Worlds Oligarchs never left.

The world's richest man is storming through American departments, canceling contracts left and right and firing staff. The third-richest man is banning the quality newspaper he bought from publishing opinion pieces that contradict his ideas.

It seems clear: in the US, democracy is over and the rule of the oligarchs has begun.

But that is not the case, says Janosch Prinz. That democracy was never purely a – to quote President Abraham Lincoln – government of, by and for the people. If you look closely, you will see in the US a field of forces in which voters are constantly pitted against the wealthy upper class of society – and in that battle usually come off worst.

One after another, they line up behind Trump

And if you look a little closer at the Netherlands, you see exactly the same thing, says Prinz, a university lecturer in philosophy at Maastricht University. And you see it in Germany, the country where he was born.

Together with colleagues in Maastricht (Franco Palazzi) and at the universities of Amsterdam (Enzo Rossi and Max Fenner), Virginia Tech (Andrew Scerri) and Münster (Manon Westphal), Prinz is trying to get a handle on this power play – and to figure out how to strengthen the position of those ordinary voters, the 99 percent who do not have billions of euros or dollars at their disposal.

What Prinz is seeing in Washington right now is not so much that the oligarchs have suddenly gained more power, but that they are rallying behind Donald Trump one after the other with all their might, hoping for less regulation and lower taxes, and they are certainly not hiding it.

Too little attention for the elite The latter makes the power they have suddenly stand out very much. “I think we just have to admit that democratic theory has not been concerned enough with elites and oligarchic power in recent decades,” says Prinz. “The idea was that politics was a matter of pluralism. Power is divided between different interest groups and normally a balance can be achieved if there are good politicians who play the different interest groups off against each other.”

But recent developments in the US belie that image. “There is a tendency, certainly in the US, to return to the Gilded Age .”

In that 'gilded age', at the end of the nineteenth century, the masses in the US were powerless, politicians played a supporting role and wealthy oil and railroad barons openly called the shots. The state was there to ensure that they could continue to make money by defending the country and maintaining order.

Defending property through lobbying Prinz: “Before states were formed, oligarchs, for example the high nobility at the time, always had to use violence themselves. They had property, but without a strong rule of law you have no property rights. When the modern state came into being, they could leave that to the government. They could say: I am going to defend my property, not with violence, but by lobbying or by buying expensive lawyers who try to avoid taxes for me.”

The vast majority of the population, who do not own much, usually cannot compete with that. “You and I have our individual rights above all,” says Prinz. “On our own, we can do almost nothing. But if we all pull together, we may be able to match the power of the oligarchs.”

In between are the politicians, themselves an elite group, who hopefully bridge that divide. “Politicians have an interest in the survival of the state. They have to be careful that the rest of us don’t get too angry, that there’s no uprising. But they also have to make sure that there’s continued economic support from people with a huge amount of power and property.

'We should not think: 'democracy is dying''

“That’s why in most periods of history you have a situation where the bond between the political elites and the oligarchs is very strong. Only sometimes, for example after the two world wars, you saw that the connection between the political elites and the majority became stronger. Then you had trade unions and other social organizations that exerted so much pressure that the elites listened to that majority sooner. That led, for example, to tax rates for the highest incomes of 70 percent.”

That seesaw movement means that Prinz is not immediately panicking about what is happening in the US. “We should not think: 'democracy is dying now'. What we had is an oligarchic democracy, and in that you can go more to the oligarchic side or the democratic side. Historically, we were more often on the oligarchic side.”

two women of the wealthy Vanderbilt family walking through New York, 1890 Bettmann Archive And a European should not think that things are or were so much better on this side of the ocean. Take the recent German parliamentary elections, says Prinz. The incoming chancellor, CDU leader Friedrich Merz, is someone who left politics for a while to earn millions as a lawyer and supervisory director at all kinds of large companies, including the German branch of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world.

Oligarchs in the background

Prinz: “In Germany, the oligarchs wanted to stay in the background in the period after the Second World War. As a result, it is not possible to say with certainty how much power they have. But you can assume that they do. Because if you look at the statistics, for example, you see that in Germany, and also in the Netherlands, the inequality of ownership is very great.”

Such inequality in wealth is expressed by economists in the Gini coefficient. That number is somewhere between two impossible extremes: at 0, everyone owns exactly the same amount; at 1, everything is in the hands of one person. Prinz: “You would never think it, but Germany is at almost the same figure as America, around 0.8.”

To be precise, in 2021, Germany’s Gini coefficient for ownership was 0.79. In the US, it was 0.85. And the Netherlands was just below Germany at 0.75.

