by Henry Demarest Lloyd’s 1894 Wealth Against Commonwealth made the case that liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. The question 132 years later is whether equity against the one percent can still be won inside a system they pay to keep tilted. Equity against the one percent describes parity of political voice, of legal protection, of access to courts and schools and air and water and a livable wage, with no implication that fortunes themselves must be equal. The republic was built on that equality of standing, however imperfectly executed and however brutally suspended along racial and gender lines. The wealth concentration of the past forty years has retired the idea entirely.
In the third quarter of 2025, the top one percent of American households held 31.7 percent of total household net worth and 35.6 percent of all financial assets, according to the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts. The top ten percent held more than 113 trillion dollars, a record. The top ten percent of earners now account for 49.2 percent of all consumer spending in the country, the highest share since the Federal Reserve began compiling that statistic in 1989. We have moved from a two-class economy to a one-class economy with everyone else paying admission.
Lloyd’s specific target was the Standard Oil Trust and the political class it had bought. In October 2008, during the financial collapse, I wrote on this site that we had failed to heed him and were relearning the lessons of Standard Oil at a generation’s interval. Eighteen years on, the concentration has compounded, the muckraking has multiplied, and the diagnosis still applies. Where do a free people turn for a way out of the monopolistic darkness when the destroyers of liberty are creating wealth out of national despair?
The question is whether equity can be reclaimed inside a system the wealthy pay to keep tilted. Honest answer first, then the work. The honest answer is yes, partially, slowly, against resistance, and only if the working class organizes its own counterweight rather than waiting for the wealthy to develop a conscience. There is no historical case of concentrated wealth voluntarily releasing political power. There is no example of philanthropy substituting for taxation. The Gilded Age reformers won what they won by building movements that made the existing order more expensive to defend than to change. That is the model. That is the only model that has ever worked.
The Wealth Defense Industry
What political scientists now call the wealth defense industry is the network of lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, foundation officers, family-office managers, public relations firms, and think-tank fellows whose work is to preserve and grow the fortunes of the top one percent. Its visible ledger is enormous.
The 2024 federal election cycle cost roughly 15.9 billion dollars in spending tracked by OpenSecrets, with another 4.6 billion at the state level for a combined total above 20 billion. Outside spending, mostly through Super PACs created in the wake of Citizens United v. FEC (2010), exceeded 4.5 billion dollars in the same cycle. Dark money, defined as spending by groups that do not disclose their donors, hit a record 1.9 billion dollars in 2024 according to the Brennan Center for Justice, almost twice the prior record set in 2020. A single billionaire, Elon Musk, routed roughly 169 million dollars into America PAC during the cycle. Miriam Adelson contributed about 100 million to Preserve America PAC. Richard Uihlein steered an additional 53 million into Restoration PAC. These are individual checks larger than the entire campaign budgets of most members of Congress.
That is the visible ledger. The invisible one runs through tax policy, where work by Akcan Balkir, Emmanuel Saez, Danny Yagan, and Gabriel Zucman published as NBER Working Paper 34170 in 2025 found that the effective total tax rate of the wealthiest Americans, roughly the Forbes 400, averaged about 24 percent across 2018 to 2020, compared with 30 percent for the population as a whole and 45 percent for top labor income earners. The corporate rate cut from 35 percent to 21 percent in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, extended in 2025, did most of that work. Critics, including Treasury economist David Splinter, argue that adjustments for accounting choices raise the figure by about thirteen points. Even taking the higher end of that critique, the structural fact remains. The richest people in the country pay a smaller share of their economic income in federal taxes than a registered nurse making 85,000 dollars a year. The wealth defense industry built that result. It will not unbuild itself.
The Myth of Withdrawal
A common shorthand says that the wealthy have withdrawn from the public commons, that they fly private, school private, doctor private, drive private, and therefore no longer feel the pull of public obligation. The shorthand is half right, which is the dangerous half. They have withdrawn from public consumption while remaining tightly bound to state power.
Their drivers ride on roads the public funds. Private jets land at airports staffed by federal controllers. Fortunes are denominated in a currency stabilized by a central bank, secured by patents granted by a federal office, traded on exchanges supervised by federal regulators, and protected by courts paid for by ordinary taxpayers. The pharmaceutical companies whose stock makes them rich rely on basic research funded by the National Institutes of Health. Semiconductor companies in their portfolios trace back to DARPA contracts. Internet infrastructure that delivers their wealth to global markets was a Pentagon project. They are deeply invested in public infrastructure. They have arranged matters so the rest of us pay for it.
