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Slotkin Panned Online After Claiming That Voters Don't Know What 'Oligarchy' Means
"It's condescending to say that the median person doesn't understand what oligarchy is," said one progressive strategist. "They're living it."
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' tour headlined with this word has drawn more than 107,000 Americans in blue and deep-red states alike. Former President Joe Biden's use of it in his farewell speech prompted a spike in Google searches. And one recent poll found that a majority of U.S. voters, including 54% of Democrats and more than two-thirds of Independents, know exactly what it means.
Yet Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) was among the Democratic politicians insisting this week that no one does.
The word is "oligarchy"—a government ruled by a small group of elites—and as experts have warned for years, the U.S. increasingly resembles one. As Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have told huge crowds in places like Nampa, Idaho and Greeley, Colorado in recent weeks, President Donald Trump's alliance with billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk has made the country's shift even more obvious.
But even as evidence mounts that Americans understand that the political system has been captured by corporations and the wealthiest people—and are living their day-to-day lives with the results, including higher healthcare costs and disinvestment in public services—Slotkin toldPolitico on Thursday that Democrats should "stop using the term 'oligarchy,' a phrase she said doesn't resonate beyond coastal institutions."
On Bluesky, The Nation writer John Nichols said that the tens of thousands people who have packed stadiums and parks in recent weeks to hear Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez speak would disagree with Slotkin.
Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin says Democrats should stop using the term "oligarchy" because, she says, no one knows what it means. These people say she’s wrong.
[image or embed]
— John Nichols (@nicholsuprising.bsky.social) April 24, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Slotkin's advice for Democrats, which she dubbed her "war plan" and gave ahead of several speeches she has planned, also included a call for the party to stop being "weak and woke," phrases she said she heard in Michigan focus groups.
Her comments echoed those of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Democratic operative who told California Gov. Gavin Newsom on his podcast last week that using terms like "oligarchs" and "special interests" makes Democrats "worse marketers"; Newsom appeared to agree that people don't "understand" what an oligarchy is.
Emanuel also appeared on the political and pop culture podcast "I've Had It," hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, and seemed caught of guard when Welch took him to task for his suggestion that Democrats should end their advocacy for issues that affect transgender Americans.
"That is total bullshit, that is buying into the right-wing media narrative, and I'm so sick of Democrats like you selling out and saying this," said Welch. "You know who talks about trans people more than anybody? MAGA... We've got to fucking fight. They're the gender-obsessed weirdos, not us. We're the ones who fight for Social Security, we fight for Medicare, and yeah, we're not gonna bully trans people."
Semafor political reporter Dave Weigel said Emanuel's derision of the word "oligarchy" is a clear "shot at Sanders/AOC, who keep saying it."
At one stop on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour recently, Sanders told a crowd that the enthusiasm for his and Ocasio-Cortez's message is "scaring the hell out of" Trump and Musk.
But shortly after Slotkin's comments, Ocasio-Cortez remarked—without naming the senator—that "plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle feel threatened by rising class consciousness."
Angelo Greco, a progressive strategist who works with grassroots organizations including Our Revolution and One Fair Wage, told Common Dreams on Friday that establishment Democrats' dismissal of the term oligarchy is "out of touch" and "underestimates" voters.
"Tell me that farmers don't understand what the oligarchy is when there's a consolidation of the agribusiness that impacts them. Tell me that workers in Michigan don't understand what it means when trade deals that are written by multinational corporations have led to lower wages and plant closures," said Greco. "It's condescending to say that the median person doesn't understand what oligarchy is. They're living it."
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Beware the Faux Populism of Corporate Democrats
For the Democrats to become a truly populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. But that won't just happen. A movement must be built and harnessed.
Jan 08, 2025
Donald Trump’s victory is causing James Carville, the outspoken raging Cajun who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, to call for the Democratic Party to go all in on a populist agenda. He wrote recently in the New York Times,
“Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress, and force them [Republicans] to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”
Is Carville really agreeing with the Center for Working Class Politics, which in October published the results of their YouGov survey, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania?” That report found that:
“… working-class Pennsylvanians responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies. What’s more, we found little evidence that focusing on economic populism risks decreasing voter enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies outside the working class.”
