Why We’ve Always Distrusted Concentrated Power
On November 15, 1813, John Adams sat down at his desk in Quincy, Massachusetts, to write what would become one of the most revealing letters in American political history. Snow was falling furiously outside, and Adams couldn’t stop thinking about the armies suffering in the storm. But what really occupied his mind was a debate he’d been having with Thomas Jefferson about the nature of power in democratic society.
“Pick up the first 100 men you meet, and make a Republic,” Adams wrote to his old friend and former rival. “Every Man will have an equal Vote. But when deliberations and discussions are opened it will be found that 25, by their Talents, Virtues being equal, will be able to carry 50 Votes. Every one of these 25, is an Aristocrat, in my Sense of the Word.”
Adams was wrestling with a problem that had haunted him since the founding: even in the most democratic society, some people inevitably accumulate more influence than others. “Education, Wealth, Strength Beauty, Stature, Birth, Marriage, graceful Attitudes and Motions, Gait, Air, Complexion, Physiognomy, are Talents,” he observed, “as well as Genius and Science and learning.” Any advantage that allowed someone to influence more than their single vote created a form of unofficial aristocracy.
This wasn’t abstract theorizing. Adams had watched these dynamics play out in real politics, had seen how natural inequalities could undermine democratic equality if left unchecked. His letter captured a central tension in American political thought: how do you preserve democratic government when people aren’t actually equal in their talents, resources, or influence?
The answer was already built into the American system from its founding. What legal scholar Kevin Frazier calls the “anti-power-concentration principle” wasn’t something that evolved over time—it was fundamental to American political thought from the very beginning, woven into the Constitution’s structure and the intellectual traditions that shaped it.
The Architectural Solution
The men who wrote the Constitution understood something that Adams articulated in his letter to Jefferson: power naturally concentrates, and when it does, it threatens the balance that makes democratic society possible. Their solution was architectural—they designed a system where power would be deliberately scattered and forced to compete with itself.
The Constitution doesn’t just divide power between federal and state governments, or among executive, legislative, and judicial branches. It creates a complex ecosystem where different institutions have overlapping authorities and competing interests, making it difficult for any single group to dominate the system. The bicameral legislature ensures that different constituencies must agree before laws pass. The federal system means that state and national governments can check each other. The separation of powers forces branches to cooperate or at least avoid blocking each other for anything significant to happen.
James Madison explained the logic in “Federalist No. 10.” He acknowledged that “the various and unequal distribution of property” would always create political conflict, but argued that a large republic would include such a diversity of economic interests that no single group could permanently dominate. The key was ensuring that conflict occurred between “different and diverse property interests” that would “fluctuate and change based on different issues, making a permanent wealthy class less likely.”
This was sophisticated political engineering based on realistic assumptions about human nature. Madison didn’t expect people to be virtuous or selfless—he expected them to pursue their interests vigorously. The system worked by channeling that self-interest in ways that served the broader public good, making ambition counter ambition rather than allowing it to accumulate unchecked.
Noah Webster, famous for his dictionary but also a penetrating political analyst, put the underlying principle simply: “an equality of property … constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.” He had observed that throughout history, “the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property,” but when wealthy people centralize power, “liberty expires” and republican government tends toward oligarchy.
The Founders took this analysis seriously in practical ways. Early American corporations were chartered for specific public purposes—building bridges, operating ferries, constructing canals—with clear limitations on their scope and lifetime. They operated more like government agencies than modern businesses, created to accomplish particular public goals and then dissolved when those goals were met. State governments carefully regulated even these limited corporations, requiring them to renew their charters regularly and prove they were serving public rather than private interests.
Even religious institutions faced scrutiny. New York’s legislature forced churches, including wealthy and prominent denominations, to have their charters renewed and adopt governance structures consistent with republican principles. The concern wasn’t hostility to religion but fear that powerful religious organizations might become rival centers of authority that could challenge democratic governance.
The Corporate Revolution
This careful balance began unraveling in the late 1800s, not through foreign invasion or constitutional crisis, but through a quiet legal and cultural revolution engineered by the first generation of American industrial oligarchs.
In 1886, the Supreme Court’s decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad established the doctrine of corporate personhood, granting corporations constitutional rights previously reserved for human beings. This wasn’t an accidental development or gradual evolution—it was the result of a deliberate legal strategy by railroad and industrial interests to escape democratic control by claiming the same protections as individual citizens.
Around the same time, new ideologies emerged that reframed concentrated wealth from a threat to democracy into its natural and beneficial outcome. Social Darwinism argued that great fortunes proved their owners’ superior fitness. Theories of “natural monopoly” suggested that industrial concentration was inevitable and efficient. These ideas didn’t emerge from universities or democratic debate—they were developed and promoted by the very people who benefited from them.
The corporate form itself was transformed during this period. Where early corporations had been chartered for specific public purposes with clear limitations, they became permanent entities with broad powers and minimal public accountability. States competed to offer the most permissive corporate charters, creating a race to the bottom that freed business from democratic oversight.
This represented a fundamental break with founding principles. Where Madison had worried about permanent wealthy classes and Webster had warned that concentrated property would destroy republican government, Gilded Age ideology celebrated such concentration as progress. Where the Founders had designed institutions to prevent power accumulation, the new thinking argued that such accumulation was both natural and beneficial.
The Progressive Revival
The anti-power-concentration tradition found new champions during the early 1900s, led by an unlikely figure: Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt understood that allowing private entities to accumulate unchecked power was just as dangerous as allowing government to do so.
“The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts,” Roosevelt declared, “are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is duty bound to control them.” This wasn’t anti-business sentiment—it was the application of founding principles to industrial-age realities.
Roosevelt’s approach proved remarkably effective. His administration broke up monopolies, regulated railroads, and established the principle that no private interest should become powerful enough to dictate terms to democratic government. The results were dramatic: increased competition, lower prices, and restoration of public confidence that government could control private concentrations of economic power.
The tradition reached its fullest expression during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, when economic collapse revealed how concentrated corporate power could devastate entire communities. FDR brought the anti-power-concentration principle into the twentieth century with characteristic directness: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
The New Deal went beyond simply regulating corporate power—it deliberately created counterbalancing forces. The Wagner Act didn’t just protect workers’ right to organize; it actively encouraged union formation as a way to distribute economic power more broadly. If corporations were going to be large and powerful, then workers needed their own large and powerful organizations to negotiate on equal terms.
This approach reflected sophisticated understanding of how power actually works in complex societies. Rather than trying to eliminate all large institutions, New Deal policies created a system of competing powers that could check each other. Banking regulation prevented financial concentration, but deposit insurance protected ordinary savers. Antitrust enforcement broke up monopolies, but labor protections allowed workers to organize their own collective strength. Social insurance programs created economic security that reduced workers’ dependence on employer benevolence.
The strategy worked because it applied founding principles systematically. Just as the Constitution prevented any single branch of government from dominating the others, New Deal policies prevented any single economic interest from dominating the broader economy.
The Extra-National Challenge
The anti-power-concentration tradition was revived during the Progressive Era and New Deal, but it has faced new challenges since the 1980s that go beyond anything previous generations encountered. The rise of extra-national corporations has created entities that operate across multiple jurisdictions and can effectively escape democratic control by any single nation.
When multinational companies can shift profits to tax havens, move operations to countries with weaker labor protections, or play governments against each other for regulatory favors, they achieve a form of power the Founders never imagined—entities that are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, subject to no particular democratic authority while influencing all of them.
This represents a fundamental challenge to democratic governance itself. The Founders designed American institutions to prevent power concentration within a single political system, but today’s corporate giants operate outside any single system while maintaining the ability to shape all of them. They can threaten to relocate if taxed too heavily, move jobs if regulated too strictly, or simply ignore laws that lack international enforcement mechanisms.
Consider how this plays out in practice. A handful of technology companies now control the flow of information that shapes public opinion worldwide. A few financial firms manage assets equivalent to entire national economies. Healthcare, agriculture, telecommunications, and countless other sectors have consolidated into oligopolies that can effectively dictate terms to consumers, workers, and government regulators across multiple countries simultaneously.
The regulatory capture that worried earlier generations has become more sophisticated and more difficult to address. When corporations can forum-shop between different regulatory systems, when they can use their global reach to pressure local governments, when they can move their legal headquarters to whatever jurisdiction offers the best deal, traditional democratic controls become much less effective.
The Demagogue’s Alliance
Alexander Hamilton warned in “Federalist No. 71” that the people are continually threatened by “the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it.” He was describing what happens when demagogues ally with concentrated wealth to corrupt democratic processes.
This alliance operates through what Madison called “artful misrepresentations of interested men”—using sophisticated communication techniques to mislead citizens about whose interests are actually being served. When concentrated wealth can fund political campaigns, shape media narratives, and capture regulatory agencies, it can create the appearance of democratic legitimacy while actually serving narrow private interests.
The pattern Hamilton and Madison warned about becomes particularly dangerous when combined with extra-national corporate power. A political leader with contempt for constitutional norms, colluding with wealthy interests on the promise that their wealth will be translated into political power and favors, can now draw on resources and techniques that transcend any single democratic system’s ability to control them.
The Persistent Pattern
What emerges from this history is a persistent pattern rather than a simple story of decline or progress. The anti-power-concentration principle surfaces in different eras to confront different threats, but it always carries the same essential insight: concentrated power, whether governmental or private, threatens the balance that makes democratic society possible.
The specific mechanisms change over time. The Founders worried about aristocratic families and established churches. The Progressives confronted industrial monopolies and political machines. The New Deal generation faced economic oligarchy and corporate control of government. Today’s challenge involves extra-national corporations and digital platforms that can shape information flows and economic relationships on a global scale.
But the underlying dynamic remains the same. Power concentrates naturally through talent, wealth, technology, or institutional position. When it concentrates enough, it can override democratic controls and shape the rules to serve its own interests rather than the broader public good. Preventing this requires constant vigilance and periodic institutional innovation to restore balance.
The tradition that runs from Adams and Jefferson through Theodore Roosevelt and FDR to contemporary scholars like Kevin Frazier isn’t about eliminating inequality or large institutions. It’s about preventing any single interest from accumulating enough power to dominate the others, maintaining the competitive pluralism that allows democratic governance to function.
This ongoing struggle explains why Americans have always been suspicious of big government, big business, and big institutions of any kind. It’s not reflexive anti-institutionalism but practical wisdom about how power works in complex societies. The challenge facing each generation is learning how to apply this principle to whatever new forms of power concentration emerge in their era.
Understanding this tradition reveals something crucial about contemporary American politics: power concentration isn’t inevitable. The Founders proved that thoughtful institutional design can prevent dangerous accumulations of power. Theodore Roosevelt and FDR demonstrated that even after power has concentrated, democratic institutions can break it up and redistribute it more broadly.
The anti-power-concentration principle isn’t some dusty eighteenth-century relic—it’s a practical blueprint that shows how democratic societies can actively prevent the accumulation of power that threatens their survival. Madison didn’t design a system to manage inevitable power concentration; he designed one to prevent it. That insight runs through Adams’ analysis of natural aristocracy, Roosevelt’s trust-busting, and FDR’s New Deal.
Power concentrates when institutions fail to prevent it, not because concentration is natural or unstoppable. The same principles that guided the Constitution’s separation of powers, that drove Progressive Era antitrust enforcement, and that shaped New Deal labor policy can be applied to today’s extra-national corporations and digital platforms.
The tradition offers both the diagnosis and the cure. The challenge isn’t whether we can prevent dangerous power concentrations—American history proves we can. The question is whether we still remember how to use the tools that previous generations wielded so effectively.
