[yogthos]

The study literally concludes that regardless of what party is in power, it's the interests of the oligarchs that take precedence. Whenever there is a difference of the opinion between the masses and the oligarchs then the oligarchs typically win. That's whose interests the parties represent.

And, if you think that's what a democracy is then what else is there to tell you.

[mopsi]

You claimed that both parties represent the exact same interests, and I don't agree with that at all and nor does the article support it.

If we use campaign contributions as a proxy for interests, then internet companies like Google and Facebook and their employees support Democrats much more than they support Republicans, and it's vice versa in the aerospace and defence industry.

[yogthos]

Once again, both parties represent the interests of the ruling class in American society which is the capital owning class. This is precisely what the study shows. This has absolutely nothing to do with democrats or republicans. The division in American society is between people whose primary source of income is their capital and those whose primary source of income is their labour.

[mopsi]

There's no monolithic "ruling class" that both major parties serve equally, and nor did the article claim anything like that. Instead, there is a huge patchwork of constantly shifting interest groups who are looking for suitable candidates to support, and candidates who are tweaking their platforms to appeal to as many groups as possible. Why would, for example, Fortune 500 companies spend a dime on elections if both parties served them the same.

The idea of a singular ruling class controlling the whole country is a lazy conspiracy theory that ignores the complexity of politics and governance.

[dragonwriter]

> There’s no monolithic “ruling class” that both major parties serve equally

There is a ruling class (capital), but it is not – nor is it asserted to be – monolithic. There are conflicts as well as common interests within it; the common interests are more consistently served by government bipartisanly because the dominant factions of each party answer to (different, but overlapping, subsets of) the capitalist class. The points on which the ruling class are also the points of genuine (rather than ginned up to build support on other issues) divisions between the parties.

[yogthos]

The division in society is between the classes of people who live off their capital and people who live off their labour. These two groups of people have contradictory interests. People who own capital want to pay workers as little as possible and provide them with as few benefits as possible in order to maximize their profits. Meanwhile, the workers want to get compensated as much as possible, to get the best benefits they can, and to have time off. This is the class contradiction of the capitalist society.

In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.

And this is precisely what the analysis of US government policy shows. US has a government by the rich and for the rich.