Populism, Pluralism, and Collective Power
Series: Politics, Not Natural Law
Article Six
The capacity the system suppressed, and how it gets rebuilt
The missing rung can only be built by the capacity the system has spent a century suppressing.
That sentence ended the previous essay, and it carries two claims that this one has to earn. The first is that the capacity exists: that ordinary people, acting together, can build accountability structures that bind actors more powerful than any of them. The second is that the capacity was suppressed: not lost, not outgrown, not disproven, but dismantled, deliberately, through means that can be named and dated. Both claims are contestable, and a piece that intends to rest an entire political argument on them owes the reader something most advocacy never provides: the philosophical ground it is standing on.
The Disclosure
Normative arguments that refuse to identify their underpinnings are asking for deference rather than agreement, and they hide their real vulnerabilities from their own authors. So here are the commitments this piece stands on, stated plainly enough to be attacked.
First: systemic outcomes are political choices, not natural laws. The distribution of income, the structure of markets, the reach of the franchise, the units in which official statistics are kept, all of these are artifacts of decisions that could have been made differently and can be remade. This is Rawls's ground, and specifically his insistence that what matters is not the formal existence of political liberties but their fair value, the effective capacity of citizens to use them. A liberty whose exercise is priced out of reach is a decoration.
Second: collective action can shape systems, and the claim is historical before it is theoretical. This is Arendt's ground. Power, in her strict sense, is not force and not wealth. It is the human capacity to act in concert, and it exists only while people act together in a shared world where their actions are visible and consequential. The eight-hour day, the abolition of child labor, the antitrust statutes, the civil rights acts, the franchise itself: every one of these was a systemic outcome produced by people acting in concert against actors who held more of every other kind of power.
Third: alternative arrangements exist or can be created. This is Foucault's ground, and it comes with his method: genealogy, the tracing of how current arrangements came to feel natural, precisely in order to denaturalize them. What was assembled can be disassembled. What was defined can be redefined. The feeling that there is no alternative is itself a constructed artifact with a traceable construction history.
Fourth: small-scale practices of freedom prefigure larger change. Town meetings before independence. Committees of correspondence before a constitution. Union halls before labor law. Freedom schools before civil rights statutes. The practices are not merely preparation for politics. In Arendt's terms they are politics, the spaces in which the capacity for acting together is kept alive between the moments when history asks for it.
Beneath all four sits a single older commitment, the one this entire project runs on: freedom as non-domination. Not merely the absence of interference, but the absence of subjection to arbitrary power, the condition of not living at the mercy of another's unaccountable will, whether that other is a king, a state, or a balance sheet. This is the republican conception of liberty, and the word republican is used here in its oldest sense, because the American political tradition began inside that conception and then, over two centuries, was talked out of it. How that happened is the story of the suppression, and it is where the argument goes next.
How Composition Was Made Illegible
The previous essay defined composition as the corrective move at every scale: actors organizing themselves into a counterparty at the scale of the problem. This section traces how that move was made not just difficult but nearly unthinkable, because the suppression ran on two tracks at once. The institutional track has been documented across this series and in the coalition history that preceded it: the dismantling of unions, the defunding of enforcement, the constitutional engineering that converted concentrated money into protected speech. The second track is the one that receives less attention and did more work. It was semantic. Over two centuries, five words were quietly redefined, and each redefinition removed a piece of the conceptual equipment that collective action requires.
The founders would not have recognized the opposition between individual liberty and collective action, because they were not individualists in the modern sense. They were classical republicans, and in that tradition freedom meant non-domination, property meant sufficient independence for civic participation, and the collective actions that founded the country, the committees, the conventions, the tea in the harbor, were not paradoxes of liberty. They were its exercise. The redefinitions began almost immediately.
Independence was redefined first, across the early republic's first decades: from political autonomy, the standing of a citizen among citizens, to market position, the standing of a seller among buyers. Then freedom itself, as the market revolution advanced: from non-domination to non-interference, from the capacity for self-governance to the absence of constraint. That single shift did more damage than any statute, because once freedom means only non-interference, collective action stops looking like freedom's expression and starts looking like its enemy.
Systems were redefined in the Gilded Age: from political creations to natural orders. Spencer and Sumner supplied the theory, and the courts supplied the enforcement, striking down maximum-hours laws as violations of a liberty of contract that treated a constructed labor market as a law of nature. The political choices that had built industrial capitalism, the land grants, the tariffs, the corporate charters, became invisible inside their own product. And it was here, as the previous essay noted, that the camouflage was issued: the corporation received individualism's rights without its limitations, so that collective capital could speak as an individual while collective labor was prosecuted as a conspiracy.
