. Let me take one example that is of great interest to oligarchs and has very important implications for inequality in America and the opportunity for wealth concentration, and that is a progressive tax regime.

A progressive tax regime simply says that those least able to pay are in a very low tax bracket, and those most able to pay are in a very high tax bracket which, if we look in the 20th century, especially after the Second World War, the highest tax bracket was in excess of 90 percent.

Now, what is the point of that progressive tax structure? It is actually trying to redistribute resources from those who are most wealthy to distribute them downward in society to create opportunities to try to level the playing field.

Oligarchs don’t want progressive taxation. They don’t want to pay the higher numbers. How do we know? First, they deploy their resources politically to eliminate high tax brackets, to compress the tax system so that it is less progressive.

And nearly all of the change in the tax brackets during the 20th century and now into the 21st century have had almost no impact on the tax bracket of the median American. All of the transformation has been to reduce progressivity in the system, both for oligarchs and for corporations. That is not just happening randomly. Resources are being deployed to make that happen.

Most citizens pay their tax bracket. Oligarchs do not. And then what is the net effect? The net effect is an absolute explosion in wealth inequality in the United States. I mean an explosion almost beyond belief. According to the best data I’ve been able to collect over studying this for 25 years, the liberal democracies in the world today are the most unequal societies perhaps ever to have existed.

And this is puzzling. This is puzzling because why is it that, as we move[d] for the last 250 years into shared power, we could possibly end up with greater inequality in society, and certainly greater wealth concentration in fewer hands, than we’ve ever seen? In a sense, democracy is unable to confront oligarchic power and oligarchy in an effective way, and we end up with something that I call “participatory inequality.”

Participatory inequality is different from all other inequalities that have existed in history. We’ve always had a tremendous amount of inequality, but when it’s under authoritarianism, we’re not surprised. Of course those who are able to dominate and intimidate and shock-and-awe the population, they’re able to grab the vast majority of what there is.

But when you have open participation, and you’re not afraid on any given day that a van is going to pull up and a hood is thrown over your head and no one ever sees you again . . . We live in societies where we don’t have that fear, and yet we have greater inequality than we’ve ever had.

Only an understanding of the expression of wealth power can account for that outcome because it makes no sense that a genuinely empowered people would vote for greater inequality for themselves. It just makes absolutely no sense logically, and it’s not hard to show that the average person has very little power. Did you ever run across this famous piece by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page?

Alex Lovit: Yes. My understanding of that is [that through] pretty sophisticated political science techniques that I don’t fully understand, looking at the marginal effect of high-income individuals on policy versus average Americans.

Jeffrey Winters: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: But you’re the expert here. You tell me.

Jeffrey Winters: Well, yeah. So Ben Page is a colleague of mine and co-author. And what’s very interesting is they write this very political science-y piece in a journal read by political scientists, and yet this piece got them on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, which is sort of public visibility which is very rare for political scientists.

Here’s what they showed. They looked at 1,779 policy decisions in Congress, and they asked a simple question: When the interests of the very wealthy and the average citizen were not aligned, were opposed, how often did the average citizen win? And the answer was: never. I mean not exactly never, but almost never.

And what they concluded was because many times the policy interests of the very, very wealthy and the average citizen align, it appears that there is a great deal of responsiveness to majorities and the average citizen.

But what was so unique about the study they did is that they isolated when the interests diverge. What they showed was that our illusion that the average citizen is a match for the wealth in terms of deploying power in the system, that that illusion is that’s what it is: It’s an illusion. It’s false.

Now, in history, oligarchs don’t always win, and they haven’t always won in the United States. But certainly right now, the power and the wealth concentration of oligarchs is really at a just very, very different level.

Alex Lovit: So democracy works just fine for all kinds of policies except where it comes to the core interests of the oligarchic class, which is to say wealth defense. Can you spell out a little bit how that functions?

So you were mentioning tax policy. I’m looking at a recent Pew poll that says 60 percent of Americans favor raising taxes on high-income people. Similar proportions, about 60 percent, say that they are bothered a lot by the idea that corporations and rich people aren’t paying their fair share of taxes. So what keeps that majority of Americans from just electing a candidate that raises taxes effectively on the oligarchs?

Jeffrey Winters: The first thing you have to do is you have to actually get candidates who support that. But here’s the first obstacle that we run into, and this is where oligarchic power expresses itself first and early in the system. So everybody knows that we’ve got the general election, and they also know that prior to that we have primaries.

