TAKING DOWN OLIGARCHY
Metacrisis Salon #14 - Cleaned Transcript
September 10, 2026 - Lightning Lofts, Brooklyn, NY

Recorded by Mike the pigeon. Cleaned and condensed: filler trimmed,
crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the night kept intact. Not verbatim.

dearcrisis.com/salon/14-taking-down-oligarchy

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1. Welcome

  [Act I · The Blue Room]

  MCK: Welcome to Lightning Lofts. For folks who have not been here before, this place used to be a button factory. Seventeen rooms, eighteen people live here, and everything is a little broken right now. The roof is leaking. We are all fine here in the blue room.
  The Metacrisis Salon has been happening for about a year and a half: Action Labs, salons like this one, and other events, including a lot coming up during Climate Week at a place called Caravan of Dreams in the East Village. Food and drinks stay next to you, because it is easy to kick things over. Three bathrooms in total.
  The agreements, shouted out by the room. Welcome the stranger, which means be friendly, say hi to the person next to you. Share the space and land the plane: when we ask questions, just ask the question, no long lead up. Hold the tension. Some of what comes up tonight might be awkward or challenging, and we are not trying to rush it or come up with the answer, we move through it together. Explore kin over transactions: we are not sharing resumes, we are being friends. And thank the chefs. An extra thanks tonight for Joseph, because the food standard here just went up. Real feedback is welcome too. Somebody once said the dessert was disappointing, and dessert has been improving ever since.
  The shape of the night: Ben opens, Jeffrey speaks in two parts, we break out and wrestle with it in between, then Q&A, then community announcements, and afterwards you can buy a book and get it signed.

2. From Mongolia

  Ben: I got back from Mongolia two days ago. I rushed back from Asia because these were the days Jeffrey was available. I found him through a video on YouTube, cold emailed him, and asked when he would next be in New York.
  Mongolia was not what I was expecting. The thing that struck me most was the lack of roads, the lack of fences, the lack of power lines. In the part we visited, near the old seat of power of the Mongol empire, you are not allowed to own land. You can only lease it. The culture is nomadic, so the buildings are temporary. And if no one owns anything, you belong anywhere. Whereas every space we belong in here is temporary in the other direction. You cannot stay here tonight, because this place does not belong to you.
  Why is that interesting? When you are presented with a landscape, there is a road, and you drive on the road. The land is divided into parcels that belong to other people, so you do not touch it. We follow roads that were built by other people, decisions made by people who were not us, and we trust that those roads take us somewhere good. I think the same thing happens in our systems. We think democracy is choosing who the bus driver is, but maybe a collection of oligarchs and other decision makers already decided what the highways are, and the lanes are just what we follow, thinking that is freedom.

3. The Frame

  Ben: We have been exploring this predicament for a year and a half. Luke Kemp, who came to an earlier salon, studies the rise and fall of over 300 civilizations in his book Goliath's Curse. His ingredients for what he calls Goliath fuel: lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land, which just means it is hard to leave, so people stay as conditions worsen. Over time that combination creates wealth inequality, which creates power differentials, and with generational transmission of wealth and power the loop continues and power consolidates at the top, until the whole thing comes crashing down and the cycle repeats.
  At salon five we talked about three plausible futures. One: growth continues, and wealth and power keep consolidating until we end up in a technofeudal surveillance future where corporations outgrow nation states and technology outstrips our ability to adapt. Two: we hit the boundaries of the natural world, mass climate migration and destabilization, collapse. And three, some middle path where we keep the benefits of modern society without reverting to the Stone Age, the bend not break scenario that Nate Hagens talks about.
  Everyone answered poll questions to be here tonight. There is a general sense of unease in the room, and people split on where to point: the rich and powerful, the systems and incentives, or the stories we carry inside ourselves. While prepping this talk I found a study that lets us test one of those. In 2014, Gilens and Page measured how much the preferences of the average citizen mattered to which policies actually passed in the United States. In a fair system, if half the people support a policy, it should have about a half chance of passing. What they found instead was that the popularity of an issue with average citizens made close to no difference whatsoever. What mattered was the preferences of the economic elites. That curve would probably be even steeper measured at the top tenth of a percent. And since Citizens United, the money flowing openly into politics has exploded, and no one is hiding their interests anymore.
  There is an app for tonight, like every event. Drop questions during the talk for the Q&A, find the presentation and references on the resources tab, and use the Friends tab. The name tags are not for show.
  Jeffrey, the video that introduced you called you the world's foremost expert on oligarchy. This is your second book on the topic. We were thinking two parts: first how we got here, then what to do and what not to do, which you have studied through the people who tried to topple oligarchs and failed. Twenty friendly minutes on the timer.

