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Plus, what happens when the next disaster strikes? \n","2648e09c-b888-4823-9cb4-2e2d8084349e","On the Media","e68b6750-ddde-4b56-8121-be01a1922ff5","https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/8b1b8b29-56db-46d2-aea3-8dcc4660fdab/89f11bc1-324e-4df8-b481-e47455f990c0/otmamericanemergency3000x3000final042126.jpg","2026-05-22T17:41:42.000Z","https://wnyc.org/browse/shows/episode/simplecast/2648e09c-b888-4823-9cb4-2e2d8084349e","/browse/shows/episode/simplecast/2648e09c-b888-4823-9cb4-2e2d8084349e","https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/14/prfx.byspotify.com/e/dts.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/waaa.wnyc.org/e68b6750-ddde-4b56-8121-be01a1922ff5/episodes/2648e09c-b888-4823-9cb4-2e2d8084349e/audio/128/default.mp3?awCollectionId=e68b6750-ddde-4b56-8121-be01a1922ff5&awEpisodeId=2648e09c-b888-4823-9cb4-2e2d8084349e",3091,"2026-05-22T13:41:42-04:00",{"slug":388,"type":335,"simplecastId":377},"ep-4-american-emergency-the-movement-to-kill-fema",{"brand":390},{"title":378,"logoImage":391},{"url":392},"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/2c9187d6-9dff-4257-bc55-469cf13afd48/8f823e1a-b8cc-4a76-8224-e2a4df4ae1f8/otm-showsquare-2025-3000x3000.jpg",{"id":394,"title":395,"uuid":396,"type":397,"listingTitle":395,"tease":398,"listingDescription":398,"listingImage":399,"socialTitle":395,"socialDescription":398,"socialImage":401,"seoTitle":395,"searchDescription":395,"showId":337,"showSlug":337,"description":398,"image":402,"link":403,"cmsSource":339,"sortDate":404,"meta":405,"legacyId":396,"publicationDate":406,"updatedDate":408,"tags":409,"url":282,"shareUrl":410,"body":411,"rawBody":411,"audio":412,"hasAudio":344,"estimatedDuration":413,"show":414,"showTitle":336,"headers":416,"transcript":419,"episodeNumber":420,"seasonNumber":297,"guid":421,"isPublished":344},1959330713,"American 'Participatory Inequality'","a42a6c01-c91d-43e6-8eeb-1540987cebc5","full","Jeffrey Winters, professor of political science at Northwestern University, talks about the history of oligarchy.",{"url":400},"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/1466ed7a-1b46-4edc-9bfc-91ff8f61ec3e/e293a688-6c13-43d2-880c-71779e30835f/blind_spot.jpg",{"url":400},{"url":400},"/browse/shows/episode/simplecast/a42a6c01-c91d-43e6-8eeb-1540987cebc5","2026-05-26T12:15:46-04:00",{"firstPublishedAt":406,"slug":407,"simplecastId":396,"type":397},"2026-05-26T16:15:46.000Z","american-participatory-inequality","2026-05-26T18:08:55.000Z",[],"https://wnyc.org/browse/shows/episode/simplecast/a42a6c01-c91d-43e6-8eeb-1540987cebc5","\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Jeffrey Winters\u003C/strong>, professor of political science at Northwestern University and the director of the Equality Development and Globalization Studies Program at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the author of \u003Ca href=\"https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Blind-Spot/Jeffrey-Winters/9781668221532\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003Ci>The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies\u003C/i>\u003C/a> (Scribner, 2026), talks about the history of oligarchy, how to fight it, and why it maintains power in a democracy.\u003C/p>\n\u003Cp>\u003Ci>Photo: Cover art for The Blind Spot. (Credit: \u003C/i>\u003Ca href=\"https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Blind-Spot/Jeffrey-Winters/9781668221532\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003Ci>Simon & Schuster\u003C/i>\u003C/a>\u003Ci>)\u003C/i>\u003C/p>","https://waaa.wnyc.org/9ad3f75f-0bb4-4437-bf95-5e4140741c91/episodes/a42a6c01-c91d-43e6-8eeb-1540987cebc5/audio/128/default.mp3?awCollectionId=9ad3f75f-0bb4-4437-bf95-5e4140741c91&awEpisodeId=a42a6c01-c91d-43e6-8eeb-1540987cebc5",1939,{"title":336,"url":415},"https://api.simplecast.com/podcasts/9ad3f75f-0bb4-4437-bf95-5e4140741c91",{"brand":417},{"title":336,"logoImage":418},{"url":352},"\n \n  \u003Cp>\n   [music]\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We use the words \"oligarch\" and \"oligarchy\" a lot these days. Tech oligarchs are the biggest example right now probably of a reference to oligarchs that can get your blood boiling. Elon Musk, tech oligarch, might soon become the world's first trillionaire, according to recent reports. Of course, he is very engaged in pushing for his politics to apply to people who have a million times and more or less wealth than him.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Another example of how we hear the word \"Russian oligarchs\". One example of that in the news recently, people say Mayor Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax on second homes in New York City worth $5 million or more is largely aimed at people like Russian oligarchs. There are other categories of oligarchs, too. If you wonder why do we have all these oligarchs with their power and politics in a democracy like ours? Well, our next guest is an expert on the topic, and his new book says, \"Society is dominated by the interests of the rich, not despite democracy, but through it.\"\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   He is Jeffrey Winters, professor of political science at Northwestern University and director of the Equality Development and Globalization Studies Program at Northwestern's Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. He wrote a seminal book about oligarchy back in 2011. He has a new one called The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies. Professor Winters, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: Thank you, Brian. Good to talk to you this morning.