As the 2016 election begins to come into focus, economic populism appears to be the order of the day. The Center for American Progress, the Campaign for America’s Future and National People’s Action, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Bill de Blasio and the Roosevelt Institute have all in the last few months released programmatic calls to action highlighting the need to tackle economic inequality. This is, of course, laudable — it’s not every day that virtually the entire spectrum of Democratic Party insiders and outsiders concurs that our increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth is a central problem to be addressed. But are calls for reform and redistribution enough?

I am opposed to very little of what is being presented in these various platforms and proposals. They are, for the most part, perfectly sensible ideas — such as financial transaction taxes, increases to the minimum wage and using government funds to build and repair infrastructure such as roads and railways — that would be, for the most part, noncontroversial if we were living in an era of sensible politics. But the fundamental fact is that we are not.

Instead, we are living in the era in which the corporate institutions at the core of our politics, along with the radical financial inequalities our system now produces, have undermined the power relationships that once allowed for traditional reforms. The labor union — the fundamental institutional power base for tempering the excesses of a corporate economy — is regrettably in terminal decline, down to 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector. Long-term structural shifts in the political economy have rendered the program of regulation and reform more or less inoperative. How long, for example, did it take for the banks to undo and neutralize even the modest post-financial crisis attempts to regulate their activities? Just four years, to judge from their recent success gutting new derivatives regulations before the Securities and Exchange Commission could even implement them. Only when contradictions emerge between different segments of an otherwise consolidated pro-corporate bloc — as they have around net neutrality and LGBTQ inclusion — we may be able to achieve a few victories here and there.

But such modest contradictions between corporate actors will not open up the political space needed to confront the underlying systemic drivers of increasing economic inequality. It’s commendable that economic inequality is on the Democratic Party’s agenda for 2016, but what’s missing is an understanding of the magnitude of this problem in the current context — that any real change will require not just regulatory redistribution, but a fundamental shift in the dynamics of wealth accumulation. The long-term economic trajectory is one that continues to return an indefensibly low share of income to working people even in an era of increased productivity, and that has maintained a more or less constant proportion of families below the poverty line since the 1970s — not to mention continuing to pump dangerous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and incarcerating an obscene and unprecedented number of Americans. If we want to reverse this trajectory — if we want an economy that delivers democratic rather than plutocratic outcomes — we need to democratize the economy.