Responding to: The Oligarchy Myth — Michael Dresdale · 2026-06-13

What the Piece Argues

Michael Dresdale’s National Review essay contends that the left-wing charge of American oligarchy is a myth. He points to billionaire candidates like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg losing elections despite massive self-funding, and he cites political science research challenging the 2014 Gilens–Page finding—arguing that when rich preferences clash with middle-class ones, the rich win only about half the time. The piece insists that corporate America regularly loses policy fights, from immigration reform to high taxes on the wealthy in New York and California, and concludes that the real danger is government intrusion into business, not the reverse.

Receipts

The framing wants you to believe that because a handful of billionaire candidates lost elections, concentrated wealth does not distort American democratic governance. This is a bait-and-switch that substitutes the spectacle of self-funding for the structural reality of donor influence.

  • The framing wants you to believe that billionaire political failure (Steyer, Bloomberg, Goldman) proves money cannot buy political outcomes — that oligarchy is “a political crutch for the left.”
  • What’s really going on:
    • Self-funding candidates losing primaries is not the same as concentrated wealth failing to shape policy. Billionaires don’t need to be candidates; they fund other candidates, PACs, and lobbying operations that work far more reliably. Total outside spending in the 2024 cycle was projected to exceed $5 billion (OpenSecrets), with the presidential race alone seeing over $2 billion — none of it dependent on a self-funder winning a primary.
    • The piece cherry-picks Branham et al. to undercut Gilens and Page while omitting the broader consensus in political science: when donor preferences and mass preferences diverge, donor preferences prevail at dramatically higher rates. The Gilens-Page finding has been refined, not overturned — the core asymmetry persists (Winters and Page 2009; Hacker and Pierson 2010).
    • The “2% crony capitalism” figure from The Economist’s index excludes the mechanism by which competitive-sector wealth maintains dominance: the revolving door, regulatory capture, tax-code engineering (carried interest, buybacks, step-up in basis), and the structural political power that even competitive monopoly-scale firms wield. The Koch network alone spent nearly $550 million in the 2024 cycle (New York Times) — that isn’t cronyism in the telecom-mining-defense sense; it’s competitive-sector wealth purchasing legislative influence through a different channel.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: a persuadable moderate, a good-faith family member who’s heard the “money doesn’t control everything” line and thinks it sounds reasonable.

Consider Maria, a home-health aide in the Bronx who works sixty hours a week and still needs SNAP to feed her two children. She doesn’t follow the academic debate about oligarchy, but she knows her rent keeps climbing while the building’s owner—a private-equity firm registered in Delaware—gets a property-tax break the City Council quietly renewed. The question isn’t whether a billionaire can buy himself a governorship; it’s whether the people who sign Maria’s paycheck have more say over the rules than she does.

The numbers say they do. When political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page examined 1,779 policy outcomes over two decades, they found that the preferences of the average American had little or no independent influence on what became law. The preferences of economic elites and well-organized business groups, by contrast, were substantial predictors. That finding—published in 2014 and still the most comprehensive empirical map of American policymaking—isn’t overturned by pointing out that Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg spent a lot of money and lost some elections. Those men still have policy agendas, and they still get most of them through the congressional committees that never make the evening news.

The polite reframe is simple: The oligarchy conversation isn’t about who sits in the mayor’s chair; it’s about who writes the legislation the mayor has to implement. When the Chamber of Commerce fails to pass a specific immigration bill but wins seventeen tax-code rewrites and a generation of antitrust non-enforcement, the scorecard still reads “Plutocracy, by a landslide.” Maria’s interests—a living wage, affordable housing, a union—are barely a rounding error in the calculations that produce American law. That’s what “oligarchy” means. And it isn’t a myth; it’s the operating system.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: an op-ed-length reply, a Substack post, or a mixed audience that needs the receipts laid out with an iron spine.

The National Review piece wants you to believe that because a couple of billionaire ego-projects crashed on the launchpad, the entire architecture of class rule is a left-wing fantasy. This is like arguing that because some rich people occasionally lose money in Vegas, the casino doesn’t have a house edge. The house edge is the entire point.

Let’s walk the receipts. Gilens and Page didn’t merely find that the rich get what they want more often; they found that when the preferences of the rich and the organized business sector diverged from those of the middle class, the rich prevailed at a rate that far outstripped their tiny share of the population—and that middle-class preferences, standing alone, had no detectable independent effect on policy outcomes. The subsequent paper the piece cites—Branham et al.—reports that the rich win 53 percent of the time when they conflict with the middle class. But the source then notes that the rich’s wins leaned in no consistent ideological direction—as if a system only counts as captured when the beneficiaries agree on a party platform. When the top one percent gets its way more than half the time on the issues it cares about, the absence of a partisan label does not erase the transfer of wealth and power that follows.

Then there’s the money. The piece breezes past the fact that billionaires and their affiliated political action committees are the principal funders of the entire American political process. The 2010 Citizens United decision and the subsequent explosion of dark money didn’t create a level field; they turned the dial up to eleven on the already-existing donor-class dominance. The same donor networks that funded the campaigns Dresdale calls failures also fund the think tanks, the legal foundations, the media outlets, and the lobbying firms that shape the intellectual and regulatory environment in which every policy battle is fought. The billionaire who runs for office and loses is still the billionaire whose network is writing the bills the winner will sign.

The moral superiority is earned because the argument from the other side is intellectually dishonest. It seizes on the rare, visible defeats of the moneyed class—the ones that make the newspaper—while ignoring the thousand quieter wins that never do. The U.S. tax code is a monument to this asymmetry: the carried-interest loophole, the stepped-up basis at death, the corporate rate cuts that delivered a trillion dollars to shareholders in buybacks instead of wages. None of those required a billionaire to win an election. They required lobbyists, campaign contributions, and a political class whose careers depend on never upsetting the donor base. The left’s “oligarchy” charge isn’t a crutch. It’s a diagnosis. And the patient is refusing treatment.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: the bystander at Thanksgiving who needs to see the absurdity, not the lecture.

Oh, thank God—National Review has crunched the numbers and concluded that oligarchy is a myth because Tom Steyer spent $200 million to lose a primary. Never mind that the same Tom Steyer has spent decades funding the policy shops, the ballot initiatives, and the candidate classes that actually write the laws. He failed to buy himself a title, so the entire system must be working. The logic here is so aggressively stupid it would be funny if it weren’t the organizing principle of the conservative intellectual apparatus.

Let’s play the game by their rules. The United States Chamber of Commerce spent $50 million on immigration reform in 2013 and didn’t get its bill. Therefore, the Chamber is powerless. Therefore, the Chamber’s multi-billion-dollar annual lobbying apparatus—the armies of lawyers, the dark-money vehicles, the state-level preemption campaigns, the coordinated attacks on unions, minimum-wage laws, and environmental rules—is all a Potemkin village. ExxonMobil didn’t get everything it wanted in the latest budget reconciliation, so the fossil-fuel industry must be politically neutered. The insurance companies had to swallow a public option they hated, so healthcare lobbyists are irrelevant. Right?

The “53 percent win rate” the piece waves around is the chef’s kiss. A tiny fraction of the population, whose interests directly conflict with the material well-being of the majority, gets its way more often than not when the two groups disagree—and this is supposed to prove that oligarchy isn’t real. If a basketball team comprising one percent of the league won 53 percent of the championships, we’d call it a dynasty. If a casino let one percent of its players win 53 percent of the hands, we’d call it rigged. But when the donor class does it, National Review calls it pluralism.

The truth is that the entire essay is a performance for the people who already own the theater. The rank-and-file reader who nods along is being handed a permission slip to pretend the game isn’t fixed—because if it is, they’d have to ask why their own wages have flatlined for forty years while the share going to the top one percent has doubled. Better to believe the billionaire candidates just had bad campaign managers. The elephant in the room is the simplest question: if the rich have so little power, why are they getting so much richer?

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: the bad-faith actor who knows the game is rigged and is working to keep it that way.

The author of this essay is not confused. He is not a sincere pluralist who just happens to have missed the most robust empirical finding in modern political science. He is a professional propagandist for the owning class, and the essay is a mirror held up to show the reader who he works for.

Let’s name the operation. The piece takes the Gilens–Page finding—the gold-standard, multi-decade, 1,779-policy empirical demonstration that the American political system is a wealth-delivery mechanism—and tries to memory-hole it by citing a single counter-paper that, on its own terms, still shows the rich winning a majority of contested outcomes. This is not scholarly engagement. This is the rhetorical equivalent of a mob accountant who, caught with the books, points to one entry in the “loss” column and insists the whole enterprise must be legitimate.

The intellectual infrastructure that produces and circulates arguments like this one—the think tanks, the donor-advised funds, the legal foundations—is itself funded by the class whose power the argument denies. The media outlets that publish them—National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News—are owned by billionaires. The research that is cited to “complicate” the oligarchy finding is frequently funded by the same donor class. This is what the social scientists call a self-referential feedback loop: the oligarchs pay for the research that says oligarchs don’t have power, and then they publish it in their own newspapers, and then their politicians cite it on the floor. The circle is closed.

And the mirror? The piece’s own moral logic convicts it. It says, in effect, that because some billionaires lose some elections, the United States is not an oligarchy. Apply that standard to any other system of domination. The Jim Crow South was not a racial caste system, because some Black candidates occasionally won local office? The patriarchy is a myth, because some women became CEOs? The standard is absurd, and the author knows it. He is not arguing in good faith; he is laundering a conclusion his paymasters need laundered.

The piece’s final pivot—that the real threat is big government—is the oldest bait-and-switch in the conservative playbook. The administrative state that the author warns against is the only remaining counterweight to corporate power, the one institution that can make Exxon pay for its spills and JPMorgan for its fraud. And so the game is to discredit it, to paint regulation as tyranny, so that the only force left standing is the one that signs the checks. This is not a defense of liberty. It is a defense of a particular liberty: the liberty of the already powerful to operate without accountability.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: the fully committed apologist for the donor class, the troll who knows exactly what he is doing, and the catharsis of the audience that has to live in the system he’s defending.

Welcome to the Oligarchy Anti-Defamation League, where the official position is that Jeff Bezos cannot possibly be an oligarch because he failed to personally win the presidency with his own money. Never mind that his company extracts rent from nearly every online transaction in the United States, crushes union drives with illegal tactics the National Labor Relations Board is too gutted to punish, and pays an effective tax rate that would make a medieval peasant weep with envy. Jeff couldn’t get 2008-vintage Mike Bloomberg across the finish line in American Samoa, so the whole wealth-equals-power thing must be a leftist hallucination.

This is the intellectual universe we’re being asked to inhabit: a world in which the Koch network, having spent half a billion dollars over a decade to capture state legislatures, judicial races, and the entire intellectual infrastructure of the American right, is suddenly the Washington Generals of American politics because a few of their preferred immigration bills didn’t pass. A world in which the Walton family, worth a combined quarter-trillion dollars, is a persecuted minority because they can’t quite get Congress to eliminate the estate tax—only to hollow it out to the point where it applies to roughly 0.1 percent of estates. A world in which the fact that New York City taxes rich people’s pied-à-terres is proof positive that the rich have no power, even as New York’s actual power structure—the real-estate developers, the hedge-fund managers, the private-equity barons—continues to write the zoning code, the tax abatements, and the campaign finance rules that ensure nobody else can build anything anywhere near them.

The Gilens and Page finding—establishing that mass preferences have negligible independent impact on policy—is a thermonuclear indictment of democratic theory, and the National Review response is, essentially, “Yes, but a later study found that the rich lose almost half the time, so maybe it’s a squirt gun.” The win-rate figure, again, is the tell. If the bottom 99 percent won a clear majority of the clashes with the top one percent, National Review would call it mob rule and demand the restoration of property qualifications. But when the fraction goes the other way, it’s called a well-functioning republic. The hypocrisy is so thick you could pave a Koch donor retreat with it.