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: Would you start by defining the word \"oligarch\" as you use it? Is it the same as just being very rich?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: It's interesting. You mentioned a moment ago that what Americans commonly use oligarch for was, for example, to refer to Russians. That was the idea that it wasn't just someone who was rich and engaged in politics, but there was something corrupt about the source of their money. That's, in fact, not the historic meaning of oligarch. It's a term that goes back thousands of years. Basically, it means people who are empowered by wealth.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   In a democracy, we have what's called participation power. This is power to vote, the right to vote, power to engage, to use our voice, to criticize, to assemble. That's participation power. That's intended to be distributed very equally through the fundamental idea of one person, one vote. That has tremendous legitimacy, but there's also alongside of it and actually fused with it, wealth power and that is not distributed at all equally. It's incredibly important in shaping what happens in our democracy.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   What I try to point out in The Blind Spot is that we have both oligarchy and democracy fused together, blended together in one system. Once we grasp that, it helps us understand a lot about what's going on and what some of the biggest trends are in our society.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: What exactly do you mean by oligarchy? Because no government calls itself one the Oligarchic Republic of America or anything like that. There are rich people, very rich people everywhere, and of course, when you have a lot of money, it will buy you influence in almost any society. What crosses a line to make a country an oligarch the way you use the word?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: It's important to think of oligarchy as not a form of government, but a kind of politics, which can be in an authoritarian system, it can be in a dictatorship, it can be in a democracy. An oligarchy basically refers to the problem that oligarchs have always faced throughout history, which is they have these enormous fortunes and they face threats to their fortunes. People want to redistribute. That might be from the people below, it might be from other oligarchs, it might be from kings or governments above them through taxation.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Oligarchy refers to the politics of wealth defense, that is, making sure that no one politically can threaten their fortunes. We see this going on in the United States throughout the country's history. One of the really shocking things is that we know for sure that the United States has become more democratic over the course of its 250-year history, but the amazing thing is that we've also become more unequal as we've become more democratic.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   That's one of the puzzles that I think a lot of us grapple with. How is it possible that we could increase suffrage all the way out to, everyone has a vote, which is a way of power-sharing, and yet today, modern democracies are the most unequal societies ever to have existed in human history? That's just a head scratcher. How could that possibly be?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   We expect that kind of extreme concentration of wealth to happen in a dictatorship where just a few people have all the power and they're able to basically grab most of what there is to be grabbed. I think a lot of people in society today are struggling with how it is that- or why it is that Democracy seems to not be helping when it comes to making us more equal or at least keeping rising inequality in check.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: You would classify our current system as participatory inequality? Participatory inequality, is that just a phrase for what you were just describing?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: Think of it like this. The wealth pyramid that we live in, something like this has existed for a very, very long time, going back to Mesopotamia when the first wealth pyramid emerges. Throughout the vast, vast majority of that story of unequal societies, it's basically relied on force and fear and intimidation and awe to maintain that kind of inequality.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   What's so unique about the period we're living in now, which is the democratic era, is that this is the first time ever in human history that we have that kind of inequality, but with wide open participation at the same time. That's why I call it participatory inequality. That's really what's a puzzle or a mystery to many of us, because what you would expect is- and by the way, what very, very wealthy people prior to the rise of democracy worried about is that if there was wide power sharing, basically the many would use democracy to redistribute, to greatly, greatly lessen fortunes, tax them away.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   There was just a panic as we were heading toward the democratic era. It turns out that that fear was excessive. We have somehow managed, in this era, to combine consent of the governed with not just inequality, but exploding inequality.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: Why? Give us your analysis as to why democracy has turned out to be so compatible with the extreme concentration of wealth that we have? In fact, I'll throw this in. It seems like if we look at the Trump era and who supports Trump and who votes for Democrats, there's much more outrage on the part of at least the white working class against educated elites than financial elites.