Review of The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy by Jeffrey Winters

The political scientist Jeffrey Winters has a new book titled The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy that is well worth reading. Winters published an excellent scholarly analysis of oligarchy in various countries in 2011, simply titled Oligarchy. In The Blind Spot he builds on a career studying how oligarchs operate to make his case that oligarchy is the greatest problem facing American democracy today.

What is oligarchy? And who are these oligarchs? Political theorists familiar with government typologies going back to Ancient Greece will know that oligarchy means rule by the wealthy few. Plato suggests that the extreme concentration of wealth in an oligarchy eventually produces a democratic backlash in which power is taken over by the people and the poor majority rules instead. Perhaps much of the populist backlash of the past 10-15 years can be understood in these terms, as ordinary citizens on the left and the right seek to reclaim popular power from ultra-wealthy elites.

Oligarchs, then, are the extremely wealthy individuals who use their wealth to exercise political power. In a representative democracy, oligarchs use the system to defend their wealth. As he says, “oligarchy is not a type of government. It is the politics of wealth defense itself.” It can happen under any system, or at the very least is a constant threat.

This is because oligarchs “are laser-focused on this political project both as individuals and as a group, and they win political battles over threats to their wealth far more often than they lose them.” (4). So, oligarchy occurs when a system is dominated by the wealthy few. And those wealthy few, rather than focus on controlling all political issues, flex their political muscle primarily when their wealth is threatened.

As Winters characterizes it, there are two issue dimensions. The vertical, oligarchic realm, and the horizontal, democratic realm. “In this first oligarchic realm, where wealth is at stake, democracy serves the few—which is to say it is broken. But in the second realm it works.” (5).

In other words, when issues concern wealth defense, we are an oligarchy in the United States. The wealthy effectively prevent any and all efforts to tax or otherwise constrain their absurd wealth. When politics concerns social issues like religion, abortion, or guns, for example, we are more democratic and what the people want tends to win out. “Because democracy works for all these horizontal issues among the non-rich, we mistakenly assume it will also work for vertical issues like greater economic equality…Whether we elect liberals or conservatives it keeps getting worse.” This is “our collective blind spot—our belief that democracy, as it currently stands, will give us the change we need.” (5). Hence the title of the book.

So, are we an oligarchy in the manner that Bernie Sanders claims? Yes, and undeniably so. (Read Sanders’ brief book Fight Oligarchy). At the same time, we also have elements of representative democracy in which ordinary activism, voting, and citizen power matter. In Winters’ words, “we live in a peculiar system that combines democracy with oligarchy: we have equal political power as voters, but our votes must contend with the unequal wealth power of oligarchs that is also built into the system.“ (5-6). This combination of representative democracy and oligarchy is “domination through democracy. It is by far the most elegant mode of exclusion ever created.” (11).

Winters calls this “participatory inequality—a combination of maximum popular voice with very limited impact, so that political freedom can coexist with gross economic injustice.” (13). There is much truth to this, though I wouldn’t characterize representative democracy as “maximum popular voice.” Only something like Athenian direct democracy creates maximum popular voice. Still, he is fundamentally correct that the American system, and other contemporary representative democracies (what political theorists would tend to characterize as republican systems of government) combine elements of free speech, popular power, and oligarchy. It is a strange combination, as Winters frequently stresses.

How does this strange combination operate? How could it be stable? After all, Plato speculated that oligarchy and direct democracy are opposites and that a political system is in danger of lurching from one to the other. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case in the USA. Instead, the two have combined into this unique mix. “More democratic equality has not produced more economic equality. Why not?” (16). This basic question is the blind spot for Winters. The gradual struggles to expand the suffrage and other modern democratic rights over the past few centuries led to a situation in which “democracy did not replace oligarchy but was instead integrated with it.” (22).

