Now that the first round of intellectual debris left in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s explosive best-seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has begun to settle, it may be time to look more closely at the gaping hole it has left not only in political-economic analysis but also in conventional political strategy. After Piketty documented long-running trends that have turned over ever-increasing shares of national income to the owners of capital at the expense of the vast majority, the best solution he could muster was what he termed a utopian idea: a global tax on capital. Liberal economists, for their part, have largely rolled out the usual list of progressive tax reforms, often conveniently forgetting to confront the extraordinary political obstacles that stand in the way of any one policy remotely powerful enough to tackle the forces Piketty documents.

What forces, you may ask? How about the fact that a mere 400 people at the top now own as much wealth — or capital, in Piketty’s inclusive formulation covering stocks, bonds, businesses, land and any other significant asset — as the bottom 180 million Americans. The best we have been offered in response to this medieval pattern is the vague hope that a cycle of history may one day bring progressive policy back in vogue. Or that demographic shifts may not only allow the election of Democrats but also award them sufficient power to effect trend-altering change rather than modest reforms that utterly fail to divert the steady and ongoing allocation of the nation’s income to those who own capital or work cheek by jowl for them.

The reasons for such a lackluster response are many, but high on the list is the dwindling power of labor: Unions that once added muscle to traditional reform have decayed in membership, from a post–World War II peak of 34.7 percent of the labor force down to a mere 11.3 percent last year (and an even more modest 6.7 percent in the private sector). Close behind on the list, of course, is that money talks in politics — especially powerfully nowadays, given the loudspeaker it is assured by recent Supreme Court decisions rolling back campaign finance regulations.

There may be no solution to the problem. If there is, two things seem obvious: First, it will probably take a long, long ramp-up of experimentation and institution-building similar in form to the kinds of processes that occurred in the state and local laboratories of democracy during the decades prior to the New Deal. Second, whatever develops is unlikely to resemble what we might consider traditional reform. We’ve done that already. We mostly “remember the future,” the historian Lewis Namier once wrote, suggesting that what we learn from the past (and therefore assume about the future) is inevitable. This is a hazardous way to think, especially if what we want is to point our compasses toward something new.

The name of the game — Piketty’s book fairly screams it — is capital: who gets to own it, benefit from it and derive political power from it. Accordingly, it may be of some interest to note that in significant part because of the pain and failure of our current reality, many of those local laboratories of democracy are, in fact, exploring new (and sometimes old) ways to own capital and are seeking to democratize it.