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Would you call Trump an oligarch? I imagine, with his personal wealth. You tell me, but it doesn't seem to be the way the politics line up. Bernie Sanders has tried and failed. How did we get to this point where people wind up voting in the interest of expanding oligarchy, even though they wouldn't call it that?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: That's a really complex question, Brian. Let me try to answer that by maybe laying a bit of historical foundation, if I can just take a moment. Here we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country, its independence, its democracy. A fundamental question we have to ask is when the Constitutional Convention happened in the summer of 1787, why did it happen then?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Many of us get this high school story of interstate commerce problems and various problems with the Articles of Confederation, our first constitution, but really what gets overlooked is that in the 1780s, there was a massive clash between oligarchic interests in the United States and democratic interests. In fact, the convention was an effort to try to manage that clash. How did the clash happen?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Basically you had a terrible economic crisis after the war of independence in the 1780s, but it wasn't just any kind of economic crisis. It was a debt crisis because the war was very expensive. There were creditors in the United States, there were creditors in Europe, there were governments that were creditors in Europe that had intervened. There's all this debt to be paid, and that was being done through taxation.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   What most of us forget is that some of the very first prisons in the United States were debtors' prisons. If you could not pay your taxes, if you could not pay the national debt, you were thrown into debtors' prisons. These debtors' prisons were absolutely horrid, terrible conditions. Debtors were thrown in with rapists and murderers. The people thrown into these jails were men, women and children. In some cases, mothers brought two-year-old children into these jails. This was happening by the tens of thousands during the 1780s, and people were having their small farms foreclosed on.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   What happened? This was an enormous amount of pain being experienced in the population. At the state level, the people, the small farmers in particular, because they were the only ones who had a vote, let's recall, they asked for relief from their own state legislatures. In 7 out of the 13 states, they got relief in the form of paper money that was printed, which is what creditors, oligarchs of the time, were very against.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Here's what's basically happening. Democracy is producing policies which are hurting the very rich and basically putting the burdens of the crisis on them. In the other six states, Brian, which are called the hard currency states, no relief for the average person. They were still being thrown into debtors' prisons and they were suffering. Famously, in the case of Massachusetts, many of us read about Shays's Rebellion, which was just one rebellion among hundreds that were happening especially across New England.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Shays's Rebellion was a bunch of Americans who weren't getting any relief, they marched on the towns. When they got there, what did they do? They did not attack the rich. They did not burn down their houses or their businesses. They released people from debtors' prisons and they blocked judges from foreclosing. It was these two things, because by the way, there had been many calls to have a convention, and either no one showed up, they fizzled. There were a lot of people who were in no rush to put a new power over the states. Six states actually voted not to have a convention ever.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Why did everyone gather in Philadelphia? By the way, they didn't just gather, they gathered in a panic. They ran to Philadelphia. The reason is in half the states, policies that were hurting oligarchs were being passed, and in the other half, people were rising up. That clash sets the foundation for what happened in the convention. You had people like Madison and Hamilton and others speaking up and saying, \"Our fundamental problem is that we have an excess of democracy in the United States. We have democratical tyranny in the United States.\"\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian, I'll just wrap up this little history lesson really quickly. Think of it like this. Your society is pyramidal in terms of concentrated wealth at the top and the vast majority of the citizens not being rich, and obviously in the case of many, being slaves, so they were part property, you have that shape of society, but the democracy at the time was very horizontal, very responsive to the people below. This meant that basically the people posed a threat to the few, and so that was a major problem.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: You're saying elements of oligarchy got written into the United States Constitution. That's where that story ends, right?