4. A Democracy and an Oligarchy at Once

  Winters: Thanks for writing to me out of the clear blue. I have been doing events all over the place since the book appeared in May, and this is already more fun than anything I have participated in so far. This is what book tours should be like.
  I call the book The Blind Spot because it is an effort at demystification. One of the questions I struggled with while writing it: what does it mean to be both a democracy and an oligarchy simultaneously? There are important ways in which we are democratic. A lot of people immediately say it is a complete sham, but for anybody who has lived in or spent real time in a very non democratic place, our circumstances are quite different. And yet we all know the system stops responding, even to serious struggle and representation, when it runs up against certain kinds of resistance.
  That is what you saw in the Gilens and Page study. They did not claim there is no democracy. They said there are many things on which the many and the few align, and outcomes look democratic there. But they asked a special question: when the interests of the many and the rich few diverge, how many times do the many win? Their answer was zero. Never. No matter how big the majority was.
  Think of democracy as having a horizontal and a vertical axis. The horizontal axis is how the non rich treat each other. We exclude, trample, and marginalize people all the time, and people have struggled against the rest of the non rich throughout history. There is a correlation between those struggles and getting change. Never perfect, always setbacks, but struggle correlates with representation and voice. The vertical axis is the relationship between the non rich and the rich. Ask it this way: should a democratic society be able to decide, democratically, how unequal it will be? Most people say yes, a democratic people ought to be able to shape their society that way. Second question: can we? No. Not in a system structured this way. Which is why, when the people wanted one outcome and the very wealthy wanted another, the wealthy won every time.
  Here is my argument: the fusion of oligarchy and democracy we live in is a design feature, not a flaw. It was consciously designed to work this way, and it has worked for 250 years.
  Wealth pyramids are not new. Highly stratified societies go back thousands of years. But every inequality in history sustained itself through coercion, violence, and awe, because a pyramid is inherently unstable and the wealthy always feel threatened. Oligarchs, who are people empowered by wealth, have faced threats throughout history, often from other oligarchs, sometimes from a king above who could take their land. There are many ways to be empowered: participation, voice, charisma. Oligarchs are empowered by wealth. And 250 years ago, with the first modern democracy, something happened that had never happened before. Stratification and wealth inequality were sustained through open participation. It is so startling that in the book I give the system a name: participatory inequality. We participate in the unequal system that oppresses us, and we feel something like consent of the governed. The system can grant all of us voice and voting and still be stable in its hierarchy. The book is driven by how that arose, how it has been sustained, and how one might challenge it.

5. The 1780s

  Winters: This is the 250th anniversary, so we are all supposed to be celebrating. Here is what actually happened in the 1780s, when the second constitution of the United States was formulated. If you took AP US History you got a mind numbing story: interstate commerce problems, so they gathered in Philadelphia and wrote a new constitution. False. There had been multiple efforts at a constitutional convention during the 1780s, and every one of them fizzled. Nobody wanted to go, because all the power was at the state level, and powerful people did not want to open that can of worms.
  And yet this was the period after the War of Independence, and it was a deep economic crisis, somewhere between a recession and a depression, and a debt crisis at the same time. The war had been funded with debt. Who provided the credit? Creditor financiers here in North America, creditor financiers in Europe, and governments intervening to push the outcome one way or the other. The debt was government debt, repaid through taxes, and the financiers wanted repayment with interest. The problem: the small farmers who had to pay could not. Today you can declare bankruptcy. In those days the United States had inherited debtors' prisons from Britain. They were the first prisons in this country. If you could not pay when the sheriff arrived, you went to prison with rapists and murderers. Tens of thousands of small farmers, who had votes, went in. Men, women, and children documented as young as two years old. In some counties, 70 percent of the farms had been foreclosed on.
  The many had to pay the debt. The few, the oligarch creditors, wanted the debt paid. It was an oligarchy and democracy clash, and it erupted in the 1780s. About half the state legislatures were dominated by small farmers who had captured them. Pennsylvania was the paradigm: a House of Representatives only, no Senate above it, because the role of a Senate is for wealthy people to block the House. No governor's veto either. The other half were captured by creditor oligarchs, and the paradigm there was Massachusetts. In the states where the people were dominant, they asked for relief and got it, in the form of printed paper money, which depreciated, which let a debtor pay off debt at a discount. A haircut for the rich, on behalf of the poor, achieved through democratic power. You may remember Madison in the Federalist Papers on the wickedness of paper money. That is the wickedness he meant. In the hard currency states there was no relief. People begged, marched, did whatever they could, and kept being thrown into debtors' prisons by the thousands.

