Now there are 21. With former Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Seth Moulton joining the Democratic presidential race last week, and Sen. Michael Bennet announcing on Thursday, the number of candidates seems to have set a record. “Can you explain why the dam has broken, and everyone is a candidate in the Dem primaries?” a Twitter follower asked me last week.

My first response was a banal one, which is that the number of candidates really isn’t so unusual for an election like this one. Political opportunities like 2020 don’t pop up very often. There’s no Democratic incumbent seeking reelection, no obvious next-in-line Democrat (like Al Gore in 2000 or Hillary Clinton in 2016), and there’s also a solid, though not certain, chance of Democratic victory. In the recent past, whenever those three conditions have aligned, quite a few candidates have been lured into the race.

At this point in 1987, for example, nearing the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, there were 13 candidates, including many whose names would occupy the highest difficulty tiers of any political trivia contest. Who remembers former Rep. Doug Applegate of Ohio? Probably not even the 25,000 people who voted for him in 1988.

Because it’s a big chapter in the Biden saga, many know he was a candidate that cycle before dropping out in September 1987, but few remember a remarkably qualified candidate who stayed in a few days longer: Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, an eight-term Congress member who was an expert on defense modernization as well as an early advocate for family leave and child care. Similar years with open Democratic fields include 1976 (15 announced candidates), 1992 (nine candidates), and 2008 (eight candidates).

But none of those fields reached 21 candidates. There may be a few other reasons that this cycle is even more attractive to candidates than similar situations in the past. Six candidates are sitting senators. That’s more than in any cycle since 1976, when five of the most distinguished and mostly admirable senators of the 20th century received just 15 percent of the Democratic primary vote, combined.

The big field of senators this time probably has something to do with the nature of the current Senate. While it’s an old (and obviously sexist) joke that every senator sees a president when he shaves in the morning, many senators consider running but decide they can have plenty of impact in the institution, either by rising to chair a committee or by carving out an entrepreneurial role around a particular issue or perhaps investigations. But in Mitch McConnell’s Senate, the scope of action for any individual senator is profoundly limited.

They usually can’t even offer amendments on the floor! Low-seniority senators such as Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have very little to lose by running for president, even if it means a year and a half of missed votes. The same is probably true of the House of Representatives. Of the four sitting House members in the race for the White House, two, Tim Ryan and Seth Moulton, have at times aspired to move into leadership. But Democratic leadership in the House has been frozen in place since the triumvirate of Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Jim Clyburn cut a deal 15 years ago.

For these members, life in the minority during most or all of their careers has been a miserable exercise in total irrelevance, but life in the majority this year, where first-year members such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing all the attention, might not be much better for mid-career politicians such as these. Like their Senate peers, why not roll the dice on the presidency?

There’s also money — there’s just more of it than ever, more dollars and more donors. In the recent past, the biggest influence of money on presidential elections involved its scarcity. The finance chair of former Rep. Dick Gephardt’s unsuccessful 1988 campaign told a researcher later, “Candidates don’t lose elections. They run out of money and can’t get their planes off the ground.”

That was then. Beginning roughly with the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, the number of people willing to give money to candidates has skyrocketed. Because of the requirements for participation in Democratic debates, candidates are now focusing on the total number of donors, with four already surpassing 100,000 contributors and Bernie Sanders over the half-million mark more than 18 months in advance of the election.

But the number of medium donors, those giving more than $200 but within the hard-money maximum (currently $2,900), and reported by name to the Federal Election Commission, has also grown. In 2000, only about 778,000 people made reportable donations to any federal campaign. By 2008, with Barack Obama taking Dean’s achievement much further, that number had almost doubled, to 1,337,000, and in 2016, 1,672,000 people donated more than $200.

Even as Democratic candidates have challenged themselves and each other by renouncing various forms of money, whether from PACs, organized fundraising events, lobbyists, or people employed in the oil and gas industries, they are operating under conditions of abundance rather than scarcity.

Just as a Super PAC and a single donor in 2012 kept Newt Gingrich’s candidacy alive long past the time when voters had lost interest (the opposite of Gephardt’s problem in 1988), the sheer number of small and medium donors available to Democratic candidates makes it much easier to get in the race and stay in.

The structure of campaign expenses, in which paid broadcasting ads are less central and online and on-the-ground organizing more valuable, might also affect the way political money works, not necessarily making campaigns cheaper but making it easier to start with less and lowering the barrier to entry. A broad base of smaller donors has another advantage: Candidates can go back to them for more, until they reach the limit of what each donor is able to give.

Finally, let’s not be totally cynical about politicians and their motives. They’re not always automatons fueled by pure ambition. Genuine outrage about the current direction of the country, along with a real hope that we can do better and escape the dreary constraints of even Democratic politics in the Clinton and Obama eras, surely has mobilized or inspired some candidates to enter the fight. That sense of obligation and inspiration was absent in earlier election cycles I can remember, such as 1988 or 1992.  

Inevitably, quite a few promising candidates who would make good presidents, perhaps a dozen, will fall away long before the primaries and caucuses begin. Pundits will draw conclusions, such as that their message or policy ideas were unpopular with Democratic voters or that the party “doesn’t have room” for a moderate, a woman, or whatever might characterize them. But more likely, it will be a small tactical stumble — they hired staff that wasn’t ready for a presidential campaign or they picked the wrong states to focus resources on.

