The United States still speaks in the language of popular sovereignty.

Government of the people.

By the people.

For the people.

The phrase hangs in classrooms like a relic from a religion no one practices but everyone invokes. It is not a lie exactly. It is a liturgy. And liturgies survive long after belief has thinned.

The problem is not that elections are fake. The problem is that sovereignty has migrated.

In large societies, power does not disappear. It concentrates. It gathers where organization gathers. It sits where continuity sits. It settles wherever the incentives are strong enough to hold it in place.

In modern America, that place is not the ballot.

It is the room.

The room is not mystical. It is simply small.

It is where donors pre-screen candidates before voters ever meet them. It is where regulatory language is drafted by the industries it will govern. It is where think tanks pre-decide what is “serious.” It is where party professionals calculate viability. It is where capital whispers what it will tolerate.

The people are consulted.

They are polled.

They are mobilized.

They are addressed.

But they are not routinely decisive.

This is not a conspiracy. It is physics.

Unorganized majorities do not rule. Organized minorities do.

If this were only a mood, we could dismiss it. But the numbers are no longer subtle.

In late 2025, roughly one in six Americans told pollsters they trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” That is near the lowest level in the modern series. More than four out of five citizens in a self-described democracy openly say they do not trust their government.

Trust does not collapse because of vibes. It collapses when people repeatedly experience misalignment between their preferences and outcomes.

Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page examined over a thousand policy decisions and found that economic elites and organized business lobbies have “substantial independent impacts” on outcomes, while the preferences of average citizens—once you control for elite views—have “little or no independent influence.” When elites strongly support a policy, it tends to pass. When the public strongly supports a policy but elites oppose it, it usually fails.

Wealth concentration reinforces this asymmetry. As of the mid-2020s, the top one percent of U.S. households own roughly a third of national wealth—about the same as the bottom ninety percent combined. The bottom half holds a sliver. Campaigns, meanwhile, now cost billions per cycle, with “independent” dark-money groups adding billions more.

But the important fact is not just that the numbers are large. It is where that money sits: at a few chokepoints from which the average citizen is structurally absent.

It sits at candidate selection, where donors and gatekeeping networks filter who is even plausible long before anyone votes. Many candidacies never exist because they never clear the fundraising threshold.

It sits at agenda setting, where legislative calendars, hearings, and “serious” policy options are shaped by organizations with staff in the room where statutes and regulations are drafted.

It sits in survival and punishment, where politicians who cross powerful lobbies face primary challengers, attack ads, and post-office employment costs that ordinary voters cannot offset.

You can see this in the gap between stable majorities and stalled reforms. Large bipartisan majorities have long supported measures like universal background checks on gun purchases or allowing public programs to negotiate drug prices. The problem has not been public will. The barrier has been organized opposition from interests with reliable access to decision points.

International assessments quietly echo the pattern: the United States still qualifies as “free,” but with declining scores tied to unequal treatment under law, the outsized influence of money in politics, and institutional erosion relative to its peers.

None of this by itself proves that the country is an oligarchy in the classical sense. But together it sketches a structure:

– Declining trust

– High wealth concentration

– High barriers to entry in electoral competition

– Measurable elite dominance in policy outcomes

– Gradual democratic backsliding

You can refuse the word “oligarchy” if you like. The substance remains.

Sovereignty has migrated from the many to the organized few.

This tendency is not unique to America. It is older than the republic.

Aristotle warned that when the wealthy few rule in their own interest rather than the common good, you have oligarchy, not polity. James Madison feared “factions,” groups united by interests adverse to others’ rights, and hoped that in a large republic no single faction could dominate.

Later thinkers were less optimistic. Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels argued that every large organization splits into rulers and ruled, no matter how democratic its origins. Michels wrote of an “iron law of oligarchy”: those who control procedures and information tend to consolidate power over time.

C. Wright Mills described a “power elite” in mid-20th-century America: an interlocking circle of corporate, military, and political leaders who made the most consequential decisions, while elections rearranged personnel without rewriting the script.

More recently, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have drawn a line between “inclusive” and “extractive” institutions. Inclusive systems distribute authority and constrain elites. Extractive systems allow elites to use the state to entrench their advantage. The drift from one to the other is rarely dramatic. It proceeds through a long sequence of minor rule changes, norm erosions, and structural biases.

The point of this lineage is simple: minority control is not a glitch. It is the default tendency of complex systems. The question is not whether a minority rules. The question is how tightly that minority is bound — and by whom.

What is distinct about this moment is not that a small group wields disproportionate power. The Gilded Age was overtly oligarchic. What is distinct is the combination of visibility, scale, and exhaustion.

First, visibility.

The scaffolding is now exposed in real time. Lobbying disclosures, donor retreats, revolving doors, billionaires underwriting primary challenges, regulatory language copy-pasted from industry memos — what once required months of investigative work now leaks continuously. The curtain is thin. The myths of shared sacrifice and neutral expertise struggle under the weight of screenshots.

Second, financialization and scale.

Capital is more concentrated and more mobile than in previous eras. Money can be redeployed globally in milliseconds. Regulatory arbitrage is routine. Lobbying is permanent infrastructure, not episodic intervention. The same networks shape corporate strategy, trade rules, tax codes, and campaign narratives. The threat of capital flight and disinvestment becomes an everyday form of pressure.

Third, institutional fatigue.

The formal machinery still turns. Elections occur on schedule. Courts issue rulings. Agencies publish rules. But belief in the fairness of the system has thinned. The stories that once made the trade-offs tolerable—“work hard and you’ll get ahead,” “we’re all in this together”—ring hollow for many whose material conditions have stagnated or deteriorated.

The result is a specific configuration:

A visibly concentrated ruling minority.

A procedurally intact but morally thin democracy.

