Ganesh Sitaraman looks at what two recent books – Classical Greek Oligarchy by Matthew Simonton and Oligarchy by Jeffrey Winters – can teach us about defending democracy from oligarchs
A few years ago, as I was doing research for a book on how economic inequality threatens democracy, a colleague of mine asked if America was really at risk of becoming an oligarchy.
Our political system, he said, is a democracy.
If the people don’t want to be run by wealthy elites, we can just vote them out.
The system, in other words, can’t really be “rigged” to work for the rich and