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: Exactly right. What happens? They decide to basically also make our democracy pyramidal in the same form so that it paralleled what our economic situation was. Think of it like this. They decided to create a house, the lower house, the lower chamber of the legislature, and that was the only thing people were allowed to vote on. Then above that was placed a Senate, and at least at the time, no one voted on the Senate. Hamilton said it should be populated exclusively by the rich for life. Why? So that the Senate would be a check on the House.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Then above that, in case anything got through the Senate, the President was given a veto on what democracy was producing. Then the absolute last safeguard, or block was a supreme court, a sovereign court, that you could not appeal its decisions, and five people could block absolutely everything that went on down below it. Think of it like this grand wedding-like layer cake of what democracy becomes.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   There are many scholars who have written how that very structure came out of two things that these framers were very, very committed to. First of all, they were very committed to democracy and consent of the governed. No doubt about it. They wanted society to be democratic, but they also firmly believed that the many should not be able to redistribute and threaten the few. They truly believed that. It wasn't only their self interest. They believed that that was best for the United States. We end up with an oligarchic democracy where wealth power and protections of it are built into the democracy from the get go.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: When we come back from a break, I want to get more into solutions you recommend with respect to what to do about it. Would you eliminate the presidential veto? Would you eliminate the Supreme Court the way it is, even the Senate? Listeners, we can take a few calls and texts for my guest, Northwestern University Professor Jeffrey Winters. His new book is The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies. Does the phrase \"participatory inequality,\" that he uses ring true for you? We'll get to his suggestions for tilting the scales back in favor of the non-wealthy.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   212-433-WNYC, if you have one or a question for him. 212-433-9692. Call or text. We continue after this.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   [music]\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Northwestern University Professor Jeffrey Winters, author of The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies, and Jim in the South Bronx here on WNYC. Hello.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jim: Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I'm an historian and one of the things I like to point out to my students is that the more equality you want in a society, the more control you have to have over people's lives. After all, the old communist states had a great deal of-- much less social inequality than we have here, as an example.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Give you another example. I'm African American. My parents grew up in the segregated South. That system was established democratically, by which I mean majority rule in the states where it was established. My mom's in South Carolina, my dad's in North Carolina. Segregation was democratic. People, especially our progressives, like to forget that, that if the goal is equality, it means that you have to have a lot of control over people's lives. I'd like your guest to address that. Thank you.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Jim. Professor, provocative.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: Yes, very provocative. One of the questions behind this idea of control is, should we be able, as a democracy, to put policies in place that do things like redistribute? That's a form of control. Part of the answer is, frankly, we already do it, at least on paper. We have something called a progressive tax system. That's a democratic product. The idea Jim, that we have a low tax rate on people who have very little money and a higher tax rate on those who have a lot is basically a redistributive problem, otherwise we would have a flat and simple tax.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Now why do we do that? That's part of our decision as a society that we want to create opportunities for those that maybe the market doesn't, and we want to not necessarily concentrate so much power and so much wealth in so few hands that they're able actually to distort our democracy in favor of themselves.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   It turns out that democratically, we come up with progressive taxes, but it turns out that oligarchs, first of all, are able to dramatically reduce what those tax rates and how many brackets there are going to be. After the Second World War, there were more than 20 tax brackets and the highest one was 91%. We now have seven tax brackets with the highest being 37%. Dramatic decrease for the very wealthy, very low increase for the average household.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   It doesn't just end there, Jim. There is also something called-- what I call the wealth defense industry. It's a term I coined 15 years ago in my oligarchy book. Basically what is the wealth defense industry? First you fight the open political battle to get low taxes and that ends up being the statute, whatever it is. Then the wealth defense industry, which is made up of lawyers, accountants, wealth management professionals and all kinds of well paid professionals, their job is to make sure you don't actually pay the tax bracket, which is why the average citizen pays virtually all of their taxes and oligarchs pay a much, much lower rate.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: If you're Donald Trump, you can strike a deal with the IRS not to examine your taxes at all. See the news from last week.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: Yes. The IRS is required every year to calculate what's called the tax gap. This is the number which represents what the IRS believes that it ought to be able to bring in and what it actually does. I think most Americans would be absolutely shocked to know what that number is on an annual basis. It is estimated to be $1 trillion. Our entire defense budget is 900 billion, so it's bigger than the entire defense budget.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   The average citizen cheats at a 1% level. The rich cheat at an over 55% level. This is by the IRS's own estimation. Why? Because every penny we make is reported, but when people make money from money, it's much less clear. When you have a wealth defense industry that is creating shelters and trusts and foundations, it turns out that our-- Here's the point I'm trying to make to Jim. We pass something like progressive taxation, which is a democratic outcome, and then oligarchic power kicks in to make sure that the tax burdens end up being on us and not on them, which multiplies the speed at which wealth is shifting upward.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: It's interesting and complicated about democracies. To one of Jim's points, you're arguing how the rich fear democracy, and so they set up in the Constitution and in other ways, ways to protect themselves from what the pure majority thinks they should be taxed at and things like that. By the same token, democracy in South Carolina that he referenced created Jim Crow and his parents home state of South Carolina. Because if democracy is just majority rule, any minority stands to be disenfranchised.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   This leads to some of your actually very radical-- you call them pie-in-the-sky solutions, longer term things. You suggest getting rid of the veto and maybe the most radical idea, getting rid of voting for representatives altogether. What?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: One of the things I close the book with is a chapter that I call The Politics of Preparation. Basically, it says two things. One, wealth power and oligarchic power is very serious, and it's deeply built into the structure of our system. I'll give you just a really, really quick example of how this works. Everybody knows that on election day, we vote and prior to that is a primary, we get to vote, but most people aren't aware that starting two years before that there's something called a wealth primary. That's when anyone who wants to be viable has to attract money from those with concentrated wealth. Those folks get to filter essentially who's able to go forward and who can't.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   We do get choices, but we don't necessarily get to choose who our choices are. That's just one example of how wealth power finds expression and then all the campaign money, finance and all the things that pour in after that. The part that's unseen is that wealth primary. That's when candidates parade themselves and make sure that they assure those with a lot of money that there's not going to be any policies that are threatening to them. What can we actually do?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   First, in an incremental kind of way, in just ordinary politics that we're able to do now, transparency and the end of secrecy is incredibly important for us to be able to see oligarchs, their money, and to be able to tax them successfully.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: Right, because there are so many ways to hide- campaign donations, for example, hide what their actual sources are.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: That's right. Also we have this thing in the United States called beneficial ownership. You can set up a shell corporation in Delaware and a number of states and literally no one can find out who owns it. It turns out those entities are able to set up offshore accounts on and on and on. All of that is very doable and it's not radical. We're already transparent. All of us should be transparent. That's just one.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   When it comes to much deeper changes, the ones that you referenced, Brian, there have been moments in history when there have been deep crises, a depression, major world wars. It turns out oligarchs are at their weakest during these major ruptures. The question is, what is society prepared to do in terms of major changes? I'll just talk about some things that people have been discussing very seriously. One is ending a presidential veto, or at least saying that the president does-\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: Your line broke up right on the key word there. You actually said ending the presidential veto, right?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: That's right. Ending the presidential veto. Sorry if it broke up. The key question there is why should a single individual be able to stop democracy in the legislative process? At a very minimum, we should not require a super majority to overcome a veto. If a president thinks that we're going in a direction that's dangerous, not wise, it can be sent back down to the legislature, passed again.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: I want to make sure we get to one more of yours, and that is random lotteries instead of elections for who gets to be representatives.