Resurrecting the Rebel Alliance

When I was a boy in Miami, we didn’t eat strawberries. Every morning I’d stare at the images on the box of Cheerios and wonder why there were no little red fruits in my own bowl. It was only later that my dad told me of his childhood. Starting at age six—after my grandparents lost their land to the bank—he’d spend 14-hour days picking berries on a sharecrop farm in Plant City, Florida. “I know how much blood,” he said, “is in each basket.” 

For most of my time at home, my dad sold insurance and my mom worked as a secretary. We lived paycheck to paycheck. But my parents saved enough for clean clothes, two-week vacations, even a new car once. Then my mom got sick and my dad lost his job and we were pretty poor. 

Still, I felt lucky. My parents were loving and supportive. Many of my friends at school had it a lot harder. Our district ran along the Snake Creek drainage canal from Norland to Carol City, then down 27th Avenue to Liberty City. Our curriculum included studying the effects of quaaludes, motorcycle crashes, drive-bys, and various forms of child abuse. 

Then there were the lessons I learned working in a factory and an industrial bakery and on the sandwich line at Burger King. All of which—as long as the boss wasn’t too much in my face—seemed preferable to helping my dad earn cash by mowing lawns and replacing tarpaper roofs. Of all my tutors, none was ever sterner than the Miami sun at midday in July. 

In the factory towns of Michigan and farms of Iowa, in the warehouses of Harrisburg and hospitals of Fresno, along the borderlands of Texas and floodplains of Missouri, most folks think about power every day. It’s not that any of us regular folk imagines having any real power. What we do think about is freedom from power. In communities like ours, economics is simple. There’s no escape from hard work. But there’s also no reason ever to be bullied and belittled by any petty foreman or distant corporate board. And that means working together to find ways to live free from any form of capricious control.

It’s in these conversations about liberty that we hear the original political economic language of America, dating to long before the founding. Most immediately, it might be the simple solidarity of letting someone sleep on the sofa so they can quit their bad job. Over time it evolves into the language of mutual protection. Sometimes the bottom-up protection of the union and guild and trade association. Sometimes the top-down protection of using the public government to limit the power of corporations and capitalists. 

Material well-being is not the only or even main subject of this language. It’s also a language of sharing out opportunity. Of breaking the barriers to making a larger human community. Of inclusion—even eccentricity and weirdness—in its inherent intent to disrupt the homogenization of uniform and cubicle. It’s a language of human dignity. Of finding one’s own purpose. Of freeing ourselves to dream. 

When I was in school, this language was largely still the language of America. We heard it in the music of Sly Stone and Johnny Cash and, a few years later, the L.A. punk band X. We also heard it in almost every utterance of Lyndon B. Johnson and Barbara Jordan and Walkin’ Lawton Chiles. And for the most part, the Democrats of that day delivered, in support for the right to organize, in protection from the chain store and the Wall Street bank, in affordable mortgages for the family home. In an entire political economy geared to empower the worker, independent business owner, and farmer—as well as the entrepreneur, innovator, engineer, scientist.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to promote a new political economic language. They said the old fight for liberty from power made the economy inefficient. They said if we let corporations concentrate control over production and retail, they could build more things and sell them more cheaply. Their new language was technocratic, mathematical. It was designed, they said, to help illuminate the mechanical operations of the “market forces” that drove efficiency. 

Soon, Democrats began to follow. A new generation of leaders spoke less of sharing out power and responsibility and more of how to “deregulate” business to make—and in theory, share out—more stuff. They also embraced the idea that economics was metaphysical in nature, and lectured us on the new forces—“globalization,” digital technologies—that restricted our ability to shape our own lives.

Today we face the gravest set of threats to American democracy, and our most fundamental liberties, since the Civil War. We see this threat in the rise of a new class of oligarchs, who increasingly have the power to determine how we work, what we read and watch, how we make community, how we do business with one another, what technologies we must use and which are crushed. We see it even more clearly in President Donald Trump’s harnessing of the powers of these oligarchs for his own private purposes. 

These threats are a straight-line result of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of America’s original system of liberty. If we are honest, we will admit that Trump sits in the White House thanks largely to the rage of citizens Democrats betrayed. He raises mobs using systems of communications Democrats led the way in corrupting. He leverages the power of private autocrats that Democrats led the way in empowering. 

The task ahead for Democrats is not merely to resist and slow the predations and destructions of President Trump. It is not merely to knock the Republicans out of power in 2026 and 2028. It is to establish a new political economic regime which ensures that our liberty and prosperity are never again threatened by any homegrown oligarch or autocrat. And Democrats must do so in a world filled with great enemies, eager to exploit the chaos sown here in America by Trump and the oligarchs, to topple us.

None of this will be possible until Democrats first fully recover America’s original language of liberty. Doing so is the only way to relearn the wisdom about power and political economic structure baked into this language. It’s the only way for Democrats to convince the American people they actually understand how to make their lives better, and have the courage to act. And the only way Democratic elites can prove they understand their own responsibility for today’s crisis, and fully grasp the threats to their own lives and the lives of their own children.

The origins of what we understand today as liberalism trace to the early 17th century. It is both a set of assumptions about the nature of the individual—that every person has an equal capacity to do good in this world, and to earn entry to the next—and a set of political and economic rules designed to protect all the forms of liberty such an individual might desire, be they political, commercial, or spiritual. People first began to establish and formalize these rules in fights against the absolute monarchs of that time, especially Charles I in Britain. Liberalism, in short, is a system of political and economic rules designed to defend and expand individual liberty.

Technically, much of this new rule of law focused on protecting the properties of the individual. People understood that if the king could seize one’s land or business at will, then that person would tend to do whatever the king demanded. In practice, these efforts largely played out in the establishment of anti-monopoly laws—to prevent the king from concentrating power through either the granting of monopoly to a particular favorite or arbitrary threats to take an opponent’s property away. Not that this system of liberty served mainly the interests of the wealthy. Early liberals made sure also to protect the rights of tradespeople to use their skills, and of farmers to bring produce to market, and of authors and dramatists to copyright their work.

Further, people without any real wealth or other forms of social power forced their way into the debates about both the nature and structure of human liberty. A main path for such early democratic liberalism were the vibrant discussions in the Protestant Churches in Britain. In contrast to the hierarchies and mysteries of the established Church, Puritans preached an equality of all souls before God, which in turn led to visions of greater equality in this world. As the historian William Haller put it, “This spiritual equalitarianism, implicit in every word the preachers spoke … became the central force of revolutionary Puritanism.” 

We must honestly admit the radical nature and full immensity of the political threat we face, which is the direct merger of private monopoly and the state. And our own complicity in creating this crisis.

The English Revolution was the first truly modern war for individual liberty. The victory was achieved largely by the New Model Army, a professional force led by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell and composed largely of Protestant dissenters. We remember the revolution today mainly because it culminated in the beheading of Charles I in 1649 and a period of brutal oppression in Ireland. But its importance for us lies in the fact that while in the field, various groups of soldiers—animated by the “democratic rhetoric of the spirit”—formulated visions of popular democracy that profoundly shaped thinking in America a century later. What they invented, the historian Edmund Morgan wrote, was nothing less than a new conception of a “sovereign people” whose authority rests on “the rights of men.” 

In the end, the Commonwealth of England could not hold. After the death of Cromwell, Parliament and the army disintegrated, and in 1660 a new parliament arranged for Charles I’s son to be crowned king.

But in America, memories of the people’s commonwealth lived on. A key actor was Samuel Adams, born to an ardent Puritan family that later went bankrupt. At Harvard, Adams studied the writings of John Locke. But it was on the streets of Boston in 1747 that he first witnessed the power of direct democratic action, as he watched African, English, Dutch, and American sailors lead a fight against impressment. Adams responded by founding a newspaper and expressing a new vision of democratic liberty, based on a belief in universal equality. “All Men are by Nature on a Level; born with an equal Share of Freedom, and endow’d with Capacities nearly alike,” he wrote. Thomas Jefferson later recognized Adams as “the earliest, most active, and persevering man of the Revolution” and the “patriarch of liberty.” 

In any discussion of the founding, it is vital to fully recognize the repugnant nature of the compromises made to the slaveholders. But if we focus only on the snakes who extorted a Big House in the sun, we miss the work of all the regular folks who first plotted out that garden, then cut the trees and tilled the land. This includes in 1789, when Adams and Patrick Henry helped lead efforts to force the Framers of the Constitution to append a clear statement of common equal liberty in the form of a bill of rights simple enough for every person to understand. 

Over the next 70 years, the belief in human equality provided the moral leverage necessary to make good on the promises of the Declaration of Independence, first through abolitionism and then civil war.

Today in America, the chain of command is simple. The oligarchs boss us. And Trump bosses the oligarchs, including sometimes by instructing them how to direct us. In short, the restoration of monarchical autocracy.

The political leverage came from the anti-monopoly systems Americans had built into the Constitution, and the anti-monopoly provisions of the common law inherited from Britain. The idea that the early United States was an unregulated libertarian utopia is a modern, dangerous myth. In fact, Americans from the first used their local, state, and federal governments both to protect themselves from private corporate power and to work collectively to create and distribute new forms of wealth. They established simple bright-line market structure rules to protect the independence of the individual and the family, and to limit the size, structure, and behavior of the corporation, usually through direct legislative charter. And they aggressively used government power to distribute land and education to those with little or nothing.

They also carefully updated these rules to apply to the railroad, telegraph, telephone, and other powerful new network technologies. They focused less on limiting the size and more on regulating the behavior of these powerful new network technologies. They aimed to prevent the people who controlled these corporations from extorting wealth and power from users, by requiring the corporations to provide the same service at the same price to all individuals and businesses.

One result was a political economy designed to promote the dignity of the individual, as well as the constructive engagement of the citizen within the political economy. Another was a fantastic explosion of material prosperity that made the average American much richer than their peers in almost any other nation.

Over these past 250 years, private autocrats twice overturned this American system of liberty. The first time came in 1877 when the “corrupt bargain” that made Rutherford B. Hayes president not only ended Reconstruction but also helped clear the way for lifting almost all traditional regulation on the corporation. This led to the rise of the vast all-powerful private monopolies of the plutocratic age and resulted, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, in an “Empire of Industry” that “assumed [a] monarchical power such as enthroned the Caesars.” 

Although Congress passed many vital anti-monopoly laws during this period—such as the Interstate Commerce and Sherman Antitrust Acts—it was not until the election of 1912 that Congress managed to reestablish a regulatory system fully able to protect liberal democracy from oligarchy, with passage of the Clayton Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, Federal Reserve Act, and a constitutional amendment enshrining the progressive income tax. This system, named the “New Freedom” by Woodrow Wilson, provided the foundation for the Second New Deal.

The second reaction against the democratic republic was launched in 1981 with Ronald Reagan’s suspension of anti-monopoly law. In 1993, President Bill Clinton then carried this anti-democratic libertarian philosophy to regulation of banking, finance, energy, media, telecommunications, trade, and the internet. 

In the years since, the consolidation of power and control has taken place in two broad stages. During the first, which we might call the age of Walmart, we saw the consolidation and offshoring of factories, the mass destruction of small businesses and family farms, the concentration of control in finance, the rise of Big Pharma and Big Hospital, and a slow-motion takeover of America’s housing and rental markets.

During the second, which we might call the age of Google, we saw a few vast information platforms consolidate control over online communications, commerce, debate, publishing, entertainment, and computing power, to a point where they have power to manipulate the thinking and actions both of the individual and society as a whole.

The result of these twin blows against America’s traditional system of liberty has been a collapse of the rule of law not merely in the political realm, but especially in the economic. Today in America, the chain of command is simple. The oligarchs boss us. And Trump bosses the oligarchs, including sometimes by instructing them how to direct us. In short, the restoration of monarchical autocracy, but this time amplified by surveillance tools vastly more powerful than even Joseph Stalin dared imagine.

It was not until college that I first realized the language I’d learned in Miami was not universal. At Columbia on scholarship I found a society of young people who’d never been forced to bend themselves to some job just to pay the rent. Their language was of fraternities and business mixers and parents with friends on Wall Street or in Washington or “the arts.” At graduation, they went to entry-level gigs at Salomon Brothers or Time Inc. or the State Department, or unpaid internships in film and theater.

I had long wanted to see the world. But this took money, and so I went back to the work I knew. I drove trucks across the country and dug ditches, pushed on construction sites and hauled office furniture. I learned what it’s like to not be able to scrub the smell of work off your body, how slowly a clock moves when you stand 10 hours on a line, how hard it is to sleep after you’ve picked hard rock all day. 

In time I learned how to pay for my travels through journalism, which led to six years as a correspondent in South America and the Caribbean. In addition to Maoist guerrilla war, cholera, and violent elections, I also had the opportunity to study up close two of the most brutal austerity “shock” programs of the Washington Consensus era of cartelized capital. The first, in Venezuela, led to a weeklong insurrection in Caracas, the death of more than 1,000 people, and ultimately the collapse of Latin America’s strongest democracy. The second, in Peru, did cure hyperinflation, but also left millions hungry.

Eventually I took a job running a Washington-based magazine named Global Business. Here again my timing—in terms of getting to learn how America’s new monopoly capitalism actually worked—was perfect. I started just as the Clinton administration was implementing NAFTA and finishing negotiations to create the World Trade Organization, and our circulation soon rocketed as C-suite executives at thousands of manufacturers scrambled to adapt their businesses to this radically new environment of law. We spent our days writing articles that helped corporations decide what to outsource, where to offshore, how to engineer a supply chain. I traveled to China, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Hong Kong, and across Europe and the Middle East reporting on the revolutionary restructuring of every major industrial system in the world. 

It was thanks to this work that I immediately understood the implications of a massive earthquake in Taiwan in September 1999. That event, in turn, is how I came to understand that the American elite’s obtuseness toward the threats posed by concentrated power actually matters in the real world.

The problem triggered by the quake was easy to understand. A few years before, almost every type of industrial capacity was broadly distributed across many countries. Many factories, for instance, made wiper blades and alternators. Much the same was true for high-end items like semiconductors, as more than a dozen vertically integrated manufacturers in the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea competed to make roughly interchangeable products. But the radical changes in policy by Reagan and Clinton had undone this balance, first by clearing the way for corporations to concentrate control and capacity in the U.S., then by clearing the way to concentrate control and capacity at some single point in the world.

What the earthquake taught was that over the previous few years Taiwan had managed to lock up a huge portion of the capacity to make high-end semiconductors. When the quake then disrupted the ability to make and transport these chips, the result was a cascading worldwide industrial crash that within a few days shuttered factories in California, Texas, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.

As it proved, we were lucky. The quake had not damaged the foundries, but simply disrupted just-in-time shipment of the chips. Within two weeks most factories were back online. But the quake also made clear that concentration of industrial capacity had reached a point where it was easy to imagine a far more devastating shutdown, triggered for instance by slippage of a fault line closer to the foundries. Or war, blockade, embargo, or some other disruptive political act. Or, say, a pandemic.

Over the next few years, I was among the first to describe the extreme concentration of capacity the quake had revealed, and to detail some of the potentially existential threats posed by such chokepointing of vital production. My work was anything but theoretical. It was based on conversations with hundreds of CEOs, vice presidents of manufacturing and logistics, engineers, reinsurers, and others—almost all of whom were eager to confirm my reporting. 

These managers and engineers also made clear that the problem was easy enough to fix. Unlike a pool of oil or vein of metal, we can locate machines almost anywhere. We can take all of a certain type of machine and put them in one place, or divide them among four or 40 places. What executives needed, they said, was for government to reestablish fair rules obligating all manufacturers engaged in a particular business to distribute their risk. Time and again, these engineers cited the same antique adage—never put all your eggs in one basket.

During these years, I met often with officials at top levels at Treasury, Commerce, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Federal Reserve, as well as the White House, and it was here that I began to see a pattern. Time and again, the economists in the room would challenge my reporting. They assured me that what the managers and engineers said could not be entirely true. Such an extreme concentration of capacity, without any backup plan, violated too many core theories. Clearly the executives must be after some handout, some sort of subsidy or protection. I heard this not merely from staff economists, but from men who had won or would soon win Nobels. 

I eventually concluded that many economists educated in the post-Reagan libertarian era were simply unable to see or understand certain forms of systemic risk. They had never learned how to use law to engineer resiliency. If anything, in their fixation on efficiency, they had begun to celebrate—rather than condemn—brittleness and fragility. 

There are many flaws in the French economist Thomas Piketty’s analysis about the origins of inequality. But in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he does cut to the heart of the problem posed by his U.S. counterparts. Despite their “absurd” claims to “scientific legitimacy,” Piketty writes, in actual fact “they know almost nothing about anything.” 

The idea that the early United States was an unregulated libertarian utopia is a modern myth. In fact, Americans used government both to protect themselves from private corporate power and to create new wealth.

It was in these discussions that I also came to understand there was another factor, besides the flawed theories of the economists, that further reinforced this blindness to the extreme concentration of risk in complex systems. This was the new deterministic thinking that libertarians had been pushing into U.S. policy making since the early years of Reagan. 

When the Clinton officials in the early 1990s first began to lecture Americans on how “globalization” and the digital revolution were forcefully restricting our ability to shape our economy here at home, their goal was to redirect political debate away from actions, such as stripping factories from Ohio and moving them to Chongqing, that voters would oppose. In claiming that those actions were being dictated by forces of nature, they were saying something they knew—or should have known—to be untrue.

Over time, however, I realized that more and more policy makers and journalists were beginning to actually believe in these metaphysical forces, sometimes almost religiously. I found such beliefs to be especially strong among Democrats and progressives. Historically, progressives tend to learn such deterministic thinking from people influenced by Karl Marx, such as the economist Joseph Schumpeter. In contemporary debate, the most influential early source for such thinking was Robert Reich’s 1991 book, The Work of Nations. Probably the single gaudiest distillation was Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat, from 2005, which he proudly described as a “technological determinist” vision of human thought and action.

Although in 2015 Reich repented of his earlier teachings, the damage had long since been done. The combination of bad science and weird metaphysics had helped foster a broad blindness—a collective incognizance—among an entire generation of progressives to the ways that extreme concentration had destabilized many if not most of the complex systems on which we depend today.

When I published Cornered in early 2010, my main aim was to help people see the new concentrations of power and control and understand all the ways this threatened their liberty, economic well-being, and safety and security. My main means was to resurrect the root language of American democracy, the language of power and structure and community I had learned growing up. Often this was as simple as replacing the word consumer with citizen, or the word welfare with liberty, or the word global with international.

Over the next few years, from a base at the New America think tank in Washington, we built a network of people able to see some key piece of America’s monopoly problem, and created opportunities to learn from one another’s work. We published many of the ideas we developed during those days here in the Washington Monthly. 

For more than decade now, we have also understood that in recovering and renewing America’s anti-monopoly system we were amending the motto that had guided the Democratic Party since the 1990s. Victory, from now on, would mean recognizing that “It’s the POLITICAL economy, stupid.”

In recent years, we have enjoyed phenomenal success. In 2016, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren thrust our message into public debate in a speech presenting a radically fresh analysis of the threats posed by concentration of ownership and control. In 2019 and 2020, groundbreaking hearings by the House antitrust subcommittee, chaired by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline, mapped America’s biggest monopoly threats and lighted the way for powerful antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook in 2020. Then President Joe Biden formally embraced our thinking in his executive order on competition in July 2021, and hired a new generation of law enforcers to carry the thinking into practice. 

That was just to start. The Biden White House also used competition philosophy to shape new visions for governing international trade, restructuring industrial systems, and protecting free speech and a free press. They also boosted innovation, protected independent businesses and farms, made it easier for working people to organize, and made it harder for monopolists to inflate prices. 

What these Democrats achieved was nothing less than the sweeping away of an extreme right-wing anti-democratic philosophy, and the first stages in the restoration of America’s true liberal centrist tradition based on pragmatic regulation of corporate power and behavior. These actions reinforced true rule of law, empowered citizens to shape their own futures, and made the world more secure and peaceful.

Come 2024, Democrats had everything they needed to win any debate about power, with Donald Trump or any other Republican. The one obstacle? Much of the aging mainstream of party functionaries and elite press sang from the old Clinton hymnal. In part, this was simply a matter of money; or more accurately, of a desire by people like Senator Chuck Schumer not to chase away some of the big donors who opposed Biden’s populist policies. But it was also—in some ways mainly—a function of intellectual inertia. Of the fact that so many liberals and progressives, convinced of their own necessary moral righteousness and superior erudition, never troubled to free themselves from the ideological shackles of the libertarian revolution of the 1980s and ’90s, with its fetishization of efficiency and pre-Enlightenment metaphysics. 

Reformers tend to blame political cowardice on cupidity and corruption. What I’ve learned over the past 25 years is that fatuousness, especially when combined with lack of imagination, often plays a much bigger role. 

Consider, for instance, the failure of these same Democratic elites to understand—let alone respond to—the threats posed to their own businesses, hence their own positions within society, by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and TikTok. As these corporations rolled up illegal control over advertising, the distribution of news, movies, television, and music, and the social media and email systems politicians use to speak to voters, Democratic-leaning publishers, journalists, and policy makers failed almost entirely to take coherent actions to protect themselves. 

When threatened by the rise of a new technology, every previous generation of Americans—of whatever party—would have immediately begun to use law and other policy tools to protect the democratic foundations of a free press, free speech, and free debate. Yet this last generation of liberals basically acted as if the concentration of control over these activities—and over the businesses they owned and market systems on which they depended—was a natural, inescapable, immutable function of the forces that power technological “evolution.” By contrast, this last generation of Republicans worked avidly for years to build an entire integrated complex of news publishers and communications platforms into a massive propaganda machine designed to shape thinking, action, and voting across the entire nation and political spectrum. (More recently, the Justice Department’s antitrust victories over Google’s monopolies in advertising technology and search offer a huge opportunity for all independent publishers to begin to build next-generation advertising-supported businesses.) 

And yet still, even with all the advantages this information machine conferred on Trump and the Republicans, Kamala Harris could have won comfortably last November. As Rana Foroohar detailed on these pages in October 2023, the Biden-Harris administration could have presented a powerful story of political economic transformation, including a sophisticated strategy to break the ability of monopolists to extort America’s families. 

If there’s a single emblem of why Democrats lost, it was Harris’s repeated refusal during the campaign to own Lina Khan and her team’s work at the FTC. When Reid Hoffman in July called on Harris to promise to fire Khan, the tech mogul provided the campaign an almost perfect invitation to demonstrate that their candidate understood the nature of private corporate power today, and had the strength of character to fight that power. Here was an opportunity to list all the successes of the Biden-Harris team in lowering prices, raising wages, and ensuring freedom in the digital economy. Here was an opportunity to identify a few villains Biden had missed but Harris would now target for action.

Instead, the campaign treated Khan—and Biden’s entire brave political economic team—like bastard children. And they continued to do so even as J. D. Vance and Steve Bannon happily embraced Khan and her policies. 

And so, during the final stage of the campaign, as Trump paraded oligarchs on leashes through the ballrooms of Mar-a-Lago, the apparatbrats of the Democratic Party tutored Harris on how to kiss the Lanvin low-top.

Let’s make sure we pull the right lessons.

Yes, Democratic Party elites’ failure to recognize the continuing bite of inflation played a big role in Harris’s loss. But the Democrats’ inability to speak honestly about the threats posed by concentrated power left much more than prices unaddressed.

The task ahead for Democrats is not merely to resist Trump. It is to establish a new political economic regime which ensures that our liberty and prosperity are never again threatened.

Voters also want a party which recognizes that true democracy is not simply a matter of having your vote counted. They want a party that will protect their rights as workers, by addressing the soaring imbalances of power between the corporation and employee. They want a party that will protect their rights not to be manipulated and exploited in their day-to-day lives, by tech corporations that circle their every act and thought. People also want a party that will recognize the revolutionary upheaval in their homes as social media corporations reach into the souls of their children and spouses and brothers—addicting them to porn, gambling, gaming, and crypto—or who throw open the door to vicious bullying by everyone from nasty schoolmates to corporations selling weight loss drugs.

And people want meaning. To feel, if only for a moment each day, that they are part of some common struggle.

In Trump’s sneer, in watching him force the oligarchs to kneel, many Americans see their own rage about all these indignities, their own search for justice gratified, at least in the form of punishment. In the 2024 election, the Democratic Party never delivered a believable promise to fight for true equality of opportunity, responsibility, and dignity. Nor did Trump. What he did do was promise to drag Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai into the same stinking pit of mud with the rest of us.

When voters turned to the Democratic Party, by contrast, they heard the treacly language of charity—of condescension—delivered in the tones of a courtier class
that itself stands on unfirm ground.

For four centuries, the vernacular of popular democracy taught that we all walk the same path to salvation and enlightenment. It is a language that balances the universal and eternal that binds all humans together, with recognition of the absolute glory of each and every individual quester and dreamer. 

