Oil company with an army...

Looks like you are a few years behind events.

That was the case since the 80s

The people saying "always has been" have really short memories or've forgotten about the Roosevelt administrations.

There is a decent argument to be made that the USA is a de-facto oligarchy. However, it's a de-jure liberal democracy and Constitutional Republic for the time being.

Sure you can. Until January 6th.

It's at least a Soft Oligarchy yes. There's no legally or extra legally enforced class system. If you can make it into the upper classes, by guile, luck, or sheer bastardry they'll accept you and let you run some things, maybe even political offices. See J.D. Vance, a millennial from Appalachia who has risen to the Vice Presidency via guile and sheer bastardry.

But it's a Soft Oligarchy because opportunities are far from equal. Before anyone starts screeching, equality of outcome isn't an expectation here, merely equality of opportunity. In the large majority of cases your zip code can predict your future socioeconomic level. And not because rural areas are cheaper, that just means middle and upper class start at lower numbers there. Those classes are still not being obtained. Along with this are several studies over the last couple decades telling us that socioeconomic mobility is all but dead, both individually, and more recently, intergenerational mobility.

So while you aren't going to be killed or imprisoned for earning too much or asking for stuff above your station, it is very rare to access those levels without being born to them. Thus the "soft" in Soft Oligarchy.

Feel free to crosspost to !AskUSA@discuss.online

if money = power then liberal (democracy) = oligarchy

The closest thing we have to democracy is our ability to begin democracy by fighting against first-past-the-post voting systems

it's very close to turning into one.

It's not quite there, but trump is definitely not one to shy away from it, so it mostly depends on who he appoints and interacts with. And how corrupt he will be.

I mean, no country truely had 10/10 democracy.

The US literally started out from people in chains, but eventually free the enslaved people (with the prison exemption), then black men could vote, then women.

Segregation was legal, then it it was outlawed.

Civil Right Act was passed

The level of racism began to deminish, not completely gone, but deminishing

I would say the US was at 1/10 democracy at the beginning, it was at 5/10 before trump, then it was at 4/10 right after Jan-6, now its at 4.25/10 (because some judicial appointments were made by biden as a counterbalance to republican judges).

Is it an oligarchy? Not really. I would say it's a democracy in which rich people have an advantage in money and influence. So I guess you could call it a semi-oligarchy. Because in a real oligarchy, the media would've been censored, and you wouldn't be seeing my comment, you wouldn't be able to ask such question, there'd be no free(ish) internet access. There's be no somewhat protected union activity. There's be no somewhat protected protests. There are often violations to those rights, but back then, it was way worse.

We never really had a true 10/10 democracy, but as time goes on, it tends to trend toward becoming more democratic. (We'll see what happens with Project 2025. Could be just another period of recession as it has happened many times throughout US history, or it could be Weimar 1933, only time will tell)