Collective was redefined in the middle of the twentieth century, and this is the redefinition still operating in most American mouths. Precision matters here, because the redefinition worked by misreading its own theorist. Hayek's actual argument was narrower than its career: The Road to Serfdom indicts comprehensive central planning, the state that owns the plan and therefore the planner, and the same book endorses social insurance, a guaranteed minimum, and regulation compatible with competition. But the argument traveled in condensed form, most famously the Reader's Digest abridgment, and the condensation shed the distinctions; what reached the American ear was that economic coordination as such is the road to totalitarianism, a claim Hayek did not make and the redefinition required. Rand made the subordination of the individual to any collective a moral evil, which made solidarity itself suspect. The Cold War finished the fusion: collective became linguistically adjacent to collectivism, and collectivism meant gulags. A tradition that began with collective self-liberation had, within two centuries, made the word for it unsayable, and it had done so partly by flattening a targeted argument into a categorical one, which is itself evidence of the direction the current was running.
Public was redefined last, and the mechanism deserves a moment of admiration for its sheer efficiency, because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy with a doctorate. Public choice theory proposed, as a modeling postulate, that political actors be analyzed under the same self-interest assumption as market actors, politics without romance, in Buchanan's phrase. As a postulate it was defensible and sometimes sharp; its prediction that concentrated interests would out-organize diffuse ones has aged well, as every fight in this series can attest. The damage came at the promotion ceremony: the assumption elevated to a description, the description to a design principle, so that if collective action tends toward rent-seeking, institutions should be built to make collective action difficult. Assume the capacity corrupt, design the institutions to constrain it, then cite the resulting paralysis as confirmation of the original assumption. By the 1980s the conclusion was common sense: government is the problem. Not a problem, not this government, but the category.
Foucault gives the cumulative result its proper name: governmentality, power operating not by prohibition but by producing particular kinds of subjects. Five redefinitions later, the produced subject understands itself as an entrepreneur of the self, a consumer, a taxpayer. Not as a citizen with a share of governing power, not as a worker with a collective economic position, not as a member of a public that creates shared worlds. The genius of the construction is that it feels like liberation. Freedom from collective obligation is real freedom of a kind, and it is offered, sincerely, at the exact moment freedom through collective power is being priced out of existence. This is the perceptual mechanism this project has traced in other domains: the framework absorbs the loss before it can register as one. A person who cannot think the phrase collective power cannot miss it.
Two tracks, then. The institutions were dismantled, and the words for wanting them back were dismantled first. Anyone who wonders why the response to forty years of documented extraction has been so weak is looking at the answer. The counterparty was not defeated in the field. It was deprived of the language in which it could assemble.
Two Populisms
And yet people keep assembling anyway, because grievance does not wait for vocabulary. The assemblies of the last decade have mostly gone by one name, populism, used as a diagnosis and usually as an insult. The name deserves more precision than that, because inside it sits the most important political choice of the present period.
The standard scholarly definition calls populism a thin ideology: a frame that divides society into the pure people and the corrupt elite and holds that politics should express the will of the former. Thin, because the frame has no content of its own and must attach to a host, nationalism, socialism, religion, agrarianism, which is why the historical instances look nothing alike. But the deeper account, and the one this piece has to face honestly, comes from Laclau: populism is not a pathology at all. It is the mechanism by which any collective political subject gets formed. Dispersed, heterogeneous demands, the shuttered plant, the unpayable medical bill, the impossible rent, get articulated into a single we through what he called chains of equivalence, held together by a name broad enough to contain them. Every movement this piece has praised, abolition, labor, civil rights, was populist in exactly this formal sense. So is this series. The people against the extraction architecture is a people-versus-elite frame, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of undisclosed move Section I forswore.
Facing Laclau honestly means facing his critics too, and their objection lands on this project directly: if the unifying name must stay empty enough to hold incommensurable demands together, it cannot carry specific content, which is why the same formal machinery describes movements of liberation and movements of scapegoat. The objection is correct about the machinery. The question is whether every unifying name is equally empty, and the next section's entire purpose is to answer no. Hold the objection; it will be paid.
First, the fork. If populism is the formation mechanism, then the political question is never populism or not. It is which populism, and the two available kinds differ in one structural respect that governs everything else. One kind names a mechanism as its adversary. The other names a population.
