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
But what we need to understand is that if oligarchs won
all of the time, no one would think that the system was democratic.
They would think that it's completely dominated.
And so what has really changed over time is this, not the presence of oligarchy, but its visibility and the extent to which they win.
So let me give you an example.
Over the last 50 years, we have seen an absolutely epic explosion in inequality.
Not just in the United States, but around the world.
And this is a reflection, actually, of oligarchic power.
And it's expressed in two ways.
One, through the legislatures, and we have a tremendous study that was done in the United States of congressional decisions.
Two political scientists in the United States analyzed 1,779 policy decisions at the federal level, and they asked a simple question.
When the interest of the rich and the non-rich diverged, how many times on those policy issues did the non-rich majority win?
And the answer was never.
That's how strong the influence was.
And they do this quantitatively and so on.
It's a very, very famous article.
And so what we really need to understand is that how do we explain the fact that we have become more democratic over time, and yet we have become more unequal?
And we are not just becoming more unequal.
Liberal democracies today are the most unequal societies ever to have existed.
How is that possible, that we would become more empowered
Showing 101–120 of 177 · page 6 of 9
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