Oligarchs Among Us (current book project)

My research focuses on the political challenges associated with rising inequality. Thomas Piketty has documented the complex macroeconomic forces driving Western societies toward greater wealth concentration. Piketty’s work dovetails with political scientists who describe a contemporary “New Gilded Age;” a political economy that affords systematic political advantages to the ultra-wealthy. Thus my research asks: how do the super-rich deploy their material advantages for political power, and what are the normative implications for democratic citizens.

My dissertation and current book project, Oligarchs Among Us, addresses these questions through the concept of oligarchy. Oligarchs, on my definition, are agents who maintain personal access to massive concentrated wealth, and who deploy that wealth for discretionary influence in the public domain. Classical Greek democracies experienced oligarchic coups as an existential threat to their constitutional stability. However, contemporary oligarchs need not exert formal constitutional power. Rather, oligarchs can operate within democratic public spheres, in accordance with democratic norms and procedures, even as they stretch the boundaries of those norms.

My first goal is to provide a normative taxonomy of oligarchic power in Western democracies, identifying the interlocking mechanisms by which different oligarchs exert their influence: from direct office-holding (Trump, Bloomberg, Berlusconi) to control of mass media (Murdoch) to political advocacy (Soros, the Koch brothers) to private philanthropy (Gates, Zuckerberg). I then explore concrete institutional strategies for regulating oligarchic power in a range of domains. I argue that democracies must counteract oligarchic threats by mixing together three different forms of normative authority: the legal authority of the free citizenry; the epistemic authority of the numerical many; and the socioeconomic authority of the non-wealthy. I call this framework the “New Mixed Regime,” and I envision it as a plebeian theory of liberal democracy; one which affords considerable participatory space to ordinary citizens.

I pursue these arguments in close dialogue with the history of political thought, engaging with a range of thinkers: from Aristotle, an original critic of oligarchy, to Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill, who developed a utilitarian critique of oligarchy centered around the concept of “sinister interest.” With these historical legacies in view, I focus on urgent contemporary challenges: restoring tax justice and fiscal fairness amid the proliferation of elaborate offshore tax evasion strategies; regulating the proliferation of “soft-money” and oligarch funded political advocacy; securing an independent and free press amid oligarch controlled partisan media empires; assessing the proper role of billionaire philanthropy in a democratic society

Towards a Democratic Theory of Tax Enforcement

Scholars have long recognized that tax policy has ethical implications in structuring the financial incentives and constraints that regulate life within a polity. But contemporary democracies are now confronting a crisis of tax avoidance, driven by offshore sheltering of the sort exposed in the Panama Papers scandal. This crisis reflects broader trends that have important implications for both domestic and global justice. I am in the early stages of a second project, Towards A Democratic Theory of Tax Enforcement, in which I hope to develop one of political theory’s first comprehensive accounts of tax enforcement; integrating its numerous normative and institutional dilemmas into a coherent democratic theory that can situate tax enforcement alongside other pressing political issues and properly assess the normative trade-offs involved in different enforcement mechanisms.

Below are brief abstracts from some of my published articles or articles in progress.

1. “Must Realists Be Pessimists About Democracy: Responding to Epistemic and Oligarchic Challenges” (with Enzo Rossi) Moral Philosophy and Politics (2020)

In this paper we show how a realistic normative democratic theory can work within the constraints set by the most pessimistic empirical results about voting behavior and elite capture of the policy process. After setting out the empirical evidence and discussing some extant responses by political theorists, we argue that the evidence produces a two-pronged challenge for democracy: an epistemic challenge concerning the quality and focus of decision-making and an oligarchic challenge concerning power concentration. To address the challenges we then put forward three main normative claims. The overall picture that emerges from our discussion is that of a renewal of democracy in a plebeian but not plebiscitarian direction. We close with some methodological reflections about the compatibility between our normative claims and the realist program in political philosophy.

2. “Aristotle and the Problem of Oligarchic Harm: Insights for Democracy,” European Journal of Political Theory (2019)

This article develops the concept of “oligarchic harm” through an innovative reading of Aristotle’s corpus. Aristotle associated oligarchic harm with the Greek vice of pleonexia, self-corruption through excess that ensues through unnatural forms of acquisition. He sought to distinguish deviant oligarchs from virtuous aristocrats (aristoi). But I demonstrate that Aristotle’s distinction between aristocracy and oligarchy is very fragile. True aristocratic virtue can be difficult to identify, allowing corrupt oligarchs to seize power on the pretense that wealth represents a “proxy” for virtue. Thus, the threat of oligarchic harm is an ever-present feature of political life. How can this threat be contained? Aristotle brilliantly recognized that the democratic demos retains a tripartite identity, the “poor,” the “many,” and the “free,” with each aspect of this identity corresponding to different political claims. Building on this insight, while moving beyond Aristotle, I propose an institutional framework called the “New Mixed Regime” that tries to balance together each constitutive aspect of the demos: aggregative institutions, such as free and fair elections, enact the legal authority of all free citizens irrespective of economic status; deliberative institutions that are fully inclusive and descriptively representative, capture the epistemic authority of a cognitively diverse demos; finally, plebeian institutions respond to the specific, socioeconomic vulnerabilities of non-wealthy citizens.

3. “Is This What Democracy Looks Like (Never Mind Epistocracy),” Inquiry (2018) (with Enzo Rossi)

This article is an invited contribution for a critical symposium on Jason Brennan’s book Against Democracy. We criticize Brennan for overlooking forms of oligarchic power that undermine his ideal of epistocracy—non-democratic rule by experts. Thus, the article draws upon my research agenda, and contributes to a highly topical debate on the epistemic value of democracy; reinforcing my point that epistemic elitism is not a viable solution to the problem of oligarchic harm.

4. “Cold War Prophecy and the Burdens of Comparative Thought: A Case for Revisiting Louis Hartz,” Polity (2017)

This article (click here for the published version) revisits Louis Hartz's distinctive contribution to American political thought. Pushing against his reputation as an overly complacent consensus historian, I highlight Hartz's forceful critique of America's liberal blindness, a critique reaching back to the Founding and culminating in an engagement with the politics of his own Cold War moment. Alarmed by the rise of McCarthyism, Hartz warned against an intensifying "Americanism" at home, and advised increased contact with cultures abroad in the hopes of facilitating the "spark of relativity" engendered by the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The result, I argue, is a genre of "prophetic liberalism," which compels Americans to transcend their liberal absolutism cum isolationism, and which still affirms core enlightenment values. Hartz underscores the need for political theory's comparative vocation—one that alerts Americans to crucial blind-spots within their national experience.

This article turns to the nineteenth-century liberalism of J.S. Mill for insights regarding the essential challenge facing democracy today: how to mobilize the public against intensifying oligarchic threats while safeguarding liberal democratic values against their illiberal alternatives. I advance a novel reading of Mill as a “liberal plebeian” who confronted the threat of oligarchy by advocating for working-class activism within a liberal parliamentary framework. I trace two discourses within Mill’s writings and speeches: an anti-oligarchic discourse focused on countering “sinister interests,” and a mobilization discourse focused on working-class incorporation. Both discourses develop from Mill’s conviction that liberal reformers should operate as “tribunes of the poor.” This reading helps to clarify Mill’s contested legacy and provides resources for rethinking the relationship between liberal democracy and plebeian populism.

5. Citizen Tax Juries: Democratizing Tax Enforcement after the Panama Papers, Political Theory (2022)

Three years after the Panama Papers scandal, tax avoidance remains an urgent normative problem. Moving beyond both the academic and policy mainstream, I advocate the “democratization of tax enforcement,” by which I mean systematic efforts to make tax avoiders accountable to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Both individual oligarchs and multinational corporations have access to tax avoidance strategies that impose significant fiscal costs. Yet much contemporary sheltering occurs within the letter of the law, rendering criminal sanctions ineffective. Moreover, existing enforcement strategies are vulnerable to regulatory and legislative capture. In response, I argue for the creation of Citizen Tax Juries, deliberative mini-publics empowered to scrutinize tax avoiders, demand justification, and facilitate concrete reforms. This proposal thus responds to the wider aspiration, within contemporary democratic theory, to secure more popular control over important economic processes.

6. Liberal Plebeianism: J.S. Mill on Democracy, Oligarchy, and Working-Class Mobilization, American Political Science Review (2022)

How should democratic societies address inequality in an age of plutocratic encroachment and populist indignation? What role should popular movements play in progressive reform efforts? This article turns to the nineteenth-century liberalism of John Stuart Mill for insights on an essential challenge facing democracy today: how to mobilize social movements against intensifying oligarchic threats while safeguarding liberal-democratic values. I advance a novel reading of Mill as a proponent of “liberal plebeianism”—that is, as an activist-theorist who confronted the threat of oligarchy by promoting working-class mobilization within a liberal, parliamentary framework. I trace two discourses within Mill’s writings and speeches: an antioligarchic discourse focused on countering “sinister interests” and a mobilization discourse focused on working-class incorporation. Both follow from Mill’s conviction that liberal reformers should operate as “tribunes of the poor.” This reading helps to clarify Mill’s contested legacy and provides potential resources for understanding how a plebeian orientation might enliven liberal democracy today.

7. Getting Real about Taxes: Tax Sheltering and Realism’s Ethic of Responsibility (with Carlo Burelli) Ethics and International Affairs (2022)

This article tackles the issue of offshore tax sheltering from the perspective of normative political realism. Tax sheltering is a pressing contemporary policy challenge, with hundreds of billions in private assets protected in offshore trusts and shell companies. Indeed, tax sheltering produces a variety of empirical dilemmas that render it a distinctive challenge for global governance. Therefore, it is crucial for normative political theorists to confront this problem. A realist approach offers three distinct advantages, elaborated in the three subsequent sections of the article. First, it relaxes the theoretical burden by starting from the real practice of tax evasion rather than from an abstract theory of equality or justice. Second, this approach recognizes that sheltering is a political harm: a threat to the very maintenance of order, not just a problem of inequality or injustice. If politicians fail at such polity maintenance, realism's ethic of responsibility provides clear political reasons why they should be held accountable. Third, realism's focus on power and its acceptance of coercion open up new strategies for addressing the problem that would not be allowed by theories with a stronger emphasis on consensus.