Oligarchy isn’t a bug of our political system. It’s a feature.

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Oligarchy has been a central part of our democracy since the founding. The U.S. is a democracy but it is also an oligarchy.

Oligarchy has been a central part of our democracy since the founding. The U.S. is a democracy but it is also an oligarchy.

Jeffrey Winters is a professor of political science at Northwestern University and the author of “The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy.”

Over the last 20 years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable transformation in a seminar I teach at Northwestern University called “Oligarchs and Elites.” When the class started in 2006, only one hand went up when I asked if students thought there was oligarchy in the United States. “Russia had oligarchs,” one declared. “The U.S. has rich people.”

Today, when I ask the same question, nearly every hand goes up. What’s changed? In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that unlimited spending on campaigns was free speech protected under the First Amendment. This opened the floodgates on the use of wealth in elections, establishing that money was a legitimate form of democratic voice.

The country’s founders worried about what they called “excess” democracy. Their solution? The very rich.

In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protests focused our attention on the disproportionate power of the 1%. The message resonated not only nationally, but globally. By 2013, the response from the students in my class had started to shift. And this perspective has only hardened as the oligarchs have taken an increasingly visible role in public life, appearing on the same stage with candidates, making speeches, and pouring billions of dollars into campaigns at all levels of government. During the recent midterms, for instance, billionaires made record-breaking investments in campaigns on both sides of the aisle; the top five political investors provided $900 million to the candidates they back.

Today, I find myself struggling to convince my students that there is still a lot that is democratic about our system.

Both, I try to teach them, can be true. The U.S. is a democracy.

There are many forms…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Christian Science Monitor. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.