Yet in 2024 as these pilgrims came to the Democratic Party’s door—and in the America of the 21st century, every human being is still in some way a pilgrim making their own particular progress—Democrats offered naught but a sack of pebbles and twigs that we called “policies.”

Our minds spin. We can almost feel his finger on our chest, his spittle in our face, as with twinkling eye he jackhammers our entire world of universities and law firms and goo-goo government offices, even the Kennedy Center. As his droogs perform “a little of the old ultraviolence” seemingly right in our living rooms, we sit in our mid-century loveseats, hands folded, waiting for it all to stop. Or, like that scourge of tyrants Tim Snyder, we book flights for Toronto, or flip through listings of pieds-à-terre in the Marais. 

Ain’t that right, Mr. Jones? 

Since the election, Democrats have been presented with three options for retaking power. The first, courtesy of James Carville, is to play possum till the hillbillies miss us. Second, championed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is to oppose everything Trump does, everywhere, all at once. Third is to cozy up to good oligarchs, so they can shelter us until the MAGA storm blows over. This thanks to Ezra Klein and the “abundance movement.” 

The better path is to honestly admit the radical nature and full immensity of the political threat we face, which is the direct merger of the power of the private monopoly and the state. And our own complicity in creating this crisis. And all the ways the old libertarian thinking continues to lead us back into darkness, superstition, and savagery. 

And then we should set about finishing the job the true liberal democrats of the Democratic Party began a decade ago—of fully restoring the traditional system of liberty that smarter generations than ours designed precisely to protect us against oligarchy and autocracy. 

Simply assuming that Trump will fail is foolish; weeks from now we may sit marveling as he pulls rabbits out of the sewer in the form of peace in Ukraine and a trade deal with China. Targeting Trump only—as if he were the sole source of today’s crisis—is a good way to lose our democracy forever. Trump is a true autocrat, vicious and violent. But he is our child, birthed of our own barbaric destruction of the rules liberal democrats designed over the course of hundreds of years to master the power of private corporation and state. Trump bestrides oligarchs we created.

For now, these oligarchs fear Trump. For now, they lie quiet in the deep grass. But they know Trump will stumble, later if not sooner. And so they slowly coil themselves to strike, to make our garden forever theirs.

Behold, with open eye, the absolute disdain for all the old constraints that grows in the hearts of today’s big men, not just Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, but Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison. Not only among the junta at Google, but even behind the smiling miens of Satya Nadella and Brad Smith at Microsoft, who in recent months unleashed a savage attack on democratic regulation of corporations in the UK, as they practice for bigger game. Smell their lust for control.

Their existing power over information already threatens a type of authoritarianism almost impossible for us to fully imagine. As Ellison has made clear, his aim is nothing less than an AI-powered surveillance state. Given such plans, any future American president who lacks a coherent strategy to break the oligarchs’ power will end up as little more than their enforcer, or pet.

The other threat, intimately related to that of top-down autocracy, is of chaos, collapse, and war. Every day the danger of cataclysm increases, as Trump in his Lear-like rage breaks the systems on which we rely for peace. As the oligarchs impose on society AI-amplified systems of control that lack any capacity to manage true human complexity, even as the oligarchs themselves create dangerous new chokepoints. It is a chaos that is already creating glittery new temptations for adventurism, perhaps right back at the original fault line of today’s world, Taiwan.

There is one way only to rebuild democracy, true prosperity, lasting security, and peaceful cooperation among nations. This is to break the power of the oligarchs and the system that created them. To join the people in their war to restore their liberty to use simple human commonsense tools to govern.

Today we enjoy the greatest opportunity since the New Freedom and the New Deal to frame a political economic system that truly works for every American. And given that the goal of such a system is to foster the independence, dignity, and confidence of each individual, perhaps we might even find it possible to build a new foundation for moral progress. It’s a prospect we should find exhilarating. 

So feel the cinder block wall against your back. Know with your skin you have nowhere to retreat. Relearn, thus, how to stand and fight. Relearn, thus, how to use the tools the people fashioned—over the course of four centuries—to keep you and your children free and safe. Relearn, thus, how to be a full part of a true American democratic community of equals, based on the common light in each of us.

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