Steelman Analysis

Our Thesis (Restated)

America has surpassed original Gilded Age wealth concentration, today's tech oligarchs have achieved direct control of government machinery in ways the original robber barons never dared, their project is guided by an explicitly anti-democratic ideology with a documented implementation timeline, and the Progressive Era provides a proven template for breaking concentrated oligarchic power -- if Americans act before the window closes.

Primary Counterargument: The Gilded Age Was an Age of Genuine Transformation, and So Is This One -- Regulating It Wrong Could Break the Engine

The Argument

The single strongest counterargument is not that wealth concentration is fine, or that Musk's conflicts of interest are acceptable. It is that the essay's framing -- presenting the Gilded Age primarily as a story of oligarchic exploitation that was corrected by Progressive reform -- is historically incomplete in ways that weaken the policy prescriptions that follow from it.

The original Gilded Age was simultaneously the period of greatest exploitation and greatest material progress in American history to that date. AEI's analysis is not wrong on the numbers: in the very industries accused of monopoly during the 1880s and 1890s, output increased 175 percent (seven times the GDP growth rate), prices fell three times faster than the consumer price index, and real wages rose significantly. Life expectancy increased. Literacy rates climbed. The telephone, electric light, automobile, and modern industrial supply chain all emerged during or directly after this period. The robber barons were exploitative and transformative. Both things were true simultaneously, and any honest accounting must reckon with the fact that Standard Oil did not just extract wealth -- it made kerosene affordable for millions of Americans who had previously lit their homes with candles.

The parallel to today is direct and uncomfortable: the same tech companies the essay frames as the new robber barons have produced genuine, broad-based improvements in human capability. Two billion people carry a supercomputer in their pockets. Cloud computing has democratized tools that once cost millions of dollars. AI is already accelerating drug discovery, materials science, and climate modeling. The essay's framing risks implying that concentrated tech wealth is only extractive, when the reality is more complex: these companies have created enormous value that even their critics use every day.

But the real force of this counterargument is not sentimental -- it is strategic. If the lesson of the original Gilded Age is that we need a new Progressive Era, the lesson of the actual Progressive Era is that its reforms had significant unintended consequences. As libertarian economic historians from Murray Rothbard to George Stigler have documented, many Progressive Era regulations became instruments of the very cartelization they were designed to prevent. The Interstate Commerce Commission, established to regulate railroad monopolies, was eventually captured by the railroads themselves. The Federal Trade Commission's early decades were marked by industry-friendly enforcement that protected incumbents more than consumers. The income tax, while necessary, created the compliance industry and the very loopholes that today allow billionaires to pay 3.4 percent effective rates. The Progressive Era did not simply "fix" the Gilded Age. It created a new set of institutions that were themselves vulnerable to capture -- and some of those captured institutions are the ones Musk is now dismantling through DOGE.

This produces an uncomfortable irony the essay must confront: if Progressive Era regulatory institutions were vulnerable to capture then, what reason do we have to believe that new regulatory institutions created to constrain tech oligarchs will not be captured by those same oligarchs? The essay proposes antitrust as a solution, but the Google antitrust case is being adjudicated in a judiciary that tech companies have spent decades influencing. It proposes campaign finance reform, but the very wealth concentration it describes makes such reform nearly impossible to enact. The Progressive Era template is historically real, but the conditions that made it work -- a fragmented media landscape that could not be algorithmically manipulated, an industrial base that did not face peer-competitor pressure from a rival superpower, and a political class that still operated within shared democratic norms -- may not exist in 2026.

Who Makes This Argument

This is the intellectual core of the libertarian and center-right economic establishment. Its most sophisticated proponents include Tyler Cowen (George Mason University, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero), who argues that large companies create more value than they capture and that the real problem is poverty rather than inequality; the American Enterprise Institute's economic policy team, which has published detailed analyses arguing that Gilded Age "robber barons" presided over genuine material progress; University of Chicago Law School antitrust skeptics who argue that the consumer welfare standard -- prices, output, innovation -- is the correct lens for evaluating monopoly, and by that standard most tech companies pass; and national security hawks in both parties who argue that weakening American tech companies in the name of antitrust hands strategic advantage to China. This coalition is intellectually diverse. It includes free-market libertarians who genuinely believe deregulation produces better outcomes, national security realists who subordinate domestic competition concerns to geopolitical ones, and moderate Democrats who worry that aggressive regulation will alienate the tech sector and its workers -- a constituency the party cannot afford to lose.