As Winters rightly observes, democracy is something you struggle towards. You are always getting more or less of it; democracy is never finally and fully realized. As he says, “the central question of democracy is to the degree to which power in all its forms is shared equally among members of a political community.” (24). And as plenty of political theorists have argued (Hélène Landemore, John McCormick, Alan Ryan, among others) our oligarch-dominated form of representative democracy is really a kind of oligarchic republican government. It is not nearly democratic enough.

The Wealth Defense Industry

“Pretending that private wealth is somehow not raw political power is the grand lie that sustains domination through democracy.” (26). It should therefore come as no surprise that oligarchs are preoccupied with preserving and expanding their wealth. As Winters demonstrates, oligarchs are willing to skirt or even break the law to avoid paying taxes on their enormous fortunes.

Winters uses the term Wealth Defense Industry to discuss the array of accountants, lawyers, and consultants that help oligarchs stash their wealth overseas and avoid paying taxes. In their book The Triumph of Injustice, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zuckman demonstrate in detail how the rich pay similar or lower effective tax rates than ordinary Americans. (See also Jeffrey Winters’ Oligarchy and Chuck Collins’ The Wealth Hoarders). This is because, as Winters reminds us, ordinary Americans have their taxes automatically withdrawn from their paychecks. In other words, there is little room for tax evasion. 

The ultra-rich oligarchs, however, don’t make their money primarily through wages or conventional salaries. This gives them ample room to park assets overseas and generally avoid efforts to accurately assess and tax their wealth. Winters shows in considerable detail how in the late 1970s the Wealth Defense Industry really ramped up and the power of the IRS to go after tax-evading oligarchs was hollowed out. As he says, “this is what it looks like when oligarchy triumphs over democracy.” (119). It makes for invigorating reading. We might ask why are the ideas of Bernie Sanders more popular now? Because, at least in part, they better describe reality in the 21st century than reality in postwar America.

Summarizing the Wealth Defense Industry and the behavior of oligarchs, Winters says that “once Congress sets the tax brackets as law, the paramount objective of oligarchs is to never pay the published tax brackets. This isn’t an option for the vast majority of citizens.” (123). In other words, oligarchs use their influence to set up a tax structure advantageous to them. They then do their best to evade even this light tax load.

“It is this capacity to come back and fight a second round outside and against the boundaries of democratic politics that separates the very rich from everyone else. Oligarchs win in framing the tax structure, and then win again in evading it.” (124). This in turn makes me think of Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism, which describes how, in practice, laws and regulations tend to be enforced in ways that benefit the rich. The laws on the books themselves don’t really tell you how things operate.

Winters spends much of the book looking at the American founding and how the battle between democracy and oligarchy can be seen in stark relief at the constitutional convention. These sections are insightful but I won’t dwell on them here. But I do want to stress that the whole book is worth reading.

Throughout The Blind Spot Winters says that we usually think of oligarchy and democracy as opposite, zero-sum things. We thus have trouble understanding how they can overlap and coexist in the same system. Yet this paradoxical combination can be very durable. Nevertheless, “the arrangement breaks down when it becomes obvious that the wealthy are distorting and impairing democracy for their own narrow benefit. Domination through democracy is sustained by the plausible illusion that the oligarchs are not, in fact, running the show.” (190). Indeed, the American system of government is durable. Thinkers from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Montesquieu saw the power of mixed republican forms of government, as did the founders. An oligarchic republican government (aka modern representative democracy) can exist and endure for centuries as a sort of halfway compromise between pure oligarchy and pure democracy.

The balance becomes less stable when these systems start to veer toward pure oligarchy, as the USA has done in the neoliberal era (the past half century). As Winters says, Americans don’t necessarily mind wealth inequality on its own. He mentions the common saying that we’re all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. But when oligarchs use that wealth to exert unequal political power and blatantly corrupt democracy, ordinary citizens become outraged. In his words, “collectively our confidence in our democracies is sinking because their failures have grown unusually visible and painful.” (27). There is a reason the Bernie Sanders “fight oligarchy” tour resonates more in the 2020s than it would have in the 1960s.

