This article launches what I am calling a "Realist's Guide to the American System" — a series examining why nearly everything in American public life appears to be deteriorating.

Donald Trump is horrendous, but he is not the root cause of the system's failures. He is a consequence of them. He can be thought of as a boil on the backside of the American system — an infected pustule that was bound to form eventually because of deeper structural flaws in how the system has evolved.

Jamie Dimon and the Architecture of Power

A useful starting point is Jamie Dimon.

In the spring of 2018, Dimon phoned me at my office at the University of California, Berkeley. I had criticized him publicly, and he was not pleased. He vented on the phone for several minutes without interruption.

Dimon wields considerable influence over the system. He heads the largest bank on Wall Street, JPMorgan Chase, which weathered the 2008 financial crisis better than any other major bank — a record burnished by the fact that JPMorgan absorbed Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the crisis at the urging of federal regulators, consolidating even more market power. After the crisis, The New York Times gave Dimon the backhanded compliment of calling him "America's least-hated banker." He has also chaired the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group representing the most powerful CEOs in America — the same organization that issued a much-publicized 2019 statement redefining corporate purpose to include all stakeholders, not just shareholders, a pledge that critics noted coincided with no measurable shift in corporate behavior. He appears regularly on cable news and in the business press, and his opinions carry significant weight on Capitol Hill.

Dimon describes himself as "a patriot before I'm the CEO of JPMorgan." He is a lifelong Democrat. He speaks out admirably about the injustices and inequalities of contemporary America, and he is not just talk: he has pushed his bank to invest in poor cities and to create better opportunities for the disadvantaged. I believe he is sincere.

But he is also awash in self-delusion — a condition especially dangerous in people who wield significant power over others.

Dimon does not see how he has contributed to the mess the country is in. He does not acknowledge the inconsistencies between his preferred self-image as "patriot first" and his roles as CEO of America's largest bank and former chairman of the Business Roundtable. He does not understand how he has hijacked the system.

Dimon is emblematic of a broader abdication of public responsibility — a failure to maintain the health of the political-economic system at a moment when a comparative few at the top possess more power over it than at any time in over a century. The share of national income going to the top 1% has more than doubled since the late 1970s, returning to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. They have used that power to secure unprecedented wealth, which has bought them even more power. They have justified their wealth and power as serving the public interest, but the public has been the loser.

Dimon is among the most capable of American CEOs, adept at promoting and defending his corporation. He understands some of the system's failings and has called for useful reforms. If he were not running JPMorgan, someone else would be — and probably not as effectively.

Nonetheless, a central part of Dimon's job is to siphon off the economy's gains for the benefit of a few at the top. In doing so, he is eroding trust in the system and undermining democracy.

This is how the nation arrived at its current predicament. Dimon is playing his part in the system as it has evolved, responding to how incentives within it are designed. To the extent that Dimon or others like him bear blame, the fault lies in their unwillingness to challenge those incentives in order to change the system for the well-being of the vast majority.

This may be an unrealistically high bar. Dimon has no legal obligation to meet it. But he has a moral duty to try to change the laws and incentives so that no one can ever again become as rich and powerful as he and his fellow CEOs at the Business Roundtable, or as other major financiers on Wall Street. He has a moral obligation to ensure the American system is no longer rigged in favor of people like him.

The Consequences

Millions of Americans — whether on the left or the right — sense that something has gone profoundly wrong.

The concentration of wealth in America has produced a political system in which the super-rich can effectively buy Congress and the presidency — a dynamic intensified by the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which removed limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions and unleashed a torrent of dark money into American elections. It has produced an education system in which they can buy college admission for their children, a healthcare system in which they can purchase care unavailable to others, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.

Almost everyone else has been hurled into a landscape of bureaucratic arbitrariness, corporate greed, and the legal and financial sinkholes that have become hallmarks of modern American life.

The term "enshittification" was coined in 2022 by novelist Cory Doctorow to describe the declining quality of nearly everything. Monopolistic corporations charge more while cutting services. Products break more often than they used to. Government is starved of the tax revenue needed to provide even basic public services. The whole system seems to be collapsing in on itself.

The word has been officially incorporated into major lexicons such as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, reflecting people's increasingly common experience of being exploited by big corporations, big hospitals, big energy companies, and big insurers — and of being bogged down in seemingly endless bureaucracies. As The New Yorker put it, we live in the "Age of Enshittification."

The advent of artificial intelligence has underscored both the possibility of mass unemployment and the growing difficulty of increasing workers' share of corporate and national income. The oligarchs now spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI — with funds funneled to them by Jamie Dimon and others on Wall Street — have done everything in their power to keep wages low, block unionization, deny workers greater political power, and fund campaigns to protect their fortunes against higher taxes on capital income and wealth.

