Extraction was built into the Constitution despite the Declaration’s vision. It’s been fought and beaten back before. Here we go again.
The Declaration of Independence named the American values — human dignity, equality, consent of the governed. The Constitution’s operative structure fed a different value — money and property, built into its actual mechanics rather than its stated ideals. The checks and balances that were included were added mainly to secure ratification, a political necessity, not a value commitment. The original design was structurally biased toward property; absent deliberate counter-pressure, that remained the system’s default equilibrium.
The Gilded Age was that one value, money, running at industrial scale with almost nothing built to check it. It killed and injured Americans, and kept them in poverty.
Public perception was controlled the same way politics was — through ownership of the press, Hearst, Pulitzer, the yellow press serving whoever controlled it. When it failed, the people’s story arose. Professional journalism norms and objectivity standards took hold in the early 1900s. Wire services like the AP distributed more neutral copy to papers that had been locally captured. Muckraking proved perception control could be challenged from inside the press. The monopoly on the story broke, the same way the monopoly on politics broke.
The New Deal and the Progressive Era brought the Declaration’s plural values into the system for the first time with real force — income tax, labor law, antitrust, financial regulation.
Government is a form of governance, with a purpose: weighing competing values and acting for the people. Capitalism is a method, a way of producing and allocating resources, with no purpose of its own beyond that. Government began weighing a competing value against capital’s single value for the first time. Extraction specifically got reined in.
Productive capitalism was never the target and kept running the whole time, unburdened by the extraction that had been feeding on it.
Productive capitalism builds. Extractive capitalism strips. It hurts the American people, American power, and productive capitalists alike.
A strong middle class followed. It showed in people’s lives. It showed on the world stage. The rich still got richer. Incorporating those values into the system is what strengthened the country. A single income could buy a house, raise a family, build toward retirement. Manufacturing was about a quarter of GDP. The top marginal tax rate exceeded 90% for much of the 1950s, and capitalism thrived anyway. America became the dominant world power economically, militarily, and culturally during this period.
Powell wrote his memo. The rich were re-energized. Powell’s project sought to restore government’s willingness to stop weighing multiple values, to let extraction operate unconstrained again.
Multiple players took the idea and developed it along multiple tracks. Trickle-down economics and the Tea Party rebuilt the political track. Media consolidation, the end of the Fairness Doctrine, and algorithmic platforms up through today’s internet rebuilt the perception track. Gerrymandering, invented in 1812, became a real political power in the 2000s, and developed into another one of these tracks. Different players, different sectors, the same root permission, developed separately. All tracks are still running.
I don’t know if current election results and the wider contest mean public power is gaining structural ground, or if it is just noise.
Government is again treating capital’s single value as the operative default. Enforcement systems and detention infrastructure function as unconstrained extraction: ICE actions have killed Americans, and detention operations have put people out into freezing conditions. Formal rights protections are being tested unevenly, upheld in some cases, challenged again the moment they are lost.
Counter-pressure is running simultaneously across multiple arenas, and the results are mixed in every one of them. Courts have delivered real losses to the administration on core questions, including birthright citizenship and the IEEPA tariffs, both decided 6-3 by a Court reshaped in its favor. The same administration lost the fight over universal injunctions and signed a new birthright order within weeks of losing the first one. Electoral contests show outside money’s earlier near-total dominance eroding toward parity; insurgent candidates have won several high-visibility primaries and lost others by inches. Street mobilization has scaled across repeated rounds, No Kings drawing roughly five million in June 2025, seven million in October, eight to nine million by March 2026, its stated grievances widening each time from a specific killing to institutional erosion to the cost of living itself. Parallel infrastructure has formed and produced concrete, localized results: mutual-aid networks in Minnesota raised twenty million dollars and sustained thousands of families sheltering in place, and Operation Metro Surge ended after sustained local pressure. Distributed tools for content and coordination now operate without requiring permission from the owners of the traditional pipelines, even while those owners retain structural control of the largest platforms.
Wins and losses are landing on both sides at every level. No single arena has any sort of clear victory, and the fact is that all these areas need restructuring at the root.
The current situation could produce a renewed governmental willingness to weigh competing values against capital’s single value. The other possibility is that nothing changes, and government remains driven by the extraction machine.
We don’t know whether this is public power regaining effectiveness or just a historical blip.
For Further Reading
For the full paradigm underlying this piece, see “Corporate Extraction and Extraction Politics: The Two-Component System.”
Fitzhugh, L. (2026, July 5). Corporate extraction and extraction politics: The two-component system. Dittany. https://dittany.com/the-extraction-machine/
Postwar American economic strength, and its later reversal.
National Archives and Records Administration. (n.d.). Postwar America. Picturing the Century. https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/picturing_the_century/text/postwar_text.html
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (2025, July 10). A history of the rise of homeownership in the United States. HUD USER. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-housingat250-article-071025.html
Sherman, A., Trisi, D., & Cureton, J. (2024, December 11). A guide to statistics on historical trends in income inequality. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality
The record of lower courts hearing challenges to the administration’s actions.
Wolves and Sheep. (2025, July 9). Let’s do this: Actually, Trump is losing in court far more often than he is winning. https://wolvesandsheep.substack.com/p/lets-do-this-actually-trump-is-losing
Bloomberg. (2025, May 9). In court, Trump is losing more than he’s winning. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-lawsuits-against-trump-administration-apple-news/
The Harvard Crimson. (2025, June 19). Judge rules NIH grant terminations illegal, orders immediate reinstatement. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/6/19/nih-funding-ruling/
The Supreme Court’s 2025-2026 term, including birthright citizenship and the tariffs.
Harvard Law School. (2026, July). Evaluating Supreme Court’s 2025-26 term: “A conservative Court that has also checked the Trump administration.” https://hls.harvard.edu/today/evaluating-supreme-courts-2025-26-term-a-conservative-court-that-has-also-checked-the-trump-administration/
(On August 13, 2026 a federal judge dismissed the government’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard in August 2026, following an earlier ruling that it had unlawfully terminated over $2 billion in the university’s research grants.)
Outside spending’s changing effectiveness in the current election cycle.
U.S. Polling Data. (2026, April 6). Campaign finance 2026: Who’s spending what. https://uspollingdata.com/news/money-in-2026-elections/
The redistricting arms race between both parties heading into 2026.
GovFacts. (2026, January 2). Why the GOP redistricting strategy failed—and what it means for 2026. https://govfacts.org/elections-voting/elections-systems/redistricting-gerrymandering/why-the-gop-redistricting-strategy-failed-and-what-it-means-for-2026/
Gerrymandering as the inversion of democratic choice, and the structural reform path for campaign finance, redistricting, and wealth taxation.
Fitzhugh, L. (2026, April 16). From organizing to power: Campaign finance, gerrymandering, and wealth taxation. Dittany. https://dittany.com/structural-political-reform/