Reversing, Citizens United, one of the most powerful Supreme Court decisions in modern history requires more than public will—it demands a precise legal strategy and structural change.
Under current trends, the next 10–20 years likely look like a country where economic gains keep flowing upward faster than political power broadens downward. That is directly tied to Citizens United. Election finance is becoming more secretive and more dependent on megadonors, with dark money hitting a record $1.9 billion in the 2024 federal cycle, while campaigns are increasingly nationalized around outside donor networks rather than local constituencies.
Where this is all leading
The future isn’t an on/off switch—unlike what happened when Trump had Maduro kidnapped and then threatened the remaining government, abruptly altering the country’s future and violating its sovereignty. {If sovereignty matters, then no country should be able to enter another country and seize its leader—period.}
Fortunately for America, no one is attacking us—except PACs and billionaires. Through Congress, legal loopholes have been created that allow them to heavily influence both Congress and the White House. Since Citizens United v. FEC, corporations, wealthy donors, and outside groups have been able to spend unlimited money on elections, amplifying that influence.
That influence doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it is reinforced by how wealth is distributed, and more importantly, how that distribution is often misunderstood. On paper, it may appear that wealth is spread across different tiers: the top 1% holds roughly 29%, the bottom 50% about 5%, and the rest (66%) sits with the upper-middle. But this framing is deceptive. Much of what is counted as middle-class ‘wealth’ is tied up in assets like homes and retirement accounts—often built on debt and subject to the wild fluctuations of the market.
A home, for example, may represent net worth on paper, but it is frequently leveraged through a mortgage and cannot be used to shape markets or policy. That kind of wealth provides stability—though increasingly fragile in today’s highly charged political climate—not control. Control comes from owning capital—equity, liquidity, and large-scale investments—and those remain heavily concentrated at the top.
Much of what we call middle-class wealth is leveraged, illiquid, and structurally limited—it stabilizes households (as long as they earn a paycheck and the market remains stable, which presently it is not), but it doesn’t confer power.
Watch for Patterns
This is how direction reveals itself—not through a single event, but through signals, or more precisely, through patterns. My age group is the last tenuous link to a pre-AI past and to an understanding of the foundations of our democratic potential. Technology has fundamentally changed how humans think and interact, especially among younger generations who don’t even know what cursive script is.
This is how direction reveals itself—not through a single event, but through signals, or more precisely, through patterns.
Brookings estimates that more than 30% of workers could see at least half of their occupation’s tasks disrupted by generative AI, and McKinsey estimates that up to 30% of hours worked in the U.S. economy could be automated by 2030, requiring about 12 million occupational transitions. Brookings also finds that millions of highly exposed workers have low adaptive capacity, with older age, limited savings, and weaker mobility making transitions harder. For many people over 30, especially mid-career workers, that suggests a future of slower wage growth, repeated re-skilling, and greater risk of downward mobility if policy does not cushion the shift.
Politically, the likely trajectory is a more managed democracy, in other words, maintaining the illusion of democracy. That means voters will continue to have force-choice among pre-ordained candidates from a menu of viable candidates shaped aggressively by parties, donors, media ecosystems, and issue-specific funding networks.
The most consequential legal decisions of the modern era: Citizens United v. FEC. That ruling cemented the idea that political spending is a form of protected speech, allowing unlimited independent expenditures by corporations, unions, and outside groups. The reason it is so difficult to undo is structural, not just political. Supreme Court decisions cannot be reversed by public opinion or a single election. To overturn it, a new case would have to move through the courts and be accepted by the Supreme Court of the United States, where a majority of justices would need to decide to reverse precedent—a rare and deliberate process. The only alternative is a constitutional amendment, which requires overwhelming national consensus that is extremely difficult to achieve.
Recent reporting also shows that concentrated money is not limited to one sector: crypto, AI, and pro-Israel groups are all spending heavily in 2026 races, often through outside entities and sometimes with mixed electoral success. That is important because it means the future is less about one faction “controlling everything” than about a system in which a few very wealthy interests compete inside rules that already favor scale, money, and access.
How to save our country: Change the Trajectory of Citizens United
To shift that trajectory, the biggest changes would have to happen in three places at once: money, labor, and ownership.
On money in politics, the strongest realistic moves are tougher disclosure rules, tighter anti-coordination enforcement, public financing options, and stronger oversight of nonprofit election spending; Citizens United itself is hard to undo because the Supreme Court would need to accept a new case and a majority of justices would need to reverse precedent, or else the country would need a constitutional amendment. Nonetheless, we—lawyers and experts—need to try to undo Citizens United.
On labor, the highest-leverage changes are wage insurance, portable benefits, retraining tied to real jobs, mid-career transition support, and stronger worker bargaining power in AI-affected sectors.
On ownership, the deeper fix is broadening who benefits from growth through tax policy, antitrust enforcement, profit-sharing, retirement asset expansion, and easier access to wealth-building vehicles for ordinary households. Without changes like those, the default path is the emergence of a caste society based solely on wealth.