This systemic dysfunction is generating enormous heat: anger, frustration, and outrage. That anger is a major reason Trump became president twice — even though he has further enshittified America and much of the world.

Heat in any system signals potential change. Like tectonic plates producing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as they collide, heat is a sign of underlying tumult. In today's America, the status quo is unsustainable, and subterranean tensions are building.

Trump exploited those tensions for his own ends. But even if Trump were replaced by someone noble, humble, and talented — someone who cares more about America than about himself — the country would still be in trouble. The system itself is out of balance and needs fundamental change.

Sixteen Reassessments

To understand why the American system has become so dysfunctional — and what might be done to help it serve average people — it is necessary to reassess many common assumptions.

1. Forget conventional politics. Stop viewing politics as electoral contests between Democrats and Republicans. Think in terms of power. The underlying contest is between a small minority that has captured power over the system and the vast majority that has little or none.

2. Rethink the "free market" versus government framing. A market cannot exist without a government to organize and enforce it. The important question is whom the market has been organized to serve.

3. Do not separate economics from politics. They are two sides of the same coin. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to pry them apart.

4. Look beyond growth and efficiency. The standard economic goals of higher growth and greater efficiency are not ends in themselves. The real issue is who benefits from them.

5. Do not be dazzled by "corporate social responsibility." Most of it is public relations. Corporations will not voluntarily sacrifice shareholder returns unless laws require it. Even then, be skeptical unless laws are enforced and backed by significant penalties. Large corporations and the super-rich ignore laws when the cost of violating them is small relative to the gains.

6. Do not frame the debate as capitalism versus socialism. America already has socialism — for the very rich. Most Americans are subject to harsh capitalism.

7. Redefine "national competitiveness." Do not equate it with the profitability of large American corporations. Those corporations are now global, with no allegiance to America. Real national competitiveness lies in the productivity of the American people, which depends on their education, health, and shared infrastructure.

8. Stop fixating on the business cycle. Focus instead on the systemic changes over the last forty years that have dramatically increased the wealth and power of a few at the expense of the many.

9. Abandon the old competitive model. Forget the idea that corporations succeed by becoming better, cheaper, or faster. They now succeed mainly by increasing monopoly power.

10. Rethink finance entirely. Think of it as a giant gambling casino in which bets are placed on large flows of money, and further bets are placed on those bets — instruments called derivatives. The biggest winners possess better inside information than anyone else.

11. Do not assume stability. The system moves through vicious spirals and virtuous cycles. It is currently in a vicious spiral; the challenge is to reverse it.

12. Discard the meritocracy myth. Ability and hard work are not necessarily rewarded. Today, the most important predictor of someone's future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they are born into.

13. Do not separate race from class. Racial discrimination aggravates class divides, and wider inequality worsens racial divides.

14. Think systemically. Most people's incomes have not risen in four decades — a period during which union membership in the private sector collapsed from roughly a third of workers to under 6%, removing one of the primary mechanisms through which working people once exercised countervailing power. Climate change is intensifying competition for arable land and potable water worldwide, generating larger flows of refugees and immigrants. Together, these forces allow demagogues to stoke bigotry by blaming immigrants for stagnant wages and economic insecurity.

15. Do not confuse policy proposals with systemic change. Even attractive proposals, if enacted, at most mitigate systemic problems. Solving those problems requires altering the allocation of power.

16. Understand power itself. Most importantly, grasp who possesses power, why, how it is wielded, and for what purposes. Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others. On a large scale, it is the capacity to set the public agenda — to frame choices, influence legislators, enact or block laws, and impose one's will on the world.

The Nature of Power

Power has been leached out of conventional discussions. It does not appear in standard economics textbooks, finance courses, or even political science and law curricula. But it is impossible to comprehend today's system without confronting power directly. It is the most important subterranean force.

Power is exercised through major Wall Street banks, global corporations, the executive and legislative branches of government, the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court, the military, elite universities, and the media — including social media as organized by Big Tech. But these institutions do not wield power on their own. Particular individuals hold outsized influence over them: CEOs like Jamie Dimon, large investors, hedge fund and private-equity managers, media moguls, lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable, and major donors to political candidates and universities.

To understand their influence, it is necessary to understand the role of wealth. In the current system, power and wealth are inseparable. Great wealth flows from great power; great power depends on great wealth. The two have become one and the same.

These realities are not intended to breed cynicism or resignation. On the contrary: the first step toward changing the system is understanding it. Without comprehending the truth, we remain trapped in conventional falsehoods and false choices, unable to envision new possibilities. Seeing the system for what it is can empower people to join with others to change it for the better.

*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997. His writings can be found at