By Jeffrey Winters, Professor of Political Science,  Northwestern University

My earliest political memory as a boy was overhearing my father dismissing American democracy. “The rich control everything,” he said to his buddies sitting around our kitchen table. They all seemed to agree. Everyone at the table that day was a high school graduate, a union member, and had grown up voting Democrat in Cleveland, Ohio.

It wasn’t until I arrived at college that I had the luxury of studying democracy and inequality and was able to understand who “the rich” really were. Thanks to a work-study job in my junior year, I joined a semester abroad on a ship along with 600 other students. As my taxi arrived at the dock, I was astonished to see a traffic jam of stretch limousines ahead of us. At sea, rich students played poker for pots worth over $25,000. During a stop in Cairo, one student bought three Straight Egyptian Arabian horses and shipped them home to the US. Here I had come face to face with extreme wealth—though I was yet to understand the immense political influence these riches could buy.

Years later I was confronted once again with my father’s ideas about democracy and the rich in a Yale doctoral seminar offered by Robert Dahl, one of the 20th century’s most influential scholars of American democracy. Dahl was too well informed to believe that anything remotely close to government of, by, and for the people existed in America or anywhere else.

He believed that elites were in charge. But because they disagreed with each other, and some occasionally had to compete for votes among the masses, there was division and pluralism among the powerful. Democracy was saved.

The importance of oligarchs and their influence

Perhaps so. But there was a glaring problem. Dahl focused only on “elites”—a general category of officials or public figures ranging from Joe Biden to Gandhi to Martin Luther King, whose power had nothing to do with riches. But he ignored oligarchs—a distinct group also at the top empowered by wealth, ranging from familiar figures like George Soros to recluses like Timothy Mellon.

By leaving the role of oligarchs out of the picture, Dahl could not explain how the rich wield so much political control, nor why wealth was becoming vastly more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

The puzzling question we must ask is: Why hasn’t two centuries of increasingly free and equal voting prevented us from becoming more unequal? The conclusion I’ve come to is this: the inability of modern democracy to address wealth inequality is not a flaw. The failure is by design.

Democracy and oligarchy

Democracy was shaped from the start to go hand in hand with oligarchy. This is surprising because we think of the two systems as opposed. When democracy goes up, oligarchy goes down, and vice versa. But the reality is that they are joined. The rich dominate us not despite democracy, but through it.

To understand how this is possible, we must think in terms of two broad realms of politics. One is vertical and involves the world of concentrated wealth. Here oligarchs share a political agenda of fighting against redistribution.

This unfolds at multiple levels over time. First, democracies were deliberately designed with institutional safeguards built in to defend oligarchs – upper chambers to block lower ones, presidents with veto powers, and supreme courts where just five people in the US can defeat literally everyone else.

Second, oligarchs deploy their wealth power directly in political contests where parties and candidates are starved for campaign resources. Long before ordinary citizens get to vote, there is a “wealth primary” through which the rich filter who can advance.

Third, since the 1960s, a multi-billion-dollar Wealth Defense Industry (WDI) arose for the sole purpose of defeating democratic attempts at redistribution like progressive taxation.  Filled with armies of lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and wealth management professionals, the WDI coordinates oligarch support for candidates, lobbies aggressively for legislation slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and then, for good measure, creates complex shelters and schemes to make sure almost no taxes are actually paid.

In the first oligarchic realm, where wealth is at stake, democracy serves the few—which is to say it is broken.

But there is a second realm where democracy works. This is the horizontal world of literally everything else that makes up politics and governance where the rich are not threatened. These are things like abortion, religion in politics, access to guns, gender definitions and rights, or race and ethnicity, to name just a few. Democracy is free to serve the people because oligarchs either oppose and cancel each other, or don’t care.

The blind spot on democracy and change

This is where our blind spot arises. Because democracy works for these horizontal issues among those who aren’t rich, we mistakenly assume it will also work for vertical issues like greater economic equality.

We all keep dutifully voting, marching, and attending town halls, but wealth keeps shifting upward. Whether we elect liberals or conservatives, it keeps getting worse. We hope that if more of us just show up at the polls and rallies, democracy will produce results.

That illusion is our collective blind spot—our belief that democracy, as it currently stands, will give us the change we need. What we fail to see is that 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 built into the system.

This clashing combination is unique in political history. Explaining it and exploring what can be done about it is the core project of my new book, The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies.

The struggle to push oligarchy out of democracy involves familiar things like campaign finance reform. But that is far from enough. Oligarchy is so deeply woven into our democracies that only radical structural changes will have an impact.

And these are politically possible only during crises, when oligarchic power is impaired. What is needed is a deliberate “politics of preparation” for these moments so that major changes are ready when then window of opportunity opens. A scramble for ideas at the last minute will be too little, too late.

Jeffrey Winters is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University