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.

Review of Insecurity Politics by Lorenza Antonucci (Princeton University Press, 2026)

Let me recommend a new book, Insecurity Politics, by Lorenza Atonucci, a professor of sociology. Her book argues, in short, that the rise of both left and right forms of anti-system populism in Europe and North America is best explained by the widespread “insecurity” in these countries.

In her words, “in this book I advance two arguments: first, that socioeconomic insecurity has steadily increased in Europe, albeit presenting itself in different ways across countries and security regimes; and, second, that this increase has created the basis for support for populism.” (3). While her focus is on Europe, similar claims could be made regarding the United States.

“Populist parties have offered new political scripts that restore and underscore the importance of the main security providers (the family, the state, and the market) in sustaining socioeconomic stability.” (8). However, “populist parties’ agenda are not simply oppositional. These parties also plan to restore security through the two actors that have been absorbing the rise in market-based insecurity: the state and the family.” (11).

What does this mean? Well, it means first that when people feel insecure and the status quo has lost its legitimacy, citizens turn to anti-system politics (the title of Jonathan Hopkin’s book, also well-worth reading). Second, they seek parties that speak to that felt insecurity—right populist parties promise to strengthen the family and close the borders, making life more secure, while left populist parties promise to build a twenty-first century version of democratic socialism that will powerfully tame (or completely overcome) the insecurity created by neoliberalism.

As Antonucci recognizes, this is, more or less, an economic explanation for the current crisis. It informs the ongoing critique of neoliberalism offered by the left. But, many liberals will say, isn’t race, or cultural resentment, or something else really responsible for the breakdown of the neoliberal order? There are plenty of studies one can point to if they want to argue that the current breakdown of the neoliberal order is not economic in nature.

Atonucci addresses this point as well. Attempts to dismiss economic explanations for the rise of anti-system politics often look at simple macro snapshots—the unemployment rate isn’t especially low in areas voting for populists, or those voting for populists aren’t the very poorest citizens, so economics can’t be the explanation, right?

This attempt to write off the economic explanation, however, is shallow and unsatisfactory. There is no one-to-one cause and effect where person A becomes unemployed and then votes for an outsider populist. Or person B is in the poorest one percent and therefore supports anti-system parties. The economic factors are more complex and diffuse than this but no less real.

Consider that first of all, the very worst off economically are unlikely to engage in any political activity, especially in as stratified a society as the United States. As Antonucci stresses, “furthermore, insecurity emerges not simply from a reduction in people’s standard of living but from a loss of what makes lives secure in a certain cultural context, which in Europe entails stable work conditions and relatively safe financial lives for the majority of citizens.” (36).

When you have decades of insecurity-driven neoliberalism undermining worker power, job security, and wages, followed by the biggest global economic meltdown in nearly a century, what follows is a generalized loss of legitimacy. Anti-system political ideas, discourses, actors, and parties arise and take the form of outsider populists seeking office. The generalized loss of legitimacy on the part of the status quo, nearly universally felt, doesn’t lend itself to the simple tests that the more shallow ends of social science tend to rely on.

Returning to Antonucci, she emphasizes “the fact that working conditions in European labor markets are now vastly different from what they were a few decades ago.” (48). She devotes considerable space delving into how things have changed. In sum, workers generally have less autonomy, more pressure in terms of speed and production, and the widespread fear they can’t get a similarly good job elsewhere. In the words of Barbara Ehrenreich, there is a broadly felt “fear of falling.”

There are many good reasons for this. “The level of generosity of social insurance policies for individuals decreased in most countries between 1980 and 2018…” (74) Then consider that “the declining compensatory effects of the welfare state since the 1980s accelerated as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent welfare-state responses…” (75). It’s hard to get a good job—if you have one, you fear it will be difficult to get another one, and welfare policies don’t seem adequate to fill in the gaps.

“Research conducted in the United States has indicated that perceived immigrant job threat tends to increase in settings with economic stagnation, where labor unions are weaker and there is a rise of work insecurity resulting from corporate restructuring and low wages.” (93). This characterizes both North America and Europe in recent decades, especially post-recession. No surprise support for such perspectives has surged.

Turning to Brexit: “Instead of being someone who had been permanently left out of society, the Leave voter appeared to be an individual with a worsening social position who was increasingly struggling—and hence a member of the intermediate middle class and the wide group of people who experience insecurity.” (117)

This confirms Antonucci’s broader finding—it is not necessarily the worst off but the squeezed middle, those who are declining, who feed support for populism. This is commonly felt and glaringly obvious but it is also diffuse. The legitimacy crisis doesn’t lend itself to easy statistical analysis. But Antonucci’s perceptive observation jibes with research indicating support for Trump has been especially strong in areas hit by the consequences of global trade.

