Jeffrey A. Winters

And by the late 1800s, the top 1% owned roughly half of all American wealth.

And so these robber barons practiced what political scientist Jeffrey Winters calls wealth defense, which When you possess vast wealth, your primary political goal is not just making more money.

What it is, it is protecting what you have from things like taxation and redistribution.

In the Gilded Age, wealth defense meant direct, blunt force corruption.

logical as plausible.

Okay.

Um, Over the long term, experts like Jeffrey Winters argue we must confront the constitutional DNA itself, reforming or replacing institutions like the Senate that grant disproportionate veto power to the minority wealth, and shifting cultural narratives so that extreme wealth is no longer confused with virtue or fitness to govern.

History shows that majority equalizing shifts from progressive era reforms to the New Deal never happen overnight.

And Alex, you're the historian here, but I do read a lot of history because it gives me relief and solace.

And it reminds me that, yes, we have been under both racially authoritarian and because I know you had Jeff Winters on your podcast earlier.

oligarchic conditions.

We have been here before and it's instructive to look outside our borders at other countries in the world that are also under authoritarian oligarchic governments and how people are resisting and envisioning something better.

But to get to Russia for just a moment.

One of the scholars that I spoke to, Jeffrey Winters, who was at Northwestern University, absolutely fascinating career he has had and a brilliant mind himself, pointed out to me that there was this weird, almost linguistic shift that took place in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the post-Cold War period, where, again, for thousands of years, oligarchy – The definition of oligarchy, it didn't matter where your money came from.

It didn't matter if you were a cartel head.

It didn't matter if you were a computer salesman.

And Alex, you're the historian here, but I do read a lot of history because it gives me relief and solace.

And it reminds me that, yes, we have been under both racially authoritarian and because I know you had Jeff Winters on your podcast earlier, Oligarchic conditions.

We have been here before, and it's instructive to look outside our borders at other countries in the world that are also under authoritarian or oligarchic governments and how people are resisting and envisioning something better.

It's also instructive to look at our own history, and especially in the American South, because there is no clearer place for me of where authoritarianism and oligarchy came together.

But there was one key difference which is worth highlighting for this podcast.

Um, there's a, um, a professor named Jeffrey Winters, uh, who's at Northwestern University.

He's one of the very few who has dedicated his career to kind of understanding oligarchy as a phenomenon.

And I t- I talked to him for the book, and he made the point that for, um, for thousands of years, that definition, that understanding, uh, did not make any distinction about where that money came from or how individuals made that money.