Winters offers a concluding reminder of the history of the term oligarchy: “oligarchy has always been about the political use of wealth for wealth defense.” (194). On wealth defense and tax evasion, Winters cites a former IRS Commissioner who estimates that there are roughly $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year, primarily from the ultra-wealthy.

He unsurprisingly argues that “stronger tax agencies” would help to weaken oligarchy. “Larger budgets, more auditors, and more technology will only hurt oligarchs. They are the group tax agencies struggle to see and collect from. It cannot be said enough—debilitated tax agencies fatten oligarchs.” (301).

To conclude we might ask, is there any hope? In part, the answer feels like no. Winters convincingly demonstrates how durable and effective the combination of oligarchy and popular participation through representative democracy remains. But there are also critical periods where the power of oligarchy is challenged, such as during and after the Great Depression and World War Two. We may be in a similar position now, with the ravages of half a century of neoliberalism combining with the aftermath of the Great Recession to shatter the legitimacy of oligarchic representative democracy. Therein lies the hope: things are so bad that mass movements are starting to call for an end to oligarchy. As I keep stressing, there’s a reason so many are now drawn to Bernie’s critique of oligarchy.

Can Lotteries Fix What is Wrong with Democracy? Review of Lottocracy by Alexander Guerrero and The Lottocratic Mentality by Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati

The legitimacy crises facing the longstanding democracies of the world have led to many diagnoses of what has gone wrong as well as many proposed solutions for how to make things right. I have discussed a number of these debates both here and in related books. 

Here I want to discuss the idea of replacing electoral democracy with lottery, or what the philosopher Alexander Guerrero has called “lottocracy.” This idea, also discussed in Hélène Landemore’s book Politics Without Politicians, has gained increasing attention in recent years and deserves a closer look. I want to consider some of its appeal and some of its potential problems. Doing so will involve Guerrero’s Lottocracy, Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati’s critical response book The Lottocratic Mentality, and my own thoughts on the continued value of participatory democracy.

Let’s start with Guerrero’s long, dense Lottocracy. His book has two main tasks: first, to demonstrate that the representative democracies of the world are facing systemic problems that require dramatic transformation in how these institutions of government operate, and, second, to argue that the fix is to replace the electoral mechanism for selecting representatives with random selection of representatives by lot. Lottocracy is complex and rich and I will only focus on a few major ideas.

Guerrero shows in elaborate detail how oligarchic our representative systems tend to be in practice and how unlike ordinary citizens these representatives usually are. Not to mention that in practice representative democracy doesn’t give ordinary citizens much power. As Rousseau pointed out almost three centuries ago, we exercise political power on the day we vote but after that our representatives make all the important binding decisions, not us.

Guerrero argues that the solution is to randomly select representatives. This will guarantee political equality because each person will have an equal chance to be selected. Having lottery-selected representatives would eliminate the role of money in elections (there would be no elections) and ensure that a representative body actually looks and thinks like the people it is supposed to represent.

In his words, “perhaps the simplest idea of political equality is that of an equal right to participate in the direct decision-making of the political system and to do so with equal power to influence the outcome. No representative system does well by this standard. By definition, all citizens who are not representatives will lack the right to participate in determining what political actions are taken. [Only] representatives have this right.” (318). Exactly. Ordinary citizens can’t walk into Congress (or their state legislature) and take part in floor votes.

Representative democracy does not meet this exacting standard of political equality. Does lottocracy? In lottocracy, one has an equal chance to be a decision-making representative, does this equate to an equal right? Yes and no. One has an equal chance to get selected, thus the same (equal) right as everyone else to be selected to a big representative body. At the same time, no one has the right to simply enter the assembly, deliberate, and vote. Only direct/participatory democracy confers this latter right.

To tip my hand, I think Guerrero’s critique of the oligarchic nature of representative democracy is damning. I won’t go into more detail here as it is a subject I have already discussed at length elsewhere. But I also think that Lafont and Urbinati’s critique of lottocracy is damning. In a sense, the two books forcefully show the problems with the vision present in the other book. They leave me convinced that a direct, participatory democracy where ordinary citizens directly decide legislation remains the best answer.

