AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with a new book that looks at how the in-your-face power of the ultrarich and the Trump administration isn’t just a flaw of our current political moment, but a foundational feature of our democratic system. As the world moves towards an ever deeper state of wealth inequality, the power of oligarchs is greater than ever.

Northwestern University political scientist Jeffrey Winters argues democracy’s failure to address wealth inequality is by design. His new book is called The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies, and he’s just published an article in Mother Jones headlined “Tax Me If You Can: Oligarchs are robbing America blind, and the IRS is powerless to stop them,” in which Winters writes, quote, “How did America’s oligarchs grow so willing to openly rub their wealth power in our faces? Well, a big part of it has to do with their success in neutering perhaps the greatest threat to their dominance: the ability of the government to tax them and to hold those who cheat accountable.”

For more, we go to Chicago, where we’re joined by Northwestern University professor Jeffrey Winters.

Thanks so much for being with us. Lay out the thesis of both this piece in Mother Jones and your book, The Blind Spot.

JEFFREY WINTERS: Well, it starts with something of a puzzle, which is the United States clearly is a country that has become more democratic over its history, far more inclusive, and yet the country has also become more unequal. And that sort of doesn’t make sense. In fact, not only have we become more unequal, but liberal democracies around the world are now among the most unequal societies ever to have existed in human history. And this is — this is a head scratcher for us, because if just the oligarchs or just the most powerful people in a dictatorship are completely in charge, we would expect that wealth would become more and more concentrated, and the people down below would get very, very little. But in a democracy, where there’s power sharing, we would expect that inequality would be kept in check. In fact, the opposite is happening.

And so, that’s sort of the starting point of the book, to try to disentangle, to try to look at the historical story of how it is that oligarchy, which is about wealth power, is combined and fused with democracy, which we should think of as participation power. Both of them are operating in our system simultaneously.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what it means, I mean, when we see at President Trump’s inauguration the tech bros behind him, the billionaire supporters — not always supporters, but because he was becoming president, that brotherhood. Explain what it means when there is little regulation, and how the IRS fits into all of this.

JEFFREY WINTERS: Sorry, the sound has gone out. But the question, the most of it that I heard, is about the tech bros. And I think what we need to understand about the household names now that all of us are aware of, these very, very powerful and wealthy people, is that they are the most visible part of the oligarchs in our system today, but we also need to understand that they are just part of a much broader and deeper structural phenomenon. So, on the one hand, these individuals are — because of their visibility, it’s actually making the American population very aware of oligarchic power. We have to understand that 20 years ago these were not the names that everyone knew, and 20 years from now the names are going to be different. So, we personalize it, but we also need to understand it in a much — in a much deeper structural and historical way.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about how right now there is a wider gap between the rich and poor than was even during European feudalism or in Imperial Rome’s slave society. Talk about the significance of this, Professor Winters.

JEFFREY WINTERS: Well, all of us are pretty aware that if we think back to Imperial Rome, we don’t view it as an equal society. It certainly wasn’t democratic. And if you take the gap between the wealthiest Roman senators and the average person in Imperial Rome, who was either a slave or a small farmer, the ratio of their wealth was about 16,000 to one. If we fast-forward — sorry, if we fast-forward to today in the United States, and we take the average person in the Forbes 400 compared to the median person in the United States, that has exploded to 140,000 to one. And so, we are just dramatically, dramatically more unequal. Our wealth is far more concentrated in fewer hands than ever before.

And that, if it were under authoritarianism, might not be an issue. But what we are seeing is that it’s actually in a democracy that this is happening. And I don’t argue in the book against the idea that the United States is a democracy; I argue that it is very much a democracy. We have the right to vote. We have freedoms to speak. It is consent of the governed in so many ways. All of those things were very important to the framers to put in place. But the framers also, because there was an oligarchic democratic crisis at the time of the Constitutional Convention, they wanted to make sure that there were safeguards built into the system that would defend those with very concentrated wealth, the oligarchs of the day.

And so, that’s how we get a system which is both democratic and oligarchic at the same time, something which, by the way, never existed before in human history. We’ve always had a wealth pyramid, but it was always in the past sustained by force, fear, awe, intimidation of all kinds. What we have today is what I call participatory inequality. We have incredible inequality, but we participate in it.

AMY GOODMAN: How does AI exacerbate the wealth gap and the power gap, Professor Winters?

JEFFREY WINTERS: Well, AI is something that is evolving so rapidly, and so few of us really understand where it’s going and how it’s going to play out. But one thing is clear: This apparently transformational technology is in the hands and being controlled by very, very few people, and they are determined that it is going to be a profit-oriented endeavor. Competition is high. We are seeing concentration of capital in AI on an extraordinary level. And it is also, by many people’s estimation, possibly going to unemploy people on an incredibly large scale.

So, if you put the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few corporations and the people who control them, on the one hand, and what may be employment devastation going on in society, on the other, it’s — if it plays out that way, it’s a formula for extreme inequality and, I would say, potentially destabilizing to society.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute to go. You say we are 50 years into a period of exploding inequality in the United States and globally, clearly tearing the fabric of society. Where do you find hope? What can remedy this?

JEFFREY WINTERS: I think the hope is that there are policies that can be put in place already. I’ll just mention quickly something called the Corporate Transparency Act, which most people don’t know about. It was passed in 2021 as part of the defense authorization bill. And what it basically said was that all corporations, we would know the beneficial ownership of corporations. There would be a registry, because you can set up a corporation in Delaware, Wyoming and elsewhere, which is completely secret, and those kinds of entities are very important for oligarchs to evade taxes, to move their money around the world in very secret ways. That got passed. It turns out in March 2025 the Treasury Department essentially gutted it by making 99.9% of all corporations exempt from it.

Those battles are incredibly important. They’re doable. People have to be aware and pay attention to these fundamental kinds of struggles. That’s just the beginning. There are many, many more things, and I try to lay them out in the book —

AMY GOODMAN: And the book is called —

JEFFREY WINTERS: — a set of ideas about what to do about oligarchy.

AMY GOODMAN: The book is called The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies. Jeff Winters is professor of political science at Northwestern University.

That does it for our show. I’ll be at the IFC tonight at 6:00 for the showing of Steal This Story, Please!, about Democracy Now!, with director Tia Lessin and Chani Nicholas, tomorrow in Great Barrington, Friday in Tucson, Saturday in Phoenix, and then next weekend in Tampa, as well as in Miami, and then on to Vermont. You can check our website at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thank you so much for joining us.