I appreciate this response to my tweet, but am irritated it doesn’t really engage with what I said or cited carefully. Which is strange given we’re talking about two tweets and three pictures. When applied to my more general perspective its even more off base.

Here’s the initial Tweet by me.

Firstly even in the initial sequence of tweets I referenced three large books: Gilens, Eatwell/Goodwin, and Piketty (2020). Tibor is welcome to disagree with all of them, but the essay notably only focuses on the first. The second book by Eatwell and Goodwin was the primary source I referenced on ordinary people’s perception that elites run the country in their interest and have little concern for the mass of citizens. Its notable these findings came from right of center scholars who can hardly be accused of squishy leftism (albeit at least one of whom later became sympathetic to right wing populism). I also cited Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2020), the concluding section of which examines many of these issues on a much broader scale and reaches similar empirical conclusions. These build on his earlier empirical work in the better known Capital in the Twenty First Century (2013)

Secondly, I never claimed that Western “liberal democracies, such as the US and other advanced societies, are virtually plutocratic, hollowed-out non-democracies where ordinary people have close to no say compared to rich folks, are locked out of the system and just generally not represented.” My exact words were “ordinary people perceive their governments as being unresponsive to their wishes. And worse that this perception is grounded in reality because governments are in fact responsive to the wealthy...”. I summarized this, based on the aforementioned studies and others-we haven’t even gotten into the vast legal socio-legal literature on the American judicial system’s tendencies to favor and be manipulated by the wealthy. See Cohen, Chemerinsky, Haltom and McCann etc- as constituting “strong oligarchic tendencies.” Tendencies even Tibor’s studies by and large acknowledge exist, even if they deny they’re as severe.

This makes it somewhat ironic Tibor would imply I’m “biased” in reading the literature. This feels to me like a topic he wanted to write on and decided to use my Tweets as a convenient prompt. Even though they don’t make a claim as strong as what he imputes to me in the Tweets, let alone my academic work which he could have engaged with.

If I thought there was nothing worthwhile in liberal democracy, or that they had entirely regressed into oligarchy, I wouldn’t have written the two books on “liberal socialism” he references at the beginning. That said I agree with the two most important liberal philosophers (Mill and Rawls) that while markets have their place in the long run capitalism (private ownership of the means of production or commanding heights of the economy) is morally incopatible with the aims of a principled liberalism. As Rawls points out capitalism-even welfare state capitalism-is incompatible with the principle that citizens getting fair value from their political rights. And I stand by the claim that evidence suggests that’s increasingly true in fact as well.