Concentration of Power

Concentration of power is the accumulation of leverage — economic, political, or informational — in a small number of actors: firms, donors, platforms, regulators, ownership networks. It is the publication’s central concern, the structural condition that the populist response is responding to.

Concentration is not the same as inequality. A society can have high inequality without high concentration (many small businesses competing, many donors giving small sums). A society can have low inequality and high concentration (a state-monopoly economy with a small ruling class). What makes the contemporary US distinctive is the simultaneous rise of both — high inequality plus high concentration of corporate, financial, and political-funding power in fewer hands.

The publication tracks concentration across four interlocking domains: corporate market structure (HHI by industry), donor networks (which firms and individuals fund which campaigns and at what scale), media ownership (consolidation of news outlets and platform gatekeeping), and regulatory capture (whether agencies write rules that protect incumbents or open markets).

The cross-ideological frame: libertarians and progressives can disagree sharply about what to do about concentration, but the underlying empirical condition is widely acknowledged. The publication treats it as the foundational fact of 2020s American politics, the thing every other political question is downstream of.