Ezra Klein, another Democratic Party influencer, picked up on that survey just before the election in November, but then dismissed it as an outlier: “Surveys like that should be treated with some skepticism”, he wrote. “The Harris team is running plenty of its own polls and focus groups and message tests.”
But the results of elections matter, and there is now a chorus of Democratic Party nouveau populists, including Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, who went on to earn tens of millions on Wall Street.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class. As former Senator Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, to this day, workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class.
Emanual seems these days to have become a closet Sanders supporter, claiming that Obama was way too soft on the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008:
Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.
Some did, at the time, but Emanuel did not. Buy hey, people do change, don’t they? Why shouldn’t we believe that the old Democrats can become real populists?
Let’s start with an understanding of how that Harris polling could have been so wrong. Why did their results cause them to shy away from the kind of strong populism that the Center for Working Class Politics found attracted the most working-class support in Pennsylvania? A state Harris had to win.
I don’t know the Harris pollsters personally, but I do know how the Center for Working Class Politics operates. They are meticulous. They know that their polls will be ripped apart by establishment academics and party gatekeepers, so they can’t make mistakes. They can’t let their own personal beliefs tilt the survey towards what they’d like to believe is true. Their goal is to ask the questions others aren’t asking, to better reflect the opinions of people of all types about working class values and beliefs.
Not so with the pollsters who cashed in on the Harris campaign. They know what their client wants to hear (and is capable of hearing). And it’s not that a strong anti-Wall Street message sells, and therefore that she should mercilessly attack what Sanders calls “the billionaire class.” After all, Harris made a public point of holding a Wall Street fundraiser in the middle of her campaign, and her staff made clear that Wall Street helped to shape her agenda. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was special adviser to her election campaign, and has deep ties to Wall Street through Uber and Pepsico.
It’s not that Democratic Party pollsters cooked the books. They just knew to ask questions that hovered within the corporate Democratic comfort zone. They didn’t ask the strongest populist questions because they didn’t think those results would be welcomed within the campaign.
I once saw this process in action. I was watching a focus group through a one-way mirror. The topic was healthcare in the leadup to Obamacare, but it was stunning to see how the discussion was shaped by the types of questions the facilitators asked. They limited them to various types of health insurance and avoided more radical reforms of the healthcare system.
At one point a younger Black man expressed his frustration: “Why all this talk about insurance? I’m interested in health care and getting access to it.” He was thanked for his comment and then ignored, while I yelled at the mirror, “Talk about Medicare for All!” It didn’t happen because the group paying for the focus group, as well as the pollster, didn’t think Medicare for All was feasible, and therefore refused to discuss it.
Today, the Democratic elites not only run away from Medicare for All, but they refuse to acknowledge their financial ties to Wall Street. They are more than comfortable, however, accepting large consulting and speaking fees from what should be the targets of their populism. This goes back to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ tone-deaf acceptance of $153 million in speaking fees, including 39 speeches from the very banks that crashed the economy in 2008. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign she collected $1.8 million for eight speeches to Wall Street banks.
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all...
It's not hard to understand. The Wall Street barons who pay the speaking fees are the same kind of people who went to Yale with Hillary and Bill. They’re all from the same newly minted class of highly successful strivers. If there were any working-class roots in their backgrounds, they withered long ago. Nearly all Democratic Party elites are swathed within this moneyed class. During their leadership of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, author David Halberstam called them “the best and the brightest.” Now they are just the richest. In this milieu, light years away from the working class, getting $225,000 per speech seems like a trifle.
But let’s try to be fair. Can’t the party change its stripes now that Democratic influencers are talking populism in the wake of Trump’s victory?
Unfortunately, I don’t think their talk is credible. It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again. He really couldn’t care less what Wall Street thinks about him.
As for the nouveau populists, I’m waiting for Carville to say, “Look I was dead wrong when I helped Bill Clinton undermine unions through NAFTA.” Or for Emanuel to confess that “I was wrong to take millions in Wall Street fees while workers were losing their jobs through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks.” Or for Ezra Klein to admit in print that the Center for Worker Class Politics, “were right about populism. The Harris pollsters were wrong, and I was at fault for dismissing their solid work.”
