Aristotle On Oligarchy

By Leo Gura - January 26, 2025

It’s amazing to see how little politics has change in 2000 years. The fundamentals of politics do not change. Which makes it the more appalling that most voters do not understand these basics enough to make good voting choices.

People have forgotten how degenerate populism can be.

It’s crucial to notice that every system of government has a healthy and corrupt form. The problem isn’t so much which form you have, it’s the corruption that seeps into it. Any great system of government that you can imagine, I can imagine how to corrupt it to make it bad. This is why today’s populism is so foolish, it assumes that just because its populist its inherently good. Furthermore, left-wing populism can also get corrupted. Corruption is not limited to any one party, class, or ideology. That’s the key insight. And the key trap is to blame corruption all on your ideological enemies.

Also notice how various forms of government hybridize in complex ways. There is not pure monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, capitalism, socialism. In practice they all hybridize with each other in corrupt ways. An authoritarian wannabe monarch will hijack democracy by stoking populist rage and align himself with oligarchs to hold power while proclaiming the virtues of socialism or capitalism — depending the peoples’ mood. There is no such thing as an authoritarian without his circle of elites to whom he expropriates wealth and power and who defend him. Authoritarianism is an alliance between a strong-man leader and a small circle of the rich and powerful with whom he is chummy, and between whom they all divide the stolen wealth. It works this way in North Korea, in Russia, in Africa, in America. The most important thing to understand about power and fame is that they are wealth extraction tools.

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