Thoughts on oligarchy 3

There’s one political party, and we’re not in it

There is one party, and when you recognize that, you have left political childhood and are well on your way.

When we discussed Aristotle and his work on oligarchy, we saw that since the first approaches to the concept, it has been multidimensional and never fully reduced to formalisms. In contemporary terms, we can speak of oligarchy with the help of any number of overlapping factors: elite control or capture of public policy decision-makers and content; the concentration of wealth in society; the connection or correlation between that concentrated wealth and those decisions; the role of money in politics; the relative power of the citizen in the political system; etc. In past discussions around state capitalism, I’ve suggested that our economic system is deeply authoritarian and statist, but often in a way that obscures some of the structural privileges embedded in the political system; this happens constantly in multiple moments of separation and confusion – for example, most of us do not understand the connection between our standard of living in the U.S. and a violent imperial system that none of our liberals would dare support. Again, the facts are more important than the theories of the case: they actually do not know what they are supporting.