oligarchy

Rule by the few; here Rome’s patrician war society before empire makes that structure corrupt and stagnant.

Rule by the few; Jiang uses it to characterize Sparta against Athens' democracy.

The elite power structure Jiang says would benefit from civil war because it redirects public anger and manages debt collapse.

The elite bloc against which Jiang imagines a debt-canceling king could politically unify the public after an engineered crash. Jiang's name for the post-2008 American order in which economic gains and political design are geared toward the top tier rather than the general public.

Jiang says elite universities with many legacies already look like an aristocracy or oligarchy rather than a pure meritocracy.

In an oligarchic, rent-seeking system, working hard and following rules can transfer energy to parasitic elites instead of producing fair advancement.

Jiang says America should be understood not as a democracy but as an oligarchy produced by inequality, corruption, and a system where only a few people benefit.

Roman oligarchy was useful while Rome was small, poor, cohesive, and at war, but became corrupt, unequal, stagnant, and civil-war prone once Rome became an empire.

Debt is the mechanism by which oligarchy corrupts itself: nobles turn renters into debtors and then slaves, creating the crisis a king can exploit.

Jiang defines oligarchy as rule by the few and uses Sparta's oligarchy against Athens' democracy to mark the two cultures as diametrically opposed.

The political choice Jiang sees is not democracy versus monarchy but monarchy versus oligarchy, and history suggests desperate people often choose monarchy because kings can cancel debt through a jubilee.

The oligarchy benefits from civil war because it diverts mass discontent away from revolution and lets elite factions settle conflicts by sacrificing people in the streets.