Most Americans tend not to think of these egalitarian (even anti-capitalist) sentiments as part of the nation’s intellectual heritage. But Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and similarly situated politicians like Bernie Sanders are drawing on influential currents in American political history.

Some of those stretch back to the founding era. Despite his own status as a wealthy slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson was wary of extreme disparities of wealth and thought it was incompatible with republican political ideals. Commenting on “the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind” in Europe, he described his position in a famous letter to James Madison in 1785. “Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.” He concluded with a statement of belief: “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”

More than a century later, labor and agrarian radicals would make a version of this observation vis a vis the unjust and unfair arrangements that trapped farmers and industrial workers. For them, the extreme inequality and labor exploitation of the era was simply incompatible with meaningful democratic citizenship, as it left both hopelessly dependent on the owners of capital, corroding American democracy’s basis in the ideal of equal relations between citizens. “Suddenly, without warning, the shop closes down” or the worker “is discharged and his wage, small at best, is cut off. He has to live, the rent must be paid, the wife and children must have clothing and food, fuel must be provided, and yet he has no job, no wages, and no prospect for getting any,” wrote the socialist leader Eugene Debs in a fiery 1904 pamphlet, “Unionism and Socialism,” which painted a dire picture of capitalist dependency.

He continued: “Is a worker in that position free? Is he a citizen? A man? No! He is simply a wage slave, a jobholder, while it lasts, here today and gone tomorrow.” Channeling the founders, Debs held independent material security as a precondition for individual liberty. “No man is free in any just sense who has to rely upon the arbitrary will of another for the opportunity to work,” he had written in 1900. As Debs saw it, if we are deprived as workers, then we cannot truly act as citizens.