As America marks 250 years since independence, debates over democracy, oligarchy and executive power are reshaping the nation's political identity, writes Patrick Keane.
ON THE ANNIVERSARY of the American Revolution, the meaning, significance and consequences of this event are still debated.
What does it mean that on the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, Americans are debating autocracy, oligarchy and democracy again?
Vice President JD Vance claimed the U.S. is ruled by “the Deep State”. The Deep State is one ruled by invisible civil servants that undermine legitimately elected governments.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote this week that the Supreme Court had made Trump more powerful than King George III, who was unable to remove officers without parliament’s approval. And President Trump governs like a monarch, issuing fiats on social media like he issues executive orders.
Trump signed 220 executive orders in his first administration compared to Joe Biden's 162. Trump signed 147 executive orders only 100 days into his second administration.
Political scientists such as Jeffrey Winters, author of The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy (2026), categorise the United States as an oligarchy, not a democracy.
Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence rejected monarchy, millions of Americans protested the Trump Administration with the slogan ‘No Kings’.
Bill is a ‘No Kings’ organiser from Arizona. I interviewed Bill to find out why he participated in the ‘No Kings’ protests.
I saw a story about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents dressed as terrorists, masked, armed like soldiers, kicking in doors without warrants and trafficking people to unrelated countries, and I was in disbelief. I got off the phone and went to my first ‘No Kings’ protest. There were thousands of people there with me. My girlfriend was there. Her dog was there.
I.C.E. is responsible for the high-profile killings of Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good, among more than 30 other murders.
Why is it important?
Because the United States is the home of the new idea. The Gettysburg Address came to influence the way we read the Declaration. Abraham Lincoln said the new idea or the American ideal out-travels all experience, history and empirics; it was transcendental. And if the new idea can be extinguished there, the light of freedom and equality can be put out everywhere.
So if America is no longer a democracy, what is it?
Professor Winters explained:
“Oligarchy blends with governments of all kinds, including democracies. There is no doubt that oligarchic wealth power operates throughout American democracy. That doesn’t mean the system is not democratic. It means it is both an oligarchy and a democracy.”
My own research into oligarchy can be read here.
Bill told me:
“These days I am worried about kleptocracy, corporatocracy, technocracy and regular old racketeering.”
The Deep State conspiracy theory used by Vice President Vance to explain the evidence for corruption and criminality made against both the administrations of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump cannot explain how Trump or Nixon became president in the first place. Along with election denial conspiracies, vaccine conspiracies, but not Epstein conspiracy theories, we can find evidence to demonstrate they are not empirical or true.
Although oligarchy does not require a conspiracy like the Deep State, there is no method or forensic accounting that can empirically demonstrate the United States is an oligarchy. Nevertheless, a new model of political fundraising is emerging whereby the oligarchs can pick their own executive and policies such as preferential tax regimes or government contracts as a return on investment.
Forty-six billionaires made up the cash for Trump's second presidential transition, but we already knew Elon Musk was appointed to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as Trump’s largest donor. Musk became the first trillionaire during our cost-of-living crisis after the SpaceX IPO.
But the founders were also concerned about democracy.
Professor Winters told me:
“The framers of the U.S. Constitution proved in 1787 that oligarchy and democracy could be fused by building safeguards for the rich into democracy’s laws and institutions.”
Take the Electoral College, for example. In 2016, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but not the Electoral College.
Oligarchy was first theorised by Aristotle as a polity in which a few were so wealthy they enjoyed discretionary political power. Massachusetts Senator Bernie Sanders used the same definition.
Professor Winters observed that the rule of a few oligarchs has a specific character, unlike a generalised elite, plutocracy or kleptocracy. Oligarchs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are not just visible, but so are their personalities in their vanity projects. It is impossible not to notice that the oligarchs are all White men. Gore Vidal argued that a ruling class does not need to conspire; it simply needs to agree.
Does oligarchy have anything to do with capitalism?
According to Professor Winters:
“Oligarchy has adapted to the capitalist era, but it is not rooted in any particular economic system. Oligarchs have existed in every society going back thousands of years that has had extreme wealth concentration in the hands of the few.”
Instead of marshalling evidence to demonstrate the U.S. is an oligarchy and not a democracy, other scholars have focused on the kinds of power oligarchs wield. The oligarchs exercise sovereignty or power, not just influence. Oligarchical power or sovereignty is a rival to national sovereignty or popular sovereignty.
In other words, an oligarch is one able to deploy extreme wealth to influence or control public policy like a sovereign or king.
For example, Musk plans to incorporate the area surrounding SpaceX operations in Texas as a company town, “Starbase”, with its own governance structures, regulators and protections from legal accountability.
I asked Professor Winters to explain the difference to me between the power of the oligarchs and the power of the rest of us:
Oligarchs are defined as people empowered by tremendous wealth. Oligarchy is the politics of wealth defence by the ultra-rich. The rest of us are empowered by rights to vote or participation power in the form of protests, speech, assembly and so on.
Electoral campaigns are one of the most important pathways for oligarchs to be able to express their wealth power in democracies. It is difficult to restrict this kind of power, but it is important that societies establish laws limiting the role of oligarchs in elections so that democracy has a fighting chance of being representative of the people.
But democracy is not only about elections. And although democracy may be unruly and noisy, that is less chaotic than the violent repression of oligarchs and kings. Aristotle refers only to the Thirty Oligarchs; Thucydides tells us the oligarchs were able to come to power in Athens because most men of voting qualification were absent while fighting in the war against Sparta.
The oligarchy only lasted a few months because of uprisings outside of Athens and the oligarchs lost power amidst street fighting.
Bill said:
By my third No King’s protest, I had joined a local chapter of a non-violent direct-action group called the Troublemakers. I was assigned to lead “Peacekeeping”, with some toes and fingers in traffic control and street medics, for a 6,000-person march through our city.
Basic safety was a minimum, of course, but non-violence was critical to the effect of the event, so we deployed approximately 60 trained activists to intercept agitators. Despite the event being unpermitted, after a long six weeks of planning, networking, recruiting, training and negotiating with police and city officials, we managed a safe, powerful and peaceful event.
Lincoln believed America proved that a republic on a large scale could exist.
France is in its Third Republic; the Weimar Republic lasted only 12 years.
The Roman Republic lasted almost 500 and the Venetian, by some estimates, 1,100 years.
Was Lincoln right?
Can a republic on a large scale exist?
Patrick Keane was a former staffer for a Labor Senator and is a member of the Australian Labor Party.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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