Democrats keep saying America is an “oligarchy.” Is that true?

Tech billionaires lined up in support of Donald Trump’s inauguration. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Joe Biden, in his farewell address, argued that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.” More recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a crowd of 10,000 in Arizona that “we are witnessing an oligarchy in America.”

Biden and Ocasio-Cortez are hardly the first to diagnose the United States as an oligarchy. Sen. Bernie Sanders has been warning about it for years. So have many others, though, recently, Sen.