If you look at income inequality rather than wealth inequality, those figures are lower. In that area, the Netherlands has a Gini coefficient of 0.26, but Germany and the US are well above that with 0.32 and 0.41.

America vs. Netherlands That this inequality translates into political influence in the US was shown in 2012 by American researcher Martin Gilens. He inventoried how various groups of Americans thought about government policy, and looked at which group got their way in policy changes in the years that followed. The result was clear: it was the '1 percent'.

But that was America. In the Netherlands, things might be different, thought researcher Wouter Schakel of the University of Amsterdam.

“The United States is the most obvious case,” he wrote in 2019 in the journal Socio-Economic Review . “Extreme economic inequality is a major reason, but so is the enormous influx of money into politics, as is – not unrelated – the fact that most members of Congress are millionaires.”

The rich are proven right more than twice as often In that article he reported on his research into the same phenomenon in the least obvious country. After all, in the Netherlands 'the level of income inequality is one of the lowest in the world, and it has hardly increased in the last few decades. Furthermore, financial donations play a very limited role in Dutch elections, and the highly proportional electoral system should in principle give poor people a greater voice.'

Schakel's conclusions were sobering, however. He examined political decisions about possible policy changes between 1979 and 2012. When the poorest 10 percent and the richest 10 percent disagreed, the richest group got its way more than twice as often as the poorest group.

Democracy in Europe also has oligarchic features, Prinz concludes. “In recent decades, parties that have traditionally stood up for the lower middle class and the working class have shifted to positions that are in the interests of the richest 1 percent. If you look at Germany, you see that unemployed and working-class people are now voting en masse for the AfD. And that is mainly because they offer to turn against those parties. Even though the economic policy of the AfD is not very good for people who are really struggling financially.”

Representation through a veto body And in the US too, it turns out that voting for a populist or populist party is not the way to make democracy less oligarchic. What would help?

A concrete idea that Prinz recently published on, together with his colleague Manon Westphal from the University of Münster, is inspired by ancient Rome, when it was still a republic, from about five centuries before Christ until the accession of Julius Caesar.

This republic was openly governed by oligarchs: in the Senate, all seats were occupied by members of prominent and wealthy families. But after the remaining citizens increasingly rebelled against this, they were given special representation: the people's tribunes. Among other things, they could veto decisions of the Senate if they were not in the interest of their supporters.

Randomly selected group

In the Prinz and Westphal scheme, the Netherlands, for example, gets a 'tribunate', a group of, for example, 100 to 150 citizens chosen by lot. Like the Roman tribunes, they can block decisions by parliament or the government, albeit only once a year. In addition, the tribunate can raise issues that politics, under the influence of a rich and highly educated elite, may not want to deal with at all.

“The tribunate makes visible some of the social reality that political institutions, based on formal equality, normally conceal,” they wrote last year in the journal Political Theory .

The idea of ??a tribunate has also been suggested by others, but then explicitly to give people with a lower income or less education a voice. According to Prinz and Westphal, however, you then bake in advance which contradiction between which groups needs to be bridged or calmed.

A randomly selected group, which will automatically include a number of highly educated and wealthy people, can decide for itself what an advice should be about – which must then be discussed by parliament. Prinz: “Show us which conflict lines really separate the elite from the non-elite”.

Low degree of organization

Prinz also sees other possibilities to make democracy less oligarchic. "You have to strengthen the social organizations again. So then it's about organizing collective power, for example of the unions, so that people say: we are the 99 percent and we are going to work together.

“But then you have the problem that you now have a very low level of organization in the Netherlands. And more generally a very big crisis of the club culture. I myself was on the board of the table tennis club here in Maastricht for years, and that is really a disaster. Everyone wants to play along, but that's it.”

That is not an improvement that you can decree by law, like the tribunate. It can be done with another option that Prinz has to offer: "You can raise taxes to limit the assets of the oligarchs a little bit."

'Anti-oligarchy is good for oligarchs'

One philosopher who is working on this, and even advocates setting a hard maximum on ownership, is Ingrid Robeyns, from Utrecht University, who published the book Limitarism on the subject in 2023.

What such proposals have in common is that they require a change in culture. Prinz: “In our culture, more is always better. But at some point, more may be worse for everyone. Even for oligarchs.”

“Just like feminism is good for men, you could say anti-oligarchy is good for oligarchs. Because now the richest people in the world, even those who don’t have hundreds of billions, but only a few million, probably have too much money to spend it all. But they’re under a tremendous amount of pressure to protect it all the time.”



Questa mattina mi sono alzato
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
questa mattina mi sono alzato
e ho trovato l'invasor.


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