When former Sen. Birch Bayh died in March, I read the obituaries eagerly, in part curious how such an accomplished senator (he passed two constitutional amendments and almost passed a third, the Equal Rights Amendment) disappeared so quickly in the 1976 campaign. The answer was boring, unfortunately: He hadn’t figured out how to work within the new fundraising rules of the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act.

It’s good that Democrats have so many choices, and it’s good that the barriers to entry in politics at the highest level seem to be somewhat lower than in the past. Unfortunately, our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it hard to sustain all those choices through the primaries, and means that we will lose promising candidates while the final few will be somewhat arbitrary.

If having 20-plus candidates becomes the new norm, the party should look at reforms such as ranked-choice voting that will give voters a chance to express their support for more than just one candidate at a time. 

Update 5/2: Updated to reflect that Michael Bennet has now also announced his campaign.

As Senator Bernie Sanders’s thunderous Brooklyn-accented denunciation of “the millionaires and the billionaires” once again echoes through the political conversation, it seems likely that if and when Sanders releases his tax returns, they will show that he is himself a millionaire. Not only in the sense that his net worth exceeds a million dollars, but it’s possible that his household crossed the seven-figure threshold in income at least once. “If it’s wrong for billionaires to exist, why isn’t it wrong for millionaires to exist?” New Yorker writer James Surowiecki asked on Twitter.

To answer Surowiecki’s question, first let’s note that it’s unsurprising for a 77-year-old white male college graduate with a steady white-collar career to have a net worth considerably over a million dollars, assuming that’s what we’ll find out about Sanders. In fact, there’s one sure formula for accumulating a million dollars: Be born early enough in the 20th century to buy a house in the 1980s, and then by sometime in your 40s, reach a low six-figure salary and keep working steadily up to or past nominal retirement age. Avoid any of the major vices, such as gambling in the stock market, and you’ve got the equivalent of the “success sequence” for upper middle-class households.

Even before any book deals, Bernie Sanders had followed exactly that familiar boomer path, at least since he was elected to the House in 1990, when a member’s salary was $125,100. And he’s been extra fortunate to be able to keep going for at least 12 years past the age when many people begin to spend down, especially if they have had physically demanding jobs.

“Millionaires” and “billionaires” are really not the same thing at all, and there’s more than a multiple of a thousand that differentiates them. A person with a few million dollars in assets can make a few decent political contributions, but not necessarily enough to get more than a handshake photo with a candidate. Billionaires, on the other hand, or multibillionaires such as Jeff Bezos at about $150 billion pre-divorce, operate on a different plane. Their power extends far beyond political contributions to the ability to make cities jump with tax incentives to lure their companies, to launch vast philanthropic initiatives that change public policy, or to draw media attention merely by ostentatiously contemplating a run for president.

Not only are millionaires less blameworthy for inequality than billionaires, I’d go even further: A reasonable long-term goal of public policy would be to create fewer billionaires and more millionaires. Where would the additional millionaires come from? Some would come from above, as billion dollar fortunes would be taxed and economic structures reformed. Entrepreneurs would still be amply rewarded for ingenuity and risk-taking, but those rewards would come with two commas, not three. A suitable motto for Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax — and for the new wave of democratic socialists — might be, “What if all the billionaires became just multimillionaires?” which is hardly a revolutionary chant.

But policy should also make it possible for many more people and families to move up to that threshold, by their mid-60s, where they have enough savings and security to enjoy a stress-free retirement and help their children and grandchildren. Retirement savings calculators likely overstate things, but a standard one indicates that a 35-year-old in a household making the median income of $56,500 should aim to save $1.6 million in order to retire at 67.

But that path is likely to be much more difficult for someone born in 1991 than it was for Sanders, born 50 years earlier. With student loan debt extending deep into one’s 30s and the cost of child care, it’s nearly impossible to begin saving early. Buying a house at 1980s prices is, by definition, impossible, and today’s young workers are unlikely to enjoy either the runup in real estate values that began in the mid-1990s or in stock prices that began earlier in that decade. Vanishingly few will have the kind of pension that provides a guaranteed base of security, and tax incentives for retirement savings provide far more benefit for those well above the median income.  

There are two approaches that public policy could take to improve the lives of people who weren’t born early enough in the 20th century to have had Bernie Sanders’s good fortune. One would be to simply provide far more benefits through public programs, such as by expanding Social Security, as advocated by a sizeable congressional caucus that includes Warren and Sanders.

In this case, people wouldn’t necessarily be “millionaires” in terms of ownership, but they could enjoy more of the security and options that are open to someone who enters retirement with a high net worth. But another approach, entirely compatible with expanding Social Security, is to make it easier for people to build their own base of assets, through programs such as Cory Booker’s proposed “baby bonds,” by reducing the burden of student loans, raising wages, or making homeownership accessible.

The first goal of such reforms would not be to create millionaires, but to give people who have little or no economic security a firmer base from which to take advantage of opportunity. If the full slate of economic policy ideas that have emerged in the 2020 campaign were put in place, many more people could follow the path to a million dollars by the end of their working lives, as Sanders has, which is nothing to be embarrassed about.

