Isn’t it? We are more or less ruled by merchant princes. There is a democratic element in our system, but the same was true of the Roman Republic, nevertheless the ruling class almost always got their way.
You’re looking at the structure. I’m looking at human rights and the exercise of power by the elites. Admittedly, I’m conflating Caesar with Bill Gates, who operated in different professions. And I’m assuming that Roman Senators had both considerable economic and discretionary power.
I would consider Luce to be an old style plutocrat though. And maybe I’ll say the same about the Koch Bros in 10 years, depending upon their performance.
Roughly speaking, I’d say tea party wacko’s control a third of the political pie, dull headed Pete Peterson style deficit poseurs another third, and rationalists the remainder.
Not really. Television and the primary system really did change the game.
The closest would be Eisenhower in 1952. No question that a bunch of oligarchs - as Tom Wicker puts it, “A group of influential Republican supporters and fund-raisers” - got him to run and put his name out there. But that’s such a special case it’s hardly an example at all. Both parties wanted Eisenhower because he was a certain winner. He was publicly non-political but secretly Republican. The role of the big-wigs was to get him to finally agree to be apotheosized. IIRC, he didn’t officially run in any primary, although he won New Hampshire as a write-in. It was deal-making at the convention that pushed him past Taft, who held the political regulars.
Stevenson also did not officially run in primaries in 1952, since he also wanted to be drafted. Neither party wanted that to happen again, and it hasn’t. Stevenson was also the last candidate to require more than one ballot. That’s 62 years, more than one-fourth of the country’s history. Not surprising that people forget how it used to be.
Does anyone debating on this thread actually consider oligarchy a good thing? Desirable? If so, it is simply because oligarchy has existed in the past in the US, or is there some other argument for oligarchy you would like to advance?
I think it’s inevitable, but that doesn’t mean that it cannot be limited to some degree. It is today in many ways compared to the past.
What conceivable realistic world can you propose in which the rich and networked elites would not also have political power? I’be been arguing that it’s been true for the U.S. since 1789. Their equivalents have never been out of power in history, not in any type of literally civilized (i.e. citified) society. It is also true at the nation-state level, in which the rich, elite nations have always held sway over those who weren’t.
Oligarchy does not mean that a few run everything. In practice it means that a small segment competes for dominance, their widely varying interests and world views acting as a partial check against one another. This has been true especially in America, where except for one short period around the turn of the 20th century, the elites have always been in perpetual battle.
Is it ideal? I suppose not. But I’ve never been shown an ideal that wasn’t a ridiculous fantasy land.
See posts #23 and 24 – if such studies are done, then perhaps we can begin to form an answer to that question, by studying which countries/periods are less oligarchic and why.
Transparency International has a panel dataset (meaning it is both across country and over time) measuring perceptions of the corruption of various countries. They also have a series measuring propensity of various foreign nationals to grant bribes. This sort of thing varies across industry as well, incidentally.
This year the Economist magazine published a cross country measure of cronyism. IIRC, it measured private wealth of zillionaires (Forbes data) in certain bribery prone industries like construction, divided by GDP.
There are a number of studies of wealth and income inequality over time and country. I found this on the internet: Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
But there are better sources, insofar as the economics is concerned. Capital by Piketty comes to mind, but there are other think tanks: Krugman just joined one of them.
The sociologist at UCSC attempts to tie together inequality and power, so further digging there might prove useful.
One underlying issue is that while obtaining measures of income inequality is conceptually straightforwards, measuring equality of political influence is another matter.
I agree with Exapno Mapcase: elites invariably run the show to one extent or another. Whether this is desirable can be best conveyed with a chart.
_______Left__________________Right________
| IPCC |
Wonky | Paul Krugman | Gary Becker |
Scientific, | | Gregory Mankiw |
Scholarly | Ezra Klein |
Rationalistic | | |
| | |
| Nick Kristof | |
| | |
|__________________ |_____________________|
|M Moore | |
| Thomas Friedman |
| Gail Collins | |
| Post-Modernism | |
Kooky | | Boehner |
| | Ron Paul |
| Communism | Tea Party |
| | Glenn Beck |
| | |
|____________/______|_____________________|
Maureen Dowd
On the upside, elitism tends to drive us away from kooks like Glenn Beck. On the downside, it gravitates towards the Thomas Friedman/Maureen Dowd axis. If we could somehow drive management towards Matt Yglassias, Ezra Klein and scientific consensus, it would be nice. But I’ll take my rationality where I can get it.
Improved chart. I blame my research assistant.
_______Left__________________Right________
| IPCC |
Wonky | Paul Krugman | Gary Becker |
Scientific, | | Gregory Mankiw |
Scholarly | Ezra Klein |
Rationalistic | | |
| | |
| Nick Kristof | |
| | |
|__________________ |_____________________|
| M Moore | |
| Thomas Friedman |
| Gail Collins | |
| Post-Modernism | |
Kooky | | Boehner |
| | Ron Paul |
Epistemic Closure | Communism | Tea Party |
| | Glenn Beck |
| | |
|____________/______|_____________________|
Maureen Dowd
…so much of the public base their decisions on personality rather than policy and believe themselves to be prudent HR directors. Examples are in the thread, Which person on the other side of the aisle would you vote for? This sort of thinking forms the basis of a lot of political reporting, but it really isn’t especially substantive.
No, not personality. “Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.” Which at least mean they’re voting for political, policy-related reasons.
I can’t comment on Carson since I haven’t read him. I do keep arguing in this forum that people generally do not vote for policy-related reasons. If you consider voting for “politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to” to be policy-related reasons, you’re using a definition of policy that is so wide as to be utterly meaningless.
“My policy is that s/he’s a bigot and so am I! Yippee!” Bleah.
Setting aside OP’s metaquestion, the cited study’s conclusion seems to me to be severely flawed:
[ul][li] Without comparing such statistics across several countries or epochs, the qualitative labels assigned in the study seem baseless. (Perhaps true oligarchies have different stats with “majoritarian” states typically near the U.S.-observed stats.)[/li][li] Expecting 90-percentile households (twice the income of mean household) to be good proxies for “oligarchs” (big corporations and super-rich) is questionable. A $100,000 manager has more in common with his $40,000 employee than he has with a $4 million CEO, let alone a major American oligarch, whose effective income may exceed a million dollars per day.[/li][li] Since there is a (small?) tendency for affluent Americans to be better informed than average, might the “success” of these affluent voters be due more to their correlation with intelligent policy-makers, rather than necessarily a correlation with the interests of any “oligarchs”?[/li][/ul]