Oligarchy in America
This article discusses the rise of oligarchy in America and other countries. America is following a course parallel to that of ancient Rome, and we could experience a similar decline. The author includes excerpts of history, making the article worth reading in its entirety.
... The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning....
Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite....
Oligarchy happens here because it happens everywhere. It is a recurring reality, the precursor of mob democracy in Plato’s Republic; the alternative to liberal democracy in modern China, Russia and the European Union; the endless present in Arab and African states. The Chinese oligarchy is ‘market-Leninism’ under the ‘princelings’ of the party, from whose ranks Xi Jinping emerged to become a quasi-emperor....
Our oligarchs are the social elite. Our universities sell credentials for membership in a class system that has hardened into a chasm... The Democrats, heirs to the progressives who unpicked the oligarchy of the Gilded Age, are firmly on the side of Silicon Valley....
Our political parties have fused with corporate and bureaucratic America into a donor-led, greed-driven ‘uniparty’. The manifest density of money and power has elicited mass revolts from the grassroots of both parties, but the DNC has defeated them all....
The ‘image of a free constitution’, Gibbon wrote of the imperial Rome that Augustus made, was ‘preserved with a decent reverence’, and the Roman Senate still appeared to ‘possess the sovereign authority’. The image of a liberal society survives in 21st-century America too. Private property and market forces are still revered in theory.... But democratic equality, the foundation of the American compact and the signature of American manners, has collapsed....
The American oligarchy is a fusion of corporate industry, the financial sector, the permanent bureaucracy, media old and new, the elite universities and the popular representatives....
Our society is now composed of three classes: the oligarchy, the middle and the underclass. The oligarchy also divides into three classes. We could call them the Plutocrats, the Aristocrats and the Meritocrats....
There is little chance that the Biden-Harris administration will launch a second Sherman Antitrust Act at the tech companies. There is a good chance that the administration will collude with Big Tech to censor and demonize the opposition. There is an even greater chance that the BidenHarris administration will use the crisis of the Covid recovery as an opportunity to hasten the advent of green corporatism. The outcome would be what Tocqueville called a ‘static state’, slowly growing and slowly declining....