As the possibility comes into view that Democrats might win the presidency and perhaps also the Senate by a slim margin in 2020, progressive presidential candidates are already divided on the role of the Senate filibuster, which will likely present a formidable obstacle to ambitious policy ideas on health care, climate change, and child care.

Governors and mayors in the race, such as Jay Inslee of Washington and Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, have no doubt that the filibuster is, as Inslee put it, “an artifact of a bygone era that is not in the U.S. Constitution and somehow it got grafted on in this culture of the Senate.”

But most of the many presidential candidates with roots in the “culture of the Senate,” despite different approaches to policy and conflict, have expressed misgivings about eliminating the filibuster. Cory Booker warned that without 60 Democratic votes in the Senate, Medicare-for-all was unlikely to pass, and even Bernie Sanders on February 19 said he was “not crazy” about ending the procedure, although it would stand in the way of his own ambitious policy vision. Among announced candidates from the Senate, only Elizabeth Warren has said that ending the filibuster is an option that should be “on the table.”

There are two strong cases for preserving the filibuster in the Senate. The better-known one, and the one that Booker and Sanders express, is that the filibuster can protect the minority party (or a minority faction that might not correspond to a party) and prevent a party that holds a majority in both houses along with the presidency from using a fleeting advantage to push through an agenda with long-term consequences. Sometimes reference is made to the apocryphal George Washington quote about the Senate as the saucer that cools the hot coffee of the more representative House, though even if Washington ever said that, it was more than a century before the filibuster emerged.

Democrats as well as Republicans can identify times when they have used the filibuster to stop legislation, as well as cases when it held back their party’s priorities. Among current senators, 68 have experienced life in both the majority and the minority at least once, so they’ve looked at the filibuster from both sides.

The second argument for the filibuster is less about partisan advantage or results. It rests on the ideal of the Senate’s character as an open institution. Individual senators can delay or block action, and are free, as they are not in the more tightly controlled House of Representatives, to put new ideas on the agenda and force their consideration.

The filibuster is not inherently a supermajority requirement; it’s linked to the Senate’s principle of unlimited debate and amendment. Ending a filibuster, when 60 senators vote to invoke cloture, sets a time limit on further debate and strictly limits the amendments that can be proposed. Until cloture, in theory, senators are free to make their speeches and to offer amendments of all kinds. This makes the Senate, at its best, a vibrant, unpredictable institution, and a platform for entrepreneurs of ideas such as Warren.

One problem with the first argument for the filibuster is that it doesn’t apply to all Senate activity. The actions that can be restrained by filibuster have become limited and arbitrary. After rules changes initiated by both Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, no presidential appointments require 60 votes for cloture. Anything that can be structured as a budget bill and moved through the one-party process of budget reconciliation is protected from filibuster.

The Congressional Review Act (CRA), a special procedure to reverse regulatory rules, creates another filibuster-proof vehicle, used 16 times to change policy during the Trump administration, though only once in two decades before Trump.

While procedures such as reconciliation can be used for partisan purposes only when a party controls both houses, the subset of legislative action that is actually subject to the filibuster is now quite limited by these exceptions. And policy is often distorted to jam it through one of these exceptions, particularly the budget reconciliation process. (It’s in order to comply with the Byrd Rule, which limits the use of reconciliation that some but not all of the 2017 tax cuts are temporary.)

Those several exceptions are likely to be less helpful to Democrats than they have been to Republicans. A party can use reconciliation to cut taxes or the CRA to wipe out regulations, but constructing new programs such as universal health care, child care, or climate change plans will remain subject to the filibuster. Because of the exceptions, the filibuster no longer has a balanced or equivalent effect between the two parties, if it ever did.

The second argument for the filibuster — that it’s an intrinsic part of the Senate’s character as an open, free-flowing institution — is the one for which I’ve always had the most sympathy. There aren’t a lot of democratic institutions anywhere in the world that give individual members or small groups the opportunity to raise new ideas, challenge an old consensus, or form durable cross-party coalitions.

The problem is that ideal doesn’t describe the Senate of 2019 at all. Instead of proposing and voting on amendments, senators have been reduced to begging Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow votes on, most recently, legislation to reverse President Trump’s declaration of an emergency, or, earlier, legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller.

Having worked in the Senate in the 1990s, I’m still taken aback whenever I hear senators asking McConnell to “allow” a vote. Allow? From what I remember, a senator gets a vote by sending an amendment to the desk and asking for its consideration. Often, the senator might accept a unanimous consent agreement to have the amendment considered later or under a time limit or accepted without a vote, or negotiate a promise that the proposal will be considered as separate legislation at another time. But the individual senator and her allies have some leverage.

In the current Senate, they don’t. McConnell controls the floor ruthlessly, drawing on a cluttered toolbox of arcane techniques. James Wallner, a longtime Republican Hill staffer now at the R Street Institute, has described some of those tools in an article in the Washington Examiner. At the core is the tactic known as “filling the amendment tree.” To oversimplify, there are only four slots for amendments to a bill at any given time — two first-degree amendments and two second-degree or “perfecting” amendments. By immediately filling all four slots with amendments (it doesn’t matter what they say) and leaving them unresolved, McConnell leaves no room for any other senator to offer an amendment.

