Tag Archives: Oligarchy

We’re Screwed: A Periodic Reminder (Part 2)

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Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times compares today to the early 19th century, when America was ruled by the “Slave Power”. It was a crisis then. It’s a crisis now:

The antislavery politicians of the 1840s and 1850s did not speak with a single voice. . . . What tied the antislavery factions of American politics to each other wasn’t a single view of slavery or Black Americans but a shared view of the crisis facing the American republic. That crisis, they said in unison, was the “slave power.”

The “slave power” thesis was the belief that a slaveholding oligarchy ran the United States for its own benefit. It had ruled the nation for decades, went the argument, and now intended to expand slavery across the continent and even further into the North.

The “slave power” thesis was also a claim about the structure of American government itself. As these antislavery politicians saw it, “the real underpinnings of southern power were regional unity, parity in the Senate, and the three-fifths clause of the Constitution,” the historian Leonard L. Richards writes in The Slave Power. Together, this gave the slaveholding oligarchs of the South a virtual lock on much of the federal government, including the Supreme Court. “Between Washington’s election and Lincoln’s,” Richards points out, “nineteen of the thirty-four Supreme Court appointees were slaveholders.”

For antislavery politicians, the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system enabled a faction that threatened democracy. The question of the “slave power,” then, was ultimately one of self-government. . . . 

You’ve probably guessed, by now, that this is not an idle history lesson. I am thinking about “the slave power” because I am thinking about the ways that narrow, destructive factions can capture the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system for their own ends. I am thinking of how they can then use the levers of government to impose their vision of society and civil life against the will of the majority. And I am thinking of this in the context of guns, gun violence and the successful movement, thus far, to make the United States an armed society.

Although there has been, in the wake of the atrocities [in Buffalo and Uvalde], the requisite call for new gun control laws, no one believes that Congress will actually do much of anything to address gun violence or reduce the odds of gun massacres. The reason is that the Republican Party does not want to. And with the legislative filibuster still in place (preserved, as it has been for the last year, by at least two Democratic senators), Senate Republicans have all the votes they need to stop a bill — any bill — from passing.

The filibuster, however, is only one part of the larger problem of the capture of America’s political institutions by an unrepresentative minority whose outright refusal to compromise is pushing the entire system to a breaking point.

Large majorities of Americans favor universal background checks, bans on “assault-style” weapons, bans on high-capacity magazines and “red flag” laws that would prevent people who might harm themselves or others from purchasing guns.

But the American political system was not designed to directly represent national majorities. To the extent that it does, it’s via the House of Representatives. The Senate, of course, represents the states. And in the Senate (much to the chagrin of many of the framers), population doesn’t matter — each state gets equal say. Fifty-one lawmakers representing a minority of voters can block 49 lawmakers representing a majority of them (and that’s before, again, we get to the filibuster).

Add the polarization of voters by geography — a rural and exurban Republican Party against an urban and suburban Democratic Party — and the picture goes from bad to perverse. Not only can Republicans, who tend to represent the most sparsely populated states, win a majority of the Senate with far less than a majority of votes nationally, but by using the filibuster a small number of Republican senators representing an even smaller faction of voters can kill legislation supported by most voters and most members of Congress.

The Senate might have been counter-majoritarian by design, but there is a difference between a system that tempers majorities and one that stymies them from any action at all. We have the latter, and like Congress under the failed Articles of Confederation, it makes a mockery of what James Madison called the “republican principle,” which is supposed to enable the majority of the people to defeat the “sinister views” of a minority faction by “regular vote.”

Rather than suppress the “mischiefs of faction,” our system empowers them. Few Americans want the most permissive gun laws on offer. But those who do have captured the Republican Party and used its institutional advantages to both stop gun control and elevate an expansive and idiosyncratic view of gun rights to the level of constitutional law.

The result is a country so saturated in guns that there’s no real hope of going back to the status quo ante. If anything, American gun laws are poised to get even more permissive. If the Supreme Court rules as expected in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it will strike down a law that requires a license for carrying a concealed firearm.

Whether or not the public wants a world of ubiquitous firearms, the [reactionary] majority on the court — which Americans have never voted for and which would not exist without the counter-majoritarian institutions that gave D____ T____ the White House and the Republican Party a Senate majority — seems ready to impose one.

Over the years, historians have been divided on the “slave power” thesis. . . . The slaveholding South may not have been as political unified as charged, but the institutions of American democracy were slanted toward slaveholders who really did capture the state for their own ends. As much as possible, they used the power of the federal government to further their interests and stymie opposition, with the help of a like-minded majority on the Supreme Court that did not hesitate to act on their behalf.

What must be understood is that the institutions that enabled this subversion of self-government are still with us, a practically indissoluble part of our constitutional order. To say that it is possible for a narrow faction of ideologues to weaponize the counter-majoritarian features of our system against the “republican principle” is, basically, to describe the current state of our democracy. It is, in other words, to state the crisis.

Why Putin and the Other Oligarchs May Prefer War to Peace

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Everything that’s happening indicates that Russia will soon invade Ukraine (possibly after China’s Olympics ends tomorrow). The Russians will blame the Ukrainian government for provocations the Russians and their Ukrainian supporters have themselves caused and even claim it’s the Ukrainians who have attacked the Russians.

An invasion may not make much sense to the rest of the world, but Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, argues for The Economist that “elites have hijacked Russia and conflated the country’s interests with their own” and that’s “why Vladimir Putin and his entourage want war”. Further economic sanctions might even be in the Russian oligarchy’s interests:

. . . When it comes to Ukraine, people in Moscow and the West can be forgiven for assuming that the Kremlin’s policy is informed by a dispassionate strategy derived from endless hours of interagency debate and the weighing of pros and cons. What actually drives the Kremlin are the tough ideas and interests of a small group of longtime lieutenants to President Vladimir Putin, as well as those of the Russian leader himself. Emboldened by perceptions of the West’s terminal decline, no one in this group loses much sleep about the prospect of an open-ended confrontation with America and Europe. In fact, the core members of this group would all be among the main beneficiaries of a deeper schism.

Consider Mr Putin’s war cabinet, which is the locus of most decision-making. It consists of Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council; Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB (the main successor agency of the KGB intelligence service); Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russian Foreign Intelligence Service; and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. Their average age is 68 years old and they have a lot in common. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which Mr Putin famously described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, was the defining episode of their adult lives. Four out of five have a KGB background, with three, including the president himself, coming from the ranks of counterintelligence. It is these hardened men, not polished diplomats like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who run the country’s foreign policy.

In recent years members of this group have become very vocal. Messrs Patrushev and Naryshkin frequently give lengthy interviews articulating their views on global developments and Russia’s international role. According to them, the American-led order is in deep crisis thanks to the failure of Western democracy and internal conflicts spurred by the promotion of tolerance, multiculturalism and respect for the rights of minorities. A new multipolar order is taking shape that reflects an unstoppable shift in power to authoritarian regimes that support traditional values. A feisty, resurgent Russia is a pioneering force behind the arrival of this new order, along with a rising China. Given the state of affairs in western countries, the pair contend, it’s only natural that they seek to contain Russia and to install pro-Western regimes in former Soviet republics. The West’s ultimate goal of a Colour Revolution in Russia itself would lead to the country’s conclusive collapse.

Washington sees unfinished business in Russia’s persistence and success, according to Mr Putin’s entourage. As America’s power wanes, its methods are becoming more aggressive. This is why the West cannot be trusted. The best way to ensure the safety of Russia’s existing political regime and to advance its national interests is to keep America off balance.

Seen this way, Ukraine is the central battleground of the struggle. The stakes could not be higher. Should Moscow allow that country to be fully absorbed into a western sphere of influence, Russia’s endurance as a great power will itself be under threat. On a personal level, the world view of the hard men is an odd amalgam of Soviet nostalgia, great-power chauvinism and the trappings of the Russian Orthodox faith. The fact that the new elite in Kyiv glorifies the Ukrainian nationalists of the 20th century and thumb their noses at Moscow is a huge personal affront.

Why then are the people around Putin not scared about possible fallout from a new round of far-reaching economic sanctions? In their eyes, the sanctions that the West imposed to punish Russia for the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas were intended largely to check Russia’s rise. America and its allies would have found a way to introduce them one way or another, they were just looking for an excuse. Since 2014 such views have solidified. Messrs Patrushev, Bortnikov and Naryshkin all find themselves on the U.S. Treasury’s blacklist already, along with many other members of Mr Putin’s inner circle. There is no way back for them to the West’s creature comforts. They are destined to end their lives in Fortress Russia, with their assets and their relatives alongside them.

