Is the United States Becoming and Oligarchy?

While the United States still has the political trappings of a democracy, economically, it seems rapidly headed toward becoming an oligarchy where wealth and power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the few.  Not since the Gilded Age have we seen such extremes in wealth and and such concentrated attacks on safety and environmental protection regulations. Such attacks are, of course are motivated so that the few can amass even more wealth even as average citizens suffer physically and economically. As a column in the New York Times notes, this is NOT the model that the Founding Fathers envisioned.  Instead, they favored a political and economic system where "the greatest happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained."  This concept could not be further than the model pushed by the Trump/Pence regime and today's GOP which favors the few over the many.   To win in November, 2020 - and November 2019 here in Virginia - Democrats need to push the vision of the Founders and rebut Trump's efforts to label them all as socialists (except Bernie Sanders, who outright states he's a socialist).  Here are column excerpts:

Pete Buttigieg, who’s shown an impressive knack for putting matters well in these early days of the 2020 presidential race, nailed it recently when Chuck Todd of NBC asked him about capitalism. Of course I’m a capitalist, he said; America “is a capitalist society.”

But, he continued: “It’s got to be democratic capitalism.”

Mr. Buttigieg said that when capitalism becomes unrestrained by democratic checks and impulses, that’s no longer the kind of capitalism that once produced broad prosperity in this country. “If you want to see what happens when you have capitalism without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia,” he said. “It turns into crony capitalism, and that turns into oligarchy.”

[H]is rhetoric reminds us of a crucial point: There is, or should be, a democratic element to capitalism — and an economic element to how we define democracy.

After all, oligarchy does have an economic element to it; in fact, it is explicitly economic. Oligarchy is the rule of the few, and these few have been understood since Aristotle’s time to be men of wealth, property, nobility, what have you.

But somehow, as the definition of democracy has been handed down to us over the years, the word has come to mean the existence and exercise of a few basic rights and principles. The people — the “demos” — are imbued with no particular economic characteristic. This is wrong. Our definition of democracy needs to change.

Democracy can’t flourish in a context of grotesque concentration of wealth. This idea is neither new nor radical nor alien. It is old, mainstream and as American as Thomas Jefferson.

I invoke Jefferson for a reason. Everyone knows how he was occupying his time in the summer of 1776; he was writing the Declaration of Independence. But what was he up to that fall? He was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and he was taking the lead in writing and sponsoring legislation to abolish the commonwealth’s laws upholding “entail” (which kept large estates within families across generations) and primogeniture.
He believed, as the founders did generally, that excess inherited wealth was fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

They were most concerned with inherited wealth, as was the Scottish economist Adam Smith, whom conservatives invoke constantly today but who would in fact be appalled by the propagandistic phrase “death tax” — in their time, inherited wealth was the oppressive economic problem.

They saw clearly the link between democratic health and general economic prosperity. Here is John Adams, not exactly Jefferson’s best friend: All elements of society, he once wrote, must “cooperate in this one democratical principle, that the end of all government is the happiness of the People: and in this other, that the greatest happiness of the greatest Number is the point to be obtained.” “Happiness” to the founders meant economic well-being, and note that Adams called it “democratical.”

So, yes, democracy and the kind of economic inequality we’ve seen in this country in recent decades don’t mix.

A number of scholars have made these arguments in recent years, notably Ganesh Sitaraman in his book “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution.” All that work has been vitally important. But now that some politicians are saying it, we can finally have the broad national conversation we’ve desperately needed for years.

Bernie Sanders has proposed an inheritance tax that the founders would love, and Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax of which they’d surely approve. But you don’t have to be a supporter of either of those candidates or their plans to get behind the general idea that great concentration of wealth is undemocratic.

Policies built around this idea will not turn America into the Soviet Union or, in the au courant formulation, Venezuela. They will make it the nation the founders intended. And this, as Mr. Buttigieg’s words suggest, is how Democratic candidates should answer the socialism question (with the apparent exception of the socialist Mr. Sanders). No, I’m a capitalist. And that’s why I want capitalism to change.