Premise: The historical evidence suggests that true economic populism is one of the few strategies that works against autocratic consolidation, from Progressive Era reforms to Depression-era movements to the economic pressures that contributed to ending the Soviet Union and Apartheid. Economic grievance doesn't disappear under authoritarianism; it intensifies.
Implication: Building coalition capacity around economic harm is both the democratic reform strategy AND the fallback if conditions worsen. It remains relevant across scenarios.
On critical issues, alignment already exists, at least on paper. Supermajorities support ending legalized bribery in our elections and fair tax contributions from big business and billionaires. Polling consistently shows 75-85% support for overturning Citizens United, with cross-partisan agreement rare in American politics. But this alignment doesn't translate to voting priority. The raw material exists; the activation gap is the problem. This is not primarily a persuasion challenge. It's an activation challenge.
Money-driven distortions in democratic governance are visible and operating. The mechanisms are not hidden: lobbying that shapes legislation, campaign contributions that secure access, revolving doors between industry and regulators, and funded narratives that shape what's politically thinkable. These distortions explain the gap between what supermajorities support and what governance delivers. The cumulative result is degraded public capacity: fiscal systems built for a vanished economy, unable to fund education for current realities, infrastructure needed to remain competitive, or resilience required to meet accelerating climate risk. This isn't primarily about fairness. It's about whether democratic societies retain the capacity to function.
Economic grievance drives elections, through distorted channels. Economic populism is winning terrain; the current regime proved it. But grievance operates through a well-resourced distortion architecture: bundled with cultural identity, framed at the wrong level, channeled toward scapegoats, and captured by performative populism that names grievance while protecting extraction. True economic populism doesn't drive voting behavior because no sustained accountability capacity exists to distinguish it from the fake version.
The fragmentation is intentional. Cultural wedges (race, immigration, "values") are manufactured and funded to prevent coalition formation around shared economic harm. This is centuries-old strategy, not accident.
Legitimate critiques are pre-neutralized. Criticism of policies or governance triggers pre-installed dismissal frames. Raise concerns about democratic norms or accountability? "Hysterical elites." "Alarmist." "TDS." Raise concerns about economic fairness? "Class warfare." "Anti-business." "They just want handouts." You're not persuading. You're activating defenses designed to prevent the critique from landing.
This is not a call to abandon immediate fights. Every just cause must still be pursued, from reproductive freedom and racial justice to climate survival and democratic accountability. This strategy is built to complement those fights, not replace them.
But consider: CRT and DEI didn't become electoral wedges through spontaneous grassroots opposition. They were manufactured and deployed through decades of investment: Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, friendly media networks, state-level policy pipelines. The deployment took months to execute because the capacity already existed.
There is no equivalent counter-capacity. Reformers fighting these attacks do so without the institutional architecture that made the attacks possible. Every defensive win is temporary because the offensive machinery remains intact.
This project seeks to build a missing layer. It doesn't replace direct action. It changes the conditions under which that action occurs.
You can't defeat oligarchy (or authoritarianism) by simply naming it. You defeat it by building a coalition around the material harm it causes, and that coalition, once built, has the electoral power to restore democratic accountability.
Money has become the mechanism for accumulating more money. Concentrated wealth doesn't just buy luxury goods. It purchases political power: the rule-writing, the rule-interpretation, the rule-enforcement, and the narrative landscape that shapes what's politically thinkable. That power is then deployed to accumulate more wealth and advance worldviews that protect the accumulation. The cycle compounds.
We have seen in real time how quickly decades of progress can unravel. Rights that took generations to secure, from voting protections to reproductive freedom to labor standards, can be dismantled in months when authoritarian-leaning governance takes hold. This is not hypothetical. It is happening. The same machinery that shapes economic terrain shapes every other fight. Building counter-capacity for economic populism is not separate from defending these rights. It is complementary: the economic coalition is the power base from which all other rights are defended.
