Jeffrey Winters
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 20 May
Jeffrey Winters’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
democracy works in the sense that you struggle to overcome those kinds of exclusions.
And we can see that there are setbacks, yes, and so on, but it actually works.
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice, as Luther King said.
Yes.
In that horizontal sense of the ways in which we as the non-rich sort of oppress each other.
And the blind spot, actually, I try to argue, is that because democracy works in this horizontal way, we mistakenly think that it will work along that vertical axis.
But it was precisely that vertical axis... Between the rich and poor.
between the rich and the poor, and the idea that the many could threaten the few, overwhelm them in a democracy by sheer numbers, that the framers decided they would create institutional safeguards and blocks.
So here's what they did.
They said, the people will get to vote at the level of the lower chamber, the House.
They would not get to vote for the Senate or anything up above that.
But that has changed now, which shows that these systems can evolve.
It has changed.
But let's just understand that it was set up so that only the wealthy would be a check in the Senate on the House.
And then the president got a veto just in case something got through.
the House and the Senate, and then the Supreme Court is able to actually nullify the entire democracy below that.
So, oligarchs have definitely experienced setbacks, and especially during major crises.
So, for example, all of those things you described, the New Deal, the FDR period, and so on, came in the wake of the First World War, the Great Depression, and in the Second World War, so that...
not only did we see the rise of the New Deal, but by the 1950s, the highest tax bracket that oligarchs faced was in excess of 90%.
And so, yes, the argument is that it is possible to actually get some relief some of the time.
Showing 81–100 of 177 · page 5 of 9
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