Democrats keep saying America is an “oligarchy.” Is that true?

Joe Biden, in his farewell address, argued that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.” More recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a crowd of 10,000 in Arizona that “we are witnessing an oligarchy in America.”

Biden and Ocasio-Cortez are hardly the first to diagnose the United States as an oligarchy. Sen. Bernie Sanders has been warning about it for years. So have many others, though, recently, Sen. Elissa Slotkin has pushed back against Democrats using the word.

So, are they right? Are we an oligarchy? If so, when did we become one? And: How bad is it?

What exactly is an oligarchy, anyway?

The concept of oligarchy goes back to ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s concept of oligarchy is laid out in his Politics, in which the philosopher distinguished among six possible forms of government. The best form was divine kingship: The monarch rules for the good of all. But this was unlikely. More likely was that the monarch would rule only for the monarchy, hence devolving into its deviant twin, tyranny.

Aristocracy, or rule by an enlightened elite, was a better alternative, assuming a virtuous few could be found to serve. But like kingship, aristocracy ran the risk of devolving into its ugly doppelgänger — in this case, oligarchy.

In an oligarchy, the elite few rule for their own personal enrichment, leaving everyone else worse off.

Which is similar to Biden’s definition: “…extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

And Ocasio-Cortez’s definition: “…When those with the most economic, political and technological power destroy the public good in order to enrich themselves at the price of millions of Americans.”

Some might prefer the label “plutocracy” because it more literally means “rule by the wealthy.” But effectively, the two have become synonymous in the US, where wealth all but ensures political purchase. The basic idea is consistent — a handful of very wealthy individuals use their riches to shape and influence the government on their own financial behalf.

Democracy and oligarchy can coexist because they operate on different axes, the political scientist and oligarchy scholar Jeffrey Winters told me. In short, the more power is in the hands of the very wealthy, the more oligarchic the society. But even under these conditions, if elections are free and fair and formal individual rights are secure, we are still living in a democracy.

The tension arises when the majority of voters decide they don’t like an unequal distribution of wealth and want a more equal distribution.

The tension deepens when the very wealthy — the oligarchs — use their wealth to influence political outcomes in their favor to prevent this democratic redistribution.

Even here, some tug-of-war is normal. Oligarchs may prefer to maintain a democracy and accept some level of redistribution because that is the price of stability. But the more concentrated the wealth and power, the more uneasy the bargain. And the bargain is indeed growing uneasy in the United States.

Is America an oligarchy? 

Oligarchy exists on a continuum, so there is not a single moment someone can point to and say that a country is now officially an oligarchy. But by analyzing data on economic inequality and money in politics, America starts looking distinctly oligarchic by the beginning of the 21st century.

Consider some stats from a comprehensive 2020 RAND report: In 1975, the median full-time American worker earned $42,000 (in 2018 dollars). In 2018, the median was $50,000, a slight increase.

But for those in the top 1 percent of earners, the bottom salary went from $257,000 in 1975 to $761,100 in 2018 — almost tripling. And the average income in the top 1 percent went from $289,000 to $1,384,000 — more than quadrupling.

In other words, almost all gains in the economy have gone to the very top of the income distribution. The paper’s authors estimate that if the US had maintained the 1975 distribution of income, the median income as of 2018 would be $92,000 instead of $50,000.

Similarly, the share of income going to the top 1 percent has gone from about 10 percent in 1980 to over 20 percent in 2023. During this period, the level of inequality in the United States has gone from being pretty typical of developed countries to being on the extreme fringe.

Then there is the active involvement of the super-rich in politics. 

For example: that iconic image from Donald Trump’s inauguration, with tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Elon Musk lined up in support, with Apple’s Tim Cook and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew nearby.

There is the official Cabinet of oligarchs. Though precise net worths are hard to pin down, the concentration of wealth is undeniable. Linda McMahon at Education (net worth estimated at $3 billion, combined with her husband); Howard Lutnick at Commerce (at least $2 billion); Kelly Loeffler at Small Business (at least $1 billion); Scott Bessent at Treasury (at least $500 million, combined with his husband); and Jared Isaacman for NASA (a longtime ally of Musk, also worth more than $1 billion). Plus Trump himself, who’s reportedly worth $5.1 billion, though his accounting is famously untrustworthy. (By contrast, Biden’s Cabinet members were mostly mere millionaires.)

And Congress. Though there are no billionaires, roughly half of the current Congress has a net worth of over $1 million, according to one tracker. The richest member appears to be Rick Scott, a former health care CEO, worth about half a billion. Very few representatives come from the working class.

Finally, there is the money spent on politics. Campaign finance limits who can even run for office, with early fundraising success as the golden ticket.

This fundraising money comes from some of the wealthiest Americans. Take the brazenness of the world’s richest man, Musk, spending $291 million, or billionaire Timothy Mellon shelling out $197 million, or billionaire Miriam Adelson spending $148 million, all to support Republicans in the last election. These are extreme sums of money. They make Michael Bloomberg’s $64 million in 2024 seem small.

By one estimate of publicly disclosed contributions, the 0.1 percent wealthiest Americans contributed about 16 percent of campaign dollars in the 2020 presidential election, while the top 1 percent contributed about 33 percent, a figure that has been roughly consistent throughout the 2010s. 

“One reason oligarchs are in such a giddy moment is because they have picked up on the signals that what they are doing is permissible,” Winters said. “In the past, there was a sense it was not okay to commandeer entire campaigns with just a handful of people funding them — that seems to have been lost.”

In earlier years, the very wealthy tended to prefer less transparent, stealthier ways of influence. Many recognized that being too public was likely to backfire. They preferred to hide their contributions through “dark money.” But these days, the super-wealthy are hiding less and getting out front more.

There are certainly divisions among super-rich political financiers. On many social and cultural issues, the very rich are deeply polarized.

But on fiscal issues, there is much more consensus. The political opinions of the very wealthy are more fiscally conservative than the average voter. For example, in survey data from 2009, 52 percent of the general public supported a redistribution of wealth via taxes on the rich. In contrast, only 17 percent of the wealthy agreed.

Meanwhile, corporate lobbying dramatically outspends countervailing forces like unions and public interest groups. In my 2015 book, The Business of America Is Lobbying, I calculated that there is 34 times more spending by business interests than by these countervailing groups. This allows powerful companies to maintain a constant presence in the halls of power.

While money doesn’t guarantee specific outcomes, it effectively constrains the policy options that both Republican and Democratic majorities are willing to consider, particularly regarding tax and regulatory advantages that benefit the wealthy.

So while America has been moving in this direction for a while, “we are really at peak oligarchic power,” Winters said. “This is in-your-face oligarchy. … The sheer visibility is incredible.”

Now what?

The US has always had aspects of oligarchy. The Senate (originally appointed by state legislatures) was to represent the elite; the House was to represent the people. The Electoral College was to keep the people at a distance from the presidency.

And America’s republican form of democracy has always wrestled with the same tension that Aristotle faced: How do we share power and wealth?

All forms of government give power to some group of decision-makers and not others. All free economies generate some level of inequality. No successful government has ever shared power or resources completely evenly, but successful governments have found a balance. 

So what happens now? 

American voters are extremely angry and distrustful. They think our political system is fundamentally broken and needs major change. Trump has long been the successful avatar of that anger and distrust. But he is also supported by some of the very wealthiest Americans.

This is not necessarily a contradiction. It is one tried-and-true answer to what the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt has called the “conservative dilemma.” In an unequal society, the party of the wealthy has a choice — it can embrace democracy even if it means some redistribution. Or it can try to undermine democracy by elevating divisive cultural and racial issues that will redirect conflict away from questions of wealth redistribution, further polarizing and dividing society. This appears to be what Trump is doing.

The political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call this situation “plutocratic populism,” in their book, Let Them Eat Tweets. Similarly, a new paper calls the GOP’s tense coalition of uber-wealthy elites and resentful non-wealthy regular people “plutopopulism.” The wild card aspects of Trump’s populism — and its uneasy electoral dependencies on anti-elitist grievances — reflect the tenuous coexistence of democracy with increasingly excessive concentrations of wealth.

Meanwhile, as the Democrats also attract more uber-wealthy supporters, anti-establishment attitudes are turning against both parties. 

Consider the relationship between support for democracy and share of income going to the top 1 percent: The more unequal the economy, the less support for democracy. More economic inequality weakens social trust and government legitimacy, which in turn weakens support for democracy.

And support for democracy has notably fallen in the US, at a time of increasing inequality.

Higher income inequality correlates with lower support for democracy

One possible future is that the rich continue to defend their wealth, but the quality of democracy continues to decline, perhaps sliding into autocracy. Elections become less fair; political corruption becomes more blatant. Cynicism turns to apathy. Citizens focus on their own survival, and that of their immediate families, and go more quietly. 

Progressives are often fond of quoting Louis Brandeis, who served on the Supreme Court: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Yet, the reality has been otherwise here for decades. We have had both.

But the tensions are mounting. The balance is increasingly unstable. At some point, one will have to win out. The question is whether we will actually get the choice.