This is activation and salience, not persuasion. The economic grievance is real and felt across partisan lines. The misdirection is the obstacle: grievance pointed at wrong targets. In competitive races at every level, margins of 1-5% separate victory from defeat. Presidential swing states are decided by fractions of a percent. Contested Senate and House races turn on single digits. This is why work that shifts margins over time has outsized electoral impact. The goal is not to break the entire cycle at once. It is to create a visible crack: one well-documented finding that gives journalists, candidates, and researchers a citable fact that didn't exist before. The crack compounds as others widen it. That is what building long-term capacity means in practice.
The current regime proved this is winning terrain. The question is whether authentic populism can compete with the fake version.
The diagnostic test:
Does the diagnosis name actual mechanisms? True = billionaire tax avoidance, healthcare extraction, legalized bribery. Fake = vague "elites," scapegoats.
Does the prescription target actual beneficiaries? True = big business and billionaires. Fake = protects extractors while blaming others.
Does the coalition hold across demographic lines? True = shared economic harm. Fake = fractures along race, culture, geography.
This test helps identify cooptation. It does not prevent it.
The current regime proved this terrain is winning by performing economic populism while protecting extraction. Populist slogans, from "drain the swamp" to "an economy that works for you," pass a surface-level test. The rhetorical moves can be learned. Bad faith actors study the script.
But cooptation works only as long as it goes unchallenged. Performative populism succeeds not because audiences lack economic knowledge, but because no sustained counter-narrative capacity calls it out. No consistent story. No disciplined accountability. No persistent frame that makes the gap between rhetoric and governance visible.
The countermeasure is narrative capacity that operates continuously, not just during election cycles. "What was promised. What was delivered." Simple. Repeatable. Maintained across years. When that capacity exists, elections become the enforcement mechanism. Electoral salience is the accountability. Cooptation has a half-life when consistently called out.
The accountability capacity is asymmetric. Forty years of Heritage-style investment created disciplined accountability pressure in one direction. Nothing equivalent operates in the other. That capacity shields one direction entirely, providing carte blanche, institutional cover, and blanket amnesty for those who benefit from extraction.
Both parties are captured to varying degrees. Both perform economic populism without delivering. But the consequences are not equivalent: not in scale, not in speed, not in outcome.
The current asymmetry is perverse: those most aggressively advancing extraction face no sustained accountability pressure, while those offering even modest resistance bear concentrated penalties for every failure to deliver. Accountability must apply in both directions not because the parties are equivalent (they are not) but because one-directional pressure allows extractors to escape consequence entirely.
This asymmetry is foundational to why this project matters.
The pattern is visible in real time:
The Performance: "Drain the swamp." "An economy that works for you." Invoke rigged systems. Channel legitimate economic grievance.
The Reality: Install billionaires in official and unofficial positions of power. Accept gifts and consultations from captains of industry. Pass the largest transfer of wealth upward under whatever label sells. The contradictions are not hidden. They are visible to anyone paying attention.
The Distraction: Seed a counter-narrative. Claim to fight "greedy" corporate actors in healthcare or elsewhere. Create enough confusion that the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes harder to track.
The Exit: Move on before accountability catches up. The news cycle turns. The story doesn't stick.
The Gap: No broad, consistent narrative capacity calls out the contradiction. Nothing penetrates beyond the already-aligned. The visible reality (billionaires in cabinet, industry access, wealth transfer) doesn't compound into electoral consequence.
The Deflection: The opposition absorbs blame for failing to deliver or mount an effective counter-narrative. Whether through their own capture, institutional ineptness, or ideological commitment to frameworks that prevent populist mobilization, they become the visible failure while extraction accelerates elsewhere.
The Weakening: The public sees both sides failing. Faith in the possibility of authentic economic populism erodes. Opposition to extraction policies weakens because no credible alternative appears capable of delivery.
The Loop: Rinse. Repeat. Each cycle deepens extraction and narrows the window for democratic correction.
This cycle is not inevitable. It operates because the capacity gap allows it.
This project seeks to address that gap directly. Narrative capacity that holds both directions accountable, not as partisan opposition, but as consistent pressure on extraction wherever it operates. When a candidate performs populism while protecting extractors, the contradiction becomes visible and persistent regardless of party. When governance fails to match rhetoric, the accountability compounds across cycles rather than resetting with each news cycle.
Cooptation should be costly regardless of which party performs it. That requires capacity that doesn't currently exist:
Continuous operation: Not just during campaign cycles, but year-round pressure that builds institutional memory
Penetration beyond the aligned: Reach that extends into spaces where current messaging doesn't land
Disciplined consistency: Heritage-level message discipline maintained across messengers and years
Civic accountability: Connecting documented contradictions to public consequence, whether through electoral pressure, policy advocacy, or civic mobilization
The work never ends because adaptation never stops. Bad faith actors will continue studying the script. The enforcement mechanism is not a test they can fail once. It's sustained pressure that makes cooptation politically fatal over time.
This is the theory: sustained narrative capacity, combined with small electoral margins, makes cooptation costly. The asymmetry is the gap. Filling it is the work.
"Narrative capacity" describes specific, operational functions:
Continuous "rhetoric vs. governance" tracking: Documentation that compounds across news cycles rather than resetting. "What was promised. What was delivered." Maintained year-round, not just during campaigns.
Rapid counter-narrative response: Heritage-level message discipline, with coordinated response across messengers within hours, not weeks. The same precision that turned "CRT" from obscure academic term to electoral wedge.
Civic accountability mechanisms: Capacity that connects documented contradictions to public consequence through electoral pressure, policy advocacy, and civic mobilization. Documentation alone changes nothing; public accountability is the enforcement mechanism.
Penetration beyond the aligned: Design for reach into spaces where current messaging doesn't land. Accountability that reaches only those who already agree changes nothing.
Institutional memory that persists: The news cycle resets; this does not. Contradictions documented in Year 1 remain accessible and citable in Year 4.
This is what the other side built. Nothing was built to counter it.
This system runs on information. Narrative capture doesn't happen spontaneously. It requires sustained investment: year-round advertising that shapes what's thinkable, media ecosystems that reinforce frames, manufactured "grassroots" campaigns that create false impressions of public sentiment, and psychographic targeting that delivers tailored messages to vulnerable audiences. This operates continuously, not just during election cycles.
Recent history shows how this works. Cambridge Analytica spent over $16 million in the 2016 US election cycle to psychologically profile voters and deliver targeted messaging. CTF Partners spent GBP 1 million creating fake "grassroots" Facebook campaigns to manufacture the appearance of popular support for hard Brexit, outspending all UK political parties combined. Fossil fuel interests spend $4-7 million annually on astroturf campaigns promoting coal. These are not anomalies. They are examples of systematic investment in information architecture designed to shape political outcomes.
The disinformation runs year-round. Healthcare industry advertising that shapes perceptions of what's possible. Financial sector messaging that normalizes extraction. Corporate-funded "research" that manufactures doubt. This doesn't pause between elections. It operates continuously, shaping the terrain on which campaigns are eventually fought.
No equivalent counter-capacity exists. The analysis in Section 5.5 describes what narrative capacity would need to do. This section addresses why building it may be more achievable than the scale of the opposition suggests.
The core asymmetry is a theory worth testing, not a proven formula. Manufacturing consensus that doesn't exist requires continuous investment. The false impression degrades without sustained reinforcement. And the entire operation depends on remaining hidden. As one Cambridge Analytica executive explained, their work had to happen "without anyone thinking, 'that's propaganda,'" because exposure undermines the manipulation.
Revealing consensus that already exists is structurally different. Once documented, the data persists: citable, shareable, compounding across news cycles. The research doesn't require continuous spending to remain true. And transparency strengthens rather than undermines the work.
This suggests truth may be cheaper to maintain than lies are to sustain. But "cheaper" does not mean "fast" or "easy." The current asymmetry is massive. Decades of investment on one side, almost nothing on the other. Building counter-capacity still requires sustained commitment over long time horizons. This is generational work, not a campaign cycle fix.
The pragmatic ground: we are not creating demand from scratch. The visceral dissatisfaction with governance already exists. People feel the extraction even when they cannot name it. Polling consistently shows supermajority support for positions that never translate into policy. The raw material is present. What's missing isn't the grievance. It's the coherent account that gives it form, the capacity that makes it persistent, and the visibility that transforms felt harm into political salience.
The operational logic follows from this. The story, that wealthy interests have captured democratic governance and that Americans agree on the fix but don't know it, is what moves. Research, polling, and analysis exist to make that story undeniable: citable, defensible against attack, institutional-grade. The evidentiary base supports the narrative, not the other way around. This is what the conservative movement understood. "Supply-side economics" was not the output of Heritage Foundation research. It was the story. The research existed to make the story credible enough that politicians could repeat it. The difference here is that the underlying story is actually true, which means the evidence doesn't require propping up. It requires surfacing.
So the claim is not "truth is cheap and we'll win quickly." The claim is: the structural asymmetry between maintaining truth and sustaining lies may make the resource gap less decisive over long time horizons than it appears, and we're giving form to demand that already exists, not manufacturing it. That combination makes the investment worth pursuing, even acknowledging the scale of what we're up against.
This system requires two forms of lying:
Lying TO Americans: The narrative capture that shapes what's politically thinkable. "Regulations kill jobs." "We can't afford nice things." "Taxing wealth punishes success."
Lying ABOUT what Americans believe: The manufactured division that isolates people from their own consensus. "Americans are deeply divided." "This is a coastal elite position." "There's no agreement on this."
The second enables the first. If people knew that supermajorities of their neighbors agreed with them on tax fairness, corporate accountability, and ending legalized bribery, the narrative capture would be harder to maintain. Isolation is a mechanism, not an accident.
This clarifies the transmission mechanism. Counter-capacity serves distinct but complementary functions:
Synthesis and analysis make it harder to lie TO Americans by connecting fragmented research into coherent accounts of what's actually happening.
Consensus research makes it harder to lie ABOUT what Americans believe by revealing the agreement that exists but is hidden by narrative capture.
Sustained presence (year-round messaging, ongoing campaigns, continuous documentation) prevents the narrative terrain from being ceded between election cycles.
The transmission model is force multiplication, not direct mass communication. This work doesn't reach 330 million Americans directly. The people who can deploy it are a small group: journalists who need a citable data point, advocates who need evidence-based ammunition for policy fights, researchers who need a framework that connects what they already know, and organizers who need language that works across partisan lines. Those people already have distribution. They already have platforms. What they lack is the evidentiary base and the connective story. This work provides the ammunition. They deploy it.
But the content does not find those people organically. The content operation builds the credibility portfolio that earns the right to be in rooms where those relationships form. Each track is designed to produce proofs of concept at minimal cost. Each proof of concept either works or it doesn't. Each one that works is both a deliverable and a funding credential. Credibility earns access. Access, through direct outreach, introductions, validation conversations, and board recruitment, creates the relationships through which intermediaries encounter and adopt the work.
The three tracks are designed as proof-of-concept engines that operate within the funding constraint. Track 1 costs almost nothing. Track 2's initial polling rounds cost $500-$1,500 each. Track 3's first applied brief costs research time. Each track produces a testable deliverable at minimal cost. Each successful proof of concept makes the next more valuable, within the track and across tracks. And each one positions for more significant fundraising by demonstrating, rather than asserting, that the model works. This is the Stevenson entrepreneurial logic: pursuing opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled, with the work sequenced so that each step creates conditions for the next resources to become available.
Polling produces an asset that appreciates in a distinctive way: each round of data makes the next more valuable through longitudinal tracking, trend lines, and methodology refinement. It is what moves an organization from having opinions to producing data that others need.
The intended outcome is changed cost structure for political speech:
Faux populism becomes riskier. When citable data exists showing the gap between rhetoric and reality, between manufactured division and actual consensus, running on faux populism carries exposure risk. Opponents, journalists, and voters gain ammunition they currently lack.
True populism becomes more viable. When candidates can point to data showing supermajority agreement on populist positions, running with that consensus becomes more attractive. Validation exists; risk decreases.
This does not require endorsing candidates or building partisan operations. The mechanism is informational, not electoral. The goal is creating an information environment where gaps between rhetoric and governance, between manufactured division and actual consensus, can be exposed by anyone: journalists, opponents, voters, researchers. Electoral consequence follows from visibility.
This section will expand. The examples here (psychographic targeting, astroturfing) represent documented precedents. The full architecture of counter-capacity, including sustained advertising presence, rapid response mechanisms, and coordination systems, requires development beyond this document's current scope. The strategic logic is clear; the operational specifics remain open for refinement.
The goal is spreading an accurate account: Wealthy interests have captured democratic governance and are systematically harvesting value from everyone else. That understanding is what shifts thinking, whether you call it "extraction" or something else.
But accurate accounts don't spread naked. They spread through frames: specific, memorable language that gets owned, repeated, amplified, and wrapped in credibility. The opposition understands this. "Anti-CRT" and "anti-DEI" weren't descriptions. They were purpose-built frames designed for electoral impact, manufactured and deployed through institutional capacity, ultimately enabling extraction by fragmenting potential economic coalitions.
The analytical model underlying this work is not an ideology. It documents mechanisms and presents data. It does not advocate for socialism, communism, or any economic system. It asks empirical questions: Who benefits? Through what mechanisms? With what consequences? Ideological labels function as dismissal mechanisms, ways to avoid engaging with evidence. The analysis stays on economic terrain, where the data speaks across partisan lines.
External validation: The extraction frame is not novel vocabulary invented here. It is converging terminology across serious research: Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics for their framework on "extractive institutions." Tim Wu's 2025 book The Age of Extraction applies the lens to tech platforms. The Law and Political Economy Project has developed extraction analysis since 2017. Policy organizations from the Institute for Policy Studies to Oxfam now use extraction framing.
What this work provides is synthesis architecture. The research foundation identifies five mechanisms through which extraction operates: how rules get written, how they get interpreted, how they get enforced, how the narrative landscape shapes what's thinkable, and how these components reinforce each other in compounding loops. This unified model connects fragmented domain-specific analyses into a coherent system-level account.
This project builds equivalent capacity:
Ongoing frame development (not a fixed list)
Testing and optimization
Cultivation across messengers and contexts
Spread through durable channels
Unapologetic ownership, because the accurate account is demonstrably true
Starting frames include: "Extraction" (names mechanism), "Legal bribery" (names the crime), "Rewards wealth over work" (names the design), "Radical status quo" (flips who's defending departure from norms). These are beginning points, not endpoints.
The bright-line test: Unless you ARE a large corporation, or your wealth grows by a million dollars an hour, we're not talking about you. High earners who work for income are natural allies, not targets. The system taxes work while shielding wealth, then uses "earned" rhetoric to make tax fairness feel like an attack on effort itself.
Two audiences, one frame:
For current autocratic coalition supporters: An identity-preserving entry point to accountability. "The system rewards wealth over work" is a statement a conservative can agree with without identity sacrifice.
For cause-oriented reformers: Connection between fragmented fights and the extraction machinery that constrains them all.
A note on history: Economic populism has a contested past, including exclusionary deployments that subordinated racial justice to white working-class solidarity. The extraction machinery harms across demographic lines, and coalition-building that fractures along race serves the extractors. This framework rejects that trade-off.
The response must be durable, not tied to party apparatus or single campaigns. It must work continuously, across cycles, over decades. The destination is restored public capacity: democratic societies that can fund education, maintain competitiveness, ensure resilience, and govern in the public interest. Extraction is the diagnosis. Restored capacity is the goal.
Consider the Heritage Foundation model: decades of patient investment. Heritage itself was an evolution, pulling together earlier movements, absorbing fragments, building on what existed. The conservative project has now run 50+ years, reshaping what's politically thinkable. That project succeeded not because of a single organization but because of specific, concrete things that accumulated over time: pre-vetted judicial candidates ready when vacancies opened, bill-ready policy language that staffers could copy into markup, talking points that candidates could repeat verbatim, a media ecosystem that amplified all of it. The word "infrastructure" came later, as the retrospective label for what the collection of concrete outputs added up to.
The work must:
Function under degraded institutional conditions (capture assumed)
Operate without requiring institutional permission or elite alignment
Be ready to capitalize on exogenous events that accelerate progress (crises, scandals)
Survive events that move in the opposite direction (further consolidation)
This requires architectural separation. Public-facing analytical work maintains non-partisan positioning to preserve cross-partisan credibility. Strategic coordination operates through trusted networks that understand how extraction operates and where civic pressure can disrupt it. A research institution and an advocacy strategy are different functions requiring different postures, even when they serve the same long-term aims.
This theory of change is anchored in evidence across four time horizons:
Centuries: Economic populism vs. autocracy (historical pattern)
4-5 decades: Heritage Foundation model, conservative movement investment, systematic extraction acceleration since 1970s
Current events: Bernie's cross-partisan appeal before neutralization; Trump's performative populism proving the terrain; regime acceleration 2025+
Near-term (2026-2028): Midterm elections as naturally occurring demand event for consensus data; post-election environment generates demand for exactly what this work produces regardless of outcome
The analysis exists. The delivery system doesn't.
Brilliant researchers, investigative journalists, and policy experts have documented every piece of this. Excellent organizations work on parts of the problem: Roosevelt Institute on progressive economics, EPI on labor data, Brennan Center on democracy reform, Open Markets on monopoly power, ITEP and Tax Justice Network on fiscal policy. Even the Center for American Progress, explicitly founded as "the liberal Heritage Foundation," has spent 20 years building Democratic policy infrastructure. What's missing isn't analysis or even institutional scale. It's cross-partisan reach: the synthesis architecture that connects fragmented work into coherent pressure across ideological lines, and the coordination layer that makes individual organizational wins compound rather than dissipate.
This project builds that connective layer. Synthesis capacity, narrative development, and network coordination, designed to make existing work more potent rather than replace it.
This theory of change identifies two forms of lying that sustain the current system (Section 6). The current work maps directly to both.
Countering the lie told TO Americans. The lie that regulations kill jobs, that we can't afford public investment, that taxing wealth punishes success. The counter is an accurate, coherent account of how extraction actually works: who benefits, through what mechanisms, with what consequences. The research foundation and published analytical work build that account. A 30,000-word research foundation documents the five-component extraction system. Published analyses apply that framework across domains, from tax enforcement to social media regulation to political strategy, producing the kind of citable, institutional-grade findings that journalists, researchers, and advocates currently lack. Each published piece is a concrete tool that an intermediary can use.
Countering the lie told ABOUT what Americans believe. The lie that the country is hopelessly divided on economic questions, that fair tax contributions are a "coastal elite" position, that no consensus exists. The counter is data that reveals the hidden agreement and measures the lived experience behind it. The American Consensus Project, currently in development, is a polling initiative designed to measure two things nobody else tracks together: how extraction is actually experienced across American communities, and the cross-partisan consensus on economic issues that exists but remains invisible. The paired-question methodology does double duty: it documents agreement AND reveals how framing manufactures division. Ask about a policy in neutral terms, then ask about the same policy using partisan framing, and measure the gap. That gap, sometimes 20 or more points on the same underlying policy, is the frame audit: direct evidence that the division is manufactured, not organic. Each round of data makes the next more valuable through longitudinal tracking, trend lines, and methodology refinement. This is the kind of durable asset that moves an organization from having opinions to producing data that others need.
These are the foundations. Each piece of published analysis, each documented consensus finding, each frame audit revealing manufactured division, earns the right to the next investment. The work compounds.
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Addressing a system that rewards concentrated wealth over work