Is Trump still running scared of the Epstein files?

23:58Lewis Goodall:Well, when we come back, we're going to be talking to someone who actually thinks that all of these party political games, and he thinks they are games, are meaningless, because democracy has been rendered meaningless by the fact that we have too many rich people dominating our society. He's got some interesting ideas as to what to do about it. Stay with us.

24:23From a range of trusted voices and award-winning journalists.

24:27Lewis Goodall:Good morning, I'm Nick Ferrari. It's time to get to your calls. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. So just as I take responsibility for the results, I also take responsibility for delivering the change that we promised for a stronger and fairer Britain that we must build. Now he's still toast. He's just wasting our time now. The words of two in a growing list of Labour MPs whose patience with the Prime Minister has run dry. Is there anything he said or can say to make you want him to stay? Listen on our free Global Player app or the LBC app. LBC leading Britain's conversation.

25:41Lewis Goodall:Right, we're talking a lot about economic and political change at the moment. We're obviously maybe going to have a new prime minister. We've got maybe an incoming prime minister who is talking about the need for transformational economic change in people's lives. But what if actually we can't achieve that change? We can't achieve that economic change precisely because the political system we have, democracy, a system we think is designed to help us deal with extreme wealth and to improve the lives, economic lives of ordinary people. What if it can't precisely because democracy is the problem, precisely because democracy is designed to keep the super rich rich and everybody else not?

26:25Lewis Goodall:Well, that is the kernel of the argument. in the book The Blind Spot, How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies by Geoffrey Winters, essentially an argument that modern democracy has not failed to stop what he calls oligarchy it's designed to accommodate it Geoffrey Winters, thanks so much for coming in to the news agents I want to get on to define some of your terms and what you mean by oligarchy and so on and how it interplays with democracy but before we do, I was very struck I mean you started the book by actually talking about one of your earliest political memories. Just wonder if you might just relay that and explain how it relates to the thesis in your book.

27:00Yes, I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, Ohio. I came from a sort of a working class family. And my father, who was not a political person at all, would jump straight to the comics page and the sports page of the newspaper, suddenly blurted out in front of his friends, the rich control everything. And I just had a very distinct memory of this. And as a little kid, it made no sense. I had been taught in school. We're in a democracy. And so I relay this as a sort of a journey that I start on. And I grow up and I go to college And I begin to study the relationship between our political system and the inequality that we were experiencing.

27:50And finally, on to graduate school, where I'm able to study this in even greater depth. And what I come to discover is that we live in a political system which actually combines participation power, which is the essence of democracy. People voting. People voting, people speaking, people criticizing, people rallying, protesting, all of those things, that's participation power. And all of us ordinary citizens have it. And oligarchs have participation power just like we do. But it turns out they have an additional form of power. And that is the deployment of their wealth in that political system.

28:38Lewis Goodall:So before we go any further, I think it might be just quite useful for you to just tell us what you mean by oligarchs and oligarchy. Because, of course, people talk a lot about elites, economic elites, political elites. They talk about the establishment. They talk about other words for this. But oligarchy is, it seems to me, a specific thing. Why do you talk about oligarchs and oligarchy as opposed to just, say, elites or whatever it happens to be? So first of all, oligarchs, that's a very ancient term. It goes all the way back to the Greeks, Aristotle, Plato, and so on. And it has always meant those who are empowered specifically by wealth.

29:17And then elites are actually, it's a much newer term. A much broader one. Much broader term also, quite true. And it refers to people who are also quite powerful, but not connected necessarily to wealth. And so think of someone like Churchill, Gandhi, Joe Biden, Martin Luther King. These are people who have tremendous power, but it's not rooted in wealth. And so oligarchs are all the way back to the Roman Senate. They were people who actually, in that case, had political office, political positions, but also had tremendous wealth. As we move forward through history into the modern democratic era, one of the important things that happens is that oligarchs themselves no longer ruled directly, or for quite a long time they didn't.

30:13actually right now what we have is a lot of very very wealthy people who are now running directly in my own state of illinois the governor the office of government pritzker ran against another billionaire this isn't becoming increasingly common but so think of oligarchs as it has nothing to do with the source of their wealth so for a while people were saying Russian oligarchs.

30:41Lewis Goodall:I was going to say that in the modern political arena, I think most people, when they think of oligarchs, they think about the people around Putin, these kind of big, almost mafia kind of power players who control Russia's natural resources. But you're saying it's a much broader thing. You would say that we do have oligarchs in the West. Oh, absolutely. In fact, I teach a course at Northwestern University called Oligarchs and elites. On the very first day I taught the course in 2007, a student made a statement, Russia has oligarchs and the United States has rich people. And the student wanted to make it very clear that no, no, no, no, we don't have oligarchs in the US.

31:19At that time in 2007, where we had sort of made this definitional detour, where really it was something about one's money having to do with corruption in Russia.

31:31Lewis Goodall:Yeah, misbegotten going somehow. That's right. That has completely changed now. And so in the vocabulary today, we've actually come back to the longstanding definition of what oligarchs is. And I define oligarchy as not a separate political system from democracy. Oligarchy is the politics of wealth defense. Give us some examples of who are the Western oligarchs, would you say? You know who the Russian ones are. Who are the ones in our own societies? So the first thing I'll say is that there are those who are very prominent in household names, and they are only the tip of the iceberg of who the oligarchs are.

32:12And so everybody knows names like Bezos, Soros. Elon Musk. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel. There's a long list of names of people that really are household names. And one of the important things to understand right off the bat is that set of names is constantly changing. Fifteen years ago, most of those names were not uttered. And 15 years from now, it's going to be a different set of names. So we have to think of oligarchs as being both a set of identifiable actors who are quite visible, but also a very large number of people actually down below them who are very influential. and are using their wealth power to make sure that oligarchs get outcomes which are very favorable to them.

33:06Lewis Goodall:And I suppose someone listening to this might say, in a way, might reflect your father's observation, which is to say, well, look, it is hardly a novel observation that the rich are powerful and the rich dominate societies. Your father, as you say, not a political man, observed that fundamental truth all those years ago. So I suppose what is the more novel observation in your book, it seems to me, is the idea that not only do the rich dominate societies in democracies, but they dominate our society through democracy. The democracy itself, which is to some extent a very old left wing argument, but the democracy itself embeds the oligarchy and it's designed to do so.

33:44Lewis Goodall:It's designed to do so. Now, what brought you to what brings you to that conclusion? Well, if we back up to the birth, for example, of our modern democratic era, it happens in the 1780s in the United States. And what a lot of people don't realize is that that moment of actually running to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention was a moment of panic. And the panic was that there was a clash at that moment between oligarchs and oligarchy and democracy in the United States. And the clash was in the form of a debt crisis. Ordinary farmers were indebted. The country was indebted after the war, and one of the questions that was worked out or struggled over democratically was, who's going to bear the pain of this debt crisis?

34:38And by the tens of thousands, these small farmers were being thrown into debtors' prisons. Foreclosures in some areas were at a level of 70 % of small farmers. And what happened is, in the states where they got no relief, where democracy was not responsive, they rose up, and especially Massachusetts, and we got Shays' Rebellion. Those two things caused the framers to run to Philadelphia. And the very first thing that Broadway Hamilton said in that convention was, there is an excess of democracy in the United States.

35:16Lewis Goodall:But in what way would you say that modern democracy is designed for oligarchy? Because, of course, someone looking at that could say, well, actually, look, look at true oligarchy. True oligarchy is Putin's Russia. And that is certainly not a true democracy. And therefore, if democracy was inherently so useful to oligarchy, surely, actually, Putin's Russia would be a democracy. But it's not. Right. So it turns out that Putin's Russia is what I call a sultanistic oligarch. He is a sultanistic oligarch and he's in charge of the rest of the oligarchs and he protects them as well as attacks them based on their political behavior.

35:56In the case of the United States, let's be clear. The argument is that it is a democracy. And in fact, there's a relationship between struggling over issues like will women have access to the vote or on issues of race and so on. Democracy actually works. It's in the vertical sense that in that moment in the convention.

36:18Lewis Goodall:Well, let's just explain that because that's the distinction you draw in the book, isn't it? Which is between sort of vertical democracy and horizontal democracy. Just explain what you mean by that. So what I mean by that is that among the non-rich, there are many ways in which people have been excluded, oppressed, marginalized, and so on. And we see a 250-year history of democracy works in the sense that you struggle to overcome those kinds of exclusions. And we can see that there are setbacks, yes, and so on, but it actually works. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice, as Luther King said.

36:54In that horizontal sense of the ways in which we as the non-rich sort of oppress each other. And the blind spot, actually, I try to argue is that because democracy works in this horizontal way, we mistakenly think that it will work along that vertical axis. But it was precisely that vertical axis.

37:16Lewis Goodall:Between the rich and poor. Between the rich and the poor, and the idea that the many could threaten the few, overwhelm them in a democracy by sheer numbers, that the framers decided they would create institutional safeguards and blocks. So here's what they did. They said the people will get to vote at the level of the lower chamber, the House. They would not get to vote for the Senate or anything up above that. But that has changed now, which shows that these systems could evolve. It has changed, but let's just understand that it was set up so that only the wealthy would be a check in the Senate on the House.

37:56And then the president got a veto just in case something got through the House and the Senate. And then the Supreme Court is able to actually nullify the entire democracy below that.

38:08Lewis Goodall:And sure. And we see if we're just talking about the United States, then obviously we see plenty of examples where the sort of democratic wiring, if you like, the scaffolding of American politics has certainly benefited the rich. And you can sort of argue, I suppose, that institutionally it was designed to do that. But I suppose just to push back on some other examples. I mean, let's even take the United States. There have been plenty of examples, haven't there, where presidents and congresses have done things that the oligarchs did not like. The New Deal under FDR, antitrust under Teddy Roosevelt, even more recently Affordable Care Act under Obama.

38:42Lewis Goodall:You go over to this country or Europe, the great post-war social democratic safety nets that were constructed. The oligarchs wouldn't have liked any of this stuff. So it does show, doesn't it, that democracy can work vertically as well as horizontally. But it isn't necessarily hardwired, as you argue, always for the oligarchs. So oligarchs have definitely experienced setbacks, and especially during major crises. So, for example, all of those things you described, the New Deal, the FDR period, and so on, came in the wake of the First World War, the Great Depression, and in the Second World War, so that not only did we see the rise of the New Deal, but by the 1950s, the highest tax bracket that oligarchs faced was in excess of 90%.

39:28And so, yes, the argument is that it is possible to actually get some relief some of the time. But what we need to understand is that if oligarchs won all of the time, no one would think that the system was democratic. They wouldn't. They would think that it's completely dominated. And so what has really changed over time is this, not the presence of oligarchy, but its visibility and the extent to which they win. So let me give you an example. Over the last 50 years, we have seen an absolutely epic explosion in inequality, not just in the United States, but around the world. And this is a reflection, actually, of oligarchic power.

40:21And it's expressed in two ways. One, through the legislatures, and we have a tremendous study that was done in the United States of congressional decisions. Two political scientists in the United States analyzed 1 ,779 policy decisions at the federal level. And they asked a simple question. When the interest of the rich and the non-rich diverged, how many times on those policy issues did the non-rich majority win? And the answer was never. That's how strong the influence was. And they do this quantitatively and so on. It's a very, very famous article. And so what we really need to understand is that how do we explain the fact that we have become more democratic over time and yet we have become more unequal?

