In 2026, Will Americans Finally Turn Against Oligarchs?

In the winter of 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, a visitor asked Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis if he thought the worst was over. “Oh yes,” he said, “the worst took place before the crash.”

Brandeis, who had predicted the disaster before it occurred, believed that the sunny lies of the roaring twenties had deluded the American people. The depression, as horrible as it was, as shameless were the business tycoons who caused the crash, was fostering a great debunking of myths. As a result, he believed, America would “gain much from her sad experience.”

There’s a misplaced belief that optimism about democratic politics is sunny and naive, reflecting of joyful circumstances, while cynicism is savvy and realistic, reflecting the grittiness of real life. The truth, as Brandeis knew, is the opposite. Disillusionment, a numbness to injustice, is the great villain of democracy. In the 1920s, after two decades of reform and a great war, the voters had become cynics. As one famous Senator, Hiram Johnson, put it, the people had become “docile, and they will not recover from being so for many years.”

It was during that time of great cynicism that the imbalances and corruption unmasked in the 1930s built up. Only when the public recovered its ability to be outraged, to believe in collective action, that Americans could once again see their society as a free people and act upon it. The actual economic collapse started in 1929, and it continued and worsened even as Brandeis became more optimistic. It was the public learning and regaining its liberty that had to come before the material part could be fixed.

Two weeks ago, I helped a colleague, an antitrust lawyer named Katie Van Dyck, prepare for a Congressional hearing on youth sports titled “Benched: The Crisis in American Youth Sports and Its Cost to Our Future.

I’ve helped prep a lot of people to testify. Most get little attention. Van Dyck was talking about private equity and its roll-up of youth hockey, football, baseball, cheer, and so forth. The cost of youth sports participation has increased 46% in just five years, twice the rate of inflation, with parents often going into debt so their kids can play. The strategies to extract are varied, from overpriced cheerleading outfits to monopolization of hockey rinks to questionable promises to high school athletes they’ll get college ...