As for sanctions by sector, including those that President Joe Biden’s team plans to impose should Russia invade Ukraine, these may end up largely strengthening the hard men’s grip on the national economy. Import substitution efforts have generated large flows of budget funds that are controlled by the coterie and their proxies, including through Rostec. The massive state conglomerate is run by a friend of Mr Putin’s from his KGB days in East Germany, Sergey Chemezov. In a similar vein, a ban on food imports from countries that have sanctioned Russia has led to spectacular growth in Russian agribusiness. The sector is overseen by Mr Patrushev’s elder son Dmitry, who is Mr Putin’s agriculture minister.

Similarly much-touted financial sanctions have led to a bigger role for state-owned banks which, unsurprisingly enough, are also filled with KGB veterans. If anything, further sanctions wouldn’t just fail to hurt Mr Putin’s war cabinet, they would secure its members’ place as the top beneficiaries of Russia’s deepening economic autarky. The same logic is true of domestic politics: as the country descends into a near-permanent state of siege, the security services will be the most important pillar of the regime. That further cements the hard men’s grip on the country.

After two years of Covid-induced self-isolation for Kremlin bosses, there is a clear tendency toward tunnel vision and a dearth of checks and balances. Russia’s interests are increasingly becoming conflated with the personal interests of the people at the very top of the system.

Who Gets to Rule a Nation? The Rise of the One-Party State

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A government in which one person has unlimited power is an autocracy. A government in which a small group has a great deal of power is an oligarchy. Unlike an autocracy, there is no requirement that oligarchs have unlimited power. Here in the United States, we still have a representative democracy, although lately it’s been veering toward oligarchy. We also have a president who would prefer America as autocracy with himself as the autocrat.

Anne Applebaum has written a long article for The Atlantic that explains the form of government that’s on the rise around the world. Her article is labeled this way:

Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well.

Whether such governments are autocracies or oligarchies isn’t clear-cut. She suggests “single-party” or “one-party state”. The paragraphs below explain how they work and how their adherents justify them. Reading the article helped me understand the current crisis.

[Who gets to rule a nation?] For a long time, we have imagined that these questions were settled—but why should they ever be?

Monarchy,tyranny, oligarchy, democracy—thesewere all familiar to Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. But the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization. It is the model that many of the world’s budding autocrats use today.

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite. In monarchies such as pre-revolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets. Old-fashioned social hierarchies are usually part of the mix, but in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.

Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anti-competitive and anti-meritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal. People advanced because they were willing to conform to the rules of party membership. Though those rules were different at different times, they were consistent in certain ways. They usually excluded the former ruling elite and their children, as well as suspicious ethnic groups. They favored the children of the working class. Above all, they favored people who loudly professed belief in the creed, who attended party meetings, who participated in public displays of enthusiasm. Unlike an ordinary oligarchy, the one-party state allows for upward mobility: True believers can advance. As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Lenin’s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of a neutral state, of apolitical civil servants and an objective media… In the Bolshevik imagination, the press could be free, and public institutions could be fair, only once they were controlled by the working class—via the party.

This mockery of the competitive institutions of “bourgeois democracy” and capitalism has long had a right-wing version, too. Hitler’s Germany is the example usually given. But there are many others. Apartheid South Africa was a de facto one-party state that corrupted its press and its judiciary to eliminate blacks from political life and promote the interests of Afrikaners, white South Africans descended mainly from Dutch settlers, who were not succeeding in the capitalist economy created by the British empire.In Europe, two such illiberal parties are now in power: Law and Justice, in Poland, and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, in Hungary. Others, in Austria and Italy, are part of government coalitions or enjoy wide support. These parties tolerate the existence of political opponents. But they use every means possible, legal and illegal, to reduce their opponents’ ability to function and to curtail competition in politics and economics. They dislike foreign investment and criticize privatization, unless it is designed to benefit their supporters. They undermine meritocracy. Like Donald Trump, they mock the notions of neutrality and professionalism, whether in journalists or civil servants. They discourage businesses from advertising in “opposition”—by which they mean illegitimate—media.

Notably, one of the Law and Justice government’s first acts, in early 2016, was to change the civil-service law, making it easier to fire professionals and hire party hacks. The Polish foreign service also wants to drop its requirement that diplomats know two foreign languages, a bar that was too high for favored candidates to meet. The government fired heads of Polish state companies. Previously, the people in these roles had had at least some government or business experience. Now these jobs are largely filled by Law and Justice Party members, as well as their friends and relatives….

You can call this sort of thing by many names: nepotism, state capture. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: It represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy and competition, principles that, by definition, never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, then what’s wrong with it?