Other techniques include bringing up a bill and immediately moving to suspend consideration of the bill, or moving to consider another bill. No other business can be conducted while those motions are pending.

As Wallner often points out, McConnell can exercise this level of control only because other senators don’t challenge him, even allowing “unanimous consent” requests to go through without objection. The “institutionalists” who protect procedures such as the filibuster have consented meekly while McConnell (and, to be fair, Reid to a lesser extent before him) has shut down the Senate. For Republicans, it has been part of their larger acquiescence in the cause of getting Trump appointees and Trump legislation through or, before 2017, blocking Obama’s appointments and legislation, while Democratic leader Chuck Schumer shares an interest in keeping the Senate under control.

But whoever is responsible, this is the Senate now and in the future: an unrepresentative, tightly controlled legislative body. In an open, free-flowing Senate, perhaps there’s a place for the filibuster, giving a minority of senators a way to bring in new ideas as well as to slow things down. But in the closed Senate, the filibuster becomes a simple supermajority requirement, one that’s applied arbitrarily and empowers a relatively small minority — one that in theory might represent as little as 17 percent of the nation’s population — to block the preferences of the majority, for years and years.

In an open Senate, the power to block action might be a worthwhile trade-off for the ability to initiate action. But on its own, it can only be an impediment to democratic decision-making.  

One aspect of the Green New Deal, according to a summary that appeared briefly on a congressional website, would be to provide “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.” Those last three words offered such fodder to Fox News that the summary was withdrawn and supporters such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared the only relevant document the legislative text of the Green New Deal resolution itself.

But before we send the last copies of that apparently sloppy document to the shredder, let’s consider what might have been meant by “unwilling to work.” Is there a case for supporting those who at a particular moment are neither “working” nor “unable to work”? Is there an insight there worth salvaging?

The phrase does conjure up the image of Seinfeld’s George Costanza dodging calls from the unemployment office checking on whether he’s been looking for work. Someone involved in writing that Green New Deal summary should have slowed down and figured out what they really wanted to say.

Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel on February 12 tweeted his interpretation of the document: “What AOC’s team meant was that people at the end of their working life would get a big pension instead of, like, coding classes.”

Perhaps it refers merely to permitting earlier retirement, but there’s a larger point: When we say that only people “unable” to work should share in economic security, it implies something like disability insurance, a program that requires an individual to demonstrate, often through a complex process that requires a lawyer, that they absolutely cannot work because of an identifiable disability. Only about 36 percent of applicants make it through that process successfully. Disability, retirement, education, and a short period after a child is born are the only exceptions to the general rule that we expect adults to be working.

Over the last several decades, through periods of both Republican and Democratic dominance, the US has built a social contract organized around the obligation to work in the market economy. From the emergence of the Earned Income Tax Credit in the Reagan era through work requirements, first in welfare reform and now proposed or implemented by waiver in the food stamp and Medicaid programs, policy has steadily enshrined the distinction between those gainfully employed — and thus deserving — and those not.

Provisions such as the refundable child tax credit enacted in 2001 were made unnecessarily complex solely to ensure that anyone not working be denied that modest benefit.

Political rhetoric has reinforced the point. Conservative language has been harsh and punitive, building on images such as the “welfare queen” of the 1980s. More recently, there’s the idea that people who are poor have chosen not to follow the “success sequence” of school, marriage, and full-time work.

Progressive rhetoric has always been more optimistic and supportive. Bill Clinton saluted those who “work hard and play by the rules,” while Sen. Sherrod Brown invoked “the dignity of work,” a wonderful phrase picked up by several other Democratic candidates. While Brown always includes caregiving and work in the home, the implication remains that dignity is an attribute of labor, not simply of being human.

Some conservative and liberal policies are punitive while some are meant to provide support. Conservative rhetoric as well as liberal rhetoric have ratcheted the social contract in the direction of supporting only people who are working in the market economy or can demonstrate that they can’t.

Social insurance programs recognize defined exceptions to the rule of work: Education (usually in the early stages of adult life), retirement (nearer the end), and disability. Paid family leave would add a fourth. Unemployment insurance provides temporary support for people who have worked steadily for years and who can show they’re looking for work. Tax-advantaged savings programs, which have been the main tool of social policy in recent decades even though they overwhelmingly benefit the upper-middle class, similarly target benefits for specific life events: college education, retirement.

But life can be more complicated than these categories allow. There are situations like the one Weigel identified when, a few years short of Social Security eligibility age, we find our experience or credentials no longer in demand. There are moments when we simply must quit a job, without a plan, for our own mental health, perhaps because of an abusive boss. Maybe we need to go spend six months with a relative who is recovering from postpartum depression or a drug overdose. Our child is having a hard time in second grade and we really need to be home for her at 3:00. We might even want to take a year to write a novel. There’s no reason to discourage that, even if after a year we discover that fiction isn’t our genre.

One policy approach would be to build new programs that target these needs, such as very flexible family leave or some provision for earlier retirement, starting by lowering the eligibility age for Medicare. The political process might recognize a wider range of legitimate excuses for not working, even if novel-writing won’t be one of them. The point is, these are just examples of the many unpredictable circumstances in which we might find ourselves not quite “unable to work,” but far better off — and other people would be better off — if we could step out of the market economy for some period of time.

