In the ongoing debate over the future of liberalism, the tensions between capitalism and democracy go almost unmentioned. It seems impossible to conceive of liberalism without these two supposedly complementary drives constituting its core: the capitalist market and the democratic state.

The two, in our conventional political theories, are thought to be mutually reinforcing—a kind of conceptual double helix constituting liberalism’s very DNA. Yet in reality, they reflect opposing notions of how political power should be distributed.

Political theorist Sheldon Wolin, author of the momentous Politics and Vision, had it right when he diagnosed the tensions between democracy and markets: Democracy seeks to spread political voice horizontally, while markets seek to pile political voice along the fat tail of highly concentrated capital.

Wolin writes: “Millions of dollars from corporations are systematically poured into the legislative process and electoral campaigns,” and the power of protest and the ballot do not come close to matching the might of monied speech.

Prior to the election of Donald Trump, and during the transition phase after, we collectively witnessed yet further confirmation of Wolin’s thesis in real time. Before the election, capitalists tripped over themselves to place their firms in a politically advantageous position. After the election, millions of donor dollars poured into Trump’s brand.

Lobbyists seeking to court the new president-in-waiting did not engage him in spirited debate or expect the persuasiveness of their ideas to win him over. Instead, they underlined their proposals with large checks. Unsurprisingly, many of Trump’s deep-pocketed financial backers came to fill his cabinet. There is a reason his cabinet selections have been all over the ideological map, and it’s not because Trump brilliantly saw the need for philosophical diversity. Trump paired a restrictionist faction with Wall Street princes because the money spoke for him; it was part of the unwritten agreement.

This gets to one of the most problematic aspects of our current system: the way big-monied interests expect to get their message across. It would be one thing if money could purchase a debate lectern rather than a seat at the table; in other words, if money meant being able to intelligently discuss, with the president’s policy heads, the comparative merits of a range of positions. But money doesn’t work by persuading — to the extent that true persuasion requires belief in reasons. Instead, money works by tacitly expecting a desired outcome. As such, its force is irrational in a literal sense.

It may seem easy to dismiss the notion of a corporatist, pay-to-play government as a left-wing conspiracy, but the U.S. Supreme Court has admitted Wolin’s premises. Money has been classified as political speech since the Citizens United decision of 2010.

Accordingly, political voice scales with lobbying power. Those who possess great sums of wealth have the ability to transform the world in a non-linear fashion. Their billions of dollars can be spread across the nation, amplifying their political voice to reach any political campaign, no matter how local, and to effect political change, no matter how unpopular.

An unpopular candidate propped up by big money outweighs the political engagement of an atomized, confused, and hopeless population. In particular areas of policy, such as military spending, the economic incentives for endless war rapidly outpace the public desire for conflict.

Now that Donald Trump has appointed John Bolton as National Security Advisor, and nominated Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, we are witnessing the hawks descend on Trump’s Washington despite the fact that, Trump’s cartoonish tough talk aside, Republican primary voters backed a candidate who denounced the Iraq War as a mistake, and was by many accounts the least hawkish candidate of the 2016 pack. In fact, these voters only elected party machinery — whatever Trump believed at the time, or believes now, is less relevant than the consensus of his handlers.

Defending the role of markets, Nicola Wright has written in Quillette that money in politics is a problem mostly because of the size of the state and its massive influence over society, not because of something intrinsic to corporate power itself. But this logic seems confused — in lieu of the state, wouldn’t the most powerful corporations simply become the state in its absence?

For people working in Amazon warehouses, with timed bathroom breaks and even wristwatches monitoring their every move, it is no longer state tyranny that has the most influence upon their lives — the source of their weekly income and job security is Amazon, which can continue to erode workers’ rights without pushback from the market, so long as unskilled applicants keep requiring jobs. Traditionally, unions and the state have balanced the influence of corporate power in society. But without those balancing forces, if the state and corporations are essentially on the same side, then where does democratic voice exist?

Pundits who argue that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democracy are arriving decades late. WikiLeaks revealed a Citigroup email recommending many of Barack Obama’s cabinet appointees, including Eric Holder and Rahm Emanuel. Firms like Citigroup advise presidents on how to run the nation, and those firms accordingly reap rewards, such as massive bailouts without having to undergo structural change.

Economic powerhouses rise above the law, and become an unofficial class of political operatives, unaccounted for in our understanding of the liberal state. Capitalism is not the enemy, fine, but a parasitic class of speculators, hedge-funds, and banks without skin in the game, immune from consequences, strikes me as well as many on the left as a rigged and rotten element of our economy.

Finance has triumphed over politics, and economics is weighted toward those institutions who recommend cabinets and consequently shape policies, never elected, never showing responsibility. The dynamic isn’t mysterious: By allowing money into politics the way we have, it has commodified political power; we have made it so that politicians, and their agendas, are up for sale. Political hopefuls, and political parties themselves, need money to win elections. And those with money offer it — on the condition that their interests are served. But who serves the people’s interest?

