THE ANTI-OLIGARCHY CONSTITUTION

[...]generations of reformers argued that gross class inequalities and oligarchic concentrations of economic power undermine fair equality of opportunity within the economic sphere - and that this, too, is a constitutional problem. The Constitution required these things, reformers argued, in order to protect the fair equality of opportunity at the heart of the political-economic order on which the Constitution rests. [...]to return to the first argument, an America without these things would become an oligarchy or "moneyed aristocracy" rather than a republic.7 The reformers who made these constitutional arguments against oligarchy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were interpreting the Constitution as they understood it.