That arrangement is the leverage point. The withdrawal is a story they tell themselves to feel less obligated. The dependency is real. When wildfire reaches Aspen, when flooding reaches Hampton estates, when a pandemic reaches private islands, the story breaks down. The republic is one organism. The fantasy of escape produces a class that allows the commons to degrade until the degradation arrives at the gate. That is a strategic vulnerability. Working-class organizing can press it.
Why Argument Alone Has Never Worked
In 2014, Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page published “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” in the journal Perspectives on Politics. Their study examined roughly 1,800 specific policy questions between 1981 and 2002, comparing the recorded preferences of average voters, of economic elites, and of organized interest groups against actual policy outcomes. Their central finding was that economic elites and business-aligned organizations produced substantial independent effects on policy while average citizens produced almost none once elite preferences were controlled for. Critics, notably Omar Bashir in 2015, argued the statistical model overstates the gap and that average citizens win their preferred outcome roughly as often as elites do when the two groups disagree. The methodological dispute is real, though the descriptive picture survives it. Anyone who has worked a phone bank, sat through a zoning meeting, or watched a healthcare bill move through committee already knows the answer.
The class is also not monolithic. Warren Buffett has argued in print for higher taxes on his own income bracket. Bill Gates has signed pledges to give away most of his fortune. A small number of inheritors organize through groups like Patriotic Millionaires and Resource Generation. The structural incentives of the class as a whole still run the other direction, which is why such pledges remain news rather than baseline.
History supports the picture. The Gilded Age delivered a wealth concentration comparable to the present, with railroad fortunes, oil fortunes, and steel fortunes operating largely outside democratic accountability. Reform took roughly forty years and required the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Pujo Committee investigations into the money trust beginning in 1912, the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing a federal income tax in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment establishing direct election of senators in the same year, the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, the Clayton Antitrust Act of the same year, and a steady output of investigative journalism beginning with Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth in 1894 and continuing through Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and others. The reforms came after visible disasters. Homestead in 1892. Pullman in 1894. Triangle Shirtwaist in 1911. The Panic of 1907. A generation later, the wealthy accepted the New Deal partly because Franklin Roosevelt sold it to them as the price of avoiding something worse, with the Communist Party USA, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Townsend Plan all visible to their left as credible alternatives to capital itself. Concession comes only from organized force.
The analogy is imperfect. Current concentration occurred under globalization, financialization, and digital network effects unknown in 1900. Reform tools must be calibrated for those conditions, including international tax coordination, platform-specific antitrust, and labor standards designed for gig work and AI displacement. The historical lesson holds. The implementation does not transfer cleanly.
Six Fronts of Leverage
Equity against the one percent runs along six fronts. None substitutes for any other. All reinforce one another when they move together.
The first is labor. Private-sector union density in the United States stood at 5.9 percent in 2025 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with public-sector density at 32.9 percent, and overall coverage at 11.2 percent of wage and salary workers. The Economic Policy Institute reports the highest absolute count of unionized workers in sixteen years, with private-sector unionization rising from 6.7 to 6.8 percent and federal worker unionization rising from 29.9 to 31.1 percent in a single year, the largest single-year federal increase since 2011. The curve has begun to bend, with health care, retail, and educational services driving the gains, and roughly fifty million more nonunion workers indicating they would join a union if they could. Effective because labor organizing produces a counterweight at the scale of capital, with strike funds, member dues, and political mobilization all operating in the same currency the wealthy use against working people. Not effective on its own because the National Labor Relations Act has been hollowed out by sixty years of judicial interpretation and employer obstruction, with first-contract failure rates above forty percent and routine retaliation against organizers. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the proposed federal restoration of meaningful labor protections, has cleared the House twice and died in the Senate both times.
Antitrust enforcement is the second front. The doctrine that animated the Sherman and Clayton Acts collapsed in the 1970s under the influence of Robert Bork’s “consumer welfare” framework, which permitted any merger that did not raise prices in the short term. The result was four decades of concentration across airlines, banking, hospital systems, agricultural processing, software platforms, and retail. Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division reopened the enforcement arc between 2021 and 2025. Whether their successors continue that work or revert to the prior posture will determine whether the next generation of fortunes seals before reform arrives. Effective because antitrust attacks the source of wealth concentration directly, breaking choke points before holders convert market power into political power. Not effective on its own because litigation moves on multi-year timelines while market consolidation moves on quarterly ones, and because adverse appellate panels can undo a decade of work in a single ruling.
