Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. A shorter version was published in Project Syndicate.
September 28, 2026 — The American political system is broken. We should ask how it got that way and should hope that the answer could contain a clue as to how it might get back on track.
Of course, many factors are at play. The long list includes things that cry out for reform, like gerrymandering of Congressional districts. But most will not bear the weight of being identified as a single fundamental exogenous cause of all the others, nor explain why this has happened now, in the early decades of the 21st century.
A common theory is that the root cause of the problems plaguing US politics is heightened income inequality, which has allowed the emergence of a self-perpetuating oligarchy that is able to buy the policies it wants through political contributions. The prescription that would follow starts by rallying to a campaign to reduce the economic gap between the richest citizens and those with lower incomes. This probably captures the spirit of the new candidates associated with Democratic Socialists on the left.
Yes, the increase in inequality is highly undesirable. Relatively attainable policy responses would include expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and expanding Obamacare. Yes, the upper .01 percent have been able to perpetuate their wealth as it is passed down to their descendants by successfully pushing for such regressive steps as the near dismantling of the estate tax. Yes, there is too much money in politics. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, for example, was a wrong turn. But these propositions do not add up to a chain of causality that can explain the root cause of our troubles let alone suggest how to fix them.
Consider four possible counterarguments to this oft-repeated theory.
- Being rich is not necessarily correlated with being right-wing or conservative. If anything, income and education these days are generally correlated with being liberal. Blue states, for example, have higher incomes than red states. Within states, blue counties have higher incomes than red counties. This is not to deny that many of the ultra-rich, the upper 1/100 of 1%, have sold their souls to get their taxes cut.
- Donald Trump did not achieve his original rise from buffoon to president in 2016 via campaign contributions. The media gave him all the free publicity he needed.
- It is not even clear that campaign contributions have a major effect on electoral outcomes, especially in cases where the candidate is already well-known to the electorate. The deeply held belief to the contrary is not clearly supported by statistical evidence, as surprising as that sounds. Admittedly, political donations could have an effect on politicians’ behavior even if they don’t get them elected. For one thing, so long as politicians think that campaign spending affects electoral outcomes – which they do – they could cater to the wishes of their contributors. For another thing, in the age of we must now take seriously the widespread suspicions that, even in the US, money goes into the politicians’ personal pockets and thus could have an effect on the behavior of our leaders without involving elections. But the direct efficacy of campaign spending is less than widely believed.
- Liberal political activists, motivated by the inequality issue above all others, are in danger of getting swept up in the evident new momentum of the Far Left. Democratic Socialists are trending. But support for such politicians in the primaries or as third-party candidates is a sure way to get Republicans elected. The lesson should have been clear when Ralph Nader’s candidacy delivered the 2000 election to George W. Bush. The median voter theorem still stands.
Even to the extent that political causality does run from inequality to conservative economic outcomes, the diagnosis doesn’t offer much of a road map for finding the way back. What is the route to moderating income inequality and oligarchic tendencies? It is no good just saying that “we” should adopt more progressive economic policies. Resentment of wealthy elites is already a big driver in electoral politics, but that does not necessarily lead to good electoral outcomes. Donald Trump managed to hoodwink those voters who felt “left behind” into voting for him, by convincing them that he would fight for their interests. Even though he did the opposite in this first term — cutting taxes for the rich and seeking to dismantle Obamacare — they elected him to a second. They don’t vote their own interests.
A better explanation for the fundamental source of dysfunction in the political process is that increasingly we believe to them, with (ii) new technology that has made it possible for each citizen to follow the news sources that tell them what they want to hear.
Recent trends in technology have exacerbated long-standing patterns of perception bias. We used all to get our news from the same few TV networks. Now, algorithms in social media steer the observer increasingly to the news sources that tell them what they want to hear, and the observer – while often aware of this fact in principle — fails to take into account that the information they are seeing with their own eyes has been heavily curated to reinforce their own prejudices. Their systematic perception errors fail to allow for the possibility of sample selection bias. This proposition is my inexpert attempt to group together the sources of systematic errors that psychologists and behavioral economists call the availability heuristic, anchoring, confirmation bias, and related phenomena. The result, of course, is that we believe different facts.
Just because these psychological attributes are deeply imbedded in human brains (plausibly as an outcome of evolution), doesn’t mean they can’t be deliberately taken into account and corrected for. Society can disapprove of social media’s engineering of algorithms that feed perception biases. Students in school can be taught critical thinking. Don’t believe everything you hear. Don’t pass on gossip with higher confidence than it warrants. Look for footnotes/links to reputable sources; and include such citations in what you write or tweet. Don’t shy away from venues where people communicate with others outside their comfort zone. Recognize that scientific statements coming from credentialed experts are likely to be more accurate than claims motivated by hatred for expertise and credentials. Don’t assume that correlation necessarily implies causation. Don’t jump from the proposition that something has particular undesirable effects to the proposition that all its effects are undesirable.
Prescriptions like these certainly sound like pie in the sky, far beyond what any realistic political strategy can hope to achieve. But consider how much harder it is to carry out a political strategy of shifting resources away from wealthy elites. Raising the political salience of inequality among the electorate won’t do it, because if the systematic perception errors are not attenuated, the strategy could continue to produce Trump votes as easily as support for progressive policies. Trying to build support for platforms of policies like tax progressivity or universal health care won’t do it, if the public does not accurately perceive the effects of the policies. And even where political campaigns in favor of specific progressive policies are successful at redistributing income, this will not necessarily generate a virtuous circle of restored political sanity and good policies. The knock-on effects of reducing the flow of campaign contributions to conservatives do not have as much self-reinforcing power that some appear to believe.
It will remain an uphill battle. But an effort to teach people to think critically would be self-reinforcing, as it would move the politicians and voters in the direction of support for science, expertise, and rationality. The effects would entail better policies and less income inequality as an outcome rather than as a purported starting point.
This post written by Jeffrey Frankel.
I think this is true. But it is an uphill battle – Trump and tech oligarchs are ahead of you.
The Trump admin is dismantling the Dept of Education and is implementing new rules that gut key student protections on program quality and is using Executive branch leverage to exert ideological control over American higher education. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administration-moves-to-tighten-grip-on-colleges/
Also – tech oligarchs control the design, direction, and systemic biases of social media algorithms through their personal platform ownership. (Example – Twitter became cesspool X).
In my community – I do GOTV and door to door voter education/connections and that is a lot of hard work.
First and foremost, thanks very much for this. In the proper forum, it ought to provoke at widespread scholarly discussion. In particular, historians, and constitutional historians in particular, would find a lot to chew on here. In that regard, I am taking the liberty of forwarding this to Prof. Jack Rakove at UCLA and Josh Chafetz at Georgetown.
There is so much to say, volumes could be written. But let me make an *extremely* summarized response.
Human nature never changes. Pace Minsky, stability breeds complacency, which in return breeds instability – which can then bring down the system. Once a saeculum has passed, the safeguards erected to prevent the return of a particular evil are usually weakened or even dismantled (e.g., “Why do we need this measles vaccine any more?”).
David Broder’s 1980 book “The Changing of the Guard” describes this happening in real time among politicians of both parties (including Democrats Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, Bill and HIllary Clinton among others). The evils of runaway capitalism having been tamed, and the obvious problems of strangling red tape being evident, the “new” guard believed that a freed market would improve society’s wealth and allow them to focus on social inequalities. This dovetailed with the GOP’s renewed “neoliberal” push as well. And so for the past 45+ years, those safeguards were duly diluted or eliminated. And here we are.
Further, for that same period of time, the GOP has been essentially an alliance between Wall Street and the Bible Belt (and bigots, which overlap considerably with the latter). The essence of right wing evangelism is that the US is G*d’s chosen country to bring about the Second Coming, and that anything that gets in the way of that Destiny is not just politically wrong, but Satanic, and must be destroyed at all costs – including destroying the Republic if need be.
Pace Jay Gould’s “I can hire half of the working class to kill the other half,” the Wall Street wing has used the Bible Belt wing to get what it wants, in return for giving the Bible Belt wing most of what it wants. T—-p, as someone else has said, merely answered the GOP’s casting call for a demagogue.
So the current oligarchy is both a symptom and, as it has become more and more entrenched, a cause of the current situation. Recall that studies have shown that it is not the (un-)popularity of an issue, but rather the money lined up on each side, which typically most decisively has driven the legislative attention to that issue.
I spent much of the last 10 years following the 2016 election reading about historical republics, seeking an answer to whether they have been inherently unstable and liable to failure (answer: no, actually they are quite robust in comparison with the constant wars of succession and palace coups prevalent in autocracies). But their Achilles heel is that once power is given to a faction, it tends over time to become more and more entrenched. It is when that power cannot be defeated by use of the electoral and legal systems of republics when they become increasingly brittle and ultimately fail.
I submit that is where the US is now. We know from psychology that once a person gains something, they are *very* resistant to giving even part of it back. Hence Billionaires will fight tooth and nail to prevent any increase in taxation or diminution of their power. So I further submit that it is likely that, whenever the situation is resolved, it will include a Constitutional rupture that at least in part overthrows the 1789 regime (because it is nearly impossible to pass Constitutional Amendments, and the Supreme Court might interpret them as nullities – cf. the 15th Amendment – if it so chooses).
That is my super-super-super abridged response. Once again, thank you for this important essay.
All right, further on this.
About a decade ago economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson wrote “Why Nations Fail,” positing that countries with a strong rule of law and a widespread distribution of benefits, succeeded, while “extractive economies” typified by a ruler at the top who is above the law who along with his cronies siphons off as much created wealth as possible, fail. The US may well have crossed the proverbial Rubicon from the former to the latter.
At root, the rise of the US oligarchy can be tied to the economic system’s privileging financial investment over work.
Consider the following. What has been the reward for labor for a person who entered workforce 40 years ago and in each year since earned the average wage for nonsupervisory workers. Compare that with a failson gifted the same amount in a stock market trust our worker earned in 1986 alone. If we norm each to $10,000 in 1986, the worker has earned $770,273 for his lifetime of work. Meanwhile our failson’s stock portfolio, if invested in the S&P, is worth $318,227, or about 40% of the worker’s total lifetime earnings. If it were invested in the Nasdaq, it would be $558,676, or almost 75% of the worker’s total lifetime earnings.
This by no means is a perfect analogy, because of course our worker could invest any money he has left over after paying his bills. And our failson has bills to pay as well. But it does perfectly show (in my opinion anyway) the drastic effects of the long-term prioritization of financial investment over work.
“But support for such politicians in the primaries or as third-party candidates is a sure way to get Republicans elected. The lesson should have been clear when Ralph Nader’s candidacy delivered the 2000 election to George W. Bush. The median voter theorem still stands.”
We need to keep in mind that the policies pursued by right-wing candidates are generally unpopular, while most policies on the left are close to what the median voter wants. Decades of propaganda, channeled through news organizations owned by the wealthy, have created an impression that progressives are “radical left-wing crazies”, when their agendas are pretty closely aligned with voter preferences. The Democratic Socialist Party platform, a catch-all for every idea any of the “outs” on the left have had since WWII, is not the agenda of most Democratic Socialist candidates.
Every social movement has an extreme fringe. Yes, that fringe is a problem, but it is also necessary if there is to be change. If less fringey candidates have to choose between distancing themselves from the fringe or telling voters what their own agenda is, what they stand for, the choice is clear – state the case for your policies. Hippie bashing doesn’t give voters a reason to vote for you.
Now, on to the bigger issue. I nearly always agree with Professor Frankel, but in this case, I think his central premise is wrong. If I understand his point correctly, it is that we can’t take economic resources from the rich, but we can educate ourselves to resist the pernicious effects of information technology and of propaganda offered by the rich. I don’t know why we should believe that approach will work.
Look at New Deal democrat’s two comments. Underneath his description of the likely political future is the assumption of extremes of power which lead to abuse and then repudiation of the abusers; there is a natural swing. We don’t successfully resist the swing as it turns corrupt. We toss the bumbs out when we finally catch on to their game. NDd isn’t alone in thinking that broad social dynamics rather than carefully planned corrections reperesent the true nature of societal change.
I’m all for citizens with better intellectual defenses against demagogues. I’m all for more thoughtful people in general. But I don’t see evidence of that often having worked to correct a swing toward the accumulation of power. Tamany, maybe. Hungary just now. Ukraine isn’t at all clear. Solon was given power and used it, but didn’t need to rely on a sophisticated middle class for his power. Education has certainly provided great material advantages, and material advantages have tended to be accompanied by liberty and democracy, but education looks to me to have spread as part of unplanned societal change – a supply and demand sort of thing – not because of a plan to foster enlightenment.
Do the good guys need an agenda? Absolutely. If NDd’s scenario works out, then big changes are coming once we repudiate our gluttonous elites. The result can be stupid and harmful, it can be little more than “not what we had before”, or it can drive toward a more egalitarian, more sustainable, less harmful set of rules. Maybe the good guys should agitate for that.
We should educate ourselves, but not as a buffer against the winners of the post-Reagan era. That’s backward-looking. We need to think about the next swing, and how to make it successful. There’s no guarantee the good guys will get to design the future, but it’s worth a try.
“Democratic Socialists are trending. But support for such politicians in the primaries or as third-party candidates is a sure way to get Republicans elected.”
Just had to slip that in there, didn’t you, to prove your “moderate” bona fides.
Just goes to illustrate why so many young people are disgusted with the Democratic establishment. As an example we have New York, one of the most reliably Democratic states, yet has Chuck Schumer who once bragged “I just forced Republicans to delete their ridiculous bill name. It’s no longer named the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill.” Yeah, that was the extent of his actions. And then we have Kirsten Gillibrand who is in bed with the crypto techbros and whose unaccomplished nepo 22-year-old son coincidentally raised $30 million from the same sources to start his own crypto scam.
critical thinking comes from a strong education system. you think the recent attack on higher education is an accident? you think the decades long attack on public education is an accident? texas is gutting funding for its public education system to fund private school vouchers that the best private schools in texas refuse to accept, because they will need to adopt their curriculum to what the republican legislature says should be taught. free quality public education should be a priority of any democracy. gutting education is antidemocratic.