The piece closes by warning that government insinuation into business is the real danger—that if the trend holds, “today’s overheated accusations will be borne out as tomorrow’s sober predictions.” This is the rhetorical equivalent of a burglar, caught in the vault with a sack of jewels, warning the homeowner that the real crime is the lock on the door. The government isn’t insinuating into business; business insinuated into government forty years ago, bought the furniture, and has been redecorating ever since. The “multiple centers of power” Robert Dahl described are now multiple sub-basements of the same corporate-owned building. The oligarchy isn’t coming. It’s here, and it’s been here, and the people writing op-eds to deny it are its public-relations department.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: the reader who understands that the moral vocabulary of the Hebrew prophets, the Black homiletic tradition, and the late Martin Luther King Jr. was built precisely for moments like this—when the powerful wrap themselves in the language of freedom while grinding the faces of the poor.

The prophet Jeremiah surveyed Jerusalem’s ruling class and gave the diagnosis: “They did not know how to blush.” The author of The Oligarchy Myth has acquired that diagnosis in full. He can write, with a straight face, that America’s billionaires are politically impotent while the nation’s wealth gap yawns wider than at any point since the Gilded Age—and he does not blush; damn him, he does not blush.

Hear the prophet Amos, whose words King carried into the streets of Birmingham and Memphis: “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.” The modern translation is only slightly updated: they sell the worker’s wage for a stock buyback, the renter’s security for a debt-service payment, the citizen’s vote for a dark-money super PAC—and then they publish essays explaining that none of this constitutes oligarchy because the transaction was technically a campaign expenditure, not a bribe. The trampling is the same. Only the sandals have gotten more expensive.

The essay’s final move—the pivot to the dangers of “government insinuation into business”—is a spiritual category error of the first order. It mistakes the cage for the beast. King, in his 1967 Riverside address, named the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism, and he insisted that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” The budget priorities of the United States—the tax cuts, the subsidies, the wars, the systematic underfunding of every program that touches the poor—are not the work of a government that has overwhelmed business. They are the work of a business class that has captured government, and the spiritual death King warned of is the death of the democratic soul, the hell of poverty that the prophets called the people to escape.

What the piece calls “sincere disagreement on the part of the mass of American voters” is, in the prophetic vocabulary, a whitewashed tomb. Behind the language of pluralism and competition, there is rot. The same political system that the author celebrates has produced, over four decades, a transfer of roughly fifty trillion dollars from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent—a figure documented by the RAND Corporation and confirmed by the work of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman. That is not the result of a fair fight in the arena of ideas. It is the result of a structural rigging so complete that the riggers no longer see the lever in their own hands.

The cup of trembling is being filled, and the essayist is pouring. The worm that does not die is the knowledge, available to anyone who bothers to read the Gilens and Page study and the mountain of corroborating research, that the democratic pretensions of the American polity have been hollowed out from the inside. The indictment is Ezekiel’s, and it is King’s, and it is Malcolm’s: the bloody city has acquired better signage, but the hands are still full of blood.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: the reader who has heard every euphemism, every dog-whistle, every polite evasion, and needs to hear the truth in the only language the liars can’t sanitize—full-throated, uncensored, cathartic fury.

Let’s cut the fucking bullshit. The National Review op-ed isn’t an argument; it’s a goddamn protection racket for the oligarchy it pretends doesn’t exist. Every sentence is a lie whispered into the ear of the reader by the very class that has spent forty years stealing the future from everyone else.

The essay’s core claim—that because a few billionaire dipshits couldn’t buy their way into office, the whole fucking system isn’t rigged—is so morally bankrupt it needs its own bankruptcy court. The Gilens and Page study, which the piece tries to dismiss with a paper that still shows the rich winning, is the most damning indictment of American democracy ever published, and the author’s response is, essentially, “nuh-uh.” This is not scholarship. It’s propaganda, produced by the think tanks the billionaires fund, published in the magazines the billionaires own, distributed through the media networks the billionaires control, and consumed by the rubes the billionaires depend on to keep voting against their own goddamn interests.

The piece says the rich lose “only 53 percent” of the time when they clash with the middle class. Fifty-fucking-three percent, for a group that comprises maybe one percent of the population, and this is supposed to be evidence that the system is fair. If a referee in a boxing match gave the heavyweight champion 53 percent of the rounds he clearly lost, we’d call it a fix. If a casino let the house win 53 percent of the time, we’d call it a racket. But when the donor class does it, National Review calls it democracy. The intellectual dishonesty is so complete it’s almost admirable—a kind of Platonic ideal of bullshit, unencumbered by even a glancing acquaintance with the concept of shame.

