Amanpour and Company

Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour & Company.

Here's what's coming up.

We are fighting for the soul of a multiracial democracy and if they are successful it will be a long time before we'll see the opportunity to regain everything that we've lost.

Trump's crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion with higher education in the crosshairs.

Renowned civil rights activist and law professor, Kimberley Crenshaw, discusses her new memoir "Backtalker" about her fight for justice and fairness.

Then... I see love more than I see cruelty and greed and exploitation but it doesn't always make the news headline.

Lebanon reels from one of the deadliest days since the ceasefire began and ended.

Foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has reported from war zones around the world and she joins me to share the importance of finding love and hope in the darkness.

Plus... Wealth is turned into power which is turned into outcomes that benefit, tilt the system in favor of the few.

The Blind Spot, how oligarchs dominate our democracies.

Author and political scientist Jeffrey Winters explains to Hari Sreenivasan how society is built to allow inequality to prevail.

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Thank you.

Welcome to the program everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London and we begin with the Trump administration ramping up its crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blasted quote "the woke military" in his address to West Point graduates while the Department of Justice is accusing both Yale and UCLA of illegally considering race in admissions to their medical schools.

Many academics say this all goes beyond just admissions and hits right at the heart of who gets to belong in America.

Our next guest is the renowned civil rights activist and law professor, Kimberly Crenshaw.

She coined the term "intersectionality" and helped spearhead critical race theory.

Her new memoir, "Backtalker", traces her own personal journey growing up in Ohio during the Jim Crow era.

And she's joining me now to discuss how she was inspired to speak truth to power and the importance of continuing to do so now.

Kimberly Crenshaw, welcome to our program.

So delighted to be here again.

Kimberly, can I just start by asking you to respond to what I alluded to, and that is, you know, at a graduation speech at West Point, there goes the Secretary of Defense again, you know, cracking down on woke, and as you know, he's cracked down on black recruits and officers, on female recruits and officers, on and on.

And I wonder, when you see that happening in the military, which I was told is one of the most successfully integrated institutions in all of the United States, what that tells you?

Yeah, well, it's shocking, but it shouldn't be a surprise.

This administration has made a promise and they're acting on it.

When you say you want to make America great again, and that moment that you're trying to take us back to was a moment before most of us had rights, before there were laws against discrimination, really before the military was even fully integrated, then that tells you that the goal that they are pursuing is to recreate precisely that image, precisely that reality.

So yes, among the first things that this administration did, the second administration, was take out the highest ranking African American military personnel and women as well.

It has long been seen as the most important moment in integration when the armed forces became integrated.

So yeah, they're going to start there but here's what's more.

In their campaign to erase history, in their campaign to censor ideas, there was a time not long ago that they went through the library at one of the military academies purging books.

They took out books like Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" but look at what they left on the shelves.

They left Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf on the shelves and other books like that.

So there is a particular ideology.

It was spoken by one of the administration's officials who said, "If you want to get things done right, you need to put white men in charge."

That is the ideology.

And that is what you heard from Hegseth and others who are basically putting words to the actions that they've already done.

Clearly, it is shocking what we're seeing being unraveled and what you just said about choosing even the kind of ideology to allow military to read.

Is it going to be successful, do you think?

Do you think these people, these leaders who want to, as you say, roll back history, give it back to when white men were supreme in the United States, is there any way they can actually make that work?

Because they're rolling back voters' rights, you've got the gerrymandering, rolling back all sorts of elements of the Civil Rights Act.

There's a lot going on in this regard.

Well, you know, it really, the jury is still out on whether they're going to be successful, but one has to say on their side, there's historical precedent for the ability of combined forces to actually unravel, dismantle, push back against progress that's been made to make us a true inclusive democracy.

This faction is a faction that has a long history in American society.

Reconstruction was an eight-year program to actually create a real democracy.

The Redeemers came through and unraveled every last bit of it and African Americans lived in racial tyranny for another seven decades.

The important thing to recognize is that this campaign that they are prosecuting isn't just about the midterms.

It's not just about the next presidential election.

They're playing for keeps.

This is about what will happen throughout this century and the next century.

So we have to understand this isn't something that we can simply try to pivot away from, try to come up with different words, try to appease.

We are fighting for the soul of a multiracial democracy.

And if they are successful, it will be a long time before we'll see the opportunity to regain everything that we've lost.

So, yes, let's say that that is their aim, and it's horrifying to hear you say, "We'd lost this and the next century."

But that was going to be my next question.

Can this be reversed?

