The People’s Republic: A Counter-Ideology for Human Flourishing

Modern Political Ideology Part 6

May 18, 2025

At its heart, this counter-ideology begins with a simple premise: the purpose of government is not to serve markets, but to serve people. Markets are a tool. Corporations are a means. Technology is a servant. When these instruments become masters, liberty becomes illusion and democracy collapses into performance.

The Mixed Ideology of American Power: What Unites the Parties

In the loud theater of American politics, partisanship dominates the stage. Red versus Blue. Conservative versus Liberal. Fox News versus MSNBC. But beneath the surface noise, a different pattern emerges—one far less partisan, yet more enduring and powerful. Over the past two decades, Republicans and Democrats have operated under a shared political ideology, one that has less to do with the will of the people and more to do with the maintenance of economic hegemony, corporate influence, and institutional survival.

This ideology has no official name. It is not printed on bumper stickers or waved on protest signs. But its effects are evident in policy outcomes, campaign finance trends, regulatory enforcement, military spending, trade agreements, and the revolving door between government and industry. It is an ideology defined not by party platforms but by structural incentives. Call it managerial capitalism, market governance, or corporate consensus. Whatever the label, it reflects a hybrid of neoliberal economics, institutional inertia, national security absolutism, and digital-age corporatocracy.

1. Economic Globalism and Corporate Consensus

Since the late 1990s, both major parties have broadly supported an economic consensus grounded in global trade liberalization, deregulation, and corporate tax advantages. Bill Clinton championed NAFTA and normalized trade with China. George W. Bush followed with expansive trade policies, tax cuts, and financial deregulation. Barack Obama introduced the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and bailed out Wall Street. Donald Trump campaigned against free trade but governed with corporate tax reform and deregulatory zeal. Joe Biden, despite populist rhetoric, largely preserved these frameworks while embracing tech-sector growth as a pillar of economic leadership. Trump 2.0 is shaking things up, but not with a clearly defined outcome as tariffs reshuffle the global trading system.

Beneath the partisan slogans lies a reality of shared interests: Wall Street gets access to global capital markets; multinational corporations enjoy cheap labor and tax arbitrage; and government officials—on both sides of the aisle—reap campaign contributions, advisory board appointments, and opportunities after serving in public office.

The ideology here is not socialism or capitalism in the traditional sense. It is corporate-managed globalism with government as a risk insurer and compliance partner. Political elites manage the system while corporations extract the value. Voters are left with the rhetoric, but rarely the benefits.

2. Security State as Sacred Cow

One of the clearest areas of bipartisan unity is national defense and homeland security. Defense budgets have risen steadily regardless of which party is in power. On one hand, this has been the bulwark of Pax Americana, making the world a safer place for decades. On the other hand, the growth has taken a life of its own. The Iraq War was supported by both parties in 2002; the expansion of domestic surveillance followed under both Bush and Obama. Drone warfare, proxy conflicts, cyber operations, and intelligence community growth have continued under successive administrations.

Few members of Congress from either party challenge the Pentagon budget in any serious way. Meanwhile, the federal security bureaucracy has grown into a massive apparatus of data collection, border enforcement, and predictive analytics—all of which now intersect with corporate contractors, including Amazon (cloud services), Palantir (data surveillance)1, and Google (AI development for defense applications).2

In this ideology, national security is not just a priority—it is the perpetual justification for expanding the authority of the federal government and the private sector’s access to privileged contracts. Military Keynesianism—stimulating the economy through defense spending—has been normalized across party lines.

3. Technocratic Faith and Institutional Inertia

From healthcare to education, both parties have accepted a top-down, technocratic approach to policy. Rather than experiment with fundamental restructuring, the default model has been to layer on additional bureaucratic complexity while outsourcing execution to corporate vendors or managed care systems.

This is most visible in healthcare, where Democrats advanced the Affordable Care Act by preserving private insurance and subsidizing its costs, while Republicans failed to dismantle it in favor of a free-market model. In either case, the insurance companies remained the structural winners. The same pattern appears in higher education financing, student loan servicing, digital learning systems, and infrastructure projects. Public institutions are hollowed out or captured by corporate service providers; government becomes a purchasing agency, not a direct provider of goods.

The shared ideological assumption is that scale, data, and elite management will deliver results. Democracy is viewed as too slow or messy to solve modern problems; administration and contracting are the new levers of progress. In this vision, politics becomes a form of systems engineering, with public officials acting more like brand managers than civic leaders.

4. Big Tech: The Crown Jewel of the New Economy

Perhaps nowhere is the bipartisan embrace of corporate power more evident than in the tech sector. While members of both parties have publicly criticized Big Tech firms—whether for privacy violations, content moderation, or labor practices—little substantive regulation has emerged.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have expanded their market share, shaped public discourse, and even governed aspects of online speech—all while receiving somewhat favorable treatment from lawmakers, regulatory agencies, and courts. The lack of enforcement in antitrust cases until just recently, the soft treatment of content moderation scandals, and the delay of Section 230 reforms are all testaments to the power of corporate patronage.