The scapegoat variant is the one the extraction architecture produces by default, and the previous essay explained why: a mercantilist formation requires a we advancing against a them, and it requires the them. The grievances it recruits are real. The people absorbing four decades of organized losses are reporting accurately on their own lives, and this series has insisted on that from its first article. What the scapegoat variant supplies is a substituted cause: not the arrangement that moved the money, but the immigrant, the minority, the neighbor one rung down. And the substitution is not primarily a persuasion problem. It is a feedback problem. Where the channels connecting grievance to institutional response have been closed, and the last several decades closed them methodically, grievance defaults to whichever coalition opens a channel, any channel, and for forty years the best-funded open channel has been the nationalist one. A wrong map held by someone who opens the feedback loop beats a right map held by someone who closed it.
There is a second thing to say about the nationalist variant, and it follows from the previous essay's map. Nationalism is pseudo-composition. It offers the feeling of acting at scale, a we large enough to matter, flags, crowds, the grammar of collective power, while remaining structurally engineered never to touch the tier where the extraction operates. The accumulation it protects is transnational; the solidarity it sells is national; the enemies it supplies are local. It is composition theater: the oar is real, the pull is real, the splash is real, but the oarlock, the fixed point that transfers the rower's force to the hull, has been quietly removed. An oar without its fulcrum moves water and moves nothing else, and the effect on the rower is the theater's actual product. Conclude that you must pull harder, and you exhaust yourself in place. Conclude that movement is impossible, and you toss the oar and hand your power to whoever claims to row on your behalf. Either conclusion serves, because either way the one thing that never gets built is the fixed point itself, the structure that couples collective force to the thing it is meant to move. That is why the distinction between the two populisms is not a matter of tone or taste. One composition is real. The other is a decoy, and the decoy is load-bearing for the system it appears to oppose.
The pluralist variant is harder, and its difficulty should be stated rather than minimized, because pluralism itself comes in a weak form and a strong one. The weak form, pluralism as tolerance, answers no grievance. It is procedural where the injury is material, and asking the loss-absorbing population to celebrate difference while the extraction continues has been tried, at length, and its results are seated in every legislature in the democratic world. The strong form, pluralism as encounter, is a practice rather than a posture: the discipline of inhabiting another's framework on its own terms before judging it, the thing the closed feedback loop refused to do. It is a near cousin of what political theory calls agonism, the conversion of antagonism into legitimate adversarial contest, but the two are not identical: agonism is an institutional design principle, encounter is an interpersonal one, and a durable coalition needs both, the institutions that keep conflict inside the walls and the practice that keeps the coalition's members from becoming each other's them.
Which returns the argument to the debt it took on above. A pluralist populism must hold together people whose frameworks genuinely conflict, evangelicals and unionists, immigrants and the towns that emptied out, without an enemy population to fuse them. What can possibly serve as the name?
The Floor That Is Not Empty
The answer this whole project has been building is: dignity. And the Laclau objection can now be paid in full, because dignity is not an empty signifier, and its non-emptiness can be demonstrated rather than asserted.
An empty signifier holds a coalition together precisely by meaning nothing specific, so that every faction can pour its own content in. Dignity is thin, deliberately so, but thin is not empty. It is pre-political: every tradition the coalition must contain already affirms it internally, for its own members, in its own vocabulary, the Imago Dei, the inherent worth of persons, the solidarity of labor, the sanctity of the individual conscience. The coalition does not have to manufacture the value. It has to extend each tradition's existing value to the coalition's other members, which is a demand of consistency rather than conversion. And, decisively, dignity violations are specifiable and auditable. This project has spent its theoretical track building exactly that apparatus: the operationalization of dignity as a design standard, the audit that identifies who bears the cognitive, emotional, and material costs of an arrangement, the evidentiary discipline that distinguishes a documented violation from a vibe. A signifier with an audit procedure attached is not empty. It has edges, and things can fail to qualify.
The floor has one more property, and it is the one that answers the previous essay's definitional test. Dignity as the coalition's floor is universal by construction. There is no population outside it whose function is to absorb the losses, which is precisely what distinguishes this we from every mercantilist we ever assembled, including the nationalist one currently on offer. A scapegoat coalition needs a population to expel. A dignity coalition needs only a mechanism to dismantle, and this series' oldest discipline, incentives rather than villains, turns out to be more than an analytical scruple. It is coalition maintenance technology. A movement that names mechanisms can hold members who would flee a movement that names enemies, because nearly everyone in the coalition loves someone the enemy list would eventually reach.
One locating frame, taken with its warning label attached. Polanyi read the last two centuries as a double movement: the disembedding of markets from social relations, followed by protective counter-movements that re-embed them, sometimes as social insurance and labor law, sometimes as the authoritarian formations of the 1930s. The frame locates both populisms precisely: the counter-movement is coming either way, and the open question is its form. But the warning label is required by this project's own argument. A series that has spent two essays demolishing stadial inevitability cannot install Polanyian inevitability through the back door. Counter-movements are historically frequent, not guaranteed, and their form is not assigned by history. It is contested, in real time, by whoever shows up with the better feedback loop. That contest is the present moment, and treating its outcome as foreordained, in either direction, is the abdication this series was written against.
Composition at Two Scales
So the coalition is conceivable. The remaining question is the operational one, and it has a famous obstacle standing in front of it that this piece will face rather than skip.
The corrective, at every scale, is the same move. Citizens compose into majorities capable of binding meso-level power domestically. States compose into coordinated governance capable of binding supranational capital, the other direction of the one-way rung. The two scales are not analogies for each other; they are the same act performed at different rungs, and the forces arrayed against them are the same force. The dismantling of unions and the dismantling of trade governance were one project conducted at two altitudes: prevent the counterparty, worker or state, from organizing at the scale of the extraction. A state facing mobile capital alone is in the position of a worker facing an employer alone, and the prescription that each should improve its individual competitiveness is the same prescription, offered by the same beneficiaries, and it fails for the same arithmetic reason. You cannot individually negotiate your way out of a system-level position.
Arendt names what is at stake in the domestic scale. Her distinction ran labor, work, action: labor as the meeting of biological necessity, work as the building of the durable world, action as the specifically human capacity for collective self-determination. The extraction architecture reduces citizens to labor, not metaphorically but operationally, by dismantling the institutional conditions under which action is possible: the union, the assembly, the local newspaper, the campaign finance regime, the margin of time and money above survival that participation requires. When citizens conclude they are powerless, they stop acting, and the learned helplessness is not a psychological failure. It is the intended product of the design, the abdication that unaccountable power requires and cultivates.
Now the obstacle, stated in its strongest form because it deserves it. Olson demonstrated the structural asymmetry at the heart of all of this: small concentrated groups solve the collective action problem easily, because each member internalizes enough of the gain to justify the effort, while large dispersed groups face free-rider incentives that defeat organization even when every member shares the interest. This is why the extraction side of every fight in this series arrives organized and the absorption side arrives as individuals. Not moral failure, not apathy, not false consciousness: arithmetic. And the irony Olson identified cuts at every populism ever assembled: the people that populism invokes are, by structural logic, the least capable of spontaneous organization, while the elites it opposes are precisely the well-organized small groups.
Any honest program has to answer Olson, and the answer has existed, empirically documented, for thirty-five years. Ostrom spent a career studying communities that solved exactly this problem without a sovereign to coerce them and without prices to bribe them: irrigation systems, fisheries, commons of every kind, governed durably by their own members. The solved cases share a design grammar: clear boundaries, rules adapted locally, participatory monitoring, graduated sanctions, nested layers of governance, recognition by the authorities above. The literature's name for the resulting structure is polycentric, federated collective power, and it is the proper scholarly name for everything this series has proposed, worth claiming explicitly because it pre-empts the mislabeling the previous essay adjudicated. A floor set at the scale of the problem, decisions held as locally as the floor allows, monitoring by the governed, sanctions that escalate rather than detonate. That is not mercantilism by another name. It is the commons grammar, scaled.
And it already runs at the interstate scale, in miniature, though the miniature now carries a scar worth reading closely. The global minimum corporate tax is a nested arrangement: a floor agreed at the supranational level, implemented through national law, enforced by mutual verification among the parties. In 2021, one hundred thirty-six states, each individually helpless against tax arbitrage, composed into a counterparty against it, using precisely the federated structure Olson's arithmetic requires: coordination costs concentrated in an organized core, benefits selective enough that participation dominates defection. The floor's logic was never complicated. An enterprise that books billions in profit across infrastructure that taxes built, the courts that enforce its contracts, the roads that move its goods, the schools that trained its workforce, should not be able to bid its own obligation toward zero; statutory rate cuts and depreciation engineering are simply arbitrage's domestic dialects, mechanisms for slipping beneath a floor by another name. Within four years, dozens of jurisdictions, including most of the world's low-tax havens, had written the floor into domestic law. Then the scar: the largest economy in the arrangement withdrew, and in early 2026 secured for its own multinationals a carve-out, a parallel regime deemed equivalent, negotiated from outside the structure everyone else remained inside. Read honestly, the episode proves both halves of this piece's argument at once. The floor held where it was implemented, which is the existence proof: the thing declared impossible by every sophisticated observer for a generation was built, recently, by the entities building it now. And the carve-out is the counterparty's oldest move performed at the newest scale, confirmation that composition is not a machine that runs by itself but a contest that continues after the signing ceremony. The impossibility was a claim about political architecture, not about the world. So is the carve-out.