Can it survive, you know, post-Trump?

In other words, the backlash, can it be reversed?

And especially since we know, the statistics show that I think by 2030, or maybe it's a little later, America will be a majority-minority nation.

So is there the numbers and the potential sort of momentum to reverse the reversals?

Well, you know, this is precisely, I believe, why they are putting the pedal to the metal right now, because numbers alone do not guarantee equality, equity, inclusion and justice.

We've known that from the history of the South itself, in which in many states and in many counties, the majority of voters there were black.

That's why there was a need for the Voting Rights Act because a minority was able to keep a majority under thumb by utilizing various means to suppress the vote.

And of course, in the international arena, we have South Africa.

We have any number of examples that show that simply being a majority doesn't necessarily translate to political power.

If you if the question is, will they be successful?

The reality is that unless we talk back to this, unless we repudiate authoritarianism in all its forms, and importantly, in the United States, unless we draw a connection between authoritarianism and racial tyranny, they may well be successful.

And that's precisely why we have to resist with everything, including rejecting the idea that what we have inherited is all we deserve, rejecting the idea that engaging the past is itself illegal, unless we reject the idea that telling the truth is divisive.

If we give up on all of what made us what we are, and if we're unable to capture the story of transformation and the people who risked everything to create the Voting Rights Act and to create opportunity, if we give up on that, we will lose the thread and be unable to bend the arc of the universe towards justice.

Now look, you are not just an activist, you are primarily an academic and a law professor and you have talked about what you want the legal framework to understand.

Back in 2022, you invoked Toni Morrison's warning about restricting racial histories and silencing experience.

You said, "Changing the rules about what racial histories can be taught and what experiences can be acknowledged is not a healthy feature of a robust democracy.

It's a symptom of a dying one.

That's Toni Morrison who you invoked.

And your book is called "Backtalker".

So how does that happen?

How do you propose backtalking actually achieves, you know, extending that moral arc towards justice?

Yeah, well, you know, Toni Morrison is the writer who keeps giving us gifts and I write a fair amount about her in my memoir.

When I discovered that essay about racism and fascism and her framing of them as secular twins, it opened up the ability to see what was missing and how we're thinking about this current moment.

You know, you have your folks who are the pro-democracy folks, and they've been deeply concerned about the unraveling of our democracy.

And, of course, you have racial justice folks who are deeply concerned about the unraveling of the commitment to racial inclusion.

Well, what we need to do is to connect those dots.

When our democracy was broken before by people who would rather break the nation rather than share it equitably with people who didn't look like them, when that happened, we all suffered.

Of course, some people suffered a whole lot more, but we didn't live in a functioning democracy.

We're at a point where the same thing is happening again.

There are efforts to break our democracy, to unravel basic protections, to render certain voters unable to elect people of our choice, and to take away the ability to say anything about it.

These are all the fundamental aspects of a nation that is moving into tyranny.

We need to be able to connect those dots and to bring communities together to be able to see what is our common interest in sustaining a democracy that's responsive.

The only way we can do it is for us to tell our truth.

The only way we can do it is to refuse to bend the knee.

And unfortunately, too many institutions who ought to know better are bending the knee.

So that's why it's time to talk back.

So tell me about your reflections because as I said you're very famous for coining the term intersectionality.

Right now there's not just a racial pushback but there's a misogyny, there's a anti-feminism pushback, anti-women pushback.

You know you've said that you can't just talk about one sort of oppressed segment and one minority is all are intersectional.

Why do you think there's such a pushback on all of that now?

Well you know I have a good colleague who always reminds me that when people try to take something away from you whether it's something of value whether it's something material or whether it's our story our narrative our ideas it's because those have been a vehicle that move people we go somewhere when we have the ability to name experiences and to name and understand the contours of our life they're trying to take it away because it was useful they're trying to take away these ideas because people mobilized around them they're trying to undermine the legitimacy of talking about structural racism and intersectionality because they saw millions of Americans being mobilized by these ideas in 2020.

There's always a backlash to forward momentum that happened as I mentioned in reconstruction it happened in the civil rights moment it's happening in this post George Floyd post racial reckoning post feminist moment and so I see this particularly with respect to intersectionality as the reaction to the fact that groups that come together and understand their common interests and understand what we need to make a functioning democracy are groups that have to be turned back.

Lastly, here, we're dealing with the consequences of what I call a huge intersectional failure.

If we look at how our democracy has been undermined by money in politics, and how our democracy has been undermined by the collapse of the Voting Rights Act, these were Supreme Court decisions that were narrow decisions, 5-4 decisions, that were made possible by a particular justice that was confirmed because of what I call a huge intersectional failure.

That's Clarence Thomas, who was confirmed when our country was unable to hear, listen and affirm the story of a black woman.

So not only is intersectionality important so that black women can be heard, women of color can be heard, intersectionality is important for us to understand what the interests are of the nation as a whole.

And when we failed her, and I could come up with other black women who have been failed, we have all lost as a nation.

- You know, I know you're talking about Anita Hill.

I know you supported her, you know her well, legally you supported her as well.

And yes, that was a pivotal moment.

You know, interestingly, it put a lot of women into Congress in that moment.

But from your memoir, you also talk about how your activism, how your academic studies have been informed by your childhood.

You talk about losing your father, then your brother, you know, growing up in a single-family-headed household.

And I was very interested to hear how, you know, you were looked at as a family, you know, with just a mom, because so many times we hear, "Oh, yes, well, you know, it's a problem with black families.

You know, there are no fathers.

There are no-they're just, you know, collapse of the family."

How did that affect you and then your-you know, your studies?

Absolutely.

Well, I lived through a period of time when we transitioned from a two parent, father headed family to one in which my mother was raising me on her own.

And this happened at precisely the time that the civil rights movement was being undermined by the claim made by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others that black folks would never achieve equality as long as our families were non-normative, as long as our gender relations were upside down and inside out.

And that was framed in terms of black women being too economically independent, black women being too powerful, black women leading families.

Well, I happened to be in one of those families that was led by a single mother after my father died.

And I understood that this was a product of a society in which we lived.

It was a product of some of the opportunities that she didn't have.

It was the product of other things that robbed her of some of the advantages that she did have, such as property that was lost through urban renewal.

So all of the things that were being framed as moral failings or as gender disruptions were actually the combined effect of patriarchy and also of racism and class inequality.

So you deal and should deal with the patriarchy, deal with the structural racism, not try to frame the problem in terms of mothers who are working hard to support their families.

The best way to support families and create equality is to create opportunities for those who are leading those families.

And Kimberley, finally, you see this, as it was coined once, this white lash going on.

And I wonder whether you, if you could do it all over again and reframe the DEI argument, is there another way to do it to, you know, to prevent this kind of real weaponization of everything from critical race theory to everything we've just been talking about?

Academically, when you put your thinking cap back on again, would you say that if you had to do it all over again, you would do it differently?

Not at all.

Because the issue is not the words.

The issue is not the names.

Look, would people have done reconstruction over?

Because "reconstruction" became a bad word.

Do we think that it would have survived?

The Confederate soldiers and the Confederate power structure that wanted to take the states back and reduce African-Americans back to a position of utter and complete subordination, if they had just called it a different name?

Not at all.

If we had called integration a different name with all those people who resisted Brown versus Board of Education said, "Oh, why didn't you call it something different?"

No, it wouldn't have had that.

That would not have been the point.

The point is whatever we call these things, if they're about changing the equation on the ground, and if they're about creating equality in a system in which people have been made to think that equality is a zero-sum game.

If there's more equality for you, there's less status for me.

There's always going to be resistance.

That's what the battle has to be about, not on what it's called.

Yeah, well this one is called "Backtalker".

Kimberly Crenshaw, thank you so much indeed.

Always a pleasure to be here.

We turn now to Lebanon, which this week experienced one of its deadliest days since the ceasefire began.

It seems to have ended on Tuesday with Israeli airstrikes killing 31 people.

That's according to the country's health ministry, which accused the IDF of carrying out "a series of massacres" in multiple locations across southern Lebanon.

For years, the award-winning foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has lived and reported from Beirut, and so she's been up close to the devastation there.

But she's also seen the strength and resilience of the human spirit.

In her new book, "This is Also a Love Story", she focuses on what's too often left out of war reporting, the kindness and connections between ordinary people.

And she joined me here in our London newsroom to discuss finding love in those dark places.

Sally Hayden, welcome.

>> Hi.

Thanks so much for having me.

>> Your book, it's called "This is Also a Love Story," and it's a lot of your reportage but focusing on people, the relationships in all manner.

You have got a chapter on Lebanon, and you profile a man called Bassam.

>> Yeah.

>> And he had to go to extraordinary measures in a moment of dire economic distress to help his family.

Tell me about him, why you chose him.

So Lebanon has been through many crises, not just the war that's ongoing at the moment, but also the economic crisis, which has devastated the country.

So depositors, what happened was people with savings in the bank, their money got effectively seized.

And you know, people who had saved up for their whole life or people who had received inheritance or whatever it was and had money in the bank.

And Bassam was one of those people.

His father needed urgent medical care and he had to pay for it.

And he, you know, this was basically a breaking point for him.

And so he decided to raid a bank and try and get his own money.

And he... Literally, he went into a bank to steal his own money back.

With a gun and a gallon of gasoline, he basically went into this bank and began effectively a hostage situation.

And the strange thing was that, so word of this spread very quickly and actually people started gathering outside and cheering him on.

But eventually this situation ended and he was then hailed as a national hero.

So I met with him and we spoke about not just what he had done, but also his relationship with his father who actually passed away the following year.

He talked to me.

You know, for me, it was very notable because afterwards there were further raids by other people who, a lot of them also had relatives who needed medical care.

And so, for me... So, this is desperation.

But it was also like, yeah, desperation, taking action, trying to reclaim, you know, your own agency in this horrible crisis situation.

But for me, I wanted to speak to him about, yeah, his relationship with his father as well.

And yeah, for me, this was also kind of a love story, as I say in the book.

- I mean, this is also a love story.

Is your take on war, crisis, disaster, and the people who are caught up in it.

Were you surprised to find that level of humanity there?

What were you thinking when you went into a crisis zone and were there to cover war?

You're a young reporter.

I mean, you've done a lot, but were you surprised to find that dynamic going on?

I think like you definitely, as a much more experienced reporter, know this.

Like you see love every single day.

You see love everywhere.

It's like it's, you know, almost taken for granted that you will see it and that you will hear people talk about love.

Not always, you know, totally expressed.

Like we're not the best at speaking about love, but people will say, you know, the reason that they take certain actions or the motivating, yeah, motivating factors, or you just see it all of the time, but it's not necessarily something we always report on.

And that's for lots of reasons.

And I think that maybe like partially why I wanted to write the book is to remind people, you know, that actually humans with feelings and, you know, connections and loves are in the middle of all of these situations.

And someone asked me actually, like, was it hard to find these stories?

And I was like, no, like you see them literally every day.

Like I see love more than I see cruelty and greed and, you know, exploitation, but, but yeah, it doesn't always make the news headlines.

- Yeah, it doesn't.

And it's a very important factor in all of this, and all these dynamics.

You used to be an intern, actually on this show, and you were there, I can't remember the exact date, but you will, when we broke the news, along with the Guardian, of the famous Caesar photograph, the Caesar file, who was a former security agent in Syria who had blown the whistle, and had taken a huge number of, had documented the evidence of torture at their worst, worst prison.

Do you remember that?

Did that spur you on?

And how has it sort of affected you since?

- Yeah, I remember that very well because it was just so shocking.

It was like the, yeah, the cruelty that humans can do to each other.

But it's strange thinking back on it because I didn't know that much about Syria at that time.

And afterwards I ended up reporting further on this.

And then when the Assad regime fell in 2024, I actually ended up in Syria right afterwards, going to Sadnaya prison with families of the missing who were searching for their loved ones.

And one chapter in the book, I actually reported most of it before the Assad regime fell, interviewing the relatives of people who were missing about their quest for justice.

Some of whom found out from those photos what had happened to their loved ones.

You referenced a particular mother, Maryam Al-Halak.

Tell us about why you chose her.

She's an incredibly courageous woman.

Her son was killed and she found out evidence of his killing in the Caesar photos.

And she has dedicated herself to trying to get justice, to trying to get answers, to raising awareness about what happened.

She described meeting so many other mothers who were doing the same searches as her.

So she said that because they were inside Syria, they weren't able to speak out.

They weren't able to, they could ask certain questions, but they couldn't push it too far because they were also worried about the missing person.

Maybe they're still alive, maybe something, they'll be punished further if they do something.

But she, yeah, found out what had happened to her son, that he had been killed and that there was the evidence of that and decided she was gonna dedicate herself to pursuing justice.

I met her in Berlin where she lives now.

And she told me both the story, but also about her son, you know, and about their relationship and her love for him.

And, yeah, it was, again, very powerful.

These fall into the -- the stories we've just spoken about fall into the non-romantic category.

But you went to Iraq, and you profile a really interesting couple, definitely romantic, how they navigated their love, you know, even under ISIS.

Tell me about that.

When was it?

Who was in charge?

Why were they anywhere near ISIS?

And how did they navigate?