A majority that suspects the game is rigged but lacks durable organizational leverage.

This configuration produces familiar pathologies. Populist waves oscillate, changing rhetoric more than structure. Policy increasingly emerges from crisis management and executive shortcuts rather than deliberate legislation. Mutual contempt deepens: elites come to view the public as erratic and misinformed; the public comes to view elites as predatory and insulated.

Minority rule has not just intensified. It has become the central, visible fact that other conflicts orbit around.

Most people do not experience this as “elite theory.” They experience it as a nagging recognition: nothing they do seems to alter the script.

There is a useful distinction here, one that cuts through comforting pronouns.

There are the people: those whose lives are shaped by decisions they do not directly influence, whose leverage is mostly episodic — an election here, a protest there.

There is the minority that rules: those who can reliably bend decisions through money, institutional position, or sustained, coordinated pressure.

And there is the audience: citizens who follow politics, donate, volunteer, argue online, feel intensely involved, and help confer legitimacy — but are not structurally decisive.

You can locate yourself with a simple test: if you disengage completely — stop reading, stop watching, stop posting, even stop voting — does governance change because of your absence?

If not, you are not in the ruling minority.

That recognition feels humiliating at first. It punctures the fantasy of immediate sovereignty. It reveals that much of what passes for “participation” is symbolic rather than structural.

But humiliation is not the end of the thought. It is the beginning.

Because the minority that governs is not omnipotent. It is constrained.

It depends on legitimacy to keep the machine running.

It depends on capital flows it does not fully control.

It depends on narrative stability so that extraction looks like stewardship.

It depends on institutions not collapsing outright.

The people do not rule directly. They constrain indirectly.

That corridor — between naïve majoritarianism and fatalistic cynicism — is narrow.

On one side lies myth: “The people are in charge.”

On the other lies surrender: “Nothing matters.”

Neither is true.

Large democracies are minority-managed systems with majority constraints. The question is not whether a minority rules. The question is whether that minority is rotating and accountable, or entrenched and insulated.

American anxiety today is not mainly about elections disappearing. It is about insulation thickening.

This is where worship and attention enter.

Power in the modern order no longer asks first for belief. It asks for attention.

We scroll, we watch, we react. We treat politics as an ongoing spectacle in which our primary role is audience: liking, sharing, commenting, denouncing. We feel immersed in “the conversation,” even as the conversation rarely intersects with the rooms where incentives are updated.

The stage is loud.

The feed is loud.

The outrage is loud.

But the room is quiet.

The minority that rules does not experience politics primarily as content. It experiences politics as a series of negotiations across time.

It thinks in decades: regulatory arcs, tax regimes, treaty structures, demographic trends, institutional capture. It can afford to lose a news cycle if it wins a rule change that compounds for thirty years.

Sovereignty lives there — in the ability to shape the future’s default settings.

A million uncoordinated preferences expressed as posts or even as votes do not outweigh a hundred coordinated actors with aligned incentives who can sustain pressure over years.

Attention is not leverage. Visibility is not entry. Awareness without organization is not power.

This is not a reason to despair. It is an instruction manual the system accidentally left open.

If sovereignty belongs to organization across time, then the moral question shifts.

Not “Why are elites evil?”

But “What are we willing to build that lasts longer than outrage?”

This has consequences for language.

Most political writing still flatters the reader. It says “we” as if the pronoun carried authority. It invokes “the people” as if invocation were power. It treats the median citizen as protagonist in a story whose ending is always one election away.

Intellectual honesty requires a different style.

It means avoiding the reflexive “we” when you mean a narrow ideological circle.

It means refusing euphemisms like “stakeholder engagement” when the process is donor-driven.

It means naming concentrated power plainly instead of hiding it inside phrases like “public-private partnership.”

It means acknowledging when reforms do not alter structural incentives, only the branding on the same machinery.

It means distinguishing between symbolic victories — who can marry, who can serve, who can be seen — and shifts in institutional control — who writes the rules, who allocates risk, who decides which losses are “necessary.”

It also means being precise about hope.

Hope cannot mean “the people will soon directly govern.” Large societies do not function that way. The many constrain and reshuffle the few; they rarely replace them wholesale.

A more sober hope might mean:

Strengthening inclusive institutions incrementally, even when transformation is unlikely.

Supporting transparency measures that increase constraint, even when they do not change who is in the room.

Building organized counter-elites—unions, cooperatives, independent institutions—that can exert sustained leverage rather than mistaking ambient outrage for power.

Refusing personal complicity in narratives you know are structurally misleading, even when those narratives are fashionable on your side.

None of this is glamorous. It will not trend. It sounds almost boring compared to the adrenaline cycles of permanent crisis.

But sovereignty is never loud.

The people are not in the room.

They never fully were.

For most of history, this fact could be buried under distance and myth. The village did not see the court. The factory did not see the boardroom. The citizen did not see the memo.

What is new is that we can see the doorway.

We can see how candidates are filtered.

We can see how laws are drafted.

We can see who funds which narratives and how institutions respond.

We cannot yet walk through at will. But we can no longer pretend the architecture is mysterious.

That changes the writer’s task.

The task is not to reassert a fiction of popular omnipotence. It is not to sell another cycle of “this is the most important election of our lifetime” as if the axis of history turned only on turnout.

The task is to describe, as cleanly as possible, who is in the room, how they got there, how they are constrained, and where leverage still exists against them.

To say: this is how power consolidates.

This is where incentives accumulate.

This is how narrative stabilizes minority rule.

This is how attention sedates instead of organizes.

And this is where building begins if we intend to be more than an audience.

The question, once you see the doorway, is no longer whether minority rule exists.

The question is whether you will spend your finite attention on the stage —

or begin learning how rooms are built.

—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.

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