Concentrated and Distributed

The organizing axis American politics is already reaching for, and why it matters now

There is an argument I keep encountering, from people whose politics I otherwise agree with, that goes like this. The left-right axis is broken. It no longer maps the actual disagreements in American life and so it polarizes without clarifying. We should get past it.

And then, almost always, the same people reach for a version of centrism as the alternative - moderation on everything, the difference split, the temperature lowered, the hard questions about race and economy and membership and power gently deferred in the name of keeping the tent wide.

I think this is a trap, and I want to propose a different way out of it.

The problem with left-right is not that it is too contentious. The problem is that it bundles together questions that don’t have to move together, and in bundling them, forecloses coalitions that could otherwise exist. The move out of left-right is not to bundle less contentiously. It is to unbundle deliberately, and to ask: is there an axis along which politically productive competition could be organized right now, in this country, under these conditions, without requiring anyone to defer justice in the name of unity?

I think there is. And I think the field is already reaching for it without quite naming it.

The axis is concentrated power versus distributed power. And it is the closest thing American politics currently has to an organizing frame that can move majorities, reach across the current coalitions, and address the inequalities the left-right frame has been unable to resolve.

What the axis picks up

Concentrated power, in the American context, means something specific. It means monopoly in markets like Amazon, Bayer, Ticketmaster, the meatpacking oligopoly, the consolidated health insurance giants, and the private equity roll-up of everything from dental practices to nursing homes to local newspapers. It means concentrated wealth, in the form of billionaire fortunes that now rival the GDP of mid-sized countries. It means concentrated political influence, in the form of a campaign finance regime that turns elections into auctions. It means concentrated surveillance capacity in the hands of a small number of tech platforms and a growing security state, and concentrated media ownership, which shapes what the country knows about itself. And it means the concentration of decision-making authority, both in corporate boardrooms and in an executive branch increasingly willing to act without legislative constraint.

Distributed power is the opposite of each of these. Competitive markets, broadly held wealth, small-donor democracy, data and privacy rights, and diverse and local media. And it means participatory decision-making in workplaces, neighborhoods, and public institutions.

Look at who’s organized on the concentrated side of that line and who’s organized on the distributed side. The concentrated side has the billionaire donor class, the private equity industry, the tech oligarchs, the consolidated corporate sector, and the political apparatus that serves them across both parties. The distributed side has - or could have - small business owners, independent farmers, working-class renters, labor unions, small-town civic leaders, small-town conservatives who remember what their main streets used to look like, urban progressives who want rent to be affordable, anti-monopoly economists, privacy advocates, civic-minded libertarians, faith communities that hold traditions about the dignity of work and the wrongness of usury, and an enormous swath of the American public that believes, correctly, that the system is rigged.

That’s a majoritarian coalition. It’s not currently organized as one, and it’s held apart, in large part, by the left-right frame that keeps its members sorted into opposing tribes on questions that are, from the perspective of concentrated power, beside the point.

Why this axis resolves what left-right cannot

The reason to reach for this axis isn’t novelty. It’s that the inequalities left-right has been unable to resolve - racial, economic, and democratic - are all, at their root, inequalities of concentrated power.

Racial inequality in the United States is not primarily a cultural phenomenon. It’s a structure of accumulated advantage, enforced over centuries, in which wealth, land, credit, housing, education, health, and political voice were systematically concentrated along a racial line. The mechanisms of that concentration - redlining, convict leasing, exclusion from the GI Bill, extraction by subprime lenders, displacement by real estate capital, over-policing as social control - are all mechanisms of concentrated power operating on racial terrain. You can’t address American racial inequality without addressing concentrated economic power, because they’re the same machinery viewed from different angles.

Economic inequality is the direct output of concentrated power. Wages stagnate when labor is disorganized relative to capital. Housing costs explode when ownership concentrates. Healthcare costs explode when insurers and hospital systems consolidate. Small towns hollow out when retail concentrates. Farms consolidate when input suppliers and processors consolidate upstream and downstream. These are not mysterious cultural trends. They are the visible effects of concentrated power operating on ordinary people.

Democratic erosion is what happens when political power concentrates. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, campaign finance capture, judicial capture, the weaponization of state power against dissent - all of it is concentration of political authority, moving in one direction. Authoritarianism is the end state of that process, not a departure from it.

The left-right frame treats these as separate domains, each with its own politics. The concentrated-distributed frame sees them as a single phenomenon with multiple expressions, and proposes a single answer: distribute the power.

This reframing doesn’t erase race. It centers race differently. It says that addressing racial inequality requires addressing the concentrated power that produced and maintains it, and that the coalition capable of addressing concentrated power is larger than the coalition currently organized around racial justice alone. It invites an honest conversation about how concentration was racialized from the beginning, and it makes the economic stakes of racial justice legible to audiences who would otherwise tune out. It lets the racial analysis surface from the work, rather than requiring it as the price of admission.

The American tradition this draws on

None of this is new. The anti-monopoly tradition is one of the oldest strands of American political thought - older than the left-right frame, older than most of what we now think of as American politics. It begins with the Jeffersonian critique of concentrated financial power and runs through Jacksonian anti-bank politics, the Populist Party of the 1890s, the Progressive Era trust-busting of Roosevelt and Taft, the Brandeisian jurisprudence of the 1910s, the New Deal’s structural interventions against monopoly and finance, the Eisenhower-era commitment to small business and independent farmers, and the mid-century labor movement at its most organized. It survived into the 1970s in the person of figures like Fred Harris and Wright Patman. It was deliberately broken, as a governing tradition, by the Bork-era revolution in antitrust law, which redefined the purpose of competition policy as consumer welfare rather than the prevention of concentrated power. That revolution is now being undone, slowly, by a neo-Brandeisian revival that has made significant inroads in both parties.

The tradition has always understood that concentrated economic power and concentrated political power are not separable. Louis Brandeis’s famous line - that we can have concentrated wealth in a few hands or democracy, but not both - wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. It was the analytical spine of a whole school of American political economy. That school is reawakening now because the facts on the ground have made its case again.

The revival is visible in unlikely places. The current Federal Trade Commission’s approach to monopoly, even under hostile conditions, represents a genuine departure from forty years of laissez-faire. Republican populists, however incoherently, attack big tech, big pharma, and big finance in language their pro-corporate leadership would have considered heretical a decade ago. Small farmers in red states are organizing against corporate consolidation of agriculture. Small business coalitions that were once reliable Chamber of Commerce constituencies are now, in many places, pulling in a different direction because the Chamber of Commerce now represents the companies eating them. The energy is there, but it hasn’t yet been organized into coherent political form.

What this makes possible

Three things, immediately.

A real cross-partisan coalition. The concentrated-distributed axis is the only current framing I can see that makes a genuine cross-partisan democracy coalition possible without requiring either side to betray its principles. A small-town conservative rancher and an urban progressive tenant do not have to agree on abortion to agree that Cargill and BlackRock have too much power over their lives. They can disagree on everything else and still organize together on the specific questions where concentrated power is eating them both. This isn’t depolarization. It’s the construction of a new political dimension along which different coalitions form than the ones the current parties offer.

A structural account of the authoritarian threat. The authoritarian project in the United States is, economically, a project of further concentration. Its base theory is that a smaller and smaller group of people should make a larger and larger share of the decisions. Framing the fight as concentration versus distribution makes the economic content of authoritarianism visible, which matters, because a lot of the people currently backing the authoritarian project have been sold on it as a populist revolt against elites. They’re wrong about the remedy, but they aren’t wrong about the diagnosis. A distributed-power politics can meet them where the diagnosis is correct and offer a real answer instead of the fake one.

A policy agenda that is already half-written. Antitrust enforcement. Banking and finance reform. Labor law modernization. Housing supply and tenant protections. Agricultural and rural policy aimed at independent producers. Small-donor democracy infrastructure. Tech and data regulation. Community-owned broadband, energy, and health infrastructure. Public banking. Cooperative and worker-ownership models. Local journalism revival. Each of these exists in draft form, often with bipartisan champions, often stalled by donor-class resistance. A coherent concentrated-versus-distributed frame gives them common ground and makes them legible as parts of a single project.

The call

If you’re in movement work right now, the question I want to put to you is this: is the organizing you’re doing reachable by the coalition that would assemble around distributed power, or is it only reachable by the coalition currently organized around left-right?

If it’s only reachable by the current coalition, you’re operating at the ceiling of what that coalition can win, which is not enough.

If it could be reachable by the broader distributed-power coalition, but isn’t currently, the work is to reframe, recruit, and reorganize. To build relationships across the lines the left-right frame has kept us sorted along. To do the patient, unglamorous coalition construction that takes the small farmer, the independent pharmacist, the gig worker, the laid-off federal employee, the faith community losing its young people to debt, the tenant facing a rent hike from a landlord they will never meet, and the union rep watching his members’ real wages fall, and lets them find each other on the terrain where they are already, in fact, on the same side.

This is the organizing work of the next several years. It’s not the only organizing work. It doesn’t replace the fight for racial justice, for immigrant dignity, for the pro-democracy defense against an active authoritarian threat. It undergirds those fights by making their coalition larger and their political ground more stable.

Concentrated power has been winning in the United States for forty years because it’s organized and the opposition isn’t. The opposition could be organized. The axis exists. The constituencies exist. The tradition exists. The policy exists.

What’s missing is the deliberate political project of putting them together.

Let’s build it.