The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: How Americans Can Fight Economic Inequality and Save Democracy

May 9, 2022

In their new book, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy, law professors and historians Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath discuss why oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. The authors reconstruct and chronicle the “democracy of opportunity,” a tradition that America has drifted away from over the last 75 years. Invoking long-forgotten constitutional arguments, this book urges Americans to reclaim this lost tradition, fight oligarchy, and ensure broadly shared wealth and power.

The Roosevelt Institute’s Deputy Director of Race and Democracy Kyle Strickland moderated the conversation between Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath. This program was sponsored by the NYU John Brademas Center.

Registration was required in order to receive the Zoom log-in details for the webinar. This program was recorded.

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Joseph Fishkin

William Forbath

Kyle Strickland

Joseph Fishkin, Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles; Co-Author, "The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy"

Joseph Fishkin is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where he teaches and writes about employment discrimination law, election law, constitutional law, education law, fair housing law, poverty and inequality, and distributive justice. Before joining the UCLA faculty he taught for a decade at the University of Texas School of Law, where he was the Marrs McLean Professor in Law; he was also a visiting professor at Yale Law School.

Fishkin received his B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, summa cum laude, at Yale, his J.D. at Yale Law School, and his D. Phil. In Politics at Oxford, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. After law school he clerked for Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Before starting law teaching he was a Ruebhausen Fellow at Yale Law School.

Fishkin’s latest book, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (with Willy Forbath), was recently published by Harvard University Press. His first book, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, winner of the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award, was published by Oxford University Press. His writing has also appeared in various publications including the Columbia Law Review, the Supreme Court Review, the Yale Law Journal, and NOMOS. He blogs at Balkinization.

William E. Forbath, Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair, Associate Dean of Research, UT Austin Law; Co-Author, "The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy"

Willy Forbath holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair and is Associate Dean of Research at UT Austin School of Law; he is also a Professor of History at UT. He is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, the forthcoming The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (February, 2022)(with Joseph Fishkin), and dozens of articles, book chapters, and essays on legal and constitutional history and theory and comparative constitutional law. He is completing a history of Jews, law and identity politics in the twentieth century and starting a history of socialist lawyering and legal imagination. He occasionally writes on legal and constitutional issues for the New York Times, the Nation and other outlets, and is on the boards of several Texas organizations devoted to social movements and advocacy for affordable housing and workers’ rights. In addition to UT Austin, he has taught at UCLA, Sciences Po, Tel Aviv, Columbia, and Harvard.

Kyle Strickland, Deputy Director of Race and Democracy, Roosevelt Institute

As the Deputy Director of Race and Democracy, Kyle Strickland leads research focused on the latest policy ideas and political movement-building on race, the economy, and democracy. Currently, he manages the think tank’s race landscape project, a multi-year effort to explore the ideas driving today’s racial justice movement and the path forward to building a more equitable economy and democracy for the 21st century.

In addition, Strickland is the Senior Legal Analyst at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity and the Director of My Brother’s Keeper Ohio. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Strickland earned his bachelor’s from The Ohio State University and a law degree from Harvard Law School, where he served as student body president.

About the Book

Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.

Fishkin and Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this “democracy-of-opportunity” tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to fight for the constitutional right to form a union. During Reconstruction, Radical Republicans argued in this tradition that racial equality required breaking up the oligarchy of the Slave Power and distributing wealth and opportunity to former slaves and their descendants. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers built their politics around this tradition, winning the fight against the “economic royalists” and “industrial despots.”

But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy.