One Cheer for Oligarchy
Trump and the DOGE bros make it look bad—but we can thank some oligarchs of centuries past for helping to lay the foundations of liberal democracy.
OLIGARCHY GETS A BAD RAP. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Peter Thiel, and their ilk are perhaps more accurately styled as plutocrats, for they have few accomplishments other than their wealth to recommend them as civic or political leaders. Yale historian Timothy Snyder has also noted that our present-day “oligarchs” bear an increasing resemblance to the Russian oligarchs of the 1990s, who ransacked the post-Soviet state for its resources to enrich themselves, helping to spoil Russia’s golden chance at democracy along the way.
It has not ever been thus. The oligarchies of early modern Europe, particularly those that emerged in the Dutch and British (and later American) political contexts, stood athwart the hereditary aristocracies and absolutist monarchs that had darkened the past and threatened to darken the future. Broadly speaking, these oligarchies were systems that made room for the trading classes who were both driving economic growth and political pluralism. They were also bulwarks of confessional and political diveristy, defending Reformation Protestantism—which was from the start as fractious as a herd of cats—against Catholic counterreformation in both its Hapsburg and Bourbon guises. They embraced a Lockean toleration of dissenting sects, even while retaining established national churches.
The Dutch Republic, Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the Founders’ America served as oligarchic incubators of modern liberalism and representative democracy. Profiling these past oligarchies, noting their strengths as well as their corrupt weaknesses, can provide a yardstick for measuring just how much trouble we might be in now.
CONSIDER THE DUTCH REPUBLIC, officially the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. In 1579, the provinces of Groningen, Friesland, Overjissel, Gelderland, Utrecht, Holland, and Zeeland formed the Union of Utrecht, and two years later declared their independence from Hapsburg Spain, resulting in an “Eighty Years War” until the Hapsburgs recognized Dutch freedom in the Treaty of Münster, part of the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. The peace also brought the Dutch “Golden Age”—the age of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Franz Hals—to its zenith and saw the Republic stand as a global empire based on trade while retaining its domestic cultural and political dynamism.
Though nominally a confederation of diverse constituent republics, the government of the Republic was highly elastic. Power was often in the hands of “regents” (de facto representatives of wealthy merchant families) in conjunction with a “stadtholder” (a quasi-monarchical chief executive and commander-in-chief who was commonly a member of the House of Orange). This was truly government by the few, and a semi-hereditary few at that. In time, and often in response to national security crises, regents were purged and the Republic had periodic “stadtholderless” periods, such as the period 1650–72 under the Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt.
Winning and preserving independence and then trading the way to global power were no mean feats for the Dutch Republic. It managed to function despite its fractured polity in large measure due to the underlying characteristics of Dutch society. From its inception, the Republic practiced an extraordinary form of toleration—first becoming a refuge for Portuguese and Spanish Jews (including Spinoza) and then French Huguenots and English Dissenters, including future American Pilgrims. Locke composed his famous “Letter on Toleration” while in exile in Amsterdam in the mid-1680s. The official Dutch Reformed Church was Calvinist, but it contained a powerful Erastian element that limited its political power.
Despite the domination of the oligarchy, Dutch culture generally disdained ostentation and display. One need only recall the sober members of the Drapers’ Guild captured in Rembrandt’s The Syndics (1662):
As traders, the Dutch prospered due to their parsimony and financial acumen, by which they avoided much of the corruption to which oligarchies are prone. The result was that the Dutch Republic’s oligarchic leaders secured their country against two hegemonic powers, fostered greater liberty for their subjects, and created relatively broad prosperity.
ON NOVEMBER 5, 1688 ENGLAND WENT DUTCH. Having sailed from Amsterdam, the Dutch stadholder, William of Orange, landed in Devon along with tens of thousands of Dutch soldiers. The following February, the British throne was declared “vacant,” James II having broken the “original contract” with his people. William and his wife, Mary, daughter of James II, replaced James, but on quite different terms. Parliament passed a “Bill of Rights” that enumerated individual liberties and limited the powers of the crown while asserting those of the legislature. It also passed a “Triennial Act” mandating that parliamentary elections be held every three years and inducing longer legislative sessions; again, a reversal of Stuart practice. In 1695, it allowed the act for the end of “licensing” (i.e., censoring) the press. Freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and frequent elections led to an expansion not only of political punditry—this was the age of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift—but the politty itself. For the next seven decades, a global empire grew around these “Revolution Principles.”
For most of that period, the responsibility for the keeping of these principles fell to a powerful oligarchy—the grandees of the Whig Party. Many of the oligarchic families came from dissenting sects like the Puritans and had supported the Parliament in the English civil wars. Though the Whigs dominated British politics, Britain formally remained a monarchy, and the oligarchs steered a mostly moderate course—though the Whigs’ antagonists, the Tory Party, constantly accused the Whigs of closet republicanism, and though many of the oligarchs came from landed families or acquired aristocratic titles. Conversely, attempts by High-Church Tories to crack down on religious dissent during the brief periods when they held power were largely frustrated. As in the Netherlands, the oligarchy was distinct from a landed aristocracy and produced different, mostly preferable policies. The government paid close attention to the interests of merchants and new financial institutions like the Bank of England that increased both British power and prosperity; country gentlemen complained constantly of “stock-jobbers” in the City of London and the iniquities of land taxes.
Oligarchic government also produced some of the greatest soldiers, statemen, and strategists in British history, following the principle of preserving the “liberties” among European great powers. John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, led armies of the Grand Alliance that convinced the aggressive Sun King of France, Louis XIV, that he had “loved war too much.” Robert Walpole, simultaneously head of the treasury and leader of the House of Commons, ruled as Britain’s first and longest-serving prime minister, preserving a general European peace, reestablishing governmental finances, and protecting the Hanoverian Protestant succession. William Pitt the Elder devised the strategy that gave birth to the global empire upon which the sun never set and drove the French from North America.
These oligarchs were hardly liberal in a modern sense. Walpole managed Parliament through rampant corruption; Marlborough was meanly avaricious as well as a military genius; Pitt’s political opportunism knew few bounds. None had the Dutch regents’ sense of probity or modesty. Yet they shared an ethos of public service that tempered their individual and systemic faults. The oligarchs’ virtues were perhaps best embodied by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, who served as speaker of the House of Commons, secretary of state, and, prefiguring Walpole, Queen Anne’s “premier” minister. Formally a Tory, he steered a moderate course that elevated his sense of the national interest above a partisan quest for power. Harley did as much as any to nurture the primacy of Parliament, secure the Hanoverian succession, and suppress the Jacobites in his party.
BOTH THE DUTCH AND BRITISH GOVERNMENTS were examples—for both good and ill—for the men who wrote and promoted the American Constitution. The decline of Dutch Republic through the eighteenth century was ascribed to the divisiveness of its fractured government. In Federalist No. 20, Hamilton and Madison saw a clear analogy between the weaknesses of the Republic and those already apparent in the American Articles of Confederation. They allowed that, “delineated on parchment,” the Dutch had a lot going for them; they were a long-running “confederacy of republics” whose sovereignty was combined in the national States-General that oversaw both foreign and domestic affairs. Executive power, and particular command of the armed forces, resided in the stadtholder, who held “considerable prerogatives.” The Dutch system was “seemingly sufficient to secure harmony, but the jealousy in each province render[ed] the practice very different from the theory.” The result was “imbecility in the government; discord among the provinces; foreign influence and indignities; a precarious existence in peace, and peculiar calamities from war.” Hamilton and Madison paraphrase the Dutch political philosopher Hugo Grotius’s verdict on the Dutch system: “that nothing but the hatred of his countrymen to the house of Austria kept them from being ruined by the vices of their constitution.”
The Founders were even more attuned to the vices of the British constitution and determined to rectify them in writing their own. The American Revolution of 1776 was in many ways the offspring of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an effort to revive and expand “Revolution Principles” for a new era and in a different context.
This ambition is plain in the Declaration of Independence. Much as James II had been accused of abrogating the “original contract” with the nation and of having “vacated the throne,” the Declaration accuses George III of “repeated injuries and usurpations” and says his government had proved “destructive” of life and liberty. The long list of indictments that makes up the bulk of the Declaration parallels the complaints of seventeenth-century Englishmen against the Stuart monarchs. In “call[ing] together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures,” George III was taking a cue from the last parliament of Charles II, which sat for just a few days in Oxford, away from his antagonists in London. George III dissolved parliaments and refused to call new ones, also in the Stuart style.
The men who composed and signed the Constitution agonized to create structures of government that would contain the excesses both of direct democracy and arbitrary monarchy. In this they were naturally oligarchs, like their forebears who had designed the governments of the thirteen colonies. Madison, even as he worked to establish governmental and electoral devices to frame the republic he imagined, admitted that success ultimately rested on the “merit” of individual leaders and the electorate, on their wisdom and virtuousness.
THESE ARE EXACTLY THE CHARACTERISTICS our current oligarchs lack. Beyond the avarice and narcissism that define Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who have no sense of virtue whatsoever, it has been Vivek Ramaswamy who has best illustrated the gulf between the modern oligarchs’ idea of merit and that of Madison and the Founders. In his infamous December 26 screed about pop-culture America, Ramaswamy champions the merit of STEM students. To him the purpose of education appears to be the efficient production of math whizzes and software engineers, not the formation of citizens. To be sure, America needs the best scientific minds it can find. But those talents are insufficient to wise government.
“Is there no virtue among us?” asked Madison. “If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. . . . To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” We are about to find out whether Madison had it right.
Conversely, and as the Dutch-Anglo-American experience suggests, a robust and shared sense of public virtue can go a long way toward offsetting the structural problems of imperfect government, even the corruptions of oligarchy. George Washington would have fit comfortably in a Rembrandt portrait. Elon Musk would not.
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