Yeah, so I went to Mosul in northern Iraq, and I met a couple called Marwa and Saif.

And for that chapter, I was thinking I wanted to look specifically at marriages and, you know, how they've been impacted or changed by kind of the changing circumstances in the region.

So when ISIS took over and they occupied Mosul, many people fled, but civilians also stayed because, you know, for a wide range of reasons, including that they just don't want to leave their houses, they knew that the houses would be seized and could be destroyed or occupied.

And also, like many told me that they thought that this was temporary, you know, so they really were like, this isn't going to be long term, we just need to hunker down and wait until ISIS leave again.

And during that period of time, Marwa and Saif fell in love.

So they used to have secret phone calls on the roofs of their houses late at night.

And at the time, you know, using your phone could get you in trouble because ISIS might think that you were a spy.

And the connection only worked on the roof.

So they'd have these very kind of slightly dangerous or very dangerous calls on the roof to each other.

And they said that that was the period that they fell in love and they ended up getting married.

- Again, it's really important to know this because so many of these people who are in all these situations are very, very dehumanized.

No more so, frankly, in my opinion, than in Rwanda during the genocide.

And even since it's been touch and go.

What did you discover in Rwanda about love?

- Yeah, so I went to Rwanda actually the first time in 2014, right after I was an intern on your show, actually.

- And that really inspired you to go all the dangerous places.

- Yeah, I went actually on a one-way ticket.

So I had a reporting grant and I was like, I'll just go and stay as long as possible.

And it was during that period that I came across this idea of artificial families.

So what these are is people whose families were killed during the genocide.

They called them genocide orphans, but sometimes they would have one parent still alive.

But a lot of their family had been killed.

And they basically formed these families with this organization called ERG.

And they appointed a father and a mother and then the others were children.

So they were all pretty much the same age.

But, you know, one person would be the father and the mother.

And they'd all meet up once or twice a week and basically just check in.

So the parents would be like, you know, are you studying?

Like, do you have any problems?

Have you been good this week?

You know, just keeping an eye on them, but also being a kind of support system.

And it really made me question, you know, what is a family?

What does it mean to be part of one?

And is there any way that you can kind of replicate that?

Obviously it's not a replacement, you know, but it's still kind of something that's quite meaningful for a lot of people.

And I wanted then 10 years later, when I was writing the book, I decided I'm going to track down some of these people and see, are they still in these families?

You know, how has it developed?

And, um, yeah, that was quite well, what they said was that, you know, which it's strange, cause I was the same age as them when I initially met them.

So I hadn't fully realized that, you know, when you get older, you kind of choose your own family as well.

So many were married, they had their own children, but they still said that these, you know, artificial families played a role in their lives.

And one man, he took out his phone and he scrolled, he showed me his WhatsApp and he was like, "Look, the WhatsApp group is at the very top, you know."

- Of the artificial, so-called artificial family.

- Yeah.

- It's amazing.

I mean, that's social science you're documenting there, particularly out of such a devastating situation.

In Japan, essentially you discovered love after death.

Tell me about that.

What was the profile?

So in Japan I ended up looking into what was called the drifting post.

I met a man called Yuji Akagawa and he basically set up a post box and there was obviously the 2011 like the devastating tsunami and earthquake and huge numbers of people were killed then and huge he set up this post box that people could write letters to people who had died basically as a form of grieving and he was still running it ten years later and he had said you know he thought that the letters were going to stop arriving but they haven't stopped arriving and it's ended up being just a way for kind of communal grief because one of the things he does is he gathers, you know, if it's a private letter, he'll keep it in a private place.

But if it's a letter that's allowed to be public, he gathers them in binders.

And so you can go in and read other people's letters kind of to be able to formulate your own.

Yeah, to be able to formulate your own words.

And I don't know if beautiful is the right word in grief, you know, but like it really, it made me think of the different ways that we can process grief and how we can continue to love someone and after we've lost them and how that love is still very real, you know.

- So finally, I'm gonna ask you how you processed and what you got out of all of this.

And I'm gonna ask you to read a passage that we and you have chosen.

Would you mind reading that?

- I know with confidence now that if you look for goodness, care or kindness amid any crisis, you will find it.

I know that local heroes are always present too, even if their good deeds go unseen or unappreciated and their actions only improve the situation on a micro level as opposed to transforming it completely.

I gathered this reportage partially as my atonement for more than a decade in the journalistic world which can strip detail, remove agency and flatten emotion in comparison to the real world which is brimming with all of those things.

