Notes from the Circus

10/30/2025

The Democratic establishment raises money from concentrated wealth. Real estate interests. Financial sector. Corporate monopolies. Tech oligarchs. Wealthy homeowners. Private equity. Venture capital. These aren’t cartoon villains—they’re often people with progressive social views who donate to Democrats while benefiting enormously from current economic arrangements.

To actually fight Trump’s authoritarianism would require naming what’s happening: Concentrated economic power has captured democratic government. When wealth concentrates to the degree it has, when oligarchs can buy political influence, when corporate monopolies face no countervailing force—democracy becomes fiction. The constitutional framework exists but no longer constrains the powerful.

This isn’t socialism. It’s the founding insight of American republicanism: concentrated power of any kind—governmental or economic—threatens self-governance. The Founders feared monarchy and aristocracy not because they hated rich people, but because concentrations of power—whether in a king’s hands or in hereditary wealth—make democratic self-governance impossible.

The establishment can’t learn from this because learning from it would require something they’ve eliminated from their approach: vision. Not “vision” as marketing slogan or aspirational rhetoric, but actual conviction about what republican self-governance requires and willingness to fight for it regardless of what polls say.

Jeffries doesn’t have vision. He has focus groups telling him what voters say they want based on the options they’ve been given. Schumer doesn’t have vision. He has consultants optimizing candidate selection based on name recognition and fundraising potential. The establishment doesn’t lead—it manages. It doesn’t build coalitions through vision—it optimizes them through data analysis.