America’s Plutocrats Are Derailing Democracy

Billionaires have not been so reviled in the US since the Gilded Age. President Joe Biden used his farewell presidential address to declare the “ultra wealthy” a threat to America’s constitutional order. The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, a city with the world’s largest concentration of millionaires, says that they should not exist at all. The Jeffrey Epstein files now being released by the Department of Justice are inevitably adding fuel to this fire. Epstein’s world might be dismissed as a populist caricature if it were not so horrifically true: a private island devoted to debauchery; billionaires holidaying with a convicted pedophile; intellectuals and politicians cavorting with scantily clad young women.

It takes a brave man to come to the defense of billionaires in this frenzied environment. It takes an interesting man to come to the defense of billionaires on the grounds that they are good for democracy. John O. McGinnis, a professor of law at Northwestern University, has a deserved reputation for being both brave and interesting. These qualities are on display in his new book, Why Democracy Needs the Rich. But so, unfortunately, is a willingness to allow fancy economic and legal theories to blind him to what ought to be obvious: that money is not only corrupting American politics but also turning what was once a globally admired system into a byword for plutocratic excess.