When this process reaches a breaking point, the voters begin to reject elites, while the president remains unwilling to upset his benefactors who outlast and overpower him.

Now Trump, promising vast and lasting change, will meet the same fate that Obama did in failing to truly appease his base. International trade is more powerful than the president, which is why you get a remarkably strong anti-TPP stance followed up by this potentially amazing instance of buyer’s remorse. The president’s political interests are served by maintaining his drain-the-swamp, anti-elitist message, but his ability to govern in the first place is also partially owed to big money, so he must combine his anti-elitism with a handing over of influence to those who epitomize financial eliteness.

At the end of the day, upsetting JP Morgan or Amazon is a far steeper political cost to pay than simply ignoring populist demands and instead satiating one’s supporters through a pointless culture war. That’s just it, Trump is capable of upsetting these firms rhetorically, and publicly, but far less willing to upset them at the policy level, which is ultimately what matters most to shareholders.

The most cynical aspect of our electoral process is that big money can ride populist waves undetected, yet when the work of governing begins, the donors ultimately vanquish the very democratic rationale that lifted a candidate into office in the first place. The election of Trump was primarily a surge of democratic angst arrayed against the globalist takeover of markets; because markets continue to move certain kinds of jobs away from states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, voters elected Trump, the hand of the state, to keep those jobs alive, or to bring those jobs back. But the entrenched interests of global capital have largely blunted the force of this movement.

The pundits have their “death of democracy” timeline exactly backwards — Trumpism was only made possible because markets have been winning a silent war against democracy for decades. Banks and international corporations have been buying administrations, winning with policies like the deregulation of Wall Street and the passage of NAFTA, moving factories out of the country, and workers, meanwhile, have seen their wages stagnate despite record-breaking productivity and innovation.

Meanwhile, all our debates over politics take place on non-neutral, private territory. Private companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google now have the power to shape democratic discourse on the whims of their technical and commercial schemes, directing floods of millions of people, and their traffic, with as much subtlety or tyranny as they please — all to secure advertising revenue. Facebook’s advertising algorithm played a part in Trump’s victory, itself another consequence of a corporate, marketing-driven electoral process. Surely it is also no coincidence that Barack Obama won AdAge’s Marketer of the Year award in 2008. The seeds were already so clearly sown for a one-man-brand to become president.

We rely on these private, profit-seeking companies to provide platforms for our discourse because The Commons no longer exist, and we have the sneaking suspicion that there is no open field of ideas left, that concerned individuals do not have the power to shift the law, that “citizenry” is an outmoded concept, and that a vote holds no power. How else could Donald Trump be president, save for the notion that electing him was the final offensive act, a violence against the failed demos, the need, as Michael Moore so eloquently put it, to give the “biggest ‘fuck you’ in political history” to those who sacrifice democracy at the altar of the market?

Additionally, given the strong correlation of IQ with success in the marketplace — with individuals who have higher intelligence and higher industriousness, individuals who are faster and smarter, gaining wealth at an exponential rate compared to the forgotten masses stacked up with almost nothing — it stands to reason that markets are inherently anti-democratic. The market selects for certain traits, rewards them, and then renders the vast majority of people either casualties or hopeful adherents to this selection of largely heritable biological predispositions. In rewarding conscientiousness and IQ disproportionately, given the strong heredity of these factors, capitalism is a successor to feudalism. You can work as hard you desire, but the cognitive elite have all the advantages.

Assuming capitalism is entirely meritocratic, and that IQ and conscientiousness should be the pillars of a functioning society, encouraging faster and more productive output, it still remains true that meritocracy concentrates political voice in anti-democratic ways. Those who earn the most capital will end up employed in think tanks, universities, and major firms, repeating the policies that helped them, and their parents, achieve the privileges they have.

Beyond biology, growing up in a two-parent household in a healthy, encouraging neighborhood, with generational wealth to fall back on if one desires to stake out a new career in an expensive city, disproportionately favors a pre-existing elite class.

This selection of exceptional characteristics and birth circumstances is opposed to the central spirit of democracy: equality of political participation. Indeed, if all people are not born with equal capacity to earn, then what is the foundation for the equal political voice vested in every human being, no matter how fit or capable? Herman Melville articulated it with the most beauty, in his cosmic tragedy Moby-Dick:

Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!

Without an omnipresent democratic worth, a kind of divine spark in each person, an equal voice distributed independently of individual merit, democracy itself no longer exists. As the distribution of wealth sequesters public voice upward, a sense of powerlessness, polarization, extremism, and the election of dangerous politicians out of spite, are the inevitable consequences.

If capitalism has triumphed over democracy, creating a new age of political powerlessness, perhaps the inverse arrangement should be pursued. Democracy should, in certain contexts, triumph over capitalism. Health insurance, instead of another test of fitness, should be a universal guarantee — the rich and the poor equalized, neither to be bankrupted by ill health and misfortune. Thus, the political project of democratic socialism, the redistribution of such elite benefits downward, seems to be a clear map forward.