What most people aren’t aware of is that prior to that there’s something called a “wealth primary,” and that happens a year or two before anyone tries to actually become a contender in that first round, when the public actually gets to vote.

The wealth primary is when you’re trying to become viable, simply viable. And what you have to do in the wealth primary is you have to attract oligarchic and big money in order just to be in play. And so that means the candidates themselves and what they support things like tax policy get vetted, get filtered early in the process and in a way that isn’t terribly visible.

So that’s just one of many structural things, but let me add there’s another one, and it’s how our mind is played with. So in addition to directly influencing candidates, oligarchs fund think tanks. Those think tanks churn out arguments, policy papers, stuff that filters out into the media, arguing things like “The lower the tax rate on the wealthy, the better off you will be, Citizen.”

So you’re filling people’s minds with the idea that higher taxes on the rich are a really bad thing for you, and there’s no example of this that is more telling than the estate tax. Think tanks managed to turn it into, through a campaign, the “death tax.” It got changed in terms of how people even thought about it and understood it.

A small number of oligarchs, one of them being the Mars family, who no one really knows about . . . The Mars family. I’m talking about Snickers and Milky Ways.

Alex Lovit: I’m a fan of their work.

Jeffrey Winters: Yes. I’m a fan of their work, also, I must admit. But they didn’t like the fact that there is an estate tax which would affect their ability to control their wealth even in death. And they campaigned, through think tanks and so on, to, first, change it to “death tax.” And this was getting into people’s minds and saying, “Oh. You’re taxed in life, and then they tax you even in death. How horrible.”

We may not think something like this matters very much, but what was the result? Thousands upon thousands of people would assemble in rallies and demonstrations to end the estate tax that was never going to affect them and was helping oligarchs. So to go back to your question: It doesn’t matter that there are super majorities in favor of these things. It doesn’t get to the point where it is voted on.

Alex Lovit: Yeah. And in fact, that majority is maybe less super because of the influence on public opinion through think tanks and the various things you’re talking about there.

One thing I want to pick up on is . . . So in the United States political system, which is to say a two-party system, wealthy influence on the Republican Party gets a lot of attention. And in practice, the Republican Party has, in recent history, more often been the party pushing for lower taxes on wealthy individuals.

But if it were only the Republican Party, then oligarchs would be at risk any time the Democratic Party was in power, which does occasionally happen. So I’m wondering: Can you talk about how this system influences both parties and not just the Republican Party?

Jeffrey Winters: So both parties are completely bought and paid for. Completely. Neither party has made a major dent in the trajectory of concentrated wealth and rising inequality in the United States over the last half century. Neither one has.

I sometimes jokingly refer to the Republican Party as organized selfishness and the Democratic Party as organized selfishness with guilt. But apart from that, neither one of these parties has really been fighting for the average household and the average person. And in part, that is reflected in the politics we’re experiencing.

One thing that people need to understand is that the most recent political election cycle isn’t really a victory for the Republicans. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, which might be called “the establishment,” have been completely rejected by a very angry citizenry. And that citizenry has embraced someone I think they view as a disruptor, a disruptor of the status quo which has not worked for them. A fascinating thing about the Trump base is that surveys showed, going back over the last ten years roughly, that many, many of the people who voted for Trump actually were very interested in Bernie Sanders also. And that’s hard for a lot of people to imagine because that doesn’t fit a standard left, right, conservative, progressive kind of model.

But it does fit the idea that there is anger against the establishment, anger against the departments of government, anger against corporations. And that doesn’t mean, by the way, that oligarchs are being negated. No. But it does help us understand the standard democratic-republican politics, which we are in a moment where it seems to be deeply disrupted.

Alex Lovit: So thinking about Trump about him as a disruptor, I agree with you that a lot of people see him in that way, as a wrecking ball to a system that they’re pretty suspicious of. However, in practice, Trump in his first term, his most significant policy accomplishment, at least in terms of legislation, was a large tax cut which disproportionately went to the wealthy, and he’s promising to do that again. How do you understand Trump’s ability to appeal to that kind of disruptive image while continuing to advance the oligarchic agenda?

