The Oligarchs Want Their Throne Back—but They Can Be Stopped
The author of the Declaration of Independence went to great lengths, on numerous occasions (as I detail in What Would Jefferson Do?), to point out that when Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues started the United States of America, they were explicitly rejecting—in favor of democracy—the men (they were all men back then) who drove the “three historic tyrannies”: kings/autocrats, theocrats/popes, and morbidly rich oligarchs.
For 2,000 years before Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, and their colleagues created our checks and balances system of Republican democracy, every country in the world was ruled by one of those three. Today, of the 167 countries on earth, only 74 are democracies, and only 24 of those are “fully democratic.”