Why It Has Merit

Several elements of this counterargument are genuinely strong.

First, the empirical claim about tech value creation is true. Consumer surplus from free digital services (search, email, maps, social media) is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Amazon has measurably lowered prices in retail categories it entered. AI-assisted medical diagnosis is already saving lives. Dismissing this as irrelevant to the monopoly question is intellectually dishonest.

Second, the historical claim about Progressive Era regulatory capture is also true. The essay presents the Progressive Era as a success story, and in many ways it was -- but its institutions were subsequently captured, and some of that capture is precisely what created the conditions for the Second Gilded Age. The New Deal built on Progressive foundations, but by the 1970s many of those regulatory structures had become sclerotic, protectionist, and industry-friendly, which is part of what gave the deregulatory movement its genuine intellectual force.

Third, the strategic concern about China is real and cannot be waved away. The original Progressive Era operated in a context where America was ascending to industrial dominance and had no peer competitor in the technologies being regulated. Today, China is investing hundreds of billions in AI development. The AI race is not metaphorical -- it has direct implications for military capability, economic competitiveness, and the global balance of power. A regulatory regime that slows American AI development could have consequences far beyond the domestic economy.

Where It Falls Short

This counterargument falls short in three crucial ways.

First, it conflates value creation with entitlement to political power. No one in the essay is arguing that tech companies have created no value. The argument is that creating value does not entitle you to operate inside the government while your companies receive $38 billion in federal contracts, fire the regulators who oversee your own products, and implement the blueprint of an explicitly anti-democratic philosopher. Rockefeller created value too -- kerosene was transformative. That did not make Standard Oil's monopoly practices acceptable. The strongest version of this counterargument implicitly asks the audience to trade democratic accountability for innovation, and that is a trade the American constitutional system was designed to reject.

Second, the regulatory capture argument actually supports the thesis rather than undermining it. If Progressive Era institutions were captured, the answer is not to abandon regulation but to design institutions that are harder to capture -- and to break the concentrated power that does the capturing. DOGE is not dismantling captured regulatory agencies in the name of better governance. It is dismantling agencies that constrain Musk's own companies, while routing government functions to Musk's own contractors. That is not deregulation. It is privatized capture. The libertarian critique of regulatory capture is intellectually honest; the DOGE implementation of that critique is not.

Third, the China argument, while real, is overstated as a reason to tolerate domestic oligarchy. The Standard Oil breakup produced 33 competing companies that thrived -- American oil dominance was not weakened by antitrust; it was strengthened by competition. Monopoly breeds complacency; competition breeds innovation. The strongest version of American AI leadership comes from a competitive market with multiple well-funded competitors, not from a protected oligarchy that can afford to coast. Moreover, China's own AI development has been fueled by competition among domestic firms (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, DeepSeek), not by tolerating a single dominant player. The argument that we need oligopoly to compete with a country that is succeeding through competition is internally contradictory.

Secondary Counterarguments

The Yarvin Influence Is Overstated -- This Is Guilt by Association, Not Causation

One of the essay's most distinctive threads -- the RAGE-to-DOGE pipeline, the Yarvin-Thiel-Vance network, the Dark Enlightenment as governing philosophy -- is also one of its most vulnerable to a specific and credible critique: that it overstates Yarvin's actual influence on policy implementation and draws causal lines where only correlational ones exist.

