Episode 127 - Oligarchy

Transcript

David: 0:13

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:16

The podcast where two philosophy professors and longtime friends connect big ideas to everyday life.

David: 0:23

I am David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:24

And I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:26

We are witnessing an unprecedented overtaking of democracy by oligarchs since Trump's reelection.

Ellie: 0:33

And in fact, Bernie Sanders is currently on a nationwide tour. He's going around speaking to crowds on a campaign against oligarchy. He calls it the Stop Oligarchy tour.

David: 0:45

This is coming on the heels of important remarks that former President Joe Biden made to the American people in his farewell address to the nation on January 15th. He said, this is a quote from that speech. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms. Now that claim very quickly led to a surge of searches for the word oligarchy on Google, suggesting that even though the vast majority of Americans voted for an oligarch, the vast majority of Americans did not even know what an oligarch, let alone what oligarchy means.

Ellie: 1:30

Speaking about things that have happened recently, but not like super recently, really in the past few years. There were 150 billionaire families who spent almost $2 billion in support of presidential and congressional candidates in the 2024 election cycle. So 150 billionaire families put almost 2 billion into the last election cycle. And the ultra richest segments of the US control a greater portion of wealth than they did even during the gilded age. The top five billionaires alone today own more than a trillion dollars total in wealth.

David: 2:06

Yeah. And the numbers are just staggering, right? And not only are we talking about billions, now we're talking about trillions. That it really adds a magnitude that I think is very hard for many of us to  comprehend.

Ellie: 2:16

Oh, yeah.

David: 2:17

Right? Like the jump from M to B to T, and you see how those magnitudes, when they become descriptors of the amount of wealth that people in power have. It tells you something about the values that those people are gonna bring to governance. And not only does Trump, at least as of the time of this recording, have literally the richest man on earth leading some of the most aggressive changes to our government systems ever witnessed in history. I'm here thinking about Musk, who leads and does not lead the Department of Government efficiency.

Ellie: 2:52

Depending on what's most convenient for the administration given time.

David: 2:54

Yes, exactly. Which in itself is really interesting, right? Like the fact that authority and leadership is quite unclear, but it's all determined through wealth. But aside from the fact that you have Musk in the White House, Trump's cabinet overall is the richest American presidential cabinet in history.

Ellie: 3:13

No billionaires in my view, nobody should be a billionaire. That's a different story. Maybe we'll do a little billionaires episode too, but we'll be talking a lot about billionaires today. Okay, so.

David: 3:21

Eat the billionaires.

Ellie: 3:26

So what is oligarchy question important to get clear on here at the beginning of the episode? Technically oligarchy means rule of the few. If we go back to its ancient Greek etymology, but it usually gets used as a synonym for another word with ancient Greek roots Plutocracy. Plutocracy technically means authority of the wealthy. And when I started researching this episode, I was wondering why oligarchy usually refers to rule by the wealthy. I was wondering like, should we actually be using the term plutocracy instead of oligarchy? And I thought maybe the fact that we use those terms interchangeably in our day had to do with capitalism. That is the fact that rule of the few in our day usually means rule of the wealthy because the wealthy are the most powerful in our society. The ones who have the authority to be the few who get to rule.

David: 4:17

Yeah, always in the minority.

Ellie: 4:20

Well, yeah, one 1% or 0.01%, but it turns out that oligarchy actually has effectively meant rule by the few, since at least Aristotle. So this association predates capitalism. Aristotle defines oligarchy as having in view the interest of the wealthy in book six of the politics. I know you're gonna return us to the politics a little bit later as well.

David: 4:41

Yeah, and so we'll put a pin on Aristotle for sure, but I like that you begin by asking the question of what is oligarchy. Equally important, I think is the question, what exactly is an oligarch. So who counts as a member of this oligarchy? Because the answer is not just somebody who is rich, who has access to power. When we're talking about oligarchs, we're talking about people who are filthy rich. So for example, the political scientist, Gordon Arlen, who has written about oligarchy, says that an oligarch is a member, as you mentioned earlier, of the 1% of the 1%, right? So we're talking about a very slim segment of the American population. So if you are a millionaire. You are not an oligarch, right? You need to move into the bees and the ts of the billions and the trillions. And in fact, Arlen says you need to be in the $60 million range and be a candidate for Forbes listing of the 400 wealthiest Americans to really be in the zone of oligarchy and beyond having that amount of wealth. Usually when we talk about an oligarch, we mean a person who is filthy rich and who uses their wealth to gain discretionary influence over politics and government. And they do so through lobbying, through Super pacs, through all kinds of generous donations to the right people. So it's people who are weaponizing their power to try to take charge of the political process and the mechanism of democracy.

Ellie: 6:18

One of the most insidious aspects of oligarchy, I would say, is the idea that just because you're good at making money or retaining money, or both, you would be good at government as well. This is something that the book Oligarchy in America by Luke Winslow mentions. Winslow suggests that a characteristic of oligarchy is the belief that extreme wealth is equal to fitness in all domains, including government. Wow. Not like we're seeing this at all in 2025. Right? Like the application of marketplace principles and even beyond that, just like an idolization of extreme wealth to all aspects of human life characteristically in the case of the administration right now, government, and related to this, Oxford of America recently laid out three oligarchical moves to watch for in Trump's administration. The first is a massive upward redistribution of wealth from everyday people, chiefly through a massive tax giveaway to the ultra rich and to corporations. Newsflash, poor people who voted for Trump, he was never interested in helping you at all. And indeed, these massive tax cuts are something he's already pushing. Second, cutting away public programs that we all rely upon and further than that, privatizing programs to give them to profit making corporations. Third, attacking the rules and referees that protect ordinary people from excessive corporate and monopoly power.

David: 7:47

I take it that these three dangers that we should be expecting from the Trump administration in the upcoming years. The tax giveaways, the privatization of common goods and the elimination of basic legal protections, right for the average citizen are going to create an even more striking imbalance, not only in wealth distribution in the United States, but also in political representation. Because one of the effects of these cuts and giveaways and eliminations is that they make political participation by those who are members of the lowest socioeconomic strata of society. More and more difficult as the wealthy amass not only economic, but also political power.

Ellie: 8:32

Today we are talking about oligarchy.

David: 8:35

What are the dangers of consolidating government in the hands of a wealthy few?

Ellie: 8:40

How has America's sharp turn toward oligarchy been prepared by generations of politics?

David: 8:46

And how can we resist Oligarchical rule?

Ellie: 8:55

David, the book I found most helpful in researching this topic is called The Hidden History of American Oligarchy by Tom Hartmann, who's a progressive journalist. And in this book, Hartmann tracks the moves that we find in Oligarchy's in general, including the ones that we're finding today, as well as the history of oligarchy, as the title suggests in America. Saying specifically that there have been three times in American history that democracy has been badly corrupted by oligarchy. First is in the South, before the Civil War. The invention of the cotton gin led to southern plantation owners buying up all kinds of small farms and creating these mega plantations that were sustained by the labor of enslaved people. This then led to the Civil War. In that case, the defeat of the South led to the restoration of American democracy. No longer was oligarchy threatening to take over at a national scale, but still, the history of southern oligarchy and the legacy of the plantation owners continues to be one of the main reasons in Hartmann's view that the South today has such intense income inequality, bad education, outcomes, poverty, and so on and so forth. Second was in the Gilded Age toward the end of the 18 hundreds through the 1920s, where robber Barons seized control of much of the federal government leading to huge income inequality in the 1920s, and a very popular fascist movement that then collapsed with the great depression. Both of those two times when American national politics have been threatened with oligarchy, the federal government has succeeded in not being overtaken by oligarchy. Now we are in a third period of American history where democracy has been badly corrupted by oligarchy, and it remains to be seen what will come of it. He says that this current rise of oligarchy began in 1971 when a tobacco oligarch named Louis Powell laid out a plan in this memo for basically corrupting American democracy and having oligarchs take over.

David: 11:01

I love that there was a memo about it.

Ellie: 11:03

Yeah, legit memo. Then in the early 1980s, especially due to a sort of Cook Brothers inspired libertarianism, the GOP has opposed virtually every form of government function and applied libertarian marketplace principles to the federal government thinking, you know, like the kind of small government Reagan administration type of approach. And this has been cemented with the Trump administration. And so Hartmann suggests we are in a really critical moment right now. Democracy has already been badly corrupted by oligarchy, and the question is whether democracy will be restored or whether it will morph into tyranny.

David: 11:42

So it's really great news for me to hear, 'cause I have not read this book, so I wanna hear more about this.

Ellie: 11:47

Great. What's great news about this, David?

David: 11:49

No, no, no, no. It's great news that he identifies the beginning of this third wave of Oligarchical danger, that he dates it to the 1970s because I hear a lot of people talking about oligarchy in America as if it just like magically began with Trump, without thinking about the history of the last few decades, especially the role of reaganomics and trickle down economics as a maybe slightly different form of oligarchy, but still oligarchy nonetheless. And so I'm curious about how Hartmann talks about the democratic precedence we have had since the 1970s, and whether in his views they are there to stop the tide of oligarchy or whether in some ways they are just oligarchy by different means.

Ellie: 12:34

Yeah, he doesn't get into this in too great detail, but he does suggest that a large minority of democratic politicians have gotten into bed with oligarchs. The rise of oligarchy begins, he suggests, with the very wealthy, acquiring political power by buying influence with elected officials. And so we see that, of course, on both sides of the aisle and have for decades now. He talks specifically about changes to campaign finance laws, as well as things like the 2010 Citizens United decision, which effectively gave corporations personhood.

David: 13:08

Which happened under Obama,

Ellie: 13:10

Yeah, when we had a little bit more separation between the executive and judicial branches. But in any case, also he talks extensively about how our system of debt, especially medical and student debt, keeps people stuck in a system, pretty much of debt espionage, where they are not able to buy houses, start a family, et cetera, because they're so burdened by their medical and student debt. And I think, you know, even in spite of supposedly well-meaning political actors, more of whom have been Democrat than Republican on Hartmann's view, I would agree. Although there's bad actors on both sides, the system itself is really the problem here. Right. And there definitely hasn't been enough effort to stem these tides of rising oligarchy by either political party in recent decades.

David: 13:58

Yeah, and I think it's important for us to recognize that it's not about the morality or immorality of particular actors, as you said, Ellie, it's not about good actors on the left and bad ones exclusively on the right, although sometimes there really are individual bad actors that make a big difference. And the one that you mentioned was this character Louis Powell and this memo that was created for how to bring down American democracy for the sake of protecting oligarchical wealth. I'm curious about what that memo by this person that I would call a bad actor said.

Ellie: 14:33

So a few of the things that Powell identifies. Are building think tanks to influence public dialogue, building or buying a massive media machine, getting quote, liberal stories and histories out of primary school textbooks and courses, and capturing university political science and economics departments. And obviously Louis Powell wasn't being like pro oligarchy, but he was a conservative thinker who effectively helped establish the system of oligarchy as we currently see it. The rise of the propaganda media machine was something I was really invested in while reading this book because certainly we've seen the pipeline that many people have been pulled into, whether it's like the YouTube rabbit hole to increasingly like bizarre alt right accounts, or even just like straight up Fox News, which is,

David: 15:25

Or Twitter being literally owned by a particular oligarch.

Ellie: 15:29

For sure. Well, and Facebook as well. And yeah, I think Fox News obviously bears a huge responsibility for the rise of oligarchy and straight up fascism in the US and the idea that we can't trust news networks anymore. So there were also changes to laws that were signed by Bill Clinton that allowed large corporations to own local news outlets, including radio and television. And so that's where you get the rise of Rupert Murdoch and people like this that enables the mass media propaganda machine that we have nowadays.

David: 16:03

Yeah, and that's why Monopoly and oligarchy go hand in hand. In fact, some people have said that Monopoly is the economic version of oligarchy, or that oligarchy is the political version of Monopoly, where both have in common the concentration of power in a few hands, and you could see why this memo, for example, really sounds like a very effective, how to become an oligarch in three quick steps, right? Like you take control of a medium machine. You try to consolidate wealth, you take charge of important academic departments to create for yourself a small class of intellectuals that serve your interests, and you're kind of set to go. There is a recipe here that's easy to follow.

Ellie: 16:46

And more than that, to establish a system of oligarchy that takes over, ultimately democracy. Because democracy and oligarchy really have different meanings and different functions. Hartmann talks about how democracy is government of by and for the people, whereas oligarchy is government of buy and for the wealthy, right? And so Hartmann suggests that oligarchy often collapses under its own weight. It implodes and or it gets checked by resistance to it. But if it doesn't do that, then as I mentioned earlier, it morphs into tyranny. And here's how oligarchy takes down democracy. He says there are first three requirements, so these are like the preconditions. Initially, we've got control of or substantial influence over a critical portion of media. Second is the legalization of bribery of elected public officials. We've seen that in recent decades with some changes to election laws and laws around lobbying and third control of most critical parts of court systems. That was obviously something that. Trump and his team were really striving for in his first term, and now all the more, so now they've like got that in the bag basically here in his second term. After those three preconditions are met, there's a fourth element, which is when oligarchy is established and tyranny begins, there's a seizure of executive power.

David: 18:08

And I think that's where we already are actually this early into the Trump second administration because one of the things that is leading towards what seems to be an inevitable constitutional crisis is Trump's hyper expansion of the power of the executive and the seizure of executive power and the using of executive power to assert the balance of power, and especially to take powers away, not just from the judicial branch, but also from the legislative branch. So if you think, for example, about the cutting of funding to universities with Columbia being the most televised example, one of the real problems with that, it's that questions about government spending go through Congress, not through the executive. So here what we are seeing is an executive overreach that is tipping the balances away from checks and balances towards a tyranny of the executive.

Ellie: 18:59

Yeah, and Hartmann compares what we're currently seeing in the US to the rise of the Hungarian oligarch, Victor Orban. Starting in 2010 where Orban took over the conventionally conservative political party, which was comparable to America's GOP, with the aim of restoring Christian purity and promising as one Trump advisor claimed. I'm reading here from Hartmann. Promising to make Hungary great again. He had big campaign rallies. He promised to build a wall across the entirety of Hungarian southern border, which has mostly happened. His party politicians altered the constitution to legislate gerrymandering and voter suppression. They've rewritten elementary school textbooks to say that dark skinned refugees entering the country are a threat because multiculturalism is a problem.

David: 19:47

In in a textbook? Oh my gosh.

Ellie: 19:49

And he locked up thousands of refugee children in cages.

David: 19:54

Yeah. When I said earlier that it seems to be following a recipe, what I mean by that is that it seems like something that can be repeated in different contexts by tapping into similar fears and similar paranoias producing similar effects. Right? It's kind of striking how similar the Victor Orban policies and the Trump discourse have been even to, to that level of granularity, like the building of the wall, the targeting of refugees and immigrants, the challenging of basic information in textbooks, so on and so forth.

Ellie: 20:29

It's been clear for a while now that Trump is not just a bumbling loser with all kinds of wild ideas, but that his administration is very much following a playbook, and this really drove it home for me all the more.

David: 20:46

Overthink is a self-supporting independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistants a fair wage. Given the many kinds of governments that existed in ancient Greece, Greek philosophers wanted to know which form of government is the most conducive to the good life? Is it the democracy of the Athenians? The oligarchy of the Spartans or the tyrannical rule practiced in places like Corinth? Or is there perhaps some other more ideal alternative system of governance that has not yet materialized in any one place? Now, Plato answered this question idealistically by creating his own political utopia in the dialogue, the Republic, where he envisions a society that is unified but hierarchical, and where the rulers live communally without private property.

Ellie: 21:56

Yikes on the hierarchy, although at least Plato is ahead of his time when he argued that men and women are equally capable of participating in political life and holding office, and thus that they should receive the same formation or education.

David: 22:08

Yeah, and I guess also equally capable of maintaining those social hierarchies that define life in the Republic, but that is Plato's vision. Now, his pupil Aristotle gives a completely different answer to the question of which political form of organization is most conducive to eudaimonia. In his book, the Politics, Aristotle gives us some clues as to what his ideal society would look like. He says it would be a society where every citizen holds office, so nobody is left out of political representation. Every citizen is virtuous and has cultivated the right moral and ethical dispositions. And every citizen is a property owner because Aristotle kind of loves people who own property in his political and in his ethical writings. But immediately after laying out this basic blueprint for an ideal political utopia, Aristotle says. I acknowledge that this is highly unrealistic and the task of a political philosopher or a legislator should not really be to pedal political utopias. The task of a political philosopher is to think concretely and pragmatically about what forms of government might work under different circumstances in the non-ideal world that we inhabit. And so the core of Aristotle's political theory in the politics is really about thinking about the pros and cons of different ways of organizing political life. Now, following the lead of his teacher, Plato, he differentiates between three types of government. There is rule of one, which is kingship or monarchy rule of the few, which is aristocracy. And rule of the many. Now we call rule of the Many Democracy, but Aristotle actually uses a different and kind of confusing term for rule by the many, which is Constitution. And although he admits that all of these can work under different political circumstances, he also warns that each of these forms of rule can always devolve into a perverse version of themselves really. So for example, think about rule of the one. Aristotle says Rule of the one can work if, for example, you live in a community where you just get so lucky that you find that ideal person who is not only really smart about governance, but is also absolutely virtuous. So if you happen to find like the diamond of political theory, maybe you do want that one person who is more virtuous than everybody and more intelligent than everybody else to be their leader. But in reality rule by the one can very quickly turn into its evil opposite, which is tyranny. Now rule by the many, which he calls Constitution, again, can sometimes work if we are able to find a collective mass, a majority that displays what Aristotle sometimes refers to as a kind of collective wisdom, right? If the crowd. Is more intelligent than the sum of its parts, then something like a Democratic, constitutional form can work for that political community. But when that's not the case, constitution is quite dangerous because that's when it can break down into what Aristotle himself calls democracy. And so democracy for Aristotle is what happens when constitutional governments break down or go down the wrong path.

Ellie: 25:51

I knew that Aristotle wasn't a huge democracy fan, but I didn't realize that he associated it explicitly with like this bad path of the better form of government, I thought he just like thought it was worse than aristocracy or something.

David: 26:04

Yeah, so both. But yeah, democracy is the perversion of Constitution and his worry about democracy really is that the masses, being both poor and uneducated, are always vulnerable to pandering by charismatic leaders, which can lead to the ruin of the polis. And so here we see how rule by the one can become tyranny and how rule of the many can become democracy, which are the evil twins of each of them. And he makes a similar argument about rule by the few, which is aristocracy. Now, the term aristocracy comes from the Greek root aristoi, which means best persons. And Aristotle believes that a form of aristocracy can avoid some of the problems that plague rule by the one and rule by the many. If the aristoi, you know, those best persons who are these elite group of people in power can manage to exercise political rule for the sake of the common good. In fact, Aristotle himself seems to prefer a kind of government that is somewhat of a mix between constitution and aristocracy. So it's somewhere between the two. And the way in which it's often described in the secondary literature is that Aristotle wants a political form of government where you have a very robust middle class that is constituted by wealth possessing individuals who are committed to living virtuously, but again, who being middle class also are property owners. That's the kind of golden mean that he's after.

Ellie: 27:46

Dude, it's so wild because I feel like never has aristocracy sounded appealing to me until you're describing it as rule by the best people and including a strong middle class. I'm just thinking like by that definition, we could use a little bit more of that today because we're literally governed by the worst people. But were governed by people so bad that Aristotle's definition of aristocracy is currently appealing to me. That's terrifying. And I know also, you know, when the US government was first founded, there were debates that people had about whether we should be governed by what would've been considered the best people, of course what constitutes best as open for debate, versus whether people should just be taken from kind of the average populace?

David: 28:28

No, that's exactly right. And Aristotle says, in my philosophy, the best is defined as a combination of having wealth and being virtuous. So you truly do have to be a moral agent, like of good moral fiber, but you do have to be a member of this robust middle class.

Ellie: 28:47

But why do you have to have wealth like being virtuous? Great all for it, but why do they have to be middle class property owners? I mean, depending on the, I guess the secondary literature interpretation, and either way have wealth.

David: 29:00

So this is a really good question, and the answer in short is that Aristotle does link virtue and wealth in his ethical writings. He says that one needs to have property and be well off in order to have leisure time to be liberated from the demands of manual, labor, which is what you need. That leisure time in order to cultivate your virtual. And so it's as if the liberation from labor becomes a precondition for the attainment of virtuosity,

Ellie: 29:33

Hmm. Which is very different from amassing capital. Like that's not, somebody who has leisure time would be in this economy a most a millionaire. Like you wouldn't need to be a billionaire. And in fact, I think Aristotle would condemn every living billionaire for not being virtuous, but.

David: 29:51

Very much so. But the point still remains that in Aristotle's ethical philosophy, if you are poor, it sort of follows that you probably don't have a good moral character, which is why. Aristotle is very much not just a philosopher of like the middle in the sense of the golden mean, but a philosopher of the middle class all around. He does have kind of negative views of people who are poor, which is why he does not like rule by the demos because he defines the demos as the many who are poor.

Ellie: 30:25

Well, and it may depend too on what we're talking about in terms of middle class, I, I would hesitate to be anachronistic because Aristotle is not living in a capitalist time. Right. And so the question of wealthy versus poor versus middle class, I worry might be a little bit anachronistic. Which isn't to say that your point about like him suggesting that we need wealth is wrong. Like you said, you're taking that from the politics because I'd also be curious about maybe how education links in. But anyway. Okay.

David: 30:50

Yeah, we certainly do not want to anachronistically project a modern form of economic production onto antiquity. But the point here really is that. Aristotle recognized already in the fourth century, BCE, that there is a danger whenever you have rule by the few, by the aristoi because there is always this very unstable connection between wealth and power that can be ruinous for the state. Because ruled by the best individuals can devolve into its own opposite, which is what Aristotle calls oligarchy. So oligarchy is the denaturing of aristocracy, and oligarchy happens specifically when we equate best persons with wealthy persons. And those wealthy persons start ruling the state based on their own private interest, and they start allowing their values, which are always about amassing money, about controlling power to take over political life. And that is what brings about the collapse of the polis.

Ellie: 32:03

And that is what we are seeing now in the US that the values of our oligarchs, many of whom are technocrats, many of whom are bigots, all of whom? Many of whom are free market capitalists and libertarians, their values are infiltrating government and they're fundamentally undemocratic values in my view. I already mentioned one way that this happens through billionaire oligarchs influencing who is in government, but also in terms of oligarchs themselves being in government positions with the power to shape the political landscape in disproportionate ways. When we're talking about Trump's billionaire stacked cabinet and administration, this is what we're talking about.

David: 32:45

Yeah, correct. And the political theorist that I mentioned earlier, Gordon Arlen points out that we can find an Aristotle, some really interesting resources to critique modern day oligarchic takeover. Especially because Aristotle leans on the Greek term pleonexia, to articulate this worry of what happens when these rich people just start controlling the government. Pleonexia refers to a vice. It is the insatiable desire for wealth that characterizes rich people and filthy rich people. You could translate it as greed, as avarice, as covetousness. You know, as with all Greek roots, it's kind of a combination of the three. It's just this desire for more and more and more wealth. And when you have the rich in power governing, without virtue, without an appreciation of the common good and solely with an eye to advancing their own fiduciary and financial interests. Aristotle says their starts spreading throughout the body politic, almost like a fungus, and before you know it, the whole city starts suffering from collective  pleonexia. And the way that I read Aristotle, the problem with oligarchy is not just that it leads to the spread of  pleonexia, but it is that it weirdly transforms pleonexia in our eyes from a vice into a virtue, and I think that's what really puts political life in jeopardy.