What is true for Europe is true for North America as well. This helps explain why populism, and anti-system politics more broadly, isn’t going away anytime soon. The legitimacy crisis is real and arguably intensifying. “Since 2020 there has been an acceleration in the pervasiveness of insecurity within European societies, fueled by Covid-19 and the cost-of-living crisis.” (132). The same could be said for the US.

“This suggests that the seeds of populist support are to be found not in the growth of unemployment or the lack of a stable job per se, but in voters’ everyday experiences of instability in relation to their finances and work conditions.” (136).

Later in the book (145) Antonucci lists three ways insecurity is changing politics. 

1. It is about micro things like work quality, security of work, day-to-day costs, not macro things like unemployment rate or GDP growth
2. Insecurity is a broad source of discontent, not limited to the most precarious or poorest
3. It leads to new class coalitions and thus new political coalitions

The “current populist wave” features people “bonded together by a perception that their life conditions have declined.” (152). Indeed, “insecurity is the material condition that bonds people together in opposition to the secure elite.” (153). I haven’t done too much analysis here; mostly quoting some important passages to illustrate the key claims of Antonucci’s book. They are compelling. Check out this book!

In addition, I’ve mentioned above Jonathan Hopkin’s Anti-System Politics, which I can’t recommend enough. Jacob Hacker’s earlier The Great Risk Shift is also informative, since it addresses this increase in insecurity.  

Some Thoughts on Race and Class in American History

I recently read a lengthy essay in The Guardian titled “The White Working Class Knows the American Project Isn’t Working. Here’s Why That Will never Matter to Them.” The author, Saida Grundy, is a sociology professor at Boston University. The essay is historically informed and thoughtful but also, I will argue, fundamentally flawed. I believe the essay offers a clear example of how not to think about American politics and history. The author is not a conservative, so this isn’t a case of left versus right interpretations of American history. It has more to do with disagreements among those left of center on how to assess these issues. The essay I am critiquing is an example of what could be called the radical race perspective. (It can be accessed here: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/ng-interactive/2026/jun/21/american-racial-anxiety-white-working-class-rights?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other).

First, the piece is torn between two conflicting viewpoints. The first recognizes that political and economic elites have used racial cleavages to divide and weaken the working class. It condemns this and calls for a cross-racial working class coalition. This is the position of labor organizers and socialists, from Eugene Debs to Bernie Sanders. I will refer to it as the historic left project and its advocates as the class based left. I endorse it.

Citing W.E.B. Du Bois, Grundy says that “the racial order required by capitalism could only be maintained if white elites successfully manipulated the white masses against their class alliances with other races. They needed to be goaded into loyalty to a white supremacist planter class…” This seems to imply, in other words, that the Jim Crow order that was created in the post-Civil War south was against the material interests of southern whites and that they had to be, in effect, tricked into accepting it. This is an example of the first viewpoint.

The second viewpoint, which seems to dominate the piece, is that the white working class is so invested in its aristocratic racial status that it will never choose to embrace a cross-racial coalition. According to this view, all efforts to create a successful multi-racial democracy, including the left project of democratic socialism, are doomed from the start, crashing on the shoals of an unchanging, forever racist and deeply powerful group of whites. As Grundy bluntly states, referring to the “white lower classes, “in reality, access to power over other racial groups is their preferred political currency.”

I think this second perspective, the radical race perspective, is both descriptively wrong and politically defeatist. But it is very common among scholars and activists and it seeps into all politics from the center to the left.

In short, an ever-present, vague, inchoate racism pervading the polity explains nothing. Being everywhere, it can’t explain anything. The radical race perspective offered in the piece fails to address anything concrete. For instance: the multiracial, working class New Deal coalition that dominated American politics from the Great Depression in the 1930s through the postwar decades, before breaking apart in the 1970s, is a direct rebuttal to the author’s perspective.

Looking back to the direct aftermath of the Civil War, Grundy discusses the grotesque racist presidency of Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after his assassination. Powerful as this is, it ignores the fact that Johnson, who was not elected President, was succeeded for two terms by Ulysses S. Grant, the pro-racial equality Union hero whose two electoral victories had to consist in substantial part of white votes.

In more recent decades the popularity of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama depended in large part on their ability to win the support of masses of working class whites. They may have been neoliberals but their rhetorical gifts won widespread support from this supposed homogenous and racist group. Similarly, the loss of such support among the working class, and with it the shift in support to the professional classes for center-left parties, what Thomas Piketty has termed the rise of the Brahmin Left, is a new dynamic that calls for explanation not offered by the author. The gradual break-up of the New Deal Coalition, a key part of this story, is likewise unexamined. American social democracy, such as it is, came into being because working class whites are not inevitably and always focused only on racial grievance.