The facts of association are real: Thiel funded Yarvin's startup; Thiel funded Vance; Vance became VP; Yarvin attended the inaugural gala. But advisors to Vance have stated that Vance and Yarvin have met "like once." Thiel himself told The Atlantic in 2023 that he did not think Yarvin's ideas would "work." Andreessen posted on X that one can "read Yarvin without becoming a monarchist." The essay presents a 13-year pipeline from blog post to government policy, but critics will argue that this conflates coincidence of direction with intellectual causation. Government downsizing has been a mainstream Republican goal since Reagan. Hostility to the federal bureaucracy predates Yarvin by decades. The fact that an eccentric blogger proposed something in 2012 that a Republican administration later did does not prove the administration was following his blueprint -- it may simply mean they arrived at a similar destination through entirely mainstream conservative channels.

This counterargument matters because if the ideological architecture thread is perceived as conspiracy-theory-adjacent -- connecting dots that are real but drawing causal arrows that are speculative -- it will undermine the credibility of the essay's empirical and structural threads, which are much stronger. The essay must be precise about what it is claiming: not that Yarvin is secretly running DOGE, but that a philosophical framework that was once fringe has migrated into the mainstream of tech-right thinking, and that the structural outcomes align with that framework regardless of whether any individual policymaker is consciously implementing it. The network map is evidence of ideological migration, not evidence of a command structure.

Assessment: This is a genuinely important vulnerability. The essay should present the RAGE-to-DOGE timeline as documented ideological influence rather than a conspiracy chain. Emphasize the public statements, the published writings, the funding records -- and let the audience draw the causal conclusions rather than asserting them. The facts are damning enough without overclaiming.

Tech Monopolies Are Structurally Different from Industrial Monopolies -- The Antitrust Analogy Breaks Down

The essay's central structural parallel -- Rockefeller/Standard Oil to Musk/Nvidia to modern tech monopolies -- is powerful but genuinely vulnerable to the argument that digital platform monopolies are structurally different from industrial ones in ways that matter for policy.

Standard Oil's monopoly harmed consumers through price extraction: Rockefeller raised prices once competitors were eliminated. Google's search monopoly does not charge consumers anything. Amazon has consistently lowered prices in categories it entered. The traditional antitrust framework is built around the consumer welfare standard -- the idea that monopoly is harmful when it raises prices or reduces output. By that standard, many tech monopolies appear benign or even beneficial.

The University of Chicago Law School has produced serious scholarship arguing that the "big is bad" intuition does not map cleanly onto digital markets where network effects create natural monopolies, where products are offered for free, and where barriers to entry are lower than in physical infrastructure industries. A startup can build a search engine or social network in ways that a startup cannot build an oil refinery. The argument is not that tech companies are perfect, but that the type of harm they cause (data extraction, attention manipulation, political influence) is qualitatively different from the harm Standard Oil caused, and that antitrust tools designed for the latter may not effectively address the former.

Assessment: This counterargument has genuine intellectual merit but ultimately misses the essay's point. The essay's argument is not primarily about consumer pricing -- it is about political power. The harm is not that Google charges too much for search; it is that concentrated control over information infrastructure translates into political influence that undermines democratic accountability. The antitrust analogy is about structural position (bottleneck control over critical infrastructure), not about identical mechanisms of harm. The essay should acknowledge the structural differences honestly -- perhaps in a single sentence -- then redirect: "The question isn't whether Google charges you for search. The question is what it means when a single company controls 90% of the way you find information, and what happens when that company's executives sit in the front row at the inauguration of the president whose administration decides whether to break it up."

The Progressive Era Template Took 30 Years and Required Conditions That No Longer Exist

The essay's "hope" thread -- the Progressive Era as a proven template -- is intellectually honest about the timescale (30 years) but may understate how different the operating conditions were. The critics' strongest version of this argument runs as follows:

The Progressive Era succeeded in a context where: (1) media was fragmented and could not be algorithmically manipulated by the targets of reform; (2) the United States faced no peer competitor in the technologies being regulated; (3) political institutions still operated within shared democratic norms that made reform legislation possible; and (4) a president (Roosevelt) emerged who was willing to fight his own donor class. None of these conditions clearly obtain in 2026. Today's media landscape is dominated by platforms owned or influenced by the very oligarchs the essay targets. The AI competition with China creates genuine strategic pressure against regulation. Democratic norms have been degraded to the point where one party contests election results and the other struggles to pass basic legislation. And no Roosevelt-like figure is visible on the political horizon.

This does not mean reform is impossible. But it means the Progressive Era template may be necessary but not sufficient -- and that presenting it as a proven playbook risks generating false confidence. The audience may leave the essay thinking "we've done this before, we can do it again" without fully grappling with why it might be harder this time.

Assessment: This is a real vulnerability and one the essay partially addresses by noting the 30-year timescale and the difficulty. But it could go further. The essay should acknowledge that the Progressive Era template requires adaptation, not just repetition. The specific mechanisms (what counts as "muckraking" when the muckraker's platform is owned by the target, what counts as "antitrust" when the judiciary has been influenced by the target) need to be updated for 2026 conditions. The hope thread should feel like a challenge to the audience, not a reassurance.

The "Robber Baron" Label Is Itself a Progressive-Era Propaganda Term That Distorts the Analysis

A more foundational critique, primarily from economic libertarians, holds that the entire "robber baron" framework is historically misleading. The term was coined by opponents of industrial capitalism and carries inherent moral condemnation that prejudges the analysis. Historians like Burton Folsom have distinguished between "market entrepreneurs" (who created value through innovation and efficiency, like Carnegie and Rockefeller in their early careers) and "political entrepreneurs" (who sought government favors, like many railroad barons who received land grants). By this telling, the real problem was never private wealth concentration per se, but the entanglement of private wealth with government power. The robber barons who sought government subsidies and tariff protection were the villains; the robber barons who simply outcompeted rivals in open markets were heroes.

This distinction matters for the essay's policy prescriptions. If the problem is government-business entanglement rather than wealth concentration itself, then the solution is less government involvement in the economy (fewer subsidies, fewer contracts, fewer regulatory bodies that can be captured), not more regulation. By this logic, DOGE's dismantling of federal agencies is the correct response to the problem the essay identifies -- just not for the reasons Musk claims.

Assessment: This counterargument is intellectually coherent within its own framework but fails on the evidence the essay presents. Musk is not reducing government-business entanglement. He is increasing it -- firing public employees while routing their functions to his own companies. Government spending rose from $7.135 trillion to $7.558 trillion despite 317,000 job cuts. The libertarian ideal of separating government from business has no relationship to what DOGE is actually doing. The essay should note this distinction between the libertarian ideal and the DOGE reality -- it actually strengthens the argument.

Tertiary Counterarguments

"You're Describing Normal Democratic Politics, Not Oligarchy"

A moderate, establishment-oriented critique holds that wealthy people influencing politics is not new, not unique to tech, and not inherently oligarchic. The Kennedys, Roosevelts, and Bloombergs were all wealthy Americans who held political power. Labor unions, trial lawyers, and Hollywood also spend heavily on political influence. The difference between "oligarchy" and "democratic pluralism with wealthy participants" is a matter of degree, and the essay may be calling "oligarchy" what is actually just one side winning in a competitive political system.

Assessment: This argument has surface plausibility but collapses under the specific facts. What distinguishes the current moment is not that wealthy people influence politics (that has always been true) but that a single individual simultaneously holds a government position (DOGE), owns companies receiving $38 billion in federal contracts, fires regulators who oversee those companies, posts the obituaries of the agencies he dismantles on his own social media platform, and has his conflicts of interest "monitored by" himself. There is no historical precedent for this level of structural conflict of interest. Acknowledging that wealthy political involvement has historical precedent only makes the current escalation more visible, not less.

"The Essay Ignores That Musk Left DOGE and It Was Largely Ineffective"

By late 2025, DOGE had been described by Fortune as having "quietly ceased to exist." Bloomberg published a "rise and fall" narrative. The $150 billion in claimed savings was acknowledged by even Republican allies as a "massive exaggeration." Musk formally departed. If DOGE was largely performative -- if it generated headlines but failed to achieve its stated goals -- then the essay's framing of it as a successful implementation of the RAGE blueprint is overstated.

Assessment: This is factually important and the essay must account for it. However, the counterargument mistakes stated goals for actual goals. DOGE's stated goal was efficiency savings. Its actual effects were: 317,000+ federal workers displaced, regulatory agencies weakened, government capacity degraded, and contractor spending increased. The question is not whether DOGE achieved the savings it claimed, but whether the structural damage it inflicted serves the interests of the people who designed it. A "failed" efficiency initiative that successfully dismantles regulatory capacity is not a failure for the people who wanted regulatory capacity dismantled. The essay should address DOGE's operational trajectory honestly -- it was messy, overhyped, and partially rolled back -- while maintaining focus on its structural consequences.

"Wealth Inequality Coexists with Broadly Rising Living Standards"

The global picture complicates the essay's framing. Extreme poverty has declined from 36 percent of the world's population in 1990 to under 10 percent in 2025. Between-country inequality has fallen as emerging economies converge with advanced ones. Consumer technology has dramatically reduced the cost of information access, communication, and entertainment. Even within the United States, material living standards for the bottom quintile -- in terms of what their money can buy -- are higher than at any point in history. The argument is that focusing on the gap between rich and poor obscures the fact that the floor has been rising.

Assessment: This is the Steven Pinker / "the world is getting better" argument, and it has genuine empirical support at the global level. But it is weaker than it appears for the essay's purposes because the essay is specifically about domestic wealth concentration and political power, not global poverty trends. Within the United States, the bottom 50 percent's share of national wealth has been declining, real wages for non-college-educated workers have stagnated relative to productivity growth for decades, and material improvements have been accompanied by deepening precarity (healthcare costs, housing costs, student debt). More fundamentally, the essay's argument is not that Americans are materially worse off in absolute terms -- it is that concentrated wealth has translated into concentrated political power that threatens democratic self-governance. Rising living standards and democratic erosion can coexist. They did in the original Gilded Age.

Our Weak Points

1. The Causal Chain from Yarvin to DOGE Is Circumstantial

The RAGE-to-DOGE pipeline is documented in terms of funding connections and personal relationships, but the causal claim -- that DOGE is implementing Yarvin's blueprint because of Yarvin's influence -- relies on inference rather than direct evidence. Government downsizing was a mainstream Republican goal long before Yarvin. If challenged on this, the essay's most distinctive thread becomes its most vulnerable. The essay must be precise about what it claims: ideological migration, not a command structure.

2. The Nvidia/Standard Oil Parallel Is Weaker Than the Musk/DOGE Parallel

Nvidia controls critical AI infrastructure, but it is a hardware company selling chips to all comers, not a vertically integrated monopolist that controls the entire supply chain and uses predatory pricing to eliminate competitors. Standard Oil's monopoly was enforced through railroad rebates, predatory price-cutting, and intimidation of competitors. Nvidia's dominance is primarily a function of superior engineering and first-mover advantage in GPU architecture. The parallel is structural (bottleneck control) but not behavioral (predatory monopoly practices). Critics with technical knowledge will note this distinction.

3. The 30-Year Timeline Undermines the Urgency Framing

The essay simultaneously argues that the window is closing fast and that the Progressive Era template took 30 years. These two claims create tension. If the window is closing, a 30-year reform arc may not be relevant. If a 30-year reform arc is the model, the urgency framing may be overblown. The essay needs to reconcile these -- perhaps by arguing that the initiation of reform is what's urgent, even if the completion takes decades.

4. The Essay Does Not Fully Reckon with the Progressive Era's Own Failures

The "hope" thread presents the Progressive Era as a success story, but those reforms were partially rolled back, captured by industry, and insufficient to prevent the conditions that produced the Second Gilded Age. If the first Progressive Era's reforms led to the situation we are in now, the essay should explain why a second Progressive Era would produce more durable results. Without this, the hope thread risks feeling like "just do the same thing that partially worked last time and hope it sticks."

5. The Musk Wealth-to-GDP Comparison Is Not Quite There

The essay notes Musk at 2.7 percent of GDP versus Rockefeller at 3 percent. But Rockefeller's wealth was 3 percent of a much smaller GDP in a much less diversified economy. Musk's 2.7 percent of a $31+ trillion GDP, while staggering, exists in an economy with far more distributed production. The comparison is directionally correct but not as clean as the essay presents it. Sophisticated critics will note that GDP-share comparisons across centuries with fundamentally different economic structures require significant caveats.

6. The U.S. vs. Europe Comparison Requires More Nuance

The essay uses Europe as evidence that inequality is a "policy choice, not an inevitability." This is true but incomplete. Europe also has lower GDP growth, less venture capital investment, fewer global tech companies, and has produced no equivalent to Google, Apple, Amazon, or Meta. The counterargument -- that European equality comes at the cost of dynamism -- is overly simple but not entirely wrong, and the essay should acknowledge the trade-off honestly rather than presenting the comparison as one-sided.

Recommended Handling

Must Address at Length (3-4 Minutes of the 45-Minute Essay)

The "regulation could hand AI to China" argument. This is the one counterargument that will resonate with the essay's target audience (the exhausted majority, many of whom are genuinely concerned about U.S.-China competition) and that has legitimate policy substance. Dedicate time to it in Thread 4, after presenting the Progressive Era template. The answer is strong -- the Standard Oil breakup strengthened American oil dominance, monopoly breeds complacency, competition breeds innovation, and China's own AI success comes from competition among domestic firms -- but it needs to be delivered honestly, not dismissively. Acknowledge the genuine tension between regulation and competition. Note that the essay is not calling for banning AI development but for breaking the concentration of political power that accompanies unchecked monopoly. Frame it as: "The strongest American AI industry is a competitive one, not a protected one."

Should Address Proactively (1-2 Minutes Each)

The Gilded Age as genuine progress. Acknowledge this early in Thread 1, immediately after presenting the wealth concentration data. One to two sentences of genuine credit: "The original Gilded Age was simultaneously an era of extraordinary progress and extraordinary exploitation. The telephone, the automobile, the modern corporation -- all emerged from this period. The tech industry has created real value too. That is not the question. The question is whether creating value entitles you to capture the government." This inoculates against the accusation of one-sidedness and actually makes the antitrust argument stronger: Roosevelt did not destroy American industry; he made it compete.

The Yarvin influence caveat. Within Thread 3, after laying out the RAGE-to-DOGE pipeline, insert a moment of intellectual honesty: "Now, critics will say we're drawing a conspiracy map. That Yarvin is a fringe blogger, not a policy architect. And it's true that we can't prove a direct command chain from Yarvin's 2012 blog post to DOGE's 2025 actions. What we can prove is the funding connections, the personal relationships, and the structural outcomes. Yarvin proposed RAGE. Thiel funded Yarvin. Thiel funded Vance. Vance became VP. DOGE implemented RAGE. Yarvin attended the inauguration as an honored guest. You can call that coincidence. But at some point, the pattern deserves a name."

Should Acknowledge Briefly (1-2 Sentences Each)

Tech monopolies are structurally different from industrial monopolies. "Google is free. Standard Oil raised prices. The traditional monopoly test -- did it make things more expensive? -- doesn't capture the full picture. The harm isn't in your wallet. It's in who controls the information you see, who sits in the front row at the inauguration, and who gets to fire the regulators."

The Progressive Era's own capture failures. Briefly acknowledge in Thread 4 that Progressive Era institutions were subsequently captured, and frame the challenge as designing better institutions, not just repeating the same ones: "The original Progressives built the FTC, the ICC, the income tax. Some of those institutions were eventually captured by the industries they were meant to regulate. The lesson isn't that regulation doesn't work. The lesson is that regulation is a fight, not a fix. You don't build the institution and walk away. You build it, staff it, fund it, and defend it -- for decades."

Rising living standards globally. "Yes, living standards have risen. That is not the argument. The argument is that concentrated wealth has become concentrated political power, and that threatens the democratic system that made those rising standards possible."

Should Not Engage With

Bad-faith "both sides" arguments that equate tech billionaire political spending with labor union political spending as if they are equivalent in scale or structural effect.

Conspiracy-theory versions of the Yarvin connection that posit a secret cabal running the government. The essay should stay firmly on documented, sourced, public-record facts.

The argument that "this is just how capitalism works." This is a nihilist position, not an intellectual one, and engaging with it lends it undeserved credibility.