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: This is not an idea of mine, but it's one that I bring forward and discuss. This is called lottocracy. There are many ways we can represent ourselves. One is we expressively vote. We already have juries that are selected randomly from our peers and they make major decisions of life and death and guilt and innocence. We'd be very suspicious of juries where people campaigned to be on a jury or oligarchs funded people to be on a jury. The idea of lottocracy is we sample the population and they represent us. It would be instantly a legislature that is half women, half men. It would represent us in all the various ways that we are different. It would also cut out-\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: Before you go, it would cut out oligarchs, over-representation?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: That's right, because oligarchs would not be able-\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: We're going to be out of time. Is there a lottocracy anywhere on Earth?\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: Yes, there are lottocracies which are being attempted already, mainly at the city and community level, in addition to juries. It's something that people are, at a very small level, attempting and experimentally looking at. Here's what I'm saying. Debate it and discuss it as a possible solution to our problem of representation. We should be thinking about a lot of deep changes that we could make that would represent Americans much better than we currently are being represented.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Brian Lehrer: All right. Promise me you will come back and have that debate, because we spent our time on the many concepts, including the history lessons in your book. I would love to have that debate with listeners and maybe other guests on lottocracy, but for now, we say goodbye to Jeffrey Winters, professor of political science at Northwestern and author of the new book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies. Thank you so much for sharing it with us and making people think.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Jeffrey Winters: It's been a pleasure, Brian. Thank you.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   Copyright © 2026 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website\n   \u003Ca href=\"https://www.wnyc.org/terms/\">\n    terms of use\n   \u003C/a>\n   at\n   \u003Ca href=\"https://www.wnyc.org/\">\n    www.wnyc.org\n   \u003C/a>\n   for further information.\n  \u003C/p>\n  \u003Cp>\n   New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.\n  \u003C/p>\n \n\n",2367,"d2f32542-3c01-4d01-a0c1-33178f461071",{"show":423,"episodes":425},{"title":336,"slug":424,"cmsSource":339},"brian-lehrer-show",{"data":426,"meta":427},[],{},{"id":429,"title":336,"uuid":430,"type":431,"listingTitle":336,"tease":432,"listingDescription":432,"preventSearchIndexing":283,"socialTitle":336,"socialDescription":432,"seoTitle":336,"searchDescription":336,"description":432,"image":433,"link":443,"cmsSource":299,"publicationDate":444,"url":282,"shareUrl":445,"section":446,"body":282,"rawBody":447,"hasAudio":283,"aboutModule":448,"linkedDataSource":459,"topper":464,"canDownloadEpisodes":344,"commentId":430,"meta":466},166704,"dfacadc8-6639-40bc-8d59-c9a2d4aa2a25","show","Join us for The Brian Lehrer Show, weekdays from 10:00AM - 12:00PM on WNYC.",{"id":434,"title":435,"description":287,"width":436,"height":436,"createdAt":437,"focalPointX":282,"focalPointY":282,"focalPointWidth":282,"focalPointHeight":282,"fileSize":438,"fileHash":439,"alt":440,"caption":287,"credit":287,"creditLink":287,"file":441,"usageLimitations":287,"expiryDate":282,"collection":297,"uploadedByUser":442},355260,"BL Show Logo",800,"2026-02-03T12:04:22.655076-05:00",5441,"78a8f061ff78d46626a9dccf58f55f3f4fe27931","The Brian Lehrer Show written in white text against a red background","https://images-prod.gothamist.com/original_images/BL.png",14,"/","2026-04-01T13:26:13.764Z","https://wnyc.org/",{},"Wednesday:Dan Goldman, US representative (D, NY-10), and Brad Lander,  former NYC comptroller and former mayoral candidate, discuss key issues  as they campaign in the June primary election to be the Democratic  nominee for Congress for New York's 10th congressional district.On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his plan to  build 200,000 affordable units and preserve another 200,000 over the  next decade. David Brand, housing reporter for WNYC and  Gothamist, relays the standout details of the Mamdani administration's  \"Block by Block: The Housing Plan for a New Era.\"David B. Oppenheimer, clinical  professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, co-director  of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality &  Anti-Discrimination Law and the author of The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea (Yale  University Press, 2026), argues that the idea that there is value in  diversity in education and politics has a long history—and that attacks  on the concept today are misguided.Jordan Lauf, producer for All  Of It and its book club, Get Lit with All Of It, introduces this summer  reading contest from All Of It and Get Lit, six books across six  categories.",[449,453],{"type":450,"value":451,"id":452},"rich_text","\u003Cp data-block-key=\"7pbv7\">Brian Lehrer leads the conversation about what matters most now in local and national politics, our own communities and our lives.\u003C/p>\u003Cp data-block-key=\"8kml1\">To comment on a particular conversation:\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli data-block-key=\"2juav\">Call 212-433-WNYC (-9692) to 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