Lafont and Urbinati’s Critique.

Guerrero and other defenders of lottocracy often point to the role that lot, or random selection, played in the democracy of Ancient Athens. This is because, in addition to selecting jurors by lot (as we still do today), Athens also used lot to fill an assortment of administrative posts (something we very much don’t do today). Lottocrats in part want to appeal to the democratic legitimacy of lottocracy by emphasizing its role in the first democracy, Ancient Athens. This point is true but overstated.

In The Lottocratic Mentality, Lafont and Urbinati argue that, contra Guerrero and certain others, democracy is not merely lottocracy. In Ancient Athens, “lottery alone does not make democracy; what makes democracy is equal political freedom (isonomia and eleutheria) among the citizens and explicit inclusion of the poor or “ordinary” common people in the demos such that they enjoy the power to speak in public and vote in the Assembly (isegoria). (63).

I agree with Lafont and Urbinati’s characterization of Ancient Athenian democracy. In a similar vein, they address Bernard Manin’s book, The Principles of Representative Government, which stresses the role of lottery in Ancient Athens. Manin is wrong to ascribe so much power to lot in Ancient Athens. He, like Guerrero, is right that in the world’s first democracy, offices that existed were generally filled by lot. But these offices didn’t have the most important role—the assembly did. The defining feature of Ancient Athenian democracy was direct decision-making by the people in the assembly (the ekklesia). Ancient Athens was neither representative democracy nor lottocracy.

History aside, what is their critique of lottocratic proposals in today’s world? The two most compelling criticisms are as follows, one on principle and one in practice. Let me address the practical one first. Guerrero argues that, by eliminating elections and randomly selecting our representatives, we will eliminate the role that big money plays in who gets elected. 

Yes, randomly selecting representatives means that corporations and wealthy individuals won’t spend gobs of cash on elections. But Lafont and Urbinati make a good point, and I had this concern reading Guerrero, that those selected by lottocracy could be just as susceptible to corruption/capture as elected representatives, perhaps more so. I’m skeptical that the problem would be worse but it might be just as bad.

After all, once the representatives are randomly selected, they will serve for some period of time on a decision-making body (Guerrero discusses possibilities for how long this might be) and their identities will be publicly known. Why can’t individual large corporations, entire industries, and powerful oligarchs use their money and power behind the scenes to push and prod these representatives?

Guerrero rightly points out that these lottocratic representatives won’t be worried about reelection. True enough. But they will go back to work after their time in office and powerful interests will have just as much incentive as they have now to buy the loyalty of these randomly selected representatives through offers of lucrative work later or even flat out under-the-table bribes while they are in office. Maybe this wouldn’t happen but I didn’t fully buy Guerrero’s answers on this point, which mostly amounted to having harsh penalties in place for anyone who engages in such behavior. More broadly, Lafont and Urbinati are right that a key way to reduce this problem is to create a world with much greater economic and social equality. At the same time, Guerrero is correct that it is hard to see how the problem could get much worse—is a lottocracy really going to be more dominated by the power of private wealth than American representative democracy in the 2020s? How?

The second problem is less a practical one and more focused on the very nature of democracy. To quote The Lottocratic Mentality, lottocracy “may be fair if there are not better options, but how is it democratic? In what sense would citizens be engaged in democratic self-government if they had no way of regularly shaping the political decisions to which they are subject? Something seems deeply wrong with this picture.” (179).

I agree! This was one of my concerns with the idea of randomly selected deliberative assemblies when I first encountered the idea in grad school. If only a tiny number of citizens are actually selected to be representatives, how is it democratic? Yes, random selection ensures that those selected won’t be elites. But it also ensures that most people won’t get a chance to make law. Instead of the people ruling, lottocracy ensures that a small representative sample of the people rule.

