Thoughts on oligarchy, part 12

Gulliver's Travels edition - a world of giants

The American political system preserves minority rule by design. It is structurally oligarchic in that elite-preferred public policies win out even when public opinion is clearly and overwhelmingly opposed. American politics has always been specifically and deliberately designed around permanent minority rule. Once more, these are facts about reality, not statements about the normative status of our system or the relative merits of minority rule. One major driver of disorientation and inaction in our politics is that we often confuse issues of fact with issues of abstract political theory or partisan allegiance. That is, rather than studying observed political and economic phenomena to understand what is actually going on, we are often looking at discrete facts in terms of how we can use them in the service of team-rooting or some abstract ideological notion. I believe, on the contrary, that we have to sit with the facts of authoritarian minority rule and the staggering levels of inequality and elite self-dealing at the public expense. There is yet much to be said for the old line about how the U.S.’s capitalist system is in fact one of socialism for the rich and cutthroat competition for the poor. This is the two-facedness we have been discussing, and one of many problems with believing that ideas or concepts mean only one thing. Benjamin Tucker put it well, criticizing the thinking of those who confusedly treat a system of powerful monopolies as a representation of “the principle of free competition”: