Predistribution Is the Anti-Oligarchy Solution

As progressives watch the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal institutions and funneling of power to the ultra-wealthy, one common lament has been the lack of a unifying economic vision that offers a compelling alternative to Trumpian “plutocratic populism,” or government for the rich in the name of the masses.

Yet progressives do not lack for options. There is “deliverism”—deliver tangible results in exchange for support. Or “abundance”—boost growth by increasing supply. Or “productivism”—prioritize production over financialization and local communities over globalization.

For us, the most compelling alternative—the one that would both transform our economy and make it more democratic—is predistribution, as Jacob Hacker coined it. The concept is simple. Should the government compensate people for the inequalities that result from markets? That would be redistribution. Or should it transform society and markets to generate less inequality in the first place? Now, that would be predistribution.

Defining Predistribution

In concrete terms, predistribution is an “upstream” solution that can reduce the need for “downstream” redistributive policies. For instance, antitrust enforcement and labor regulation are predistributive: If these policies reduce prices and boost wages, that reduces the need for cash transfers down the line.

By combining public investments with market regulations, predistribution can help foster substantive equality of opportunity and balance power in the economy. And by addressing the roots of inequality, it offers a more fundamental solution than redistribution alone. As we argue in our recent Roosevelt Institute policy brief, predistribution provides both a persuasive explanation for the rise of plutocratic populism and a powerful antidote to it.

The United States’ failure to predistribute has denied many Americans the dignity of good jobs with fair pay and a reasonable opportunity to improve their material welfare. Ultimately, this has undermined working-class Americans’ faith in government as a democratic institution. As we covered in our brief, researchers have shown that beginning in the 1970s, congressional Democrats and other elected officials, particularly those on the Left who historically advanced predistribution policies,  shifted away from such measures. These include pro-labor policies (such as raising the minimum wage, improving working conditions, and facilitating union organizing), industrial policy, and public works. They also find that Americans in general—and Americans with less formal education in particular—support predistribution policies more than redistribution policies.

The predistribution policy agenda provides the most compelling alternative to the world that neoliberalism created. US neoliberalism since the 1970s has not reduced government regulation as theory would suggest, but rather shifted market governance in favor of those with wealth and power. The plutocratic populism we see today constitutes a mutant form of neoliberalism more than a break from it, in that it still seeks to redistribute power and wealth upward. Hence the antidote to both neoliberalism and plutocratic populism is to shift power decisively in the opposite direction: from employers to workers and from producers to consumers.

Marketcraft as Anti-Oligarchy

At the heart of the predistribution agenda is “marketcraft”: addressing all the arcane rules that set the balance of power in the economy, from antitrust and intellectual property protection to corporate governance and labor and financial regulation. More aggressive antitrust policies, for example, would constrain corporate power, reduce prices and enhance value for consumers, and increase the bargaining power of labor. And policies that directly support labor, like cracking down on wage theft, would boost wages and enhance working conditions.

Although the failure to predistribute helped undercut working-class Americans’ trust in government, it does not necessarily follow that a predistribution program alone will rebuild that trust. But there are positive signs of predistribution’s resurging popular salience, on top of the material ways it would shift democratic and economic power to the people. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) demonstrated on their road show that an anti-oligarchy message resonates with people, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s democratic-socialist economic agenda has proven popular with young people both in and outside of New York. The Biden administration followed the predistribution playbook in many ways, aggressively strengthening antitrust enforcement, supporting labor power, and revitalizing industrial policy, but critics point out that the administration got little credit for its economic achievements because the US public was overwhelmingly concerned with inflation.

The most pressing problems we face today, from climate change to affordability, cannot be resolved within the existing structure of our unbalanced economy. We must address unequal power in our markets and civic power by channeling public investment to enhance human capabilities for all and by unrigging the market rules that define the power relationships in the economy.

The anti-oligarchy message carries substantially more punch now, however, because the second Trump administration has supercharged and exposed oligarchy like never before: It has promised a massive tax reduction for the wealthy while slashing Medicaid and food assistance. It has deployed government power to enrich the president and his family. It has targeted material rewards to friends like Elon Musk, and punishments to the president’s perceived enemies, including the media, universities, and law firms. It has allowed historic corporate concentration, including massive media mergers. And it has doubled down on support for fossil fuels at the cost of energy prices and the environment.

These blatant displays of corrupting wealth and the growing salience of anti-oligarchy sentiment among the people pair well with a predistribution policy agenda that addresses inequality at its roots and shifts power from corporations to people. The most pressing problems we face today, from climate change to affordability, cannot be resolved within the existing structure of our unbalanced economy. We must address unequal power in our markets and civic power by channeling public investment to enhance human capabilities for all and by unrigging the market rules that define the power relationships in the economy. The predistribution agenda does not accept labor exploitation and value extraction and then compensate for it—rather, it strives to give workers fair wages and consumers fair value in the first place.

Americans deserve a government that works for them, not the ultra-rich. A comprehensive predistribution agenda can shift power back to the people and offer Americans dignity and a fair opportunity to thrive.

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