6. Shays' Rebellion and the Panic

  Winters: Then you got Shays' Rebellion. Whoever told you that Shays' Rebellion was an oligarchy and democracy clash? That is exactly what it was. I have read what high school students are taught: an anarchist moment, people rising up. No. The people marched with fife and drum. This was America, so everyone was armed. In Massachusetts alone there were five such rebellions. And when they got to the town centers they did two things. They did not attack the oligarchs. They did not burn the creditors' businesses or destroy their homes. They released people from debtors' prisons, and they blocked judges from ordering more foreclosures.
  All of a sudden, the same framers who had been unwilling to gather, including Washington, who would not come out of retirement for a convention, overcame their reluctance. When they saw the democratic decisions being made by half the states on behalf of the poor, and the rebellions in the places where, in their view, democracy was working, they ran in a panic to Philadelphia. We have documentation of what they said there, because six people took notes. By the way, the very last decision of the Constitutional Convention was an agreement to embargo all of their notes for a minimum of 30 years, so no one could see what they talked about. It took 53 years for the first notes to be published.
  They disagreed about many things. Big states and small states, slave states and less slave states. They agreed about one thing, in the words of Elbridge Gerry, the source of the word gerrymandering: there is an excess of democracy in America. And they wanted to fix it.
  They were wealthy men, alarmed at what democracy was doing, who also genuinely believed in the consent of the governed. And they believed the pyramidal form of society was just. Their word was natural. It would go against human nature for society to be much more horizontal. So their diagnosis: our society is pyramidal, our democracy is too flat. We must structure the democracy in a pyramidal way too. One more thing. The Congress had authorized them only to amend the existing Articles of Confederation. They decided on their own to scrap it and write a whole new one. They had no authorization. What they did was not legal.

7. The Vertical Wedding Cake

  Winters: Here is what they built. The House of Representatives would be the only thing the people are allowed to vote for. And that is true, as they structured it. Then, because the House is closest to the people, it is dangerous. It might produce more ideas like paper money, what they called licentiousness, democracy that steals from the rich. So they created a Senate over the House, to check the House, constituted exclusively by the wealthy and not by a vote. The people of the United States did not get to vote on the Senate until 1913, by constitutional amendment. It was never intended that they would.
  Think of it as a layered wedding cake, each layer a check on the one below. If something gets through the House and the Senate, an executive with a veto over both, requiring a supermajority to overturn. And if it somehow gets through all of those layers, a Supreme Court that can block the entire democratic process, no matter how legitimate. They talked about this openly as they structured it.
  In school we are taught checks and balances as a horizontal story: executive next to legislative next to judicial, so no king or autocrat can rise. Simultaneously, they created a vertical checks and balances, and that one never gets talked about. One protects us against a king. The other protects the wealthy few against the many. House, Senate, executive, Supreme Court.

8. Aristotle's Recipe

  Winters: Aristotle, writing the Politics 2,300 years earlier, grappled with a single issue. There are the few and there are the many, and that structure is unstable. There will always be conflict and revolution. The oligarchs will oppress the many, and the many will oppress the oligarchs by taking their money. So you need an institutional design that melds and fuses democracy with oligarchy at the same time, and he laid out how. He said you know you have the balance right when, on any given day, you were not sure whether you were living in an oligarchy or a democracy. Perfect. That is the balance. Confusion is the basis of the fusion. And 2,300 years later, the framers did what Aristotle laid out. They achieved a balance that had never been achieved before.
  It explains one of the most important developments of the last 250 years. The United States is more democratic than it was 250 years ago. Dramatically more, given who was excluded and enslaved then. And we are more unequal than we were 250 years ago. Today's modern liberal democracies are among the most unequal societies ever to have existed in human history, and we do it with participation, something oligarchs of old could never have dreamed of.
  Last sentence, truly. Take the average Roman oligarch in the Senate of imperial Rome, a small farmer enslaved society, and compare his wealth to the median person in imperial Rome. The multiple was 16,000 to one, which is incredibly stratified. Now take the Forbes 400, roughly the head count of the Roman Senate, average them, and compare that to the median wealth position in the United States today. The multiple is 140,000 to one. Eight or nine times the inequality of imperial Rome. That is where we are.

9. The Room Responds

  Ben: Take a minute to digest. I do not know how everyone else is feeling, but I am feeling a little duped. Before the next part, one more graph, from Luke Kemp: the double spiral of well-being, average well-being moving opposite to the wealth and power gap, in cycles. Which means there are always opportunities for resets. The question for the tables: how do we dig ourselves out of an oligarchy?
  Winters: Your faces drive the narrative when I speak to a room. So before I go on, what did you think? What is your reaction?
  From the room: People before us did hard physical work and went to war over their conditions. We are comfortable, and maybe there is an inertia tied to the work we do now. We generally feel kind of okay.
  From the room: I had no idea part of the constitution was about reconciling the interests of the oligarchy and the people below. I thought it was about states. And the Iroquois confederacy influenced constitutional ideas before any of it: Franklin said that if those nations could form their union, educated Europeans should be able to do better.
  From the room: When the oligarchy is split, democracy actually works, and the popular will gets through. Also, the baseline: at 16,000 to one people fought. At 140,000 to one we do not. How good is life today that we do not fight back? Then it was, I sleep on hay and die of sepsis, so I will go to war. Now it is, I am poor, but I still have Facebook and the emergency room.
  From the room: How do you make oligarchs feel safe? They did not feel safe at 16,000 to one, and they got to 140,000 to one. What could they be given, other than more money?
  From the room: At what point did people become unaware they are being taken advantage of? The rebellions were very aware.
  From the room: Access to healthcare is tied to the job, so you cannot leave the stressful position to resist. And outlets like Twitter channel the energy into things that are not change.
  From the room: The rebellion then was more effective than it could be now. The whole country was two and a half million people, Shays had a couple thousand, and the oligarchs had to hire private militias, because there was no federal military to protect them. That is partly why they went to Philadelphia. Now there is the most powerful military in history, and a million people in the streets can feel futile.
  From the room: The floor is so much higher now, even if the multiple is bigger. How does it look in authoritarian states?
  Winters: The 140,000 to one of the United States is 5.6 million to one in India, a comparable billionaire class over a much lower median standard of living. And India is a democracy. Participatory inequality in India. That case is one of the biggest head scratchers political scientists have struggled with for decades: how could such an unequal society continue to have open participatory democracy?
  From the room: Devil's advocate: higher productive forces can sustain a higher multiple. It is not just value shifting from bottom to top, the two drive each other.
  From the room: Aristotle's sign of a stable fusion is that you cannot tell which system you are in. If it were labeled an oligarchy, we could say screw this. The confusion is what makes drastic action hard to justify.
  From the room: When subjugation is explicit, divine right or violence, revolutionary energy is available. The feeling of being able to change things democratically dampens it. The catharsis is the control.
  From the room: My concern is the trajectory, not the level. Historically, inequality booms ride a frontier being exploited: the continent, labor, oil. We are approaching the edge of the frontiers, the natural limits of the planet. There has always been another frontier. What happens when there is not?
  From the room: The middle class does not see itself as labor. Tech workers do not unionize because they do not think of themselves as factory labor. And the truly poor are so disempowered that the only outlet is yelling at an employee making fifty grand.

10. Not Roman Dentistry

  Winters: The points you raised were incredible. First, on comparing ourselves to Roman times: we are not comparing American dentistry to Roman dentistry. We are comparing inequality then and inequality now. No matter how much additional wealth we generate, the question is whether we allow it to continue to be pyramidally distributed, and whether that is fair.
  And we are not in an ordinary moment. We are 50 years into one of the greatest surges of inequality on record, globally. In the United States, between 1975 and 2025, 55 trillion dollars shifted upward in society. Trillion with a T. Another way to see it: a study asked, if we take the inequality of 1975, not an equal society, and just project it forward as the economy grew, what would the median income be today? Instead of something like 39,000 dollars, it would be closer to 80,000. Imagine the slogan: restore the glorious inequality of 1975. That is the loss in the standard of living of the average person.
  How upset are Americans about material inequality? This is a society remarkably tolerant of great inequality. Lots of people buy lottery tickets and want to win 100 million dollars, and nobody thinks, oh no, I am going to become an oligarch. They think it will be great. And yet: the fight oligarchy rallies with Bernie Sanders have been drawing between 10,000 and 25,000 people for almost two years. I have been studying oligarchy for 25 years, and I spent most of that time being told: oligarchs, right, that is in Russia. Not here. A student on the first day of my Oligarchs and Elites seminar at Northwestern blurted out: Russia has oligarchs, the United States has rich people. Think about those categories. For a long time the American idea was that an oligarch is someone who got rich in a corrupt way and engages in politics. No corruption element, not an oligarch. That is an American detour on what the word means. We have now come back. Oligarchs are people empowered by wealth.

11. In Your Face Oligarchy

  Winters: Why are we talking about oligarchs now? Because we live 50 years into an incredible ascendance of oligarchs, and they are drunk with confidence. Brazen. I have a chapter called In Your Face Oligarchy. Stealth wealth was the old notion that in a fused oligarchy and democracy you should not be too visible. Thanks to Citizens United, thanks to victory after victory, they now feel they legitimately rule. We even have euphemisms for them: donors. Megadonors. People who give blood are donors. People who pump money into the political system are investors. Political investors. They are venture capitalists funding outcomes in their favor, and our media cannot use the word.
  We have not had this much visibility of oligarchs since the Gilded Age. Then, they were called robber barons, and there was a backlash from below that lasted roughly four decades and delivered real setbacks. It broke up their corporations. It imposed the first peacetime income tax in the United States, in 1894, written so it fell only on the top third of one percent of the population. It passed. The Supreme Court, the last bulwark, struck it down in 1895. It took 18 years to reverse the Court, and the only way was a constitutional amendment. The Progressive Era did it, and the income tax came back, targeted at the wealthy. The rest of the twentieth century is the story of democracy wanting progressive taxation and oligarchs fighting for regressive. Who won? The oligarchs won. But while they were losing, wealth concentration at the top stagnated, and the living standards of the average household tripled in real terms.
  It matters that they got too brazen. They violated Aristotle's dictum: suddenly, on any given day, people knew they were not in a democracy. We are again in that moment. Americans do not feel they are in a democracy. They have lost confidence in the institutions, and they are very aware of what wealth power is doing. That is why we are talking about oligarchy today, and the backlash has already begun. It is supposed to be un-American to talk about a wealth tax, and wealth taxes are in play. Being voted on in California. A version in play here in New York. Europe is discussing wealth taxes and coordinating, so that if the wealthy try to escape, they pay an exit tax, 40 percent of their wealth if they want to run. It takes awareness, mobilization, coordination.
  One more thing about wealth taxes. We already have one in the United States. What is the number one store of wealth for the average household? Your house. Taxed annually, reassessed by the county, over and over. Wealthy people pay property taxes too, but on a small percentage of their total wealth. And here is the viciousness: you are taxed not on your equity but on the full value of the house. You are taxed on the mortgage. You may have 100,000 dollars of equity in a 500,000 dollar house, and you are taxed on 500,000. That is as vicious as it gets. So the next time someone says a shareholder is not liquid and might have to sell shares to pay a wealth tax: granny, who lived in the house 50 years and paid it off, has to sell it as her property taxes go up. Who is boohooing for grandma? Meanwhile we worry that an oligarch cannot be liquid enough to pay three percent.

12. Redefining Democracy

  Winters: A basic principle: how do you define democracy? The liberal system is designed to stop the definition at voice and voting. It stops there. I offer an alternative: democracy is power, in all of its relevant forms, shared equally. Oligarchs do not mind you having voting and voice, as long as wealth power is concentrated in their hands exclusively. The contestation is between wealth power and voting and voice. The average oligarch holds the equivalent of millions of our voices and votes, each one of them, in effect.
  A friend said, you would not have written the book if you did not have hope. I depressed myself writing it. But I believe in demystification. Clarity hurts, and it is important. I hope what you feel is some combination of shock, anger, and I must do something.

13. Strategic Incrementalism

  Winters: There are two ways to think about challenging oligarchs. One is doable within the politics of the ordinary, which, despite the craziness, we are still in. The other is for the politics of crisis, of rupture. First, the ordinary: strategic incrementalism. There are doable things right now that slow, weaken, and complicate the power position of oligarchs.
  The ENABLERS Act. Do not feel embarrassed if you have never heard of it. 99.999 percent of people have not. After 9/11, the Patriot Act required banks to know their client and report suspicious activity, because terrorism. It turns out oligarchs and terrorists use the same mechanisms and vehicles, so that law complicated the lives of oligarchs evading and avoiding taxation, and they moved their transactions into non transparent vehicles. The ENABLERS Act listed about 30 more kinds of entities with the same duties: law firms doing transactions for oligarchs, family offices, real estate agencies. It was slipped into the defense authorization bill in 2022, and it was blocked by a single senator, Toomey of Pennsylvania. It almost passed. It is doable.
  Here is one that did pass: the Corporate Transparency Act. If you had heard of it before tonight, I will buy you a beer. In the United States you incorporate at the state level, and states like Delaware and Wyoming let you incorporate completely secretly. The beneficial owner is never documented. That is what lets a shell corporation invest in a super PAC, and I almost said donate, I am going to slap myself, invest, with only the entity's name disclosed. A shell can buy shares, open a bank account, move money offshore, form a trust. The act said the United States would build a national registry of every corporation with the beneficial ownership revealed. Six questions: name, address, Social Security number, driver's license. Thirty three million corporations. Publicly listed ones exempt, because we already know their owners. This was aimed at the shells. The activists framed it around money laundering and terrorism, not oligarchs, and it passed in 2021, inside the defense authorization bill. In 2024 the registry opened and companies started to register. Then the election happened, and within months, in March, the Treasury Secretary, whose department implements the rules, exempted 99.9 percent of all corporations with a stroke of the pen. You did not hear about it when it passed, and you did not hear about it when it was gutted. Nothing was more devastating to oligarchs in the past 30 years than this act, and they knew it. It was named in Project 2025. You could have read right past it. Here is the good news: the law is still on the books. A Treasury department, if the election comes out differently, can reimpose the beneficial ownership requirement.
  Large partnerships. Most corporations used to be C corporations, one set of owners, a clear structure, too easily taxed. The wealth defense industry, a term I originated, created large partnerships: a blob of partners in a maze of relationships that the IRS cannot disentangle and cannot audit. The original partnerships had about 100 members. Today, large partnerships have as many as 500,000 members in a single entity. Unauditable.
  The tax gap. The IRS is required by law to publish, annually, the gap between what its data shows it ought to collect and what it does collect. Right now the tax gap in the United States is about one trillion dollars per year not collected. The last defense budget was about 900 billion. The entire defense budget. Overwhelmingly, it is oligarchs not paying those taxes. That is what the wealth defense industry does. And then they make money on the money they did not surrender, which accelerates the concentration of wealth.