Which leaves sequence, and the sequence is the strategy. The composition capacity, suppressed for a century, is not rebuilt by manifesto. It is rebuilt by demonstration, and the first demonstration should be chosen for legibility rather than importance. Taxation is the candidate, and the reason is pedagogical. The numbers are simple enough to carry in a pocket: the corporate share of federal revenue fell from roughly a third to under a tenth across the postwar era while the payroll share tripled, a reallocation of the burden from capital to labor accomplished entirely through political choices. Simple, documented, and reversible by the same means. A coalition that wins that fight has won something larger than the revenue: it has demonstrated, to itself, that the arrangements are political, chosen, and therefore changeable together, which is the one lesson the entire suppression project was built to prevent. This piece states its status honestly: that a legible early win rebuilds suppressed organizing capacity is the declared operating hypothesis of the strategy, supported by the organizing tradition and the movement literature but not yet by the kind of evidence this series requires for a causal claim. The series' standards apply to the series, here most of all.
One specification, owed rather than volunteered, because flexibility clauses are historically where floors go to be hollowed out. Teeth at scale, decisions local is a design commitment, not a slogan, and its content is the Ostrom grammar: the floor itself, the minimum below which no jurisdiction may bid, set at the scale of the arbitrage it exists to end; implementation, rates above the floor, enforcement design, and adjacent policy held at the national and subnational levels; monitoring mutual and participatory; sanctions graduated. The full institutional design belongs to the framework's theoretical track and is developed there. What this essay commits to is the principle that decides hard cases: wherever discretion would recreate the arbitrage, the floor governs; everywhere else, the locality does.
What the Capacity Is For
Begin the ending where the previous essay began, with the name, because the name was never the point.
Naming the system accurately was worth two essays because the wrong name assigned the wrong role: spectator at a collapse. The right name assigns a different one. A consolidation can be contested, and contested by ordinary means, the boring, procedural, unromantic means this tradition invented precisely for the purpose: the statute, the treaty, the audit, the vote, the local experiments in self-governance that keep the capacity alive between its larger exercises. Nothing in this series requires the situation to worsen before response is justified. The suffering already documented is the justification, and the window in which institutional response remains possible is open, narrowing, and indifferent to whether anyone uses it.
A single strand of anything breaks in the hand. That was never an argument against strands. It is the reason rope exists, and rope is not a metaphor for something exotic. It is the oldest human technology of composition: ordinary fibers, individually weak, laid together with intention until they can hold what none of them could bear alone. Every institution this series has invoked, the union, the treaty, the commons, the franchise, is rope. The system described across these essays was built by people who understood this perfectly and wove accordingly, one treaty, one charter, one redefinition at a time, while teaching everyone else that fibers are only ever fibers.
They are not. That is the whole of it. The rung gets built by the people it was built to exclude, at the scale the problem actually operates, on a floor with no one underneath it. The capacity was suppressed because it works. That is the entire case for beginning.
Five Historical Redefinitions That Hindered the Great Experiment concludes this series.
Sources and Further Reading
Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. Harcourt, Brace & World.
Buchanan, J. M., & Tullock, G. (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. University of Michigan Press.
Congressional Research Service. (2011). Reasons for the Decline in Corporate Tax Revenues (Report R42113).
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Hayek, F. A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom. University of Chicago Press.
Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).
Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic Paradox. Verso.
Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563.
Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2021, October 8). International community strikes a ground-breaking tax deal for the digital age [Press release].
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
Ostrom, E. (2010). Beyond markets and states: Polycentric governance of complex economic systems. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641–672.
Pettit, P. (1997). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press.
Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. A. (1977). Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Pantheon Books.
Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Farrar & Rinehart.
Rand, A. (1964). The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library.
Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.
Rawls, J. (1993). Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press.
Sumner, W. G. (1883). What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. Harper & Brothers.
U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2026, January 5). Treasury secures agreement to exempt U.S.-headquartered companies from global tax plan [Press release].