Or maybe the Democrats could finally show some outrage about Wall Street-induced mass layoffs that are destroying the livelihoods of working people. (For more information, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all, as the original American populists, the Peoples Party, did in the 1880s. Today, that might look like a sustained, organized version of Occupy Wall Street, which fights against mass layoffs caused by Wall Street’s greed and for a $20 federal minimum wage.
Meanwhile, get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.
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Schumer Endorses Veteran Progressive Organizer Ben Wikler for Chair DNC
The Senate leader called the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair "one of the best organizers in the country" and said he "knows how to win."
Jan 02, 2025
Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on Thursday said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's endorsement of him for a top national leadership role is evidence that the veteran senator, while firmly an establishment politician, "knows the enormous stakes of this moment."
The most prominent lawmaker to endorse a candidate in the race for Democratic National Committee chair, Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that following the party's bruising losses in the November elections, Democrats in power "should view this moment as a challenge."
"We must listen to the American people, learn from the results, and move forward stronger," said Schumer. "That's why I am enthusiastically supporting Ben Wikler to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee."
Schumer highlighted Wikler's successes since he began leading the Wisconsin Democrats, which he's done since 2019. In November, his fundraising and state-wide organizing helped secure a victory for Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) despite Vice President Kamala Harris' loss in the state in the presidential election. The party also flipped 14 seats in the state legislature.
After former Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his party "dismantled workers' rights and voting rights, rigging Wisconsin to keep the GOP in power through the courts and the legislature," Schumer said in his statement, "Ben didn't despair. He rolled up his sleeves and helped unify the Democratic Party and reignite Wisconsin Democrats from the grassroots up. This year's election shows the results."
He called Wikler, a former senior adviser to the progressive grassroots group MoveOn, "one of the best organizers in the country... a proven fundraiser, [and] a sharp communicator."
"Most importantly, he knows how to win," said Schumer.
Wikler announced his candidacy to chair the DNC in early December, weeks after President-elect Donald Trump won the White House race and Republicans took control of the House and Senate in the upcoming Congress.
To win future elections, Wikler said at the time, "we've got to make sure that we are reaching people with the message that we are on their side and fighting for them."
Wikler has also received the endorsements of MoveOn and the centrist advocacy group Third Way.
Members of the DNC are set to vote on the chair on February 1, following four candidate forums in January.
At the forums, Wikler is expected to speak along with fellow contenders including 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, and the chair of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, Ken Martin.
Martin was considered an early frontrunner in the race, winning endorsements from 100 out of 448 DNC members early last month.
He also has a strong fundraising and organizing background, having led the DFL since 2011, when the party was struggling to get out of debt. The party has not lost a statewide race since 2006, and is now in a strong financial position.
Martin's messaging has been similar to Wikler's since the race started, with the Minnesota leader calling on Democrats to emphasize that they—not Republicans—are fighting for workers' rights and policies to make families' lives easier.
"The majority of Americans now believe that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democrats are for the wealthy and the elite. That's a damning indictment on our party, and clearly our brand as Democrats," Martin toldNPR in late December. "We're fighting for people, people who are working harder than they ever have before."
Days after the two Midwestern leaders entered the race, Greg Sargent of The New Republicinterviewed them both, along with O'Malley, about what the Democratic Party can do to counter the "information gap," which has been worsened by the $20 million Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk "dumped into a brazen pro-Trump propaganda campaign" run by a "shadowy outfit called the RBG PAC."
Wikler offered "the most concrete agenda for dealing with" the problem, said Sargent. The Wisconsin leader said Democrats "must appear far more on right-leaning political shows—not just Fox News but also podcasts and YouTubes and streamed interviews and the like—especially in nonpolitical spaces," in order to "disrupt the right-wing narrative about Democrats."
Wikler also said the party must invest resources in building an "independent, progressive media ecosystem," where leaders would do "high-profile interviews... with the express goal of elevating and empowering it, something the GOP does with Fox News."
Responding to Schumer's endorsement on Thursday, Wikler said that as chair of the DNC, he would "show voters that we are the party of working families everywhere by choosing fights that show who we are for—and who Trump and the GOP are for."
"As Trump and the GOP again seek a multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, paid for by working people," he said, "Democrats can make clear that we're against those seeking to rig the country for those at the top, and for a country that works for working families."
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