Recent left wins in Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York are real momentum — but the Wisconsin primary defeat and a judge’s stay of New York City’s pied-à-terre tax are reminders that every movement breeds its own reaction. University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq argues that the scaffolding for that backlash is the legal system: insiders play for the rules themselves, not just for outcomes.

Two legal fronts are converging to concentrate power and insulate incumbents:

  • Partisan gerrymandering now protects incumbents, not just parties. The Supreme Court has blessed partisan advantage in mapmaking while dismantling Voting Rights Act protections. California’s new map, pushed by Newsom and drawn by a veteran Democratic redistricting expert, was defended in court as protecting Democratic insiders’ seats — which means gerrymandering now locks out challengers at the primary stage.
  • Campaign finance deregulation feeds party insiders. A July 2026 Supreme Court ruling struck down the ban on coordinated party spending, letting parties become dark-money conduits. Short-term it helps Republicans; medium-term it entrenches both parties’ insider machinery.
  • Dual-class shares lock in founder control at the commanding heights. In the SpaceX IPO, the public got single-vote shares while Musk kept super-voting Class B shares — roughly 40% of equity, 80% of votes, forever. OpenAI and Anthropic use nonprofit-holding-company and trust devices to the same end. Dual-class firms now dominate the most profitable sector of the US economy, not a niche.
  • The two trends are joined at the hip via “buy, borrow, die.” A handful of megadonors — Musk foremost among them — use concentrated equity as collateral to borrow for political spending. Founders become political rainmakers; their heirs inherit both the corporate heights and political hegemony.

Campaign finance and corporate governance are usually studied in isolation, which is precisely why the connection is easy to miss. Huq’s point is practical as much as analytic: an exact accounting of the legal filaments joining economic and political power is the precondition for challenging it. The law is where reaction builds its scaffolding — and where it must be dismantled.