The author also suggests that if the Trump phenomena is at least partly class-based it should impact nonwhite voters as well. Contrary to what the piece claims, this is exactly what has happened. Given that the year is 2026, it is a glaring omission for the essay to ignore the surprisingly multi-racial nature of the Trump 2024 coalition. Trump won more Latino votes than any Republican in decades, perhaps ever, through his ability to win over working class Latinos, particularly men. He also won more black votes than any Republican in decades, again by pulling in a surprising number of working class men. Ditto across different categories of Asian voters. This is exactly what happens when working class Americans of all races are shifting right. Again, this ties into the changing dynamics of American politics and shows how much the US has in common with Europe, even though our domestic histories are distinct.

A key problem for the historical analysis provided by the radical race perspective is that it treats the white working class as a homogenous group, unchanging through time. But this is simply inaccurate and won’t do for serious historical and social scientific scholarship. Poor white farmers in the south in the 1820s have nothing in common with ethnic immigrant families working proletarianized jobs in northern cities in the 1920s, who have nothing in common with downwardly mobile white families in the rustbelt struggling to make ends meet at Dollar Tree in the 2020s. Their shared whiteness just doesn’t get you anywhere if you want to understand the changes in American history. 

Consider the idea that white people form an “aristocracy” in America. The historic left project, best embodied by Mamdani and Sanders today (and a slew of less famous people) says that we must try to unite the exploited multi-racial working class across its differences. The radical race perspective says this will never work because white people form an undifferentiated aristocracy over all people of color. That’s the key problem with seeing all white people as part of a ruling aristocracy. If this is true, as the elites in the Jim Crow south claimed, then whites will never give up this power. And this in turn would mean that the historic left project can never be realized. What a terrible, depressing thought. 

The author criticizes centrist elites, claiming that concerned writings about the white working class are produced by “almost exclusively centrist white elite authors.” Let’s set aside the fact that we shouldn’t be shaming authors for their race. The other problem is that this claim disguises the fact that the essay, and the entire radical race project, is punching left as much as right. It is, in its strongest form, a rejection of the historic left project as an impossibility.

This points to a key difference in understanding how the world works. When those of us on the class-based left look at the Jim Crow south, for instance, we see an evil system in which black people were tyrannized. We see a system in which most white people in the south were also screwed, suffering in poverty and frequently disenfranchised. The radical race perspective looks at the Jim Crow south and sees an evil system in which black people were tyrannized but white people were undifferentiated aristocrats.

Here I think we should spend a little time with MLK’s “Our God is Marching On” speech from 1965. In his words, “it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir).”

King in this speech recognizes the psychological power that came with whites being told that they were part of a ruling aristocracy. But King, unlike the current radical race perspective, recognized that this was a lie. You can’t actually eat Jim Crow. Far from being members of an aristocracy, poor whites in the south were exploited, suffering laborers, often denied full citizenship as well, who were told that they were aristocrats to distract from this reality.

In King’s words, again, “And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.”

Grundy recognizes that Jim Crow segregation was an elite strategy to weaken and divide America’s workers. But once we recognize this fact, that it was a contingent strategy that was created and put in place through concerted effort, we must recognize the consequence: it can be defeated. White and black Americans divided against one another isn’t an immutable fact of America—it is a contingency that democratic socialism seeks to overcome. King is gesturing at this in the above quotes. He doesn’t flinch from condemning the monstrous evil of a century of Jim Crow. But he also recognizes how that system doesn’t work for most southern whites either. Note how King described the populist movement of the late 1800s that tried to unite working whites and blacks: “The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests.” See King stressing how that vile racist order was bad for black and white Americans?

The class based left is deeply opposed to racism and sees it as a significant part of our history and our present. The evil injustice of racism is not just an unfortunate blip from our past, as some conservatives treat it. But I have tried to show that the radical race perspective, as embodied for example in Grundy's essay, does not offer the best way to think about race in American politics. The historic left project, embodied now in democratic socialism, is deeply concerned with racism but also understands its operation in different terms than the radical race perspective.

What does this mean for today? We are not battling Jim Crow but global neoliberal capitalism. To succeed we need to unite workers of all races into a coalition for something like democratic socialism. This won’t happen if you think working class whites are aristocrats and dismiss their sufferings as “feeling left behind.” Read Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton for a tutorial on the misery in much of working class white America if you need convincing on this point.

Unfortunately, the radical race perspective is not only descriptively misguided. It is politically defeatist. If you really believe that the white majority is an unchanging group committed above all else to its aristocratic racial privilege, then nothing will ever change. If you really believe this you should simply shrug your shoulders and give up on politics.

On the other hand, if you believe, as leftists throughout American history have, that a working class coalition can be formed in favor of democratic socialism, then a more just world is possible. In the political sphere today this will probably look something like Bernie Sanders’ steely anger at the dominance of oligarchs combined with Zohran Mamdani’s cheerful hope that democratic socialism offers the best prospect for constructing a more democratic, more peaceful, and more equal world.

For an optimistic take on winning rural voters see this piece from The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/democratic-socialists-rural-voters.