One attribute gives people the freedom to make their own choices in situations like those above: Wealth. Not vast wealth, and not wealth that’s tied up in a house or a retirement account. Just $10,000 or $40,000 in a liquid account can make many things possible. But according to the Federal Reserve’s most recent report on household finances, four in 10 adults don’t have $400 for an emergency, and a majority have less than $1,000.

This kind of moderate savings also marks the sharpest racial divide. As researchers including William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton have shown, the average white household near the poverty line in income has a net worth of about $18,000 (including housing value), while a similarly situated black family has zero or negative net worth.

Of the many ambitious policy ideas emerging at the moment, Universal Basic Income is the one that most explicitly discards the idea that work is the essential qualifier for public support. While many UBI supporters think it’s an appropriate response to a future in which there may be fewer jobs (because of the robots and all that), the idea has value regardless of one’s prediction about the future of work. Income from a UBI can form the basis of savings, but that won’t happen without accounts or incentives to set aside some income.

Other approaches, such as Sen. Cory Booker’s American Opportunity Accounts, would help people build savings, but much like social insurance programs, uses would be limited to specific purposes: education, retirement, homeownership. In a new book, A Few Thousand Dollars, Bob Friedman of the organization Prosperity Now, a longtime advocate for helping all families build savings, argues for a more flexible strategy to help households save for emergencies as well as other purposes.

Programs to encourage savings and assets are only one aspect of a social contract that recognizes the dignity of work but also the complexity of life. Work in all its many forms (both in and out of the home) gives life structure and meaning, but social policy should also acknowledge that work fits into life, at different points, in ways too unpredictable to capture in narrowly targeted programs. And we should aspire to design programs that help people work and earn, but also structure their lives in ways that can fulfill their aspirations, personal as well as economic.  

When former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that he was considering running for president as an “independent centrist” because “the political system is broken,” the first day’s reaction — and the second’s — was that he risked being a spoiler in 2020, pulling some portion of the anti-Trump vote away from the Democratic nominee and leading to the reelection of Donald Trump.

It’s possible that Schultz, if he runs, could play that role. But before we worry about that, let’s look at the assumptions behind Schultz’s potential candidacy and what they say about the state of American politics at this moment — and what’s actually “broken.”

Schultz argues, correctly, that his “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” policy preferences are unlikely to prevail in either party’s nomination process. He is against tax increases on the very wealthy, and the only issue that seems to have awakened his passions in recent years was reducing the federal deficit. (In 2012, he directed Starbucks baristas to write the phrase, “Come Together” on cups, by which he meant that Democrats and Republicans should find common ground on a deficit-reduction plan.) Deficit reduction is no longer a high priority for Democrats (thankfully!), and never was for Republicans.

I don’t reject the idea that Schultz’s career as a CEO is a qualification. One part of being president involves managing an incredibly large organization. I have no doubt that Barack Obama’s absence of experience in the sociology of very large organizations was a weakness, just as Michael Bloomberg’s corporate background helped him at key points in his 12 years as mayor of New York.

But sure, if Schultz wants to test whether his is a viable message or resume, he should try. Just as former Rep. John Delaney or former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper should give their own policy platforms or experience a test. Or former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. Or, on the Republican side, Maryland governor Larry Hogan or basically anyone else.

All those candidates are running in the first round of the presidential election process. They’re competing for a spot in the final round, the general election. Some appear at this moment to be longshots, but there’s precedent for candidates who were little-known longshots in the January before the election year to capture their party’s nomination or the presidency, including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. All of them not only won their party’s nomination, but in different ways showed that the party was open to a policy combination and a coalition that had seemed unlikely to succeed two years earlier.

But what Schultz is proposing is to jump directly to the final round, the general election. And to get there, he would not even work through the competition for the nomination of the Green Party or the Libertarian Party. While he may or may not form a party for legal purposes, what he is suggesting doing is simply collecting signatures to get onto the ballots of as many states as possible. Without a personal following (he has about 5,700 Twitter followers), Schultz is likely to do that by hiring paid signature-gathering firms. In some states, such as Texas and California, the number of signatures needed is high (California requires signatures from 1 percent of registered voters), but in many swing states, it’s only 5,000.

So, if on the debate stage for the general election in November there’s a Democrat, a Republican and Howard Schultz, they will have reached that stage in radically different ways. The Democrat will have ground it out through a grueling round of primaries and caucuses, raising money within legal limits as well as self-imposed limits (most candidates are likely to reject corporate PAC money, some may go further), building coalitions, developing policy proposals, and prevailed in a field that may include six senators, several governors and former governors, a former two-term vice president, and Mr. Delaney. Perhaps a half-dozen candidates who worked just as hard and had their own energized base of support won’t quite make it to that stage. The Republican will either be the incumbent president or will have in some form prevailed over the incumbent, generally considered an impressive achievement. And then there will be Mr. Schultz, who bought some signatures.

You may think that the Democratic and Republican parties are a “duopoly” that needs competition. You may believe that there are widely held viewpoints that don’t really have a place in either party. (The opposite of Schultz’s formula, economically liberal but socially conservative, is probably the most glaring example, although many voters may have thought that’s what they were getting with Donald Trump.) But the path around that duopoly seems to be open to exactly one kind of person, someone like Mr. Schultz. It’s like we’ve built a fast lane into the political system and it’s open only to billionaires.

This is much closer to the way “the political system is broken” than whatever Schultz is referring to, like the possibility that some people in one party propose to raise his own taxes. Together with their influence through SuperPACs and other dark money vehicles, this fast lane to the final round dramatically increases the influence that billionaires can have. Even his media blitz this week couldn’t have happened without the expectation that Schultz could buy himself a spot in the general election.

And Schultz is also a pioneer in another avenue by which the very wealthy influence politics. Remember those “Come Together” cups? They may have been meaningless to a majority of Starbucks customers, but Schultz obviously thought they would have an influence in the political process. As Alexander Hertel-Fernandez showed in his book Politics At Work, more people than you might think are subject to political messages in the workplace. Starbucks under Schultz took it a step further, because they are among the handful of companies whose employees are in direct contact with millions of customers daily. Schultz understood that that was a megaphone.

Party primaries and caucuses are far from the ideal way to run the first rounds of an election, especially in a system with only two major parties. Primary and caucus voters aren’t representative of the general election electorate (or the overall population), the process is expensive and requires careful allocation of funds across states, small tactical mistakes, such as Hillary Clinton ignoring small caucus states in 2008, have an outsized impact. The sequencing of state contests gives some states outsized voice, and then there are all the ordinary problems of first-past-the-post election systems.

The “duopoly” of the two parties is a serious problem, stifling a lot of potential competition and ideas. The right answer to that is not a fast-lane alternative candidacy, with no existing party and no plan to build a new one. It’s redesigning the system so that there are more ways for parties to develop, participate, influence the major parties, and in the most traditional way, organize and mobilize a constituency.

And all that is even before you get to the question of whether Schultz would be a spoiler.

There’s a wonderful clarity to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a 70 percent marginal tax rate on incomes over $10 million. Compare it to past Democratic or progressive efforts to nudge up taxes on the superwealthy, which inevitably became mired in complexity as they struggled to avoid violating an inexplicable promise never to raise taxes on any households with incomes below $250,000.

Recall, for example, the “Buffett Rule” that President Obama and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) designed in 2012, in response to Warren Buffett’s point that he paid taxes at an overall rate lower than his secretary, simply because, like all investors, most of his income is in the form of capital gains and dividends. The obvious answer would have been to bring the tax rate on investment income in line with the ordinary rate on income from work, which is the rate his secretary pays. But fearful that might touch some of those struggling quarter-millionaires, Whitehouse and the administration cobbled together the Paying a Fair Share Act, which looked more like a second layer of the dauntingly complex alternative minimum tax.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) joined in the promise to protect households under $250,000 — about the top 3 to 4 percent — from any tax increases, which made his 2016 campaign proposal to raise the cap on taxable wages for Social Security as convoluted as the Buffett Rule bill.

Ocasio-Cortez didn’t put forward a full tax proposal (there’s no reason she should), but her top-end number alone signaled a departure from the tiptoe caution of earlier Democrats. The focus on the top marginal rate also marks a break from a more traditional approach to tax policy, which aims to keep the tax base broad (as much income as possible should subject to tax, with few special breaks) and rates relatively low. This is the approach of tax reformers from the Kennedy administration through the tax reform of 1986. It’s what Republicans claimed they were aiming to achieve in 2017, although what they actually did was entirely different.

There’s both an economic and a political logic to the low rates/broad base model of traditional tax reform. The economic logic is that the tax system should be fairly neutral about economic activity; it shouldn’t favor one form of investment or income over another, because economic choices should be motivated by economic logic, not tax avoidance. The political rationale was that if rates were very high, politicians would be sympathetic to influential constituents who complained about the rates, and would push through special benefits for favored industries or firms.

That story rang true in the 1980s, when rates were nominally high but the tax code was larded with provisions that directly or indirectly benefited the politically influential oil and gas and real estate industries. (That’s why Donald Trump hated it: “Some very foolish people,” he told a congressional committee, “heard the word ‘tax shelter’ and thought it was a bad thing.”) Starting over with lower rates and as few exceptions as possible would mean that the wealthy would actually pay something close to the nominal rate, and the hope was that the system would be stable.

The tax reform of 1986, which embodied those ideas, doesn’t get much respect on the left today, in part because the lower top rates coincided with, and may have caused, the staggering increase in executive pay, a key driver of inequality. And the lower rates didn’t keep the wealthy special pleaders at bay for very long, so that today we have what might be the worst of all worlds — relatively low top marginal tax rates by historical standards (although at 37 percent, not as low as the 28 percent of the late 1980s), but also dozens of exceptions and special deals, some of which serve good purposes and some of which don’t. These “tax expenditures” totaled about $1.5 trillion in 2017.

If the traditional tax reform model has failed, then just raising top rates makes a lot of sense. But it’s still important to clear away as many of the tax expenditures, old and new, as possible, particularly because the form they take will make them even more valuable to the very wealthy if the top marginal rate were to be set as high as 70 percent.

The first priority should still be to make sure as much income as possible is subject to the same rate, whatever it is. Members of the $10 million-plus club, like Buffett, get most of their income from investments, so it won’t do much just to raise the ordinary rate if the top tax rate on capital gains remains at the current level of just 20%. Many of the most notorious tax evasion schemes — the “carried interest” loophole, the “hedge fund” loophole — involve treating ordinary compensation as if it were capital gains. The main effect of raising the top rate on regular income to 70 percent would be to make those tricks, which are only available to the very wealthy, all the more valuable.

And then there’s a whole family of tax expenditures that have the effect of taking huge streams of income out of the tax system altogether. Take, for example, the increasingly popular Roth IRA, in which you pay taxes on the money when you contribute it, after which it grows tax-free and is tax-free on withdrawal — all that investment income is invisible to the tax system. Married taxpayers can contribute if they make less than about $200,000. So if you expect to be in the 70 percent bracket later in your career, you can (and should!) park all the money you can in a Roth IRA now, paying at your current lower tax rate, and that income will never see taxes again, at any rate. Other tax expenditures that take a similar form include 529 programs for college savings and health savings accounts.

The newest tax shelter, and a particular obsession of mine, is a program called “Opportunity Zones,” which allows investors with capital gains income to avoid tax altogether if they put their gains into a fund that, in turn, invests partly in “economically distressed” neighborhoods such as Brooklyn Heights. While taking very little risk in such gentrifying, or long-gentrified neighborhoods, the program will allow investors to take even more income out of the tax system.

The next generation of progressive tax policy won’t go back to the low rates/broad base model that long ago achieved a bipartisan consensus. But it’s not enough to just raise rates. Given a choice between a 70 percent top rate, with all the tricks and shelters that will allow the very wealthy to avoid it, and a 60 percent or even 45 percent marginal rate that the very wealthy actually pay, we should always prefer the second. But at least the debate has begun and we’re past the cautiousness of the Buffett Rule era.

Correction 1/15: A previous version of this piece misstated the amount of 2017 tax expenditures. The correct amount is $1.5 trillion.

Rep. Liz Cheney was elected chair of the House Republican Conference on Tuesday, a leadership position that her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, held in the 1980s while representing the same Wyoming at-large district that she holds today (despite spending most of her life since middle school living in Virginia). It was a potent reminder that family dynasties can still play a part in American politics.

Hard as it is to remember through the fog of the Trump era, about three years ago, dynastic politics seemed like a dominant theme and one of the biggest dangers to the “any kid can grow up to be president” myth of American democracy. In 2015, many foresaw a general election matchup between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, recycling the last names of the candidates from 24 years earlier. It would have been the fifth appearance of a Bush on a national ticket since 1980, and the third for a Clinton.

Bushes have also won elections in three states — Connecticut, Texas, and Florida — and the Clintons two, Arkansas and New York. Other, newer Bushes, such as George P., the Texas land commissioner, were on the way up. Joseph P. Kennedy III, of the fourth generation of Kennedys, was the most electrifying new Democrat in the House. Andrew Cuomo and Jerry Brown each held big-state governorships that their fathers had occupied for multiple terms. Three members of the Udall family had almost overlapped in the Senate in the previous decade, from both parties. (Besides Mark Udall of Colorado and Tom of New Mexico, Republican Gordon Smith of Oregon is a cousin.) 

If you include Al Gore, whose father was a senator, and Mitt Romney, whose father was a governor, Cabinet official, and presidential hopeful, five of the 10 major party nominees for president between 2000 and 2016 have been members of established political families. (With his election to the Senate this year, Romney has matched a Bush family record — statewide victory in three states: Michigan, where his father was governor, Massachusetts, and now Utah.)

While outsiders to the dynastic system, such as Barack Obama, could emerge, they seemed unusual, and those born to politics seemed to have hoarded at least half of the opportunities to run and win, raising real questions about whether American democracy was as open and meritocratic as we had been taught.

But then came 2018. The new class of congressional Democrats, one of the largest in history at about 58, depending on the last few races to be called, is striking for its near-total absence of sons, daughters, spouses, ex-spouses, grandchildren, even nieces or nephews of other elected officials. 

Among Democrats, there is one exception, although the race got no national attention: In Michigan’s Ninth District, 58-year-old Andy Levin won the race to succeed his father, Sander Levin, who had served since 1983. Andy Levin’s uncle, Carl Levin, was the longest-serving senator in Michigan history, until retiring in 2015. 

But that’s it. Reviewing the backgrounds of all the incoming Democrats, I found that beyond the Levin family (Mike Levin of California is unrelated), the rest of the new Democrats are all newcomers, none from political families, many with little elective experience of their own, and quite a few from working-class backgrounds. 

The same is true of the newly elected governors. While two come from backgrounds of staggering wealth — J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Ned Lamont of Connecticut, whose great-grandfather was chair of JP Morgan & Co. — none come from families with histories of elective office.

The notable, and welcome, diversity of the new Democratic class is certainly part of the story. The dynasties mentioned above are all white and Protestant or Catholic. So almost by definition, the third and fourth Muslim members ever elected to the House are unlikely to come from old political families.

But that logic doesn’t apply to women, and in the past, many women elected to public office have come from politically successful families, including, besides Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, whose father was mayor of Baltimore, and West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, whose father was Gov. Arch Moore. Others, such as Reps. Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Doris Matsui of California, hold seats previously held by their husbands, although more than half have been elected without family name recognition. It really is notable that not one of the women elected to the House or governorships in 2018 have that background. 

On the Republican side, Donald Trump in 2016 broke not only the Bush dynasty but also the father-son dynasty of Ron and Rand Paul. Still, the dynastic strain seems a bit stronger on the Republican side. Besides the Cheneys, the fathers of two of the new Republican House members also served in Congress: Jim Hagedorn of Minnesota and Carol Miller of West Virginia, the only woman among newly elected Republicans. And Vice President Mike Pence’s brother Greg was elected to the House seat Mike represented from 2001 to 2013. (Mike Pence also held the same leadership position as the two Cheneys: conference chair.)

And there is always the possibility that the Trumps themselves will seek to form a political dynasty, as those with authoritarian instincts often do. Donald Trump Jr. seems to relish red-meat political rallies and hate-filled tweets as much as his father does, but it’s not just wishful thinking that makes it hard to foresee multiple generations of Trumps. (Okay, maybe it’s also wishful thinking.)

But for the most part, the era of dynastic politics seems to have receded. Andrew Cuomo survived a primary challenge and was reelected handily, but his 1990s-bred brand of politics remains far out of tune with the current Democratic mood. Joe Kennedy is now the only member of that remarkable family in federal or statewide office, and while he still has a bright future, he is just one of very many charismatic young representatives who deliver a progressive message with passion.

The generation of George W. and Jeb Bush is exhausted, and George P.’s career in Texas seems to have plateaued. With all respect to Hillary Clinton, she’s run her last race. Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush Hager, or Meghan McCain might run for something someday, but none seems eager. Michelle Obama shows no interest, and the Obama daughters are still too young to even talk about it. 

And remarkably, even the most expansive list of potential 2020 presidential candidates on the Democratic side contains no dynastic politicians, now that Cuomo has been dropped from the Washington Post’s long list. 

The disasters of democracy hit us every day, but we might sometimes forget to notice those points where we’ve stepped forward and made progress. If it holds — if Liz Cheney is now the exception rather than the rule — it’s possible that something we all saw as a problem just a few years ago has been solved, or at least that the dynastic clock has been reset. Perhaps a few decades from now, we’ll be looking at the third generation of Ocasio-Cortezes, but we can worry about that when the time comes. 

For a draft bill that has no chance of enactment in the current Congress and not much chance even if Democrats win control, the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act introduced early in September by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna drew an astonishing level of criticism across the left and center of the political spectrum. The responses ranged from snarky tweets to a 3,000-word detailed critique from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the think tank that usually reserves its firepower for more immediate threats.

What motivated these fervent criticisms of a bill that would require large employers to repay the government when their employees needed public benefits such as Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), housing assistance, or even subsidized school lunches? Was it residual hostility to Sanders, a blast from the intra-party enmity of the recent past? Was it “concern trolling,” as liberal journalist David Sirota called it? Was it another case of older liberals resisting a policy that our 1990s-trained brains aren’t prepared for? Was it unfair to come down so sharply on what’s simply a poorly designed first draft of a policy?

As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias proposed, perhaps it’s good for Democrats to push some rough, flawed ideas that change the conversation, just as conservatives did with the idea that cutting taxes, boosting military spending, and balancing the federal budget were compatible. This allowed them to move on the first two of those ideas when they held power and use the third to excoriate Democrats when they didn’t.

Stop BEZOS is what’s sometimes called a “message bill.” The point isn’t to become law but to reinforce the idea that some of the best-known employers in the country, such as Amazon and Walmart, don’t pay their workers enough, and many of these workers can’t live on income and benefits from work alone. But it’s as a message bill that Stop BEZOS is most fundamentally flawed. The message that it sends is to casually dismiss essential programs that have boosted incomes and life chances for lower- and middle-income people.

The CBPP analysis focused on the ways in which it’s an impractical proposal, in part because the federal government doesn’t have data on who benefits from the programs identified, many of which are administered at the state or local level. More importantly, the key variable that determines eligibility for these programs is usually not the wages of a single member of a family — it’s the size of the household.

A single parent with three children will be eligible for much more assistance than, say, a single worker without kids, or a couple with two employed parents and one child, even if each adult earns the same amount. If an employee or someone in the household has a disability, they’re also more likely to be eligible for benefits. Employers don’t have any control over those non-work factors. If they want to minimize their tax payments under the act, they would have to either pay employees with larger families or disabilities more than others doing the same job, or avoid hiring people with children.

Yes, in theory, they could pay everyone enough that none would be eligible for benefits, but that’s not realistic. In Sanders’s state, for example, children are eligible for Medicaid in households with incomes up to 312 percent of the federal poverty line. For a family of three with one full-time worker, that’s the equivalent of a $31-an-hour wage, more than double the minimum wage proposed by the “Fight for 15” movement. In California, where 12 million people are covered by Medicaid, the cutoff would be about $26 an hour for a family of three.

But the message the bill sends is not just that big companies (and small ones, too) owe more to their workers. It’s also saying there’s something wrong with using these programs that support workers, in exactly the ways that they’re intended to work.

That’s not just disparaging government. It overlooks a quiet revolution in US social policy over four decades: Working people, even those earning above the median income in some states, can be eligible for benefits. In the scope of American political history, that’s fairly new and a remarkable achievement. It was achieved not with a high-profile bill signing, but through incremental progