Oligarchy works as a patronage system that dissolves democracy, law, and patriotism.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (p. 261). Crown/Archetype.
One of the things that can happen to a democracy is oligarchy.
Oligarchy is set up in opposition to democracy from the very very beginning.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
Aristotle comes onto the scene and he says oligarchy is not just rule by the few, which is its literal meaning in Greek, it’s rule by the rich few, by the wealthy few, the few who are in charge tend also to be the wealthiest people , which is a very important modification.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
Aristotle says oligarchy is rule by the wealthy few, and then Plato says, in book eight of the Republic, Plato says there’s a danger in democracy and the danger in democracy is that someone will come along, probably somebody with a lot of money, and will tell people what they want to hear, and democracy will break down.
So if we put Plato and Aristotle together for a minute, we get a classical argument about the relationship between democracy and oligarchy, which is that democracy has the weakness that it’s vulnerable to oligarchy. This is what the classic philosophers were worried about, and for this reason by the way, the founding fathers were worried about it as well.
So two things to note from the classics: democracy and oligarchy in opposition, but democracy can blend in to oligarchy.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle. As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (pp. 15-16). Crown/Archetype.
In The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides defined “oligarchy” as rule by the few, and opposed it to “democracy.” For Aristotle “oligarchy” meant rule by the wealthy few; the word in this sense was revived in the Russian language in the 1990s, and then, with good reason, in English in the 2010s.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (p. 11). Crown/Archetype.
In conditions of oligarchical impotence, you shift the task of government from doing anything to affirming identity. Government is no longer about doing, government is about being.
What you end up doing as an oligarch is deliberately hurting your own followers and asking them to applaud you.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
Rule by the rich few doesn’t answer the question of what comes next.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
It’s very hard for oligarchs to make markets because oligarchs can’t really accept the rule of law.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
Markets will not work under oligarchy.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
It’s very hard for oligarchs to redistribute.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
Citizens United, in 2010, ignores exactly what’s happening in Russia.
Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 3: What is Oligarchy? – YouTube
The United States is tottering between democracy and oligarchy.
We cannot expect policy from a would-be oligarch, from a wannabe oligarch, that will benefit the population as a whole.
In conditions of oligarchical impotence, you shift the task of government from doing anything to affirming identity. Government is no longer about doing, government is about being.
What you end up doing as an oligarch is deliberately hurting your own followers and asking them to applaud you.
What will happen in oligarchy is that you will have people who are above the law, the oligarchs, their friends, their families, their business associates, and those people will be able to block the rule of law and therefore block prosperity and social advancement for everybody else.
So markets will not work under oligarchy, there’ll be no social advancement for that reason.
In a famous speech to the Commonwealth Club, President Franklin Roosevelt had used the new phrase “economic constitutional order” to explain back to Americans what so many of them had been seeking in their organizing efforts. Pointing to the chaos of the Great Depression as the climax of structural changes that were leading to “economic oligarchy,” he argued that in the age of the large corporation, capitalism had shown that it would demolish itself and society unless constitutional reform precluded such “a state of anarchy” by ensuring economic security.
For forty years, in fact, the Byrd Organization had to win only about 10 percent of the potential electorate to hold on to power. “Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most thorough control by an oligarchy,” the political scientist V. O. Key Jr. observed in his classic study of southern politics. Key went on to quip that, compared with Virginia, “Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy.”39
Virginia’s oligarchs maintained their control not with night rides but with carefully designed rules. They showed little tolerance for the vigilantism freely practiced in the Deep South. In fact, when Byrd was governor, the state effectively outlawed the Ku Klux Klan and all but ended lynching.40 The rulers understood, better than others, how clever legal rules could keep the state’s voter participation among the lowest in the nation relative to population, and its taxes among the lowest in the nation relative to wealth. Above all, the rules served to hold in check the collective power of those who might want their democracy to do more.
The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s. To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.
The question this stealth plan presents Americans with is, at one level, quite simple: Do we want to live in a cosmetically updated version of midcentury Virginia, in a country that so elevates property rights as to paralyze the use of government for democratically determined goals and needs? That extinguishes “the political we”?
For what is the substance of James Buchanan’s and Charles Koch’s idea of liberty but Harry Byrd’s Virginia, the state subjected to the “most thorough control by an oligarchy,” with tools now to be grafted upon the nation as a whole? Byrd’s state-mandated racial oppression would go; the cause would not publicly advocate for that. But nearly all else about the political economy of midcentury Virginia enacts their dream: the uncontested sway of the wealthiest citizens; the use of right-to-work laws and other ploys to keep working people powerless; the ability to fire dissenting public employees at will, targeting educators in particular; the use of voting-rights restrictions to keep those unlikely to agree with the elite from the polls; the deployment of states’ rights to deter the federal government from promoting equal treatment; the hostility to public education; the regressive tax system; the opposition to Social Security and Medicare; and the parsimonious response to public needs of all kinds—not just the decent schools sought by aspiring teenagers like Barbara Rose Johns and John Stokes but also the care and shelter of the elderly poor, the mentally ill, and others in whose names Dr. Louise Wensel ran her 1959 Senate campaign against Old Harry. Her core criticism, after all, was that he worshipped “the golden calf”: that he prized the accumulation of private wealth over the Golden Rule and democracy, “no matter what the cost.”
MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (pp. 233-234). Penguin Publishing Group.