Both parties benefit from this structure. Democrats rely on digital platforms for campaign outreach and funding from Silicon Valley donors, some of whom switched sides in the 2024 election cycle. Republicans, while publicly critical, also rely on online platforms for fundraising, messaging, and voter mobilization. The result is political performance without political reform.

This is not classical liberalism. It is platform feudalism, where corporate lords control the infrastructure of communication, commerce, and consumer identity—and elected officials merely negotiate with them.

5. The Culture War as Distraction

In the absence of structural change, both parties have increasingly turned to the culture war to motivate their base. Battles over identity, education, immigration, and social norms dominate headlines, while the material conditions of life—wages, housing, healthcare, and debt—remain tethered to corporate-defined systems.

This strategy serves a purpose. Cultural outrage is emotionally potent and politically useful. It mobilizes donations, garners media attention, and reinforces partisan identity. But it also functions as a release valve, allowing voters to express moral indignation without confronting the economic arrangements that both parties continue to support.

In effect, the culture war is the mask of the managerial state. It keeps voters engaged while insulating the corporate-government nexus from serious disruption.

Summation: The Unspoken Alliance

American political ideology in the 21st century cannot be fully understood by parsing Republican and Democratic platforms. The real power lies in their overlapping commitments: to global corporate capital, to institutional preservation, to national security expansion, to technocratic governance, and to Big Tech as the engine of modern life.

This mixed ideology has produced stability for elites but uncertainty for the public. It has suppressed radical experimentation in favor of managerial continuity. And it has eroded faith in democracy by making elections feel like brand contests rather than avenues of structural transformation.

Independent voters sense this disconnect. They may disagree on policy specifics, but they share a common frustration: the system protects itself. The challenge ahead is not simply to replace party leadership—it is to interrogate and transform the ideological assumptions that have governed both parties for decades.

Until then, American governance will remain a house with two wings but one foundation—a bipartisan consensus rooted in corporate continuity, managed democracy, and elite control. That is the real ideology of our time.

The People’s Republic: A Counter-Ideology for Human Flourishing

If the prevailing political ideology in the United States is a bipartisan alliance around corporate continuity and elite-managed governance, then the time has come to offer a compelling alternative—an American counter-ideology rooted in civic virtue, economic dignity, and decentralized democratic renewal. This is not a call to return to a romanticized past or to burn down the institutions that exist. It is a strategic call to innovate politics itself—to re-empower citizenship in the age of digital empire.

To build a republic worthy of its name in the 21st century, we need a new framework—one that reasserts citizen rule over corporate power, reimagines the economy as a platform for dignity, and renews the civic bonds that sustain self-government.

I. Civic Republicanism: Citizenship as a Practice, Not a Status

At the core of this vision is civic republicanism—not in the partisan sense, but in the classical tradition. To be free, said Cicero and Machiavelli, is not merely to be left alone—it is to live under laws you help make, to govern alongside equals, and to resist domination in all forms.

In modern America, domination has returned—not from monarchs, but from monopolies. Not from tyrants, but from platforms. Our attention is colonized by algorithms. Our choices are narrowed by predictive analytics. Our speech is filtered by unseen moderators. And our politics, increasingly, is packaged by consultants for consumption, not engagement. Public liberty entails critical boundaries on powerful private actors.

To reclaim the republic, we must rekindle the idea that freedom requires active participation in shaping the world around us. That means innovating democratic institutions, not just protecting them.

II. Citizens’ Assemblies: Governance by the Governed

One of the most promising democratic innovations is the rise of citizens’ assemblies—deliberative bodies composed of ordinary people, selected by lottery, to study, debate, and propose solutions to complex public problems. Unlike elected officials, these participants are not captured by party machines or donor pressure. They are given time, evidence, and facilitation to make reasoned judgments in the public interest.

In countries like Ireland, France, and Canada, citizens’ assemblies have temporarily resolved polarizing issues for the current generation—such as same-sex marriage, climate action, and constitutional reform—with more legitimacy and nuance than parliaments could muster. Remember, the point of founding a government of, by, and for the people is to enable each new generation to refresh the experiment for the needs of the day.3 Creating perpetual power that is trapped by incumbency is anti-democratic and leads to government from the grave.

In the United States, citizens’ assemblies could be used at the local, state, and federal level to:

Set legislative priorities in gridlocked areas
Evaluate the ethical use of emerging technologies like AI
Recommend economic and environmental policy packages
Guide redistricting and election reform

These assemblies should not replace representative government, but supplement it—offering an independent voice from the people themselves. Their recommendations could be referred to Congress, the states, or even direct vote. Most importantly, they model what citizenship could look like beyond protest and personality politics: informed, collaborative, public-spirited.

III. Economic Dignity: Rebuilding from the Bottom Up

The ideology of corporate techno-feudalism treats workers as costs, consumers as data points, and communities as delivery zones. A counter-ideology must recover the economic ideal of dignity—the idea that human beings are not mere units of productivity, but carriers of intrinsic worth. Their labor, their aspirations, and their participation in the economy should sustain dignified, flourishing lives.

Economic dignity is not a form of charity. It is the foundation of liberty. People cannot participate meaningfully in self-government if they are trapped in cycles of debt, exhaustion, or algorithmic manipulation. The erosion of dignity at the economic level eventually hollows out democracy at the political level.

To recover that foundation, we must think beyond the assumptions of our inherited post–World War II economic architecture. Too many debates—on taxes, entitlements, public debt, or health care—are framed within the same structural limits that have produced decades of polarization and drift. The result is a politics of avoidance. The two-party system kicks the can down the road, while younger generations inherit the bill. The burden grows heavier, and the unfairness more glaring.

There are opportunities for bold reforms, not just tweaks, if we are willing to question the rules of the system itself. Whatever guardrails exist at the top of the economic hierarchy, the real measure of a political economy is how it shapes life at the bottom: how individuals and families experience risk, reward, security, and purpose.

So how do we begin to build something different?

The simple answer is: new questions, new structures, and new alliances.

We are fast approaching a tipping point. Artificial intelligence is poised to displace large swaths of the professional workforce, even as it delivers extraordinary productivity gains to capital owners and platform monopolies. The old question—how do we create more jobs?—seems insufficient. We must also ask a new question: what meaning do we attach to work, to contribution, and to civic life in an era of rapid displacement and automation?

What are we solving for as a nation—or as a community of interdependent citizens? Are we still optimizing for GDP and shareholder returns? Or are we prepared to pursue human flourishing, community resilience, and shared belonging as national aims with local experiments? What does it mean to thrive?

The answers are not easy. But the first step is to name the tensions we must confront.

There are tensions between autonomy and solidarity—especially in early childhood, elder care, and family formation. There are tensions between labor market churn and the human need for stability and meaning. Between inheritance and opportunity. Between private capital and community need. Between innovation and concentration—at what point does “innovation” become enclosure of labor, information, or public life? Should we allow the most powerful in society to extract rents from public goods and monopolize access to the future—an ongoing collusion between Big Business and Big Government?

There is also a deep tension at the heart of our tax and welfare systems: do we keep relying on redistribution after the damage is done, or do we redesign the rules of the game to prevent extractive dynamics from dominating in the first place?

These are not just policy questions. They are questions of civilization. And asking them openly—without deference to old orthodoxies—is the only way to move beyond the deadlock of the corporate consensus duopoly.

The best questions won’t resolve the conflict between managerial capitalism and a civic republican counter-ideology. But they can illuminate the fault lines that demand moral clarity, civic imagination, and public deliberation. These are the questions we need to ask if we hope to rebuild a political economy grounded in dignity rather than exploitation.

The next essay in this series (Part 7) will dive deeper into such questions—across political structure, economic systems, corporate power & regulation, and beyond. We need a new civic conversation around economic wellness. The time to begin is now.

IV. Independent Federalism: Let Different States Be Different

Rather than a centralized administrative behemoth or a libertarian free-for-all, we need a revival of independent federalism—the principle that diverse communities should be free to pursue public policy experiments within constitutional bounds, without federal coercion or partisan litmus tests.

States could be empowered to:

Pioneer healthcare systems and delivery models
Build resilient local economies with co-ops, credit unions, and community land trusts
Redesign civic education and experiment with democratic curriculum selections
Solve housing affordability issues and create new cities for the 21st century

This is not secession. It is democratic pluralism. Different states reflect different values—and a healthy republic allows for divergence, not forced homogeneity. The federal role is to ensure equal protection and civil rights, not to micromanage local civic life.

V. Digital Democracy: Taking the Tools Back

We cannot renew the republic without confronting the digital architecture that mediates our lives. The internet—once a platform for open exchange—has become a surveillance economy controlled by a handful of firms.

Digital democracy requires public infrastructure. This list might not be the best starting point, but imagination and new thinking across the public square might invent some of these or better offerings:

Open-source voting technology, with secure and transparent code
Data fiduciary laws, where platforms must act in the best interest of users
Civic media funding, to replace clickbait with trusted local journalism
Public-interest social media, free from ad incentives and run by cooperative governance

If the 20th century built highways and airports, the 21st must build civic bandwidth. The next First Amendment battle will not be fought in court, but in code.

Conclusion: The Revival of the American Republic

In every generation, Americans are asked to decide whether democracy is worth the work. Today, the challenge is not foreign invasion or frontier expansion—but a creeping post-democracy, where elections proceed but governance is captured. Where liberty is branded, and participation is gamified. Where citizens are turned into users, and republics into platforms.

The counter-ideology we need is not reactionary—it is re-foundational. It draws from ancient republican virtues and modern civic tools. It insists that the purpose of politics is not simply to allocate resources, but to cultivate citizens. And it recognizes that power, left unchecked, will always seek new forms—corporate, digital, or otherwise.

We must innovate toward a people-centered politics that transcends party lines and pierces the techno-feudal fog. This is the work of a generation—but generations have done it before. The tools are in our hands. The questions are clear. What remains is the will to act—and the courage to reimagine what a free people can be.

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