Ellie: 34:15

Wow.

David: 34:17

And I think this is exactly what we're seeing under Trump, this rampant and unapologetic  pleonexia becoming official government policy where the values of the super rich become law. Just think about DOGE. We mentioned that earlier, the Department of Government efficiency. The main idea behind DOGE is that the government should be a hundred percent efficient, where efficiency is understood as cutting public services and eliminating goods that people currently enjoy. And that's because that conception of efficiency is a value in the world of businessmen and technocrats. But now it's becoming a political value that guides official government policy at the federal level.

Ellie: 35:05

Yeah, Hartmann talks about this. He says that Republican and libertarian oligarchs believe absolutely in the magic of the free market, but that magic has to do with the logic of supply and demand, which involves a lot of exposure to risk. Whereas government's literal job is to anticipate and protect its citizens from risk. And so the free market and the government just have different jobs and applying the principles of the former to the latter is disastrous. He talks in particular about the American federal government's response to COVID-19

David: 35:40

Mm.

Ellie: 35:40

And the way that South Korea had a super different response that actually came out of an American playbook that was created under the Obama administration. That's called the Pandemic Playbook, which Obama's administration had left for the Trump team. That included things like. Early nationwide testing, investing in virus test kits, you know, to allow for that. PPE, et cetera, et cetera. And the Trump administration instead basically was like, well, let's just see what happens. Test kits then become extraordinarily difficult to find, which drives up the price, enriching oligarchs, and so on and so forth. And so you end up with oligarchs getting richer and the average citizen. Okay, yeah, we got those $600 checks. So, maybe we didn't all necessarily get poorer, although many, many people did, but many people died because of this. So many citizens died because Trump allowed this logic of the free market to be his playbook for the Covid to 19 response, rather than letting the government actually take charge.

David: 36:46

And the reason that they don't let the government take charge or see that as an overstep on the part of government is also because of their social Darwinist tendencies of thinking that let the strong survive and those who are weak and don't make it is just because they didn't have what it took to make it in the competitive marketplace. Whether that's the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of like literal goods and services or the marketplace of survival vis-a-vie pandemic. And so it's a complete disregard for life, which is why some people have described this capitalist social darwinist ideology as a cult of death because they often celebrate death, the death of others, because it becomes almost by reflection, a proof of the fact that they, the survivors were the ones who merited to go on.

Ellie: 37:36

Yeah. And one of the things that has been most surprising to me about Trump's getting elected for a second term is the fact that he is just so shameless about all of this, not only about death, but also about just simple things. Even like in his first election cycle, bragging about not paying taxes, saying it's because I'm smart. And so this discussion of  pleonexia is really helpful here because I think that's absolutely right. What's actually happened. I thought this had already happened under capitalism, but I guess it's happening even more and more. There's a spread of the value of sheer greed.

David: 38:10

And I think going back to Aristotle's theory can help us name that kind of like what, how did you call it? That shamelessness or that lack of interest, even in seemingly legitimate. Because Aristotle talks about the difference between the person who is incontinent, meaning the person who can't help themselves but be bad, and also the self-indulgent person, which is even worse. The self-indulgent person is the person who does bad and believes that they're entitled to do bad. And so I think with the current administration, what we are seeing is oligarchy not just as incontinence in this moral sense of the term, but oligarchy as self-indulgence, where you have oligarchs who are violating basic principles of communal life, but feeling as if not only they're entitled to that, but that in doing so, they are proving their grit and their superiority to others.

Ellie: 39:28

We've talked about how oligarchy can seize power from democracy, and when it does so it implodes or gets destroyed. In his book, Hartmann identifies a number of ways that oligarchy can morph into tyranny. And the first step, David, this was so depressing for me to hear the first step is lies. Related to that tyrants, he says, modify the very language of a culture. They see language as a key mechanism of control. This is something that Newt Gingrich wrote about Influentially in 1990, and that has been part of the GOP playbook ever since. I'm thinking of that list of all of the words that the administration is targeting. Anything that uses these words.

David: 40:08

Don't say gay bills.

Ellie: 40:10

Like woke obviously, but even like pregnant person, if you have a grant and it says pregnant person in it, then good luck getting your funding.

David: 40:18

Yeah. Or the characterization of student protestors as terrorists as well. This manipulation of language to shift perception.

Ellie: 40:25

Exactly. This manipulation of language is so worrisome to me, and I was listening to an episode of Pod Save America recently, where they had a guy, a British guy named Campbell on who has been a very important source of political influence in Britain, you know, on the side of the Labor Party. And he was saying if he were to advise the Democrats today, he would actually say, why don't you guys just double down on DEI and woke. Those terms have a lot of appeal for a lot of people. Why have you just let the Republicans take over those terms and twist them for their aims. But indeed the GOP has been so good at twisting language for its own aims for decades. And the Democrats, I mean, a nice way of thinking about it is that they don't wanna play dirty, haven't been doing this, but look what's happening to our republic.