Jeffrey Winters: I think it’s a great job of talking about one thing and doing something else [laughs]. I think he’s really an amazing showman, and the horizontal conflictual things that he’s able to focus on to get people to get people in society to focus anger towards each other, he’s very, very good at this. I think that explains it. I think if he puts in place a bunch of policies that start to really hurt average citizens in a big way, I don’t think the gap between doing one thing and talking in a different way, I don’t think that’s sustainable over time.

But he did do massive tax cuts. But Americans have been taught and have had it pummeled into their heads that tax cuts for the rich are going to work great for you, and so they think that. And it takes others coming forward Sanders-type candidates and so on to really argue the opposite. And he is genuinely the only candidate, the only figure in the system who focuses relentlessly on the gap between the haves and the have nots and especially the distortions of wealth power.

And I’d say, interestingly he’s made an enormous amount of headway. Bernie Sanders is someone who’s been there forever and has been in complete obscurity for the vast majority of his political career. Why is Bernie Sanders in play now? And I think the answer is there is a significant segment of the American population that is aware of what is going on in terms of distortions of oligarchic power and wealth concentration that results from it. It’s happening.

And let me just point out one other key turning point that makes someone like Sanders viable and his agenda. And that is Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street was so important in so many ways. First, it was the first time in eight decades that there had been a popular mobilization focused on wealth inequality. It had been a long time since there had been a mobilization on that.

Second, it put the idea of the one percent versus the 99 percent into people’s consciousness. And they demonstrated at Wall Street instead of in Washington. Those things changed the conversation. And so if you think of the one-two punch of Citizens United on the one hand and Occupy on the other, it has put a conversation about oligarchy and democracy in play in a way that is quite new. And by the way, we are now having a conversation, nationally and globally, about a wealth tax.

This is new. This is not just income and what tax bracket income, but we’re talking about a percentage on the wealthy themselves. And by the way, we do have a wealth tax already in the United States, but it’s not on the rich. It’s on the average citizens. And that is the tax you pay on your house. That is the core wealth of the average citizen. And we pay a tax on it even though we don’t transact anything. It’s reassessed in value.

So the question becomes, and by the way, another expression of oligarchic power which is so subtle in the system, is that incomes are tracked and traced by the government, and the government knows every penny that you make. But wealth is considered private, except when it’s the average person’s core source of wealth, which is incredibly public. You can look up what the value is of your neighbor’s house and what they paid in taxes, all of that transparency and visibility around the wealth and the incomes of an average person, and all of this nontransparency around an inability to tax the wealth of the very rich.

Those kinds of things, which are just norms in the system, are the result of decades and decades of work, political work to make sure that wealth is well-defended when it is the wealth of the very rich but not when it is the wealth of the average citizen.

Alex Lovit: I’m hearing you say kind of a couple of things here. One is that we’re having a growing conversation as a country and, indeed, as a planet about inequality and, at the same time, looking at the last 50 years, the last 20 years, there’s been a trend of growing wealth inequality in this country. We already talked about Citizens United, some of the changes to the legal structure that are making oligarchic power even more powerful in our politics. Are we headed towards some sort of crisis point?

I mean, you’re talking about the ability for American democracy and oligarchy to coexist throughout our history. Is that going to continue, or are we headed to some kind of tipping point where we’re not going to be able to have those things coexist?

Jeffrey Winters: Well, history is not always kind to those who have concentrated wealth and concentrated power. In some periods in history, it leads to having your head chopped off. Are we heading toward some sort of reckoning? I would say in the major well-known democracies of the world, the long-established democracies, there is an activation from below.

And if I may say, the fact that we are even talking about this means the awareness of these issues is rising, and the visibility of oligarchs in the form of people like Elon Musk but others Soros, Gates, Thiel, and so on the sheer visibility of these actors forces people to say, well, wait a minute, this democracy that I think I’m a part of maybe it’s not democratic, and maybe my investment in it and my willingness to continue it under these terms is less than it might otherwise be.

Alex, I teach a course at Northwestern called Oligarchs and Elites. And I’ve been teaching that course for about, mm, 15 years. And it’s a senior, junior-senior, undergrad seminar. And let me just tell you about the transformation that I’ve seen just in 15 years. When I first started that course, a couple of interesting things happened. One, on day one of the very first class, a student said, “Russia has oligarchs. The United States has rich people.” That was like, at just the rhetorical level, we don’t have oligarchs, okay?

