How to Use plutocracy in a Sentence

plutocracy

noun
  • If only the wealthy can afford to run for public office, are we more a plutocracy than a democracy?
  • Some of these cities are becoming hubs of the global plutocracy.
    — Emily Matchar, Smithsonian, 28 Apr. 2017
  • Where their influence prevailed, the result was sometimes called plutocracy, or the rule of the rich.
    — Ron Elving, NPR, 1 Feb. 2025
  • The Populists opted for an alliance, promising a war on the plutocracy.
    — David McWilliams, Fortune, 16 Nov. 2025
  • Social equity pits people with very little wealth and clout against the plutocracy that runs the world, with billions of dollars at stake.
    — Amanda Chicago Lewis, The New Republic, 4 Apr. 2022
  • One suspects that his problem with plutocracy isn’t its existence, but that membership in it didn’t save him when a fall guy was needed.
    — Laura Kipnis, The Atlantic, 10 Nov. 2022
  • But in this case the opacity is obscuring the rise of a new American plutocracy.
    — Dana Milbank, The Denver Post, 18 Apr. 2017
  • In recent decades, as the stock market has soared, the vast fortunes amassed by some members of the plutocracy have largely escaped taxation.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 8 June 2021
  • American democracy has been hijacked by a one-man plutocracy.
    — Ben Travers, IndieWire, 10 Feb. 2025
  • One school of progressive thought says that America has devolved (once again, perhaps) into a plutocracy.
    — Katherine Stewart, The New Republic, 11 July 2022
  • Even fiscal policy, or the deficit spending favored by the left, has at least the indirect effect of promoting a plutocracy.
    — Thomas Geoghegan, The New Republic, 18 Nov. 2020
  • Democracy can flip into plutocracy if a single party accrues enough voting credits, which gets easier when voter turnout is low.
    — Joel Khalili, WIRED, 26 Jan. 2024
  • The Roosevelts saved America from plutocracy and created a golden age for the middle class.
    — Robert D. Atkinson, The New Republic, 4 May 2018
  • But, almost as if to assist the cause, the plutes seemed this year to put on an extended exhibit of performance art whose plain, if unstated, thesis is that plutocracy is maybe a bad idea.
    — Anand Giridharadas, Time, 21 Nov. 2019
  • Mueller’s father was an executive at DuPont, part of a family firmly planted in the country’s plutocracy.
    — Marc Fisher, Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2018
  • That way lies straightforward plutocracy, as those familiar with European social history will know.
    — Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 4 Aug. 2020
  • Why is turning American democracy into a plutocracy so troubling?
    — Mordechai Gordon, Hartford Courant, 25 Dec. 2024
  • The battle against plutocracy isn’t going to be won in a single piece of legislation, certainly not one against which Manchin and Sinema hold an effective veto.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 1 Nov. 2021
  • This odious walled vertical suburb is a civic embarrassment, the embodiment of a runaway plutocracy that places its own interests over the commonweal — and common decency.
    — Mark Lamster, Dallas News, 18 Dec. 2020
  • Disturbed by vanishing jobs, rising plutocracies, melting polar ice caps, not to mention numerous other serious threats to a good night's sleep and a reasonable life for future generations?
    — Deanna Isaacs, Chicago Reader, 22 June 2017
  • The problem with plutocracy is that billionaires are typically removed from the struggles of working- and middle-class citizens, ordinary folks who share neither the goals nor system of values of the ultrawealthy.
    — Mordechai Gordon, Hartford Courant, 25 Dec. 2024
  • All of this was a considered response to European systems within which a tiny plutocracy had built power and control over land and people, especially through familial inheritance.
    — Tyler Green, The Atlantic, 21 May 2026
  • The term populist plutocracy might more accurately describe American politics today.
    — Robert O. Paxton, Slate Magazine, 6 Apr. 2017
  • Its point is that if this governing combination of executive chaos and legislative plutocracy continues apace, Democrats could see opportunity ripen in some of the unlikeliest of places.
    — Jim Newell, Slate Magazine, 22 May 2017
  • Once before, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, similar rhetoric about the dangers of plutocracy helped cement a Democratic majority that endured for decades.
    — Los Angeles Times, 29 Apr. 2021
  • Bestselling books predicted dystopian outcomes in which society split into a wealthy, robot-owning plutocracy and an unemployed underclass, and repressive governments would be needed to rein in social discontent.
    — The Economist, 6 July 2019
  • Once among America’s most oppressed populations, her triumph is not only immune to interrogation, so is American plutocracy for having anointed her as its apostle.
    — Soraya Roberts, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
  • Within 40 years, California had created a new plutocracy of Eloi, whose wealth exempted them from all worries about the mundane problems of the distant and despised Morlock others.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, Arkansas Online, 13 Sep. 2021
  • Properly enforced and supported by other measures, such as meaningful campaign-finance reform and an effective antitrust policy, the new tax could help reverse America’s descent into plutocracy.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 12 Sep. 2019
  • Before stadium building became another heartless money grab for the American plutocracy, Roy Hofheinz’s Astrodome was a genuine source of civic pride and national curiosity.
    — The Si Staff, SI.com, 28 Aug. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'plutocracy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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