41:16And we are not just becoming more unequal. Liberal democracies today are the most unequal societies ever to have existed. how is that possible that we would become more empowered and yet we would become dramatically

41:34Lewis Goodall:more unequal well there's not part of the answer that part of it is about economics and part of it is about the way in which our society and we're obviously going to potentially see this unfold over the 21st century the sorts of people who are able to avail of themselves of the productive and industrial changes that we're seeing potentially are narrower and narrower and narrower more and more educated and we're seeing that hollowing out of the workforce so there's trends that you described are likely to get worse how do you as a society manage to and as a polity manage to harness the productive power and entrepreneurial power that some of these people have and we mentioned musk he's clearly a deeply entrepreneurial person clearly a very ingenious person in all sorts of ways albeit does not always use his power and money for the good of the rest of mankind but But nonetheless, he is.

42:22Lewis Goodall:How do you harness that in the 21st century whilst not ending up succumbing to quite crass leveling down policies that we've seen in the past? Sure. So one of the first questions is it's not whether we should have absolutely egalitarian societies or the incredibly extreme inequality that we have. But really, where would the inequality land in a way that is good for society, but also good for innovation and creativity and all of those things? We happen to be at an extreme right now that is sort of off the charts. That's one point to make. Another is that we have, on the one hand, market outcomes from the work people do, the changes and the innovations that they introduce and so on, right?

43:12We have that, but we also have something called progressive taxation, which is a democratic policy. And it was introduced a long time ago. And progressive taxation is basically the fundamental notion that whatever the market outcomes are in society, we can decide democratically that we're going to put very heavy taxation on the ultra-wealthy and that we are going to create opportunities for others in society, access to education, and so on and so on. Well, it turns out that progressive taxation has actually been defeated by the oligarchs. And let me give you an example. Starting in the 1950s and 60s, something I call the wealth defense industry emerges.

44:00Because those tax rates were so high coming out of the Second World War. An entire private sector industry of armies of lawyers, accountants, wealth management professionals, lobbyists of all kinds emerge. And it's a multi-billion dollar industry today. And its sole purpose is A, to knock down the tax bracket rates in the first place by lobbying the legislative process, and then making sure that oligarchs actually don't pay those taxes or brackets at all. So that many of those names you mentioned pay somewhere between one and three percent. And we have something in the United States called the tax gap.

44:46This is the number which the IRS is required by statute to calculate. And it's the difference between what the IRS confidently believes it should be collecting and what it actually does. today per year, the tax gap in the United States is$1 trillion. The defense budget is$900 billion. What they've also shown is that the cheating rate by the average citizen is about 1%. The level at which oligarchs are evading and avoiding their taxes is 55%. So what does that mean? The democracy says we want to do something about inequality and progressive taxation is one of the most important instruments. Oligarchs say you can't and you won't tax us.

45:39And in the end, they keep hundreds of billions of that trillion and make money on that money. And what it does is it supercharges the rate at which we're becoming unequal.

45:52Lewis Goodall:just finally Jeffrey I mean I suppose the question is what to do about it you just talked about progressive taxation there I mean I suppose we could argue you could argue that maybe some of this sounds rather fatalistic we are living I mean it seems to me surely if there is going to be a threat if we accept this oligarchal presence exists and if there's going to be a threat to it surely if that threat is going to come it's going to come now I mean we're living in a time and we just let's take the democracy or the sort of recent trends in democracy, what we have is genuine electoral volatility.

46:26Lewis Goodall:We've got a population which is, generally speaking, actually more enthused about politics, less enthused. We've seen repeated democratic shocks. And there certainly is, I think it's fair to say, a kind of electrification of the impulse that your father had all those years ago, which is this sense that, you know, we're getting screwed over, the rich is getting richer. We see the sort of populism that we've seen on left and right. Bernie Sanders, Trump channel some of this stuff enough. You know, we've seen it in our own country as well. Surely this is a moment ripe for challenging the oligarchy if someone has a wherewithal and political nows to do it.

47:02Yeah. You know, the melding, the fusion of oligarchy and democracy relies on the fact that actually oligarchy is not very visible. If it's not visible, that fusion actually can go on for decades upon decades and over generations. We happen to be in a moment when the population's awareness of the use of wealth power in democracy is at a very high level right now. In fact, we have not had this kind of visibility of oligarchs since the Gilded Age, when they were called robber barons at that time. And what followed after that was a backlash politics against them. And there were a lot of rough policies put in place.

47:52We are today, first of all, let's note a couple things. One, people are talking about oligarchs in a way that they haven't sort of ever. And that's reflective of the fact that populations are agitated about the role that money is playing in democracy. Also, we are seeing policies being considered that have not been considered in a very long time. For example, not just increasing of taxes, but people are talking very seriously about wealth taxes for the first time. And it's not just happening in the United States. Europe is in the lead on this. So what we're seeing is an awareness of this. And by the way, oligarchs themselves are talking about this with some nervousness because not all oligarchs are visible and out in front.

48:45And so the sheer visibility of this moment, I think, is bringing awareness and change. And we need to see how is this going to play out. But I would certainly just say we are at a moment when not only is inequality at epic levels, but people's interpretation of why that's happening is also evolving and changing. and the word oligarchs and oligarchy, those words are in play.

49:16Lewis Goodall:Jeffrey Winters, your book, The Blind Spot, How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies is out now. It's a really fascinating read. I can recommend it. Jeffrey, thanks so much. Thank you. Pleasure to talk to you.

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50:39Lewis Goodall:So to everybody in the UK who rejects that idea, I'd encourage them to just keep on going. It's okay to want to defend your culture. It's okay to want to live in a safe neighborhood. It's okay to want your job to go to yourself and your neighbors and not to a stranger who you don't even know. It is reasonable for the people in Western societies to want to control who comes into their country and who doesn't. A lot of people, frankly, a lot of people in the media have tried to persuade all of those people that it's somehow racist to want to protect your borders, even though very often the very people who are most affected by low wage immigration are lower income black and Hispanic Americans right here in the United States of America.

51:22Lewis Goodall:And I guarantee that's true in the UK. You know what? He's right. It is absolutely fine to want to defend your culture. It is absolutely fine to want to understand who is coming into your country. That is J.D. Vance, who is nonetheless siding with one Tommy Robinson after Saturday's protest because he believes that Tommy Robinson represents the best of British values and culture. And it remains extraordinary that we are in a sense and it reflects kind of what we were talking about before, which is how pickled the brains of the Republican Party has become that, you know, this is somehow that he has become Robinson.

52:02Lewis Goodall:I found this when we were in Dallas for CPAC. It's disturbing to think, I honestly think Tommy Robinson is the most influential British, I almost hesitate to refer to him this way, political figure in this country. It's not Liz Truss, it's not Keir Starmer or whatever. For a big part of the MAGA right, which is basically the right in American politics, and the right is in office, therefore it's the most powerful bit. Genuinely, he is almost sort of talismanic and is someone that they literally would listen to the nonsense that he spews and spouts about Britain that they would take as red as opposed to over and above any other British politician or British political field.

52:39My favourite image actually of the weekend was Tommy Robinson draped in the St George's flag in his protest, surrounded by lots of Shahists, Iranians, draped in their flag, representing the Shah who was sort of marching alongside him. and I just imagine that he sort of looks around and goes, what? What? This is about Britain. This is about England. What are you doing? What are all these foreigners doing? They're like, no, Tommy, we're with you. We're with you all the way.

53:11Lewis Goodall:Well, and this is maybe, I mean, sort of like grimly chuckle about like the sort of Conservative Party policy at the moment on the Gaza protests versus the Tommy Robinson protests. You sort of ask Conservative shadow ministers about it and they go, you know what? The Gaza protests, they're full of anti-Semites. And you're like, yes, we know there have been anti-Semites on them. like wait till you find out about the far right lads they were specialising in this before it was cool don't look at who's so I think all in all like if that's your metric you might want to apply it a little bit more isn't it great it all happens on the same day yeah that is handy we'll see you tomorrow bye bye bye for now this has been a Global Player original production