If you believe, as my old friends now believe, that Poland will be better off if it is ruled by people who deserve to rule—because they loudly proclaim a certain kind of patriotism, because they are loyal to the party leader, or because they are … a “better sort of Pole”—then a one-party state is actually more fair than a competitive democracy. Why should different parties be allowed to compete on an even playing field if only one of them has the moral right to form the government? Why should businesses be allowed to compete in a free market if only some of them are loyal to the party and therefore deserving of wealth?

Forewarned is forearmed. Please vote for Democrats up and down the ballot in November’s mid-term election. And convince your reasonable friends to vote if any of them still need convincing.

The Red Menace Isn’t What It Used To Be. It’s Not Even Red. It’s Orange.

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One thing everyone needs to understand about the Orange Menace’s love for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is that Russia isn’t a Communist country anymore. Boris Yeltsin banned the Communist Party of the Soviet Union back in 1991, shortly before the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. Putin resigned from the party that year.

In 1995, Putin helped organize the pro-government “Our Home Is Russia” party. In 1999, he joined the new “Unity” party. That’s the same year he described Communism as “a blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization”. In 2008, during his second term as Prime Minister, Putin became the leader of the “United Russia Party”.

Although there are still quite a few Communists in Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is much less popular than United Russia. In this year’s election, Putin’s party got 54% of the vote. The Communists came in second with 13%.

Since Putin isn’t a Communist anymore, what is he? Here’s how Wikipedia describes United Russia:

The Party has no coherent ideology; however, it embraces specific politicians and officials with a variety of political views who support the administration. The Party appeals mainly to non-ideological voters; therefore, United Russia is often classified as a “catch-all party” or as a “party of power“. 

In 2009 the United Russia Party proclaimed “Russian Conservatism” as its official ideology.

United Russia isn’t so much a political party that tries to win elections in order to carry out a set of policies. Instead, it’s one of the tools used by the rich and powerful to win elections so they can maintain their positions at the top of Russian society.

Putin began his political ascent when he was put in charge of the Presidential Property Management Department in the late 1990s. His job was to manage the transfer of overseas property belonging to the Soviet Union and Communist Party to the new Russian Federation. That process had been going on since the fall of the Soviet Union. But instead of being transferred to the new government, much of that property was “privatized”. In other words, it ended up in the hands of a small number of well-placed people, including Putin, who quickly became extremely rich. 

In the words of the economist and lawyer James S. Henry, whose long article “The Curious World of Donald T___p’s Private Russia Connections” tells the sordid story in detail:

…One of the most central facts about modern Russia [is] its emergence since the 1990s as a world-class kleptocracy, second only to China as a source of illicit capital and criminal loot, with more than $1.3 trillion of net offshore “flight wealth” as of 2016…

[It was] one of the most massive transfers of public wealth into private hands that the world has ever seen.For example, Russia’s 1992 “voucher privatization” program permitted a tiny elite of former state-owned company managers and party apparatchiks to acquire control over a vast number of public enterprises, often with the help of outright mobsters.

A majority of Gazprom, the state energy company that controlled a third of the world’s gas reserves, was sold for $230 million; Russia’s entire national electric grid was privatized for $630 million; ZIL, Russia’s largest auto company, went for about $4 million; ports, ships, oil, iron and steel, aluminum, much of the high-tech arms and airlines industries, the world’s largest diamond mines, and most of Russia’s banking system also went for a song.

In 1994–96, under the infamous “loans-for-shares” program, Russia privatized 150 state-owned companies for just $12 billion, most of which was loaned to a handful of well-connected buyers by the state… The principal beneficiaries of this “privatization”—actually, cartelization—were initially just 25 or so budding oligarchs with the insider connections to buy these properties and the muscle to hold them.… 

For the vast majority of ordinary Russian citizens, this extreme re-concentration of wealth coincided with nothing less than a full-scale 1930s-type depression, a “shock therapy”-induced rise in domestic price levels that wiped out the private savings of millions, rampant lawlessness, a public health crisis, and a sharp decline in life expectancy and birth rates.

Is it any wonder at all that Vladimir Putin, the man in charge of this highly successful criminal enterprise, is one of the Orange Menace’s favorite people? T___p built his real estate career on tax breaks from local government (a billion dollars from New York City alone), tax evasion, loans that were never repaid and a number of shady deals, while Putin should be made an honorary member of the Republican Party. Donnie and anti-Muslim, super-secretive white guy Vladimir have a whole lot in common.

