Oligarchy in America
Oligarchy in America
Power, Justice, and the Rule of the Few
To an American, oligarchy is something that happens somewhere else. In Oligarchy in America, Luke Winslow reveals oligarchy’s deep intellectual roots and alarming growth in America. The book provides conceptual tools the lack of which have prevented Americans from recognizing oligarchy at home.
Winslow argues that generic labels like “billionaires” for a class of ultra-rich masks the pervasive structures that entrench their power. He introduces instead the concept of democratic oligarchy—an institutional arrangement in which the ultra-rich form a class consciously creating and leveraging state power to accumulate wealth.
Like a master class in political ideas, Winslow traces the intellectual lineage of oligarchy in the US. His lively and compulsively readable survey examines key rhetorical sources such as Herbert Spencer, Andrew Carnegie, Friedrich Hayek, Lewis Powell, Milton Friedman, Charles Koch, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and others.
Oligarchy in America maps the connective web of oligarchic ideas uniting these disparate figures. By offering a lucid framework through which to view oligarchic ideas ambient in American culture, Winslow makes a vital contribution to readers and scholars of communication and rhetorical studies, public address, economics, and political science.
‘Oligarchy in America explains how arguments as diverse as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism and Tucker Carlson’s anti-elitism, suture the interests of the ultra-rich to state politics and disenfranchises the ordinary electorate, upending the arithmetic of democracy. It is a must read for those interested in rhetoric and the increasingly fraught politics of democracy.’ —Catherine Chaput is author of Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates
‘Luke Winslow’s Oligarchy in America provides new entry points into the discursive underpinning of American capitalism. Reigning in the ubiquity of neoliberalism, Winslow positions oligarchy as a key to understanding inequality in America. Erudite and provocative, Winslow’s book is essential for scholars of economic rhetoric and public address alike.’
—Kevin Musgrave, author of Persons of the Market: Conservatism, Corporate Personhood, and Economic Theology
‘Luke Winslow takes readers on an engaging exploration of the views of oligarchic corporate captains, public intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians as they defend ostensibly natural and just orders of grossly unequal societies. Winslow’s book illuminates pressing challenges to contemporary democratic practice, forcefully calling out the harmful impact of money in public life.’
—Robert Asen, author of Democracy, Deliberation, and Education and School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy: How Market-Based Education Reform Fails Our Communities
Luke Winslow is an associate professor of rhetorical studies in the Department of Communication at Baylor University. He is author of American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump, Economic Injustice and the Rhetoric of the American Dream, and coauthor of Children as Rhetorical Advocates in Social Movements.
The Practice of Rhetoric
Poetics, Performance, Philosophy
Edited by Debra Hawhee and Vessela Valiavitcharska