This is where Lafont and Urbinati also err in The Lottocratic Mentality. The problem, specifically, comes from their inaccurate description of representative democracy, when they say “shaping and guiding the general political direction of their government is an extraordinarily important political power that citizens in electoral democracies collectively exercise as equals.” (185). As I wrote in my side notes, citizens in representative democracies do not exercise political power as equals. A small subset of representatives, with their hands substantially guided by the interests of major corporations and wealthy oligarchs, make the binding decisions. 

Problems with lottocracy and representative democracy.

The problem, at the end of the day, is that Guerrero’s critique of how representative demoracy operates in practice, especially in the United States, is quite damning but Lafont and Urbinati’s critique of his lottocratic solution is equally damning. In their words, “the lottocratic mentality…envisions a political order that would supposedly empower the people not through reinstating direct democracy but rather through a new mechanism to select lawmakers.” (123). I agree with this characterization. But we might just as easily accuse Lafont and Urbinati of embodying something like “the representative mentality” in which they idealize the power and “political equality” that representative democracy provides ordinary citizens. As I stated above, the arguments of the two books almost cancel each other out and leave me feeling reinforced in my initial belief that participatory, direct democracy remains the best option.

In one passage Lafont and Urbinati show why both lottocracy and representative democracy are flawed. Criticizing lottocracy, they say “excluding the bulk of citizens from effective opportunities to exercise decision-making power can hardly count as a democratic strengthening of the political rights that citizens currently enjoy in democratic societies.” (175). I agree. Some small subset of citizens being selected to serve in power isn’t democratic enough, even if those who are selected are not an elite.

Unfortunately, immediately after this Lafont and Urbinati say that we should oppose lottocracy because we shouldn’t give up “our current rights to collectively exercise political power as equals.” The problem with this happy gloss on representative democracy is that it is not accurate. We only have that equality as voters—the actual exercise of political power, in which binding laws are passed, is done by elected representatives (at best) or de facto by the oligarchs who actually run the country (at worst). In neither case does the mass demos rule as equals.

The most glaring flaw in Lafont and Urbinati’s critique of lottocracy is not their critique. It is, rather, their idealized depiction of representative democracy as a better alternative. Their take on how representative democracy functions is far removed from the messy reality, in which ordinary citizens have very little power while organized business interests and wealthy individuals tend to dominate. They completely fail to address the many empirical critiques of how representative democracy functions in the US and elsewhere. 

Hence, we should demand neither lottocracy nor representative democracy, but rather participatory democracy, defined by Carole Pateman as occurring when “all citizens have the opportunity and the right to participate each year in a major part of city government.” She was focusing on opportunities to participate in municipal budgeting, hence the reference to cities, but the point applies more broadly, to include workplaces, NGOs, state governments, and so on.

If democracy requires, as I believe it does, that everyone has the equal right to make direct decisions, then we need a hefty dose of direct, participatory democracy to make this a reality. Representative democracy reduces us to republican choosers who pick our rulers, while lottocracy reduces most of us to non-actors with the equal chance of landing on a temporary law-making jury. Neither is adequate.

Does this mean my idealized depiction of participatory democracy has no place for lotteries or representation? Both principles have their place. In addition to jury selection, it might make sense for various other administrative positions to be selected by lot, as was done in Ancient Athens. Similarly, if one lives in a nation-state with tens or hundreds of millions of citizens, it is not clear how we could have full participatory democracy at the national level. Perhaps the best one could do would be to combine local participatory democracy with national referenda and national representatives, sort of like Switzerland does. What the best version of this balance looks like is an open question. But if we are to understand and address the legitimacy crisis facing the representative democracies of the world, we need something better than or unrealistic account of representative government (Lafont and Urbinati) or a flawed lottocratic alternative (Guerrero).

Within the next few weeks I plan on posting a review of Jeffrey Winters’ new book, The Blind Spot, which addresses the topic of oligarchy and its relation to representative democracy today. This will take us back to something that lurks in the background of the above review—namely that to realize the true promise of democracy requires tackling neoliberalism. It is thus a political-economic project.