14. The Politics of Preparation

  Winters: The other realm: the politics of preparation. Deep changes that, if you propose them today, people call you a complete joker. Not feasible, quit dreaming. Yet political theorists and activists are thinking through what deep changes would really reach oligarchs. What is possible in the politics of the ordinary is limited. In moments of rupture and crisis, oligarchs are at their weakest, because the system is not working for them either. I am not in favor of cataclysms. But the only thing worse than a deep rupture is a wasted one, where you are not ready with radical transformations. The politics of preparation means thinking them through, refining, debating, testing at small scale, and being ready for the pushback, because you cannot do this in a politics of the last minute. Oligarchs reconstitute very quickly. The window is short.
  Examples. One: undo what was done in Philadelphia. Eliminate the Senate. Two: no executive veto over anyone below. The purpose of an executive is to carry out the legislation of the people. Maybe allow a veto that only stalls a decision and sends it back down, and if a simple majority passes it again, done. Three: people talk about expanding the Supreme Court to 13 and stacking it. Wrong. The Supreme Court should be at minimum 45 people. Half through an appointment process via a rotating legislative committee, and the other half by public lottery: all you need is a law degree and to have served as a judge at any level once. Limited terms.
  And the last proposal: how do we represent ourselves? We are trained to believe we represent ourselves by voting for someone who represents us. Political science is devoted to the art of explaining how you are actually not represented. What if our legislature were composed by national lottery? Sortition. Instantly, a sample of us. Women immediately 50 percent of the seats, after all this struggle, decade after decade. Racial and other representation, immediate. Oligarchs would not do well. The question becomes: how much do you trust your average citizen to legislate on your behalf? My Northwestern students say, after all this effort becoming an elite, surely there is some payoff, I am not turning this over to a lottery. So: how many of you have been on a jury? Juries are sortition. Imagine someone campaigning with money to get onto a jury. You would immediately think it illegitimate. Yet juries decide guilt and innocence, life and death. I have been on two juries. When you empower people, people get very serious. You disempower people, and they are interested in the Kardashians. Why study anything in detail if you are completely disempowered? Empower people with decisions of life and death, and I have been consistently blown away by the seriousness of average citizens in positions of responsibility. I trust sortition more than what my colleagues Ben Page and Marty Gilens found about how our representation currently works.
  Our fusion of oligarchy and democracy is a feature, by design. This democracy, participatory inequality, will not stop oligarchs. It is not designed to. If we want democracy, we must redesign it.