And when we first started that course, it was a bit of a challenge to have students wrap their minds around the idea that there is democracy and oligarchy in the United States. Starting about seven years ago, maybe eight years ago, the challenge for me as the professor was to get any of the students to agree that there was democracy in the system. They were all convinced that anything that mattered was really dominated by wealth and wealth power. And only the stuff that oligarchs don’t care about was left for us as democracy.

Now of course, the sample of my students at Northwestern is not a national sample. But that changing awareness and the delegitimizing of democracy itself is dangerous for democracy if people don’t believe in it anymore. We’ve had conversations now in the United States about whether democracy is even viable anymore. And if you have a mass of people who feel like it’s not working for me, it’s working for the establishment, the willingness to dump it is much higher.

Does that play well for oligarchs? Not necessarily. And crises, in particular, are not good for oligarchs. Oligarchs are at their most powerful during what I call the politics of the ordinary. Their institutional power, their ability to shape and work the system and its outcomes, is greatest when it’s operating normally. Crises are extremely risky for oligarchs and protecting their wealth because protecting their wealth is very reliant on the decisionmakers and what the course of apparatus does and what courts do and so on. So things get very iffy for oligarchs in times of crisis.

Alex Lovit: So there’re a couple of things I want to draw on in there. One is I kind of don’t like this idea that I’m waiting for a crisis, that I’m hoping for a war or a depression. Is there something we can do now to prepare to be ready to seize an opportunity if it arises to disrupt the current system?

Jeffrey Winters: Absolutely. And again, I don’t like the idea of preparing to hope that there might be a chance to implement some of these things. You know, I’m sorry it works that way, but let’s ask, why is the nature of the politics of this like that? And what that speaks to is, first of all, the sheer scale and influence of oligarchic power is so great that ordinary efforts through democratic process and mobilization to challenge it are not terribly effective. And the second reason is it’s deeply structural, which is why disruptions to the structure are those moments of opportunity, okay? So that’s why the politics happens to be like this.

Now with regard to actually preparing, it unfolds in a number of ways. One, there is the battle of the mind and the awareness and the consciousness. That is, you cannot fight that which mystifies you. Clarity about the way things are really working is extremely important. And that’s a conversation that a society or a community has about its politics. So that’s a very important and I thank you, Alex, and your podcast for the role it plays in trying to shape what we know and what we think.

So one of the ways that people have traditionally thought about doing it is just trying to limit the money that someone can deploy. Were we a much stronger democracy than we are, there are actual options that are available to us that we have not really explored. And some of this, by the way, currently sounds a bit unimaginable, but it is very important in society to talk about solutions that seem unreasonable politically in the moment, but it’s important to discuss them, debate them and refine them because many, many deep changes occur in history in moments of rupture, in moments of breaks politically, crises.

And it is very important to have ideas in place and options in place long before the rupture. So I’m just saying that as a preface to what is now going to sound like nutty ideas.

Alex Lovit: [Laughs]

Jeffrey Winters: Of that one and a half or two billion dollars which was just spent by the Presidential campaigns, the overwhelming proportion of that was spent on ads, on airwaves owned by the public. There is no reason why any viable candidate has to spend any money to be on the airwaves. They are our airwaves. Television, radio, satellites such as Starlink, for example, everything that gets to us via the Internet and cable, all of those things are owned by the public. And we license access to those airwaves to companies that privately profit.

There is a requirement that those frequencies that we give companies and even individuals access to via licensing must operate in the public interest. That is already in place as a law, as a rule. And that means we can require that the airwaves not profit from the political cycle by actually facilitate the public’s access to knowledge about candidates. So the biggest component of the cost can be provided free, and it can be regulated that it must be free.

Let me give you another example. Limit all campaigns to four months. You can’t campaign longer than that. If you limit the campaigns and you make things like access to the public airwaves open, now we have actually dramatically decreased the cost, and the ability of oligarchs to distort and influence that has been undermined without doing anything to the oligarchs themselves necessarily. So there are things we could do that would change the nature of money and cost in politics.

Now in the end, the greatest antidote to oligarchic power is much more even wealth sharing. And that is actually what people thought democracy was going to produce, not absolute equality, but democracy was supposed to even out life opportunities, life chances, and we do that by policies that intervene in changing people’s lives and outcomes. That’s what it was supposed to do. It hasn’t done that, obviously, and that’s one of the things that I work on a lot in my past work and in the book I’m writing now. Why is it that what we end up with is domination through democracy rather than overcoming domination through democracy? Why is it that it works that way?