Taxation is the third. The top marginal income tax rate stood at 91 percent under Eisenhower and 70 percent through 1981. The current top rate is 37 percent, and the effective rate on the wealthiest sits closer to 24. Saez and Zucman have proposed a progressive wealth tax of two percent above 50 million dollars and three percent above one billion, which their projections show would raise above 200 billion dollars annually in the United States alone. A constitutional challenge to such a tax is likely under Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, though the Sixteenth Amendment provides a path. Easier and more immediate proposals exist. Taxing capital gains as ordinary income, ending the stepped-up basis at death that lets dynastic wealth escape tax entirely, restoring the estate tax to pre-2001 thresholds, and closing the carried-interest loophole would each raise meaningful revenue and reduce the ammunition the wealthy use against organized labor. International coordination matters here. Zucman’s 2024 G20 report proposed a minimum tax on billionaires equivalent to two percent of wealth, which would generate roughly 200 billion dollars annually if adopted across major economies. Without coordination, capital flight to lower-tax jurisdictions limits what any single country can collect. Effective because reducing the size of the largest fortunes reduces the political damage they can do, regardless of what courts say about money as speech. Not effective on its own because tax policy alone does not change who runs for office or who wins.
Public financing of elections is the fourth front. Citizens United explicitly permits public financing systems that operate alongside private money. Seattle’s Democracy Voucher Program, in operation since 2017, mails every registered voter four 25-dollar vouchers each cycle to give to qualifying candidates. University of Washington research published in the Journal of Public Economics in 2022 found the program increased donations per race by 53 percent, increased donor counts by 350 percent, and increased the number of candidates by 86 percent. Donor participation in Seattle local elections rose from 1.49 percent of residents in 2013 to nearly 10 percent by 2021. The donor pool became measurably more representative by race, age, and income. New York City’s matching funds program, the model that influenced Seattle, provides eight-to-one match on small donations and has operated for four decades. Maine and Arizona have full clean-elections systems for state office, though both have been contested in court and weakened by subsequent legislatures, a reminder that public financing victories require maintenance to survive. Effective because public financing changes whose phone calls candidates return, which changes which bills get drafted, which changes who runs in the next cycle. Not effective on its own because matching small donations does not equalize the spending power of one billionaire writing one Super PAC check, and because the Super PAC vehicle remains the actual delivery mechanism in the post-2010 environment. Reform here means combining public financing with restored disclosure requirements and, eventually, a constitutional amendment overturning Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Burger Court decision that first equated money with speech and which is the deeper root of Citizens United.
The fifth front is election administration and the franchise itself. Organizing produces nothing if votes do not count or if maps are pre-decided. The collapse of preclearance under Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the proliferation of voter-roll purges, the intentional understaffing of urban polling places, and the geometry of partisan gerrymandering all operate as ammunition multipliers for concentrated wealth. The For the People Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would address most of this at the federal level. Both have stalled. State-level reform, including independent redistricting commissions in Michigan, California, and Colorado, has produced measurable improvements in the relationship between vote share and seat share. Effective because the franchise is the only nonviolent mechanism by which working people convert numerical majority into legislative majority. Not effective on its own because election administration cannot, by itself, produce candidates worth voting for or movements worth voting with.
Civic press is the sixth front. Local journalism collapsed across the past two decades, with more than 2,500 American newspapers closing since 2005 and roughly 200 counties now classified as news deserts. The wealthy depend on the absence of scrutiny in the same way they depend on the absence of regulation. Pro-public-records nonprofits, regional investigative outlets such as ProPublica’s state partnerships, the rise of subscription-supported newsletters, and university partnerships with local newsrooms have begun to fill some of the void. Civic literacy programs and public library funding can extend the reach. Effective because what is documented can be addressed and what is hidden cannot. Not effective on its own because journalism describes power without commanding it, and because hostile actors have learned to flood the information channel rather than capture it.
The Maintenance Problem
Reform requires maintenance. Every gain made in 1935 was contested again in 1947 with Taft-Hartley, again in the deregulatory wave of the 1970s, and again in the 2017 tax cuts. The wealthy do not stop fighting because they lose a single round. Working-class organizing must extend across decades, with institutional infrastructure that does not depend on a single charismatic leader or a single election outcome, or the gains erode. Reform that arrives without the organizing base behind it gets repealed within a presidential term. The Affordable Care Act survived Republican repeal efforts only because organized constituencies, including hospital systems, insurance carriers, and patient advocacy groups, mobilized to defend it. Working-class reforms typically lack that defense bench, which is why they have shorter half-lives.
The Coalition Problem
The phrase “working class” carries an assumption that needs interrogating. The American working class is divided by race, region, language, immigration status, and trade, and those divisions have been weaponized for as long as the republic has existed. Frederick Douglass observed in his Life and Times that the slaveholders’ first achievement was teaching poor white workers to identify with their masters rather than their fellow laborers. The mechanism survived emancipation, survived the Knights of Labor and the AFL split, and survived the New Deal coalition’s collapse over civil rights. Today a substantial share of working-class voters still select candidates who legislate against their own economic interests, persuaded that cultural identity matters more than wages, healthcare, or pension security. The Gilded Age reformers were also, frequently, white supremacists, nativists, eugenicists, and prohibitionists whose movements excluded Black workers, immigrant workers, and women workers from the gains they extracted from capital. The wealth defense industry knows this history and exploits it. Any working-class counterweight that does not address race, immigration, gender, and rural-urban divisions head-on will fracture along the same fault lines that fractured every prior attempt. Solidarity must be built, with intention, across the divisions the wealthy have spent two centuries widening.
A theory of change follows from this. Federal reform arrives last, after state and municipal proof of concept builds the political class capable of carrying it through Congress. Seattle, New York, Maine, and Arizona produced public-financing systems before any federal version cleared committee. The Fight for Fifteen movement raised the minimum wage in cities and states for a decade before the federal floor moved. Medicaid expansion proved the demand for healthcare reform state by state. The pattern is consistent. Movements win locally, scale regionally, and reach Washington only when the legislative arithmetic has already been done at lower levels. Anyone planning a single national push in a single election cycle is planning a defeat. The work is multilevel and it is patient.
The Deep Version
The fronts above describe political work. The deeper answer involves something the Scandinavian social democracies understood and Americans still resist. Make public goods so good that the wealthy ride the trains because the trains are better than driving. Build schools so strong that the wealthy enroll their children alongside everyone else’s. Fund a healthcare system so reliable that boutique concierge medicine becomes redundant. The withdrawal of the wealthy is partly chosen and partly produced. We have permitted public goods to deteriorate to the point where opting out feels rational to anyone who can afford it, and then complained about the opting out. Restoring the commons is harder than complaining about its abandonment. It is also the only durable answer. A republic in which a senator’s child and a janitor’s child sit in the same first-grade classroom is a republic the wealthy have a stake in defending.
That stake is the long game. Forty years of organizing built the wealth defense industry. Forty years of organizing can build its counterweight, working-class infrastructure that does not blink when a billionaire writes a 100-million-dollar check, because the counterweight has fifty million people writing 25-dollar checks and showing up to vote and going on strike when negotiations stall. The math works. The organizing has not yet caught up to the math.
Is It Possible?
Yes. Not soon, not easy, not without setbacks, not within a single election cycle, and not on the strength of any single reform. Possible across a generation, across multiple fronts moving together, across a recovered labor movement and a restored antitrust posture and a tax code that does not reward dynastic accumulation and a press capable of telling people what is happening to them. Possible when the conditions of 1900 produce the response of 1932, with the difference that this time the wealthy will not stop at New Deal concessions and the reform coalition will need to be prepared for that.
My recommendation, ranked by leverage and sequenced for plausible implementation. First, rebuild private-sector labor organizing as the only counterweight that operates at the same scale as concentrated capital, and pass federal legislation restoring the right to organize without retaliation. Second, expand state and city public financing programs as proof of concept, since they train candidates, build donor habits, and produce the political class who will eventually pass federal reform. Third, restore antitrust enforcement aggressive enough to prevent the next round of fortunes from sealing into political ammunition. Fourth, use tax policy as the rear guard, closing carried interest, ending stepped-up basis, restoring the estate tax, taxing capital gains as ordinary income, and pursuing a wealth tax above 50 million dollars regardless of how the constitutional fight ends, because the fight itself shifts the framing. Fifth, defend election administration and the franchise as the precondition for everything else. Sixth, fund the civic press as the documentary record without which reform cannot be argued. And seventh, the long arc, build public goods so good that the wealthy rejoin the country they govern, because that is the only configuration the republic has ever survived.
Equity against the one percent is possible. The one percent is counting on us not believing that.
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