15. Q&A

  Ben: For the politics of the ordinary, are there tangible groups to join, especially in New York?
  Winters: I do not know the list of organizations, but find them. Join. Here is the problem for us versus oligarchs: for us, participation requires our time, and it is zero sum with everything else in our lives. Oligarchs can golf while their wealth power is being expressed. The cost for us is that we have to show up. I am old, posting things does not feel real to me. Showing up really matters. And one more thing, somewhat controversial. Know your privilege, recognize your privilege, and then use your privilege. We could spend a lot of time beating ourselves up and wallowing in guilt. That is pretty useless. Some of the most important moments in history for average people have come from class traitors, people empowered in some way who turn against rather than defend their privileged group. Embrace that power. I say this to oligarchs as well. I know oligarchs, I have interviewed them, and some want to use their power against oligarchy. I am not going to analyze how you got there. I do not care. If you will take that concentrated power and turn it against this structure, we are allies. What progressives do better than anything else is form circular firing squads. As you mobilize, embrace and deploy whatever empowerment you have.
  Ben: Who is preparing for the moment of crisis, and what does preparing look like?
  Winters: Every one of us has to recognize what superpowers we have. I am incredibly bad at organizing. My contribution was to write the book, the first one I have written for the general population instead of academics, out of step with my colleagues, and some of them frown on it. Knowledge, sharing, inspiring. All of us row this boat differently: artists, musicians, organizers who get things done. And movements need leadership. Remember Occupy Wall Street? Part of their ethos was, we are so egalitarian we have no leadership. The media wanted to talk to Occupy, and no one spoke for them. So horizontal there was no vertical structure at all. Ask any sociologist who studies movements: the people you are up against are organized and structured. It is okay to be structured as you fight for something much more egalitarian. If you lead well, lead, and do not be afraid if people follow. People need leadership.
  Ben: On what not to do. What should a movement against oligarchs avoid?
  Winters: There are warnings in the book. There have been moments when the safeguards built into democracy did not hold the people back, when procedural democracy was commandeered by transformative movements that succeeded democratically at the polls. Allende in Chile came to power democratically. He lost, and lost, and won after 21 years of struggle. They were oligarch threatening: redistributing concentrated land, changing conditions in factories. Allende said all along, we came to power democratically, with democratic legitimacy. And they killed him, and they destroyed the movement. That movement came to power at a time when oligarchs were strong. They are not to be toyed with. These folks do not go quietly into the night. If you move against oligarchs and the state does not defend them, they defend themselves. They hire militias, and it gets violent. Another example: Indonesia. The Communist Party of Indonesia had a very progressive agenda in the 1950s and 60s, absolutely committed to the democratic pathway, unarmed. In the 1955 elections they did very well, which scared elites and oligarchs in Indonesia and in Washington, because this was the Cold War, and here was a people's movement, completely democratic, that did not cheat at the polls. In the 1957 regional elections they did even better. It was clear that if the 1959 election had been held, the largest communist party outside a communist country would have won it, democratically. Unthinkable to Washington. That party was slaughtered. A million people were killed in six months. About 10,000 people a day. Because of the threat they posed democratically. The lesson: make sure the deepest, most threatening actions happen under conditions of greatest oligarchic weakness, not strength.
  From the room: What about voting directly on issues a couple of times a year, cutting out the representatives?
  Winters: I think that would be very hard for most people. I am a political scientist, this is my day job, and when I go into the voting booth and have to vote on judge so and so, I go in with a cheat sheet from an organization I trust, and I vote right down the line. Because I cannot familiarize myself with all of it. There are limitations. That is part of why I favor sortition: it samples our population and says, go at it. And I would not have 435 members of Congress. I would have 3,000. Why should 400 people represent us? Three thousand is manageable, and the likelihood of a bad sample goes down as the number goes up.
  From the room: So much media is owned by oligarchs, and it is the source of public awareness and education. How do we address that?
  Winters: Media is more concentrated in fewer hands than ever. And at the same time, the public has lost confidence in media. Interesting. They are reacting, in part, to the oligarchic control. If people felt the media were far more contested in voices and ownership, I think they would trust it more. The collapse of trust and the concentration of ownership are related. A good step, learning from the Gilded Age: break up the big. Force it by law. You would be amazed what we could do by law. Another example: the gap between CEO pay and average worker pay. Index them. Index CEO pay to the average worker's pay, by law. Done. The gap cannot widen. Do not talk about minimum wage, index the wages of people to the top, and boards will be careful how much they pay the top, because they must raise everyone else with it. We passed a law saying children cannot labor. We can index wages.
  From the room: Buckminster Fuller said do not fight the existing system, build the new one that makes it obsolete. Is that possible here, or would it be stamped down?
  Winters: I do not know if that would work, but I am completely open to the idea. I want to hear how it would play out. I might raise feasibility questions, but my attitude is that we need to be incredibly expansive and creative about what we consider as alternatives, and explore them. The more ideas out there the better.
  From the room: Can anything be done about what campaigns cost?
  Winters: The biggest cost in campaigns is advertising, something like 85 percent of all costs. We own the airwaves. Literally, all of us together. The FCC manages them on our behalf. All the media lease the signals from us. They do not own them. Therefore we can command the media, during elections, to provide airtime free. The cost of an election plummets. Oligarchs cannot dominate that cost structure. Access to campaigning becomes much more accessible. A democratic decision can do that by fiat. Make your money on the Super Bowl, but at campaign time, the last three months, free airtime. Because we own it, and it is our democracy.
  Six or seven questions from the app went unanswered when time ran out. They were sent to Jeffrey afterward, and he agreed to answer them in writing for a follow up.

16. Announcements and Close

  The community: A fundraiser on Sunday for the earthquake in Colombia. Groundship, embodied relating sessions at the intersection of climate psychology and connection. Dinners for the 99%, coming in October with an art gallery partnership on gatekeeping in the art industry. The Art in Odd Places festival along 14th Street on September 26, this year on the theme of utopias. A DSA political club. A Climate Week pathfinder app mapping 1,100 events, 1,200 organizations, and 600 venues. Circuit Breakers, October 17 and 18, on unionizing the tech industry. The Emergent Strategy book club, every other Sunday. An elder circle on Tuesdays, nominations open. And Caravan of Dreams needs Climate Week volunteers: front of house, stage management, funding, marketing. The 22 curated events are at dearcrisis.com/climate.
  Ben: Jeffrey brought books, sold at cost, and some free for anyone financially stressed. The signing line forms after close.