Alex Lovit: So you’re talking about this increasing conversation about oligarchy and that potentially posing some risks. I want to read a quote to you from Jane Mayer in her book “Dark Money.” She quotes you as saying, “It is unusual for those wielding plutocratic power in America to exercise it directly. Direct rule by the super-rich invites a dangerous amount of scrutiny.” But then that book becomes a bestseller, which is kind of inconvenient for people trying to avoid scrutiny. And now Elon Musk is kind of even more public about his attempts to translate money into political power.

Are oligarchs getting bolder, and is that exposing them to more risk?

Jeffrey Winters: Yeah. So I describe the period we’re in as in-your-face oligarchy. Brazen. Visible. And I can assure you that there are very, very wealthy, very powerful people who are made very nervous by this kind of visibility and this kind of exposure because whatever illusions people may cling to about how democratic the system is, it’s hard to sustain those ideas and the legitimacy of democracy itself when you’re faced with the clear visible expression of oligarchic power by a few very visible people.

And it hasn’t gone well for oligarchs in the past. We had a robber baron gilded age when the prominence of particular actors in the system, Rockefellers and Carnegies and others, which actually provoked and played a role in the progressive era that came after it and mobilized a kind of politics against these people who were distorting politics. So first of all, it is very important to remember that oligarchs are not the whole story. Mobilization matters, what people do, how angry people are, and at whom they are angry matters tremendously.

And so we do have figures in the system today who are agitating against millionaires and billionaires, you know [laughs]. And the discourse is changing. So I think it’s risky for them. It’s also, may I say, unnecessary, unnecessary in this sense: In order to have your oligarchic interests taken care of, advanced, your agenda of wealth defense well taken care of, you don’t have to actually be this visible. You can actually let politicians that you fund, limit, I don’t want to say control but certainly constrain, let them be the public visible face. That actually works much better for oligarchs in the end.

So what is currently happening is unnecessary for them and probably detrimental to their long-term political interests.

Alex Lovit: So why are they doing it? What motivates this era of in-your-face oligarchy if it’s not useful for wealth defense?

Jeffrey Winters: A lack of fear. [Laughter]. They’re not afraid. And you might say why should they be? And my counterargument would be, you need to read more history to understand that this is not a single linear trajectory. There are actions and reactions, and some of those reactions in the past have been very detrimental to the interests of wealth defense. Some have been revolutionary, some not as extreme as that but certainly highly redistributive.

I think we are living in an era of people seeing no downside to this kind of politics. It’s a risky game to play.

Alex Lovit: Well, so that’s maybe a prescription for oligarchs is read more history if you want to be more effective. Let me close with maybe an unfair question: Do you have any advice for what the average American can do? And it’s an unfair question because the way these conversations go in this podcast is I say, oh, we’ve just talked about some giant systemic problem, but is there something –? If I’m a listener to this podcast, I might be thinking, well, geez, that seems like I’m not a billionaire. Is there anything the average citizen can do to push back on this?

Jeffrey Winters: My advice to the average citizen would be, as you think about what the source is of your dissatisfaction with how the system is working, as you think about your precarity, your insecurity in the system, and as you get angry and frustrated about it, try to focus less on your fellow non-rich people who are sharing your precarity and think more about in what ways are your politics and the system distorted such that it’s not working out well for you, your family, young people.

We have a situation now where the delay in leaving the home, the delay in first mortgage, the delay in first child, and so on, the delay in marriage, all of those things are happening in part because the system is much more economically, materially precarious for the average citizen. And one of the questions I think people need to ask themselves is, if we are a moment where we are approaching trillionaire status, if we have just a handful of people who commandeer tremendous amounts of wealth and were unable to distribute that, what affect does that have on your life and the future of your family and the people you care about?

I would say think long and hard on that and orient your politics toward making sure democracy works for you and people at your level in society.

Alex Lovit: Well, wise words, Jeffrey Winters, thank you for joining me on The Context.

Jeffrey Winters: Thank you very much, Alex.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake, Jr., and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our Director of Communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine, Olaore, and Maxine Thomas. We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.

In the meantime, visit our website, Kettering.org, to learn more about the Foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at TheContext@Kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or tell a friend about us. I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a Senior Program Officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.

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