Is oligarchy the human condition?

Oligarchy is our past and present. Is it also our future?

The hunter-gatherer tribes of our past led an egalitarian lifestyle. But almost every society since then has been marked by extreme inequality. Whether in the form of pharaohs, kings, feudal aristocrats, colonizing imperialists, or corporations run by mega-wealthy investors, oligarchy—rule by the few, usually the wealthy—has been a consistent pattern across history.

To be sure, the oligarchs have never gone unopposed. In every era, people have dreamed of some version of democracy, of shared prosperity. There have always been radicals who proclaimed that we shouldn't bow to crowns or thrones, that everyone deserves to have a say in their own future.

The fortunes of democracy have risen and fallen through the ages. Often, it was no more than a utopian dream—or a dangerous heresy. Sometimes, it has broken through into history. And there was a time, during the years of relative peace after World War II and especially after the fall of communism, when it seemed as if democracy would prevail around the world.

History turns right

Alas, history isn't a perpetual upward arc. In the 21st century, when the world had a choice, it turned away from democracy. Humanity is sinking back into oligarchy, regressing to dictatorships whose rulers enrich themselves by plundering their people.

The rise of the far right, which pines for authoritarian rule, is a global phenomenon. Countries like Hungary and Turkey have fallen under the sway of strongmen. Others had close calls, like Brazil and South Korea.

Russia may be the most salient example. After the dissolution of the USSR, there was a window in which it seemed poised to join the neoliberal world order of capitalism and free trade—which, for all its faults, was more peaceful than the previous eras of empire and colonialism. Instead, Russia is now regressing to a mafia state of thugs and kleptocrats, waging war to conquer and loot neighboring Ukraine. It's a return to the might-makes-right mindset of the dark ages.

Of course, the United States can no longer claim the moral high ground. America too is entering a new era of oligarchy, where billionaires rewrite the law to glut their cruelty and bottomless greed. With Donald Trump at the helm and the robber barons of Wall Street and Silicon Valley setting his agenda, a massive upward extraction of wealth from the poor and the middle class is sure to result.

In fairness, this isn't new. The US has always been an oligarchy. That thread runs back through the Gilded Age of monopoly capitalism, through the era of plantations and slavery, all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, which was signed by—who else?—oligarchs.

Despite a few rags-to-riches stories, America's founders were wealthy, privileged men, and they wanted to keep it that way. The government they created was designed to concentrate power in the hands of a ruling class, rather than the people. It featured a president chosen by the Electoral College rather than voters; a Senate appointed by governors, without any popular input at all; and voting rights restricted to white male landowners.

While later reforms made this antiquated system slightly more democratic, the problem of economic equality hasn't gone away. The US remains a deeply unequal society, and that cuts against the grain of democracy. As long as politicians depend on big-money donations to fund their campaigns, extreme concentrations of wealth fatally undermine the notion that everyone has an equal say. Studies find that American policy outcomes are directly dictated by the wealthy, not by the desires of ordinary voters.

The United States isn't exceptional in this. The world as a whole has colossal wealth disparities that just keep growing. The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, tells the tale:

The Gini coefficient saw sustained growth during the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1820, the global Gini coefficient was 0.50, and in 1980 and 1992, the figure was 0.657. According to World Bank's Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020 report, the Gini coefficient increases about 1.5 points in the five years following major epidemics, such as H1N1 (2009), Ebola (2014), and Zika (2016). While the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are still being calculated, early estimates predicted an increase in Gini coefficient of 1.2-1.9 percentage points per year for 2020 and 2021, signaling an increase in income inequality.

Given this evidence, you could make an argument that oligarchy is the human condition. Rule by a handful of elites is natural, in the same way that malaria and appendicitis are natural.

If this is true, then what hope is there? Does the future have anything to look forward to, other than a golden boot stamping on a human face forever?

The constant of change

The cheerful news, such as it is, is that no political order is permanent. If history teaches that oligarchy is common, it also teaches that inequality doesn't increase to infinity. Eventually, one of two things happens.

One way it ends is that a mass disruption—war, natural disaster, economic or ecological collapse—levels a society to the ground, where it often rebuilds on a more equal footing. What's more, such catastrophes are more likely to strike unequal societies, because oligarchs are more motivated by self-interest rather than the common good. They hoard wealth and power for themselves, caring more about their own fiefdoms and rivalries than the well-being of society as a whole. That makes them incapable of uniting to confront outside threats.

The other way is that ordinary people hit a breaking point and rise up against an unjust system. This can take the form of violent revolution, with torches, pitchforks and guillotines, as in the French Revolution. Or it can be mass popular movements reclaiming power through democracy, as in the American New Deal and civil rights eras.

There's no knowing what the future holds, but for that reason, we shouldn't give up hope. History often runs in cycles, and it may be we're on the downslope of one: a time of distrust and disintegration, when people seek certainty in simple answers and strict rules. However, what falls can also rise again.

It may seem impossible to imagine true equality. But many social orders seemed permanent, until they weren't. Beliefs that the past viewed as outrageous and radical have won the day. Many causes weren't won in a single lifetime, but the ideas behind them triumphed in the end. That's a lesson to take heart from. However long it may take, it's not futile to believe in a better future.