I was playing a game with my family last spring where one player picks a prompt, and then everyone else has to guess how the "player" would answer the prompt. One of the prompts I selected required my family to guess what courses I would teach if I were a professor. Without comparing notes, they landed on the same answer: inequality.

That day, the word landed differently than I expected.

My interest was not actually in the concept of inequality, or the debate around the merit of various outcomes. It was the understanding that inequality is not a naturally occurring result. The upward transfer of wealth is not organic. It is produced: defined mechanisms that repeat, persist, and are systematically refined. There is a reason that people who are playing by these rules are feeling the pressure as basic things become increasingly difficult, from education and healthcare to home ownership and elder care.

Once I shifted from outcomes, which is what I was seeing and reacting to, towards the systemic production of those outcomes, a sense of clarity emerged.

The system runs on "machinery" that stays just beneath the surface of public debate. Most of the conversation happens up top -- personalities, partisan stories, the latest outrage cycle. But the outcomes get shaped one layer down, where rules and incentives live:

What gets funded -- campaigns, career paths, the infrastructure of access. How rules get drafted. How they are interpreted when they get challenged. What gets enforced -- and where enforcement quietly disappears. How the story gets shaped so the whole arrangement feels normal, technical, inevitable. And when public pressure builds anyway, where it gets aimed.

When you map that machinery across enough domains -- healthcare, tax enforcement, campaign finance, tech regulation -- what used to look like a collection of separate problems starts to look like one problem with different labels. The wealthiest individuals and businesses have pulled away at a pace that hard work and good ideas alone do not explain. That pace is a product of the machinery: value extracted through the shaping of rules, in a system that rewards accumulated wealth over work.

The consistent output, felt across every domain at once, is manufactured insecurity: the steady erosion of what used to be predictable. Healthcare costs you could plan around. Housing within reach. A retirement that held. The unpredictability is not incidental. It is what the machine produces.

But here is the part that changed everything for me.

You would expect Americans to be hopelessly divided about all of this. That is certainly the story we get told. Every cable news segment, every social media comment section, every election cycle reinforces the same message: the country is split down the middle and cannot agree on anything.

On the economic questions that actually shape daily life, that story is wrong.

When you strip partisan labels off and ask people about the substance -- should billionaires pay a higher tax rate than schoolteachers, do billionaires and large corporations have too much power over the rules, are working people getting squeezed while the wealthiest pull further away -- consistent polling across multiple independent organizations finds 70 to 80 percent of Americans, across party lines, say yes.

These are supermajorities. And they show up every time someone bothers to ask the question cleanly. That pattern holds across differently-constructed instruments: when two independent organizations tested the political power question separately in 2025, using different survey designs, they arrived at virtually identical results.

The agreement is massive. The ability to act on it barely exists. That gap has a source: the same machinery that distorts the rules also distorts the story about the rules, including the story about whether Americans agree. When people believe their frustration is a minority position -- that the other side will never come around -- they look for converts, run purity tests, and miss the coalition that already exists. The broad, cross-partisan pressure that level of agreement should generate never materializes, because nobody believes the majority exists. The system that benefits from their perceived division never has to face the pressure that real, visible consensus would create.

The division is not the story. The consensus is.

That is what I am working on. I am focused on three things.

I'm writing pieces that attempt to make the machinery more visible. Wherever outcomes shape daily life -- tax enforcement, immigration, campaign finance, healthcare -- the question is the same: how do those outcomes actually get produced? Not at the surface, but at the layer where rules and incentives live. When it works, you finish reading and something that looked broken starts to look like it's working -- for someone.

I'm also focused on how to construct and maintain polling that is not issue-specific or fleeting, but rather persistent and measured over time, that: captures the shared economic experience; consensus; and the distortion of ideology and partisan labels. The stock market, gas prices, grocery prices -- these get used as measures of how the economy is doing, and each captures something real, but none of them adequately measure what people are actually experiencing economically. The polling data showing supermajority consensus on economic questions already exists, but it is structurally episodic: different organizations, different instruments, no one holding the findings together or tracking whether they persist. Each study gets a news cycle and disappears. The consensus is already there. What has been missing are the tools to make it visible, and keep it visible over time.

The third thing is more aspirational, but it follows the logic. Once you can see how the machinery works, and once you can document what people actually agree on, the next question is what policy would look like if it were built on that foundation -- on what supermajorities already support -- rather than on what the current environment produces. That work is early. But it is where the first two things point.

The whole project rests on a simple bet: accurate visibility -- of how the system works and what people actually believe -- creates leverage. Whatever your politics, seeing clearly helps.

Here is what changes when you see this clearly.

The positions you hold on tax fairness, on whether working people are getting a fair return, on whether billionaires and large corporations have accumulated too much influence over the rules -- those are majority positions. Not a plurality. Not a close call. Supermajorities, across party lines, every time the questions get asked without the partisan framing attached.

The consensus is real. It is large. And it is mostly invisible to the people who hold it.

That changes what the work is. The work is not persuasion. It is not searching for common ground -- the common ground is already there. The job is making the majority that already shares it visible to itself, so it can act like one. On each of these questions individually, the consensus is already there. What the current information environment is not built to show is that those separate agreements belong to the same majority. Connecting them, making that visible across issues rather than just within them, is what creates the condition for the majority to act on what it already believes. That is what this is pointed at.

This is a work in progress, and the journey has already been informative. Where it ends up is uncertain but the focus is clear.

If you're curious, the Theory of Change at thecambiuminstitute.org is the full map of what I think we are up against. There are also a few analysis pieces there, including who actually gets audited by the IRS and what that tells you about enforcement as a policy choice, and how social media platforms are designed to outrun the rules that are supposed to govern them.

If this resonated, share it with someone -- or a few people -- who care about the future or who are tired of the current discourse. That is how this grows.

Sources

The polling claims in this piece rest on a body of independent research assembled in one place for the first time in the Cambium Institute's polling synthesis, What Americans Actually Agree On (March 2026). The findings below represent a subset of that evidence base.

Tax fairness and the wealth gap

Navigator Research (2025) found 71 percent of Americans blame wealthy individuals and large corporations not paying enough taxes as a driver of their own tax burden. YouGov/Economist polling found 65 percent say the wealthy pay too little in taxes (April 2025), rising to 80 percent who say billionaires specifically are taxed too little (October 2025). A January 2026 YouGov/Economist poll found 80 percent of Americans say the gap between rich and poor is a very big or somewhat big problem -- including majorities of Republicans and self-described MAGA Republicans.

Political power and influence over the rules

A fall 2025 YouGov/Economist poll and a 2025 Issue One survey conducted by YouGov each found approximately eight in ten Americans, regardless of partisan identification, believe big business and billionaires have too much political power. These findings were produced independently, using different survey instruments, by organizations with no coordination between them.

Economic squeeze and living costs

A February 2026 KFF Health Tracking Poll found 82 percent of American adults say their cost of living has increased in the past year, including majorities across all partisan groups. YouGov/Economist polling from October-November 2025 found 52 percent of Americans believe children today will be worse off financially than their parents, and 69 percent of employed Americans say it would be hard to find a new job that paid as much if they lost their current one.

Navigator Research is a progressive-aligned polling organization. Issue One is a campaign finance reform advocacy organization. YouGov/Economist, KFF, and YouGov/AP-NORC operate as nonpartisan research organizations. Source orientations are noted because the cross-partisan consistency of these findings across organizations with different institutional orientations is part of what makes them significant.