The closing pivot—that the real danger is government intrusion into business—is the money shot. It’s the moment when the mask comes off and the author reveals himself as the mouthpiece for the owning class he’s been laundering the whole time. The “government” he’s warning about is the one institution that could, in theory, restrain the power of the people who sign his paycheck—regulate their pollution, tax their wealth, enforce their labor laws—and so the project is to convince the public that the cage is the predator and the predator is the cage. It’s a con so old it’s in the fucking Bible, and it still works because the people running it have spent a century perfecting the art of making the victim feel like the criminal.

The truth is this: America is an oligarchy. It has been an oligarchy for decades. The evidence is overwhelming, the mechanisms are documented, the beneficiaries are named, and the costs are borne—in foreclosed homes, in uncashed paychecks, in bodies broken by jobs that don’t pay enough to fix them—by the people this op-ed is designed to keep quiet. The author is a liar, or a fool, or both, and his essay is the spiritual equivalent of a pickpocket who, caught with your wallet, explains that the real threat is all the locks on your doors.

Fuck that. Fuck the op-ed, fuck the billionaires it protects, fuck the entire machine that grinds ordinary people into paste and then publishes think-pieces explaining that the paste is fine, actually, because the grinder lost an election once. The oligarchy is real. The receipts are public. And the only thing more obscene than the theft is the lecture we get from the thieves about how grateful we should be that they only took half the fucking store.

The Deeper Breakdown

The cui bono is straightforward: the piece benefits the ultra-wealthy donor class and the conservative intellectual infrastructure that depends on its funding. By framing America as a pluralist democracy where moneyed interests routinely lose, it delegitimizes demands for redistribution, campaign-finance reform, antitrust enforcement, and the closing of tax loopholes—all policies that would reduce the wealth and power of the very people who fund the publication and the author’s ideological ecosystem.

The anchor receipt is the 2014 Gilens and Page study, which examined 1,779 policy outcomes between 1981 and 2002 and concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” That central empirical pillar is what the piece tries but fails to dislodge.

Further receipts: the RAND Corporation’s 2020 analysis of income distribution showing that had economic growth been shared as broadly since 1975 as it was in the previous three decades, the bottom 90 percent would have had roughly $50 trillion more in income—a redistribution upward of historic proportions. The tax code is a monument to donor-class power: the carried-interest loophole would cost roughly $6.3 billion per year in forgone revenue, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s 2023 estimate of the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act, while the step-up in basis at death shields an estimated $40 billion annually in unrealized capital gains from income tax, per the Congressional Budget Office. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act delivered 83 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent by 2027, per the Tax Policy Center. These are not the outcomes of a system in which billionaires are “politically impotent.”

The piece touts the Economist’s crony-capitalism index, which ranks the U.S. with crony wealth at just 2 percent of GDP, versus Russia’s 19 percent. That index, however, measures only state-dependent sectors like telecoms, mining, and defense—missing the vast influence of finance, tech, and real-estate lobbying on regulatory capture that does not register as “cronyism” by its narrow definition. The piece itself, despite its central argument, concedes that the Trump administration is “blurring the lines” by personalizing executive power over drug approvals, merger reviews, and broadcast licenses, leading to record White House lobbying—a concession that acknowledges the oligarchic drift when it wears an (R) label.

The piece’s own evidence cuts against it. Billionaire Tom Steyer may have lost his gubernatorial bid, but the network he built—NextGen America, his climate and voter-mobilization organizations—continues to shape policy and elections. The Chamber of Commerce’s failure on one immigration bill did not prevent it from securing decades of deregulation, free-trade agreements, and corporate tax reductions. The selective focus on visible defeats while ignoring the cumulative structural victories is the essence of the bad-faith frame.

Key missing information: More up-to-date replication of the Gilens–Page methodology for the post–Citizens United era would strengthen the case, but the existing literature, including the Princeton working papers and the 2020 volume The Unheavenly Chorus by Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, consistently confirms the outsized influence of economic elites. The oligarchy thesis is among the most replicated findings in political science, and the attempt to dismiss it as a “myth” is itself a work of myth-making.