But I also hope it stands as an entreaty to the reader to always remember that people exist at the center of geopolitics.

Well, it's very powerful and it's a really, really important reminder.

When you see what's going on now, whether it's in Iran, the Middle East, wherever it is, Lebanon, where you've been living, do you think people do focus on that, on the humanity?

Do you hope that this book helps them move in that direction?

So I read the book for a few reasons.

One was for myself, honestly, because I was feeling just despair at the cruelty of humans.

I mean, you've seen it through your work, obviously.

I think reporting internationally and reporting on crises, you just see so much horrible things and horror.

And you can really get very down.

And yeah, you can struggle.

And I think I needed to remind myself that there's kindness and goodness in the world.

And by looking for it, I mean, you don't have to look far.

You just have to remind yourself that it exists.

But yeah, it is also a book about dehumanization.

It's a book about the dangers of detachment.

And I do think that that is, you know, dehumanization is used to enable atrocities effectively as a tool.

And I think that we are seeing that in so many situations.

And yeah, it's always important to remind, it sounds very obvious, but to remind people that there are humans at the center of geopolitics.

It's a very timely reminder.

So Sally Hayden, thank you very much.

- Thank you.

- Fewer than 60,000 people, that 0.001% of the world's population, controls three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity.

That shocking statistic from the World Inequality Report shows how extreme inequality in our modern world has become.

Political scientist Jeffrey Winters argues that while the wealthy have dominated the masses throughout history, the gulf between oligarchs and the average citizens today is even greater than during imperial Rome.

But he points out one key difference, that today, this disparity is often achieved and maintained through democracy.

He joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss this so-called "blind spot".

Jeffrey Winters, thanks so much for joining us.

You've written a new book.

It's called "The Blind Spot, How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies".

I guess first, what's the blind spot?

Well, the blind spot is we live in a democracy where we see that democracy works in so many ways.

Think of it as among the non-rich.

If you were excluded as women, you struggle and you get in.

If you're excluded on the basis of race and ethnicity, there are so many ways in which democracy works horizontally among us.

We assume that because democracy works in those spaces, that it will also work vertically.

That is, with regard to inequality in our societies.

And in fact, that's not the case.

Our democracies are actually designed not to work vertically.

That was something that goes all the way back to the founding.

And so the blind spot really is about our collective assumption that we can actually address rising inequality through democracy.

And that's an incredibly hard thing to do.

In fact, we're going in the opposite direction, Hari.

We're, we're, strangely enough, over the 250 year course of American independence, we are vastly more democratic, and we are vastly more unequal.

In fact, now, democracies around the world are the most unequal societies ever to have existed in human history.

And that's, that's just shocking and it makes no sense.

Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the structure.

I mean, you're right that the rich dominate us not despite democracy, but through it.

How is the design itself flawed?

Yeah, so it's built in.

So think of it, think of it like this.

First of all, all of us have what might be called participation power.

This is the right to vote, voice, speech.

But some of us and that we distribute that radically equally one person, one vote.

Sure.

And that's the basis of the legitimacy of democracy itself.

And yet, that those are not the only kinds of power that operate in politics.

We also have wealth power, that's the power of oligarchs.

And that is not distributed at all equally.

And so the two systems are actually fused, they're actually woven together.

And one of the things that that oligarchs who were there before the rest of us in terms of governing, one of the things they were so worried about, as we came into the democratic era was, if there was power sharing with the many, basically, the power of the vote and the legislature would be used democratically and legitimately to redistribute wealth.

There was a great panic about that.

And in fact, if we go back to the convention of 1787, one of the things that the framers were struggling with was a clash at the time between democratic power, participation, and wealth power.

And they tried very hard to build institutions that would meld them together.

You're saying that even the framers in that constitutional convention were not interested in an actual rule by the will of the people?

Well, I wouldn't quite frame it that way.

Here's the dilemma they faced.

On the one hand, they were very committed to consent of the governed.

They were committed to freedom.

But they also recognized that there was a wealth pyramid in society and that they thought that that wealth pyramid was normal and just and they tried to say how is it that we can basically have both at the same time.

Consent of the governed, democracy, responsiveness and yet safeguards that are built in.

So they ran actually to Philadelphia in the middle of a crisis in the 1780s.

It was an economic crisis after the war.

And it was a debt crisis.

A lot of us don't remember that the first prisons in the United States were debtors prison.

So if you were in debt, and there was a lot of debt at the time to try to pay for the war, people were being thrown into debtors prisons.

And the response in the States was to give relief to the average farmer.

And the creditors oligarchs at the time were getting a haircut.

Part of the reason they actually gathered in Philadelphia was to say that that injustice of what the many were doing to the few had to be limited.

So when they gathered people like Hamilton, Madison, and a number of others all said, the first problem we need to deal with is there is an excess of democracy in the United States, we have to limit it.

And what did they do?

They said, the people get to vote on the House, the Senate, we didn't get to vote on and it was its job was to block the house in case any kind of threatening politic policies came up.

Yeah, and then they gave a veto power to the president in case those two institutions down below failed.

And then finally, they built five people in a Supreme Court who would be able to block the entire democratic process.

So that is their democracy?

Yes, but we have to understand it as being with limits.

So I call it in the book, participatory inequality is what we end up with.

Okay, what about the idea that listen, this one person, one vote is only as good as the people who actually show up?

What responsibility does low voter turnout have when it comes to either your local school board election or the presidential?

So participation is so incredibly important there's no doubt about it.

If people are going to be able to affect the kind of policies in their favor that help them, they've got to show up.

Actually, oligarchic power is very different.

Wealth power is set in motion.

It sets in motion others, what I call a wealth defense industry.

So actually, oligarchs can golf and do other kinds of things, and their wealth power is still working in their favor.

We all know that we get to vote on Election Day.

And then prior to that, we have an opportunity to vote in the primaries.

Prior to that is what might be called the wealth primary, which is two years before any voter ever gets involved.

And that's when candidates who want to be viable put themselves in front of oligarchs to try to get money so that they can go forward.

In essence, oligarchic power is filtering the choices we later get to have.

So whether it was Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, you're saying they both had to curry favor from the oligarchs to fund their campaigns to give them a shot at winning their party's endorsement.

Is that right?

Absolutely.

So what I'm describing here, you know, Joe Biden in his last speech from the Oval Office famously warned that oligarchy is rising in the United States.

What he didn't say is that, Hari, it's fully bipartisan.

And, in fact, Donald Trump raised 1.5 billion, Kamala Harris raised 2 billion.

The difference between the two is that a smaller number of really big political investors put their money in, I don't call them donors, because these are not donations, these are political investments.

They put their money into the Republican side.

On Kamala Harris's money poured in many, many more oligarchs at a smaller level, the biggest being around 50 million.

So it is it is unfortunately a bipartisan system.

And that explains also how it could be that over the last 50 years, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, inequality in the United States has been exploding.

So here, you know, you could see hyper capitalists say, this is just name calling.

This is what the market set up.

I and other people have won.

We are we have done the best.

We've innovated the best products.

We've made the best widget, so to speak.

And that's why we're wealthy.

What's wrong with that?

Yeah.

So one of the things we have to do is, is, is separate just pure wealth from the political influence that wealth buys.

And so Americans are actually quite tolerant of, of great inequalities in society.

When Bernie Sanders runs around and does his fight oligarchy rallies and so on, and he stands in front of the audience and he says, you know, we have millionaires and billionaires who are who you know wealth inequality, the audience doesn't go very crazy.

When he says that wealth is being used to distort democracy.

That's when people's sense of legitimacy gets offended.

They don't like the idea that wealth is turned into power, which is turned into outcomes that benefit tilt the system in favor of the few.

And so that that really explains how it is that we can be tolerant of difference.

Somebody's got a yacht, somebody's got a robot.

That doesn't necessarily offend everyone.

But if you start taking the fundamental principle of one person, one vote, and start saying, well, thanks to Citizens United, which has really thrown open the floodgates, we now have people who have the equivalent of millions of votes, what it amounts to in terms of their power and their influence.

That is why we're now talking about oligarchs, not in the Russian oligarch sense, but in the American oligarch sense.

And we haven't talked like this since the Gilded Age, since the Robber Baron Age.

And that's because although oligarchs have been there all the way along, the visibility of oligarchs today is so different, that it's impossible for the average American to say, well, are we are we in a democracy?

Or are we in an oligarchy today?

We had this Corporate Transparency Act that was supposed to be the bipartisan measure that increased our ability to see who's funding what.

You would describe that as kind of an anti-oligarchy piece of legislation, right?

What happened to it?

So the Corporate Transparency Act, one of the things that works in favor of oligarchs is that unlike you and me, all of our money on a W-2, on our wages, is completely transparent to the IRS.

But when money is made from money through shell corporations and trusts and foundations and placed in secrecy jurisdictions, it's not transparent.

So in Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada, and a number of other states, you can set up a shell corporation where what is called the beneficial ownership of it is not known.

So you can't tax that which you can't see.

And so one of the things the wealth defense industry in the United States does, lawyers, accountants, wealth management professionals, is make oligarchs help them avoid paying taxes.

And so the Corporate Transparency Act was put, was passed in the National Defense Authorization Bill.

And it basically said, there's gonna be a registry where we're gonna know every corporation and who owns it.

That got blocked in March of 2025.

And it was an incredible victory to sort of reduce secrecy and transparency toward oligarchs.

And it's been it's been reversed.

There's something called the tax gap.

Okay, this is the amount every year that the IRS is required to calculate.

And it's the difference between what the IRS expects it ought to be able to bring in given all its data and all of its records and what it actually brings in.

That number, that gap is now one trillion dollars a year.

Remember that our national defense budget is 900 million.

So this is more than our entire defense budget.

It's a massive number and who's not paying?

Well, it turns out that the average citizen, where the government knows every penny you've made, they basically cheat at about a 1% level.

Oligarchs cheat at a 55% level.

What they're doing is they're holding on to their money and they're making money on that money.

Is this pattern of this notion of oligarchy or inequality as a political outcome something that you see repeated in other societies besides the United States?

Yes.

So everywhere where there is dramatic wealth concentration and not just in the democracies but also in authoritarian states, that means that this small group of people have tremendous power.

How that plays out in each country is very different.

So for example, two countries that used to not have oligarchs because of, frankly, because of their revolutions, Russia and China, have an explosion of new oligarchs.

And the way one operates as an oligarch in China is very different from the way one operates as an oligarch in, in Putin's Russia.

But also, a lot of people maybe don't realize that very sort of quasi socialist countries like the Scandinavian countries, Norway, Sweden, and so on, who have extensive welfare cushions in their society, those societies have as much wealth concentration as the United States does.

In other words, what I'm saying is, the taxes that are collected to be able to create welfare in those Scandinavian countries are taxing the many, not the wealthy few.

They evade and avoid taxes as successfully as anyone else does anywhere.

All right, so let's talk about some of those changes.

What would you propose?

First of all, I would go back to what you mentioned earlier, something as fundamental as the Corporate Transparency Act.

It's already the law, but the Treasury Department has decided to exempt 99.9% of all firms from the law.

That was just an executive decision.

That is something that could be reversed.

We don't have to re-pass the law.

That's one.

There's another very simple law.

It's a policy called the Enablers Act.

It was blocked by one senator a few years ago.

It had bipartisan support.

What is the Enablers Act?

We all know that banks are required to know their customer.

This happens because of terrorism and everything else.

They wanted to be able to track the flow of money.

So oligarchs and others began to avoid banks and they went through wealth management professionals, family offices and all kinds of things.

Basically passed in all kinds of places.

Basically that law requires the same kind of reporting of suspicious activity.

Let me turn to something a bit more deep cutting.

Wealth taxes.

Here's what's interesting about wealth taxes.

What is the number one store of wealth for the average household?

And the answer is their home.

And it turns out, all of us are already paying a wealth tax every year on our homes.

And it's adjusted whether we sell the home or not.

That's how vicious the system is.

It is putting a wealth tax on all of us at the average level.

And including sometimes someone, you know, granny has lived in a house for 50 years, paid it off, has to sell it because the property taxes on the house keep going up.

Meanwhile, the main store of wealth for oligarchs is not their home, not their property, but their stuff and their financial assets and so on.

When you're taxed on your home, you're taxed not only on your equity, the part of it you actually own, you're taxed on the mortgage as well.

So we are taxing our debt.

That is an example of how the system is slanted in favor of the very wealthy and against the average citizen.

Jeffrey Winters, thanks so much for your time.

It's been a pleasure, thank you.

And finally, remember a jazz legend.

This week, Sonny Rollins died at the age of 95, leaving behind an incredible legacy.

The saxophonist was known for embracing unique, bold and experimental sounds, earning him the title "The Greatest Improviser in the History of Jazz".

During his more than 50-year career, Rollins released over 60 albums, and his widespread popularity even led to the company Pioneer Electronics booking Rollins for this iconic commercial from the 1970s.

So poignant and Sonny Rollins was awarded the 2010 National Medal of Arts by President Obama who said that he had been inspired by the musician to quote "take risks that I might not otherwise have taken".

What great advice.

And that's it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up every night just sign up for our newsletter at pbs.org/amanpour.

Thanks for watching and goodbye from London.

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