It’s remarkable that the Orange Menace hasn’t said a bad word about Putin or Russia since he began running for President, even though he’s criticized just about everyone else on Earth. It isn’t just admiration on T___p’s part. There has been a lot of money involved. Mr. Henry proceeds:

… For many banks, private bankers, hedge funds, law firms, and accounting firms, for leading oil companies like ExxonMobil and BP, as well as for needy borrowers like the Trump Organization, the opportunity to feed on post-Soviet spoils was a godsend. This was vulture capitalism at its worst.

The nine-lived Trump, in particular, had just suffered a string of six successive bankruptcies. So the massive illicit outflows from Russia … from the mid-1990s provided precisely the kind of undiscriminating investors that he needed. These outflows arrived at just the right time to fund several of Trump’s post-2000 high-risk real estate and casino ventures—most of which failed. As Donald Trump, Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, [said] in September 2008 (on the basis, he said, of his own “half dozen trips to Russia in 18 months”):

“In terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

All this helps to explain one of the most intriguing puzzles about Donald Trump’s long, turbulent business career: how he managed to keep financing it, despite a dismal track record of failed projects.

According to the “official story,” this was simply due to a combination of brilliant deal-making, Trump’s gold-plated brand, and raw animal spirits—with $916 million of creative tax dodging as a kicker. But this official story is hokum. The truth is that, since the late 1990s, Trump was also greatly assisted by these abundant new sources of global finance, especially from “submerging markets” like Russia. [T___p and Putin] are not evil twins, exactly, but they are both byproducts of the … scams that were peddled to Russia’s struggling new democracy.

So, maybe the Orange Menace did something very bad on one of his trips to Russia and they’re blackmailing him. Maybe one of his fundamental desires is that the U.S. and Russia form an alliance to make weaker countries give up their nuclear weapons (as reported here). Maybe he sees Putin as an ally in the fight against Islamic radicals or a coming war with China. Maybe he views Vlad as a role model, since Putin often has his critics and enemies murdered. It seems likely, however, that it’s mostly about the money.

(For a look at one way Putin plans to rake in the rubles once the new President and the Secretary of State from Exxon are in charge, take a look at this. There’s a whole lot of oil just north of Russia.)

The Criminals Who Poison Our Elections

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Anybody with the sense God gave a goose understands that Republican efforts to stamp out voter fraud are really an attempt to reduce the number of Democratic voters. Here’s what’s been happening in Georgia:

[The Republican] Secretary of State publicly accused the New Georgia Project in September of submitting fraudulent registration forms. A subsequent investigation found just 25 confirmed forgeries out of more than 85,000 forms—a fraud rate of about 3/100ths of 1 percent [in decimal terms, that’s a rate of 0.000294].

Meanwhile, a group of civil rights lawyers filed a lawsuit claiming that thousands of registration forms submitted this summer still haven’t been recorded in Georgia’s voter database, “nearly all of them belonging to people of color in the Democratic-leaning regions around Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus”. State and county officials, however, said they have already processed all of the applications sent to them by the October 6 registration deadline, and anyway, there is no state law that requires properly-submitted registrations to be processed by any particular date. A local judge has declined to intervene, citing a lack of proof that the registrations have gone missing.

Then there is this detailed report from Al Jazeera America:

Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb…

At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison.

How does this Crosscheck program work? You can appear on the list as a suspected felon if your first and last name matches the first and last name of someone who voted in another state:

The actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored [such as Jr. or Sr.], even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.

A statistical analysis revealed that African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans appear on the list much more often than their percentage of the population would indicate, while white Americans appear less often. The reason is that there is less variety in the names of certain ethnic groups, and among those groups are African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, groups that all tend to vote for Democrats. (By the way, you can enter your own name at the Al Jazeera America site and see if you’re right to vote may be challenged.)

If you’ve watched enough Fox News, you might conclude that the hordes of Democrats who poison our elections by illegally voting in more than one state don’t use the same birthdates or Social Security numbers when they register to vote in this state and that, so why bother matching on those criteria?

Or you might infer that America does indeed have a criminal element bent on interfering with the electoral process. Unfortunately, the most crafty and dangerous members of this criminal conspiracy are Republican officials whose job it is to administer elections.

PS — Paul Krugman wrote an excellent column the other day called “Plutocrats Against Democracy”. I suggest reading the whole thing, which isn’t very long. It ends this way:

But now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.

The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy.

Professor Krugman is an optimist. He thinks the plutocrats haven’t already won.