David: 41:13

Yeah, but also it's not as if the Democrats want to play at all. Because often what happens is that they let the right wing determine the terms of the political debate, and then they just position themselves just left off the far right and hope that people will vote for them as a lesser of two evils, which is what's been happening now, for example, with Gavin Newsom, who has now like made this sudden shift to the right because he's preparing a presidential run. Right? So once the terms are determined from the right end of the spectrum. The whole debate is kind of fucked.

Ellie: 41:47

Absolutely, which is a strategy that doesn't even seem to be working particularly well in any case. Hartmann also talks about a number of things that we should be on the watch for in the transition from oligarchy to tyranny. I'm not gonna go over all of them, but he talks about the practice of scapegoating, normalizing outrageous behavior, corrupting the police. But one thing that I did just wanna mention in greater detail quickly here, David, is the fact that as Tyrannies emerge out of oligarchy, they always first corrupt the individual institutions of governance. And since the 1980s, republicans have made a practice of moving large numbers of lobbyists and industry executives into senior positions in regulatory agencies. And my, oh my, have we seen this all the more in both of Trump's administrations and the corrupting of individual institutions of government from the inside is literally what DOGE is tasked with doing.

David: 42:40

Yeah, no, that's

Ellie: 42:41

right. That's, it's not actually a department of government efficiency. We all know that. But what it is, positively speaking is a corrupting force of individual institutions of governance

David: 42:52

By positioning loyalists in particular in positions of institutional influence, which then sets and cutting and all of that. But it sets also the stage for political nepotism because once those loyalists are in a position of influence inside of these government agencies, very quickly they can socially reproduce by handpicking those who are going to come after them. And you know, Ellie, in his Stop Oligarchy tour, Bernie Sanders has been very realistic about where we are in connection to oligarchy. But also he has been optimistic about the fact that. It's not inevitable that the oligarchs will win at taking down American democracy. I'm curious about what Hartmann says we can do now in terms of thinking about resistance to combat this tide that is washing over the US and that is leading to all these lies, to all these scapegoating, to the establishment of loyalists in positions of power. How do we resist that according to Hartmann?

Ellie: 43:53

Well, luckily he has quite a bit about this. I mentioned I like did a bunch of research for this episode and I've just ended up talking about this book, but I did find it very helpful and quite pithy. I, like I said, I learned a lot from it. Following what we were saying about the warping of language and the rampant lying that are really the first step from democracy to tyranny. He says that the most important initial way to break oligarchy is a free press. Trump has repeatedly talked about the free press being fake news, and that Hartmann suggests is designed to weaken citizens' faith in and connection to the press. And the press historically has been understood as the fourth estate, really the fourth branch of government. It needs to be free and it needs to be independent of the three branches of government. What we're seeing now is an overtaking, we have been in different ways for decades, an overtaking of the free press by oligarchs, and so we have to combat that. I don't know how to do that in this day and age. It's not gonna be through podcasters who can say anything regardless of whether it's factually accurate or not and who may, you know, be incentivized and even in some cases paid to say certain things.

David: 44:58

Yeah, unfortunately that is also true of news anchors and television show hosts. It's really difficult to know in the moment where you go for reliable free information.

Ellie: 45:08

There are guardrails and laws around that stuff as opposed to podcasting. So I do think it's separate. But anyway, yeah, go on.

David: 45:13

Yeah, it is more of a digital Wild West, definitely podcasting, in terms of rules and regulations, aside from the free press, what are other mechanisms to combat oligarchy?

Ellie: 45:24

Economic rights for everybody. Very important. You know that Thomas Payne actually was a thinker of Social security. Take that Elon. Not that he really cares what Tom, he probably doesn't even know who Thomas Pain is. Yeah, including Good Pay, Medicare for all, free college education, decent housing strength and social security program. All things I very strongly support. Here's another one. Tax the crap out of the rich.

David: 45:49

Yes.

Ellie: 45:50

Yes please. Prosecute Trump and his henchman under the Hatch Act, man. Okay, so this book, I haven't even mentioned, David. This book was published in 2021.

David: 45:59

Okay.

Ellie: 46:00

Yeah, so this was before the indictments, which had really no negative impact on Trump's political career, next publicly funded elections. Okay, there's a few more, but maybe I'll stop there because otherwise it's just gonna be a list.

David: 46:13

No, but, okay, so this is great because now we're getting concrete and it reminds me of some of the proposals that, . Arlen the, , author whom I've been referencing now a couple of times, makes in his writings on oligarchy. So for example, he writes about the importance of moving the left away from this exclusive focus on enfranchising the poor, of like focusing on the least enfranchised and trying to like raise them up to also thinking about putting, , limits on the rich, which is not often something that you hear politicians talk about. But it's equally important because that's how you prevent the rise of oligarchy in the first place and how you can actually take out its Achilles heel if it's already in place, right? If you manage to take the wealth that massive wealth away from oligarchs and reduce them just to upper class individuals, they no longer have that access, that massive wealth buys them. I also obviously like the idea of taxing them, and that includes not only taxing them for their wealth, but imagine also policies like an inheritance tax at like 90% that prevent the intergenerational accumulation of wealth because often oligarchs are not self-made billionaires, but they are inheritors of large fortunes that create family legacies. One really interesting point that I want to make here from Arlen is he points to the fact that often when we think about democracy, the majority of people, right, the demos, we tend to focus on the fact that the demos is free, right? Everybody has freedom and liberty, and also that the demos is many. So there is a kind of wisdom in the crowd, which makes it better than aristocracy and monarchy. Arlen says we also need to learn to embrace the poverty of the demos. We need to realize that non wealthy individuals, so the lower socioeconomic strata of society are a vulnerable community who should be entitled to class specific forms of power. And so he envisions a world where we start creating mechanisms like governmental mechanisms, judicial mechanisms that are constituted exclusively by poor and working class people and allow them to exercise power. So he gives the example of plebeian tribunals, which would be tribunals made up of poor people by lottery that would allow those people to make government reforms about things that affect them. So it's a way of giving voice to the poor. And those recommendations that those tribunals could make, could include things like. Tax the rich. They could include things like campaign financing reform, like maybe you recommend Overturning Citizens United. And then those things that those tribunals propose are put up for a referendum, and if they pass, then they become policies. So what I really like about this approach is that he says, in order to really curtail oligarchy, you have to move political power away from the hands of the wealthy and intentionally put it into the hands of the poor, which means putting poor people in positions of political influence because they are poor.

Ellie: 49:47

Wow. I like the idea of this, and I also wanna say at risk of sounding elitist, that I wonder how this intersects with the divestment from public education that we've seen in recent years in the US. Because I definitely think that working class people should have way more political power than they currently do, especially when it comes to actual on the ground legislation. They know what they need best, and also I'm concerned about the way that ideology functions and especially the corruption of our media in recent decades has functioned to. To use a Marxian term, mystify people from what is actually in their best interest. And I don't know how viable a concern that really is when we're talking about on the ground legislation because I think people can be mystified about what's best for society, but still know what kinds of specific policies they would most benefit from, right? The policies that prevent them from falling into immense medical debt, for instance. But I think I would really want to see that tribunal model in tandem with much more investment into our public education system so that the average citizen really does have a strong sense of what's in their best interest. And I, maybe it's not even elitist because I would say even for myself, I think I would benefit from more civic education before entering such a tribunal.

David: 51:02

I absolutely agree that education is paramount, especially when it itself is on the chopping block. I think it's only a matter of time before the Trump administration starts pushing for the privatization, not only of higher ed across the board, but even of K through 12, which is one of the basic social goods that a society can offer the citizenry. But I also do believe that that education can, even in ideal circumstances, fall flat if subsequently, there are barriers to political participation for those who are poor or at least not wealthy. So if you think about. The fact that in the United States, for example, election day is not a national holiday, it means that you could have well-educated people of low income who don't even get to vote because they don't have the day off. And so the most basic form of political representation is denied to them. And so, you know, we've been talking a lot about how we are like entering or have been entering into an oligarchy. In recent decades, but I wonder whether the more accurate description is that we've been an oligarchy for a long time, insofar as those who are really the working class have never been given a shot to rule.

Ellie: 52:14

Well, and his would lead to practical questions about how we make the move from oligarchy back to a more well-functioning democracy. Hartmann certainly thinks that we used to have a more well-functioning democracy. He never says that it was like perfect. Obviously it's never been perfect, but it has been better than it is now on his view. But one thing that comes up in the work of Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist who has a book on oligarchy, is that oligarchs will cease to exist not through democratic procedures, but rather when extremely unequal distributions of material resources are undone, and thus no longer confer exaggerated political power to a minority of actors. So Winters thinks that the solution of oligarchy is not actually going to be found within democracy itself.

David: 52:59

It's like economic.

Ellie: 53:00

Yeah. Yeah. But through the marketplace.

David: 53:02

I know. That's why I really want taxation of the rich. That's why I want the elimination of tax havens abroad that allow the offshoring of all this surplus wealth. I'm telling you all, I want us to eat the rich, economically speaking, because that's the only way that they cease to be oligarchs.

Ellie: 53:20

Yeah. I dunno about eating the rich David, but definitely taxing them so that nobody is a billionaire. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our overthink community on Patreon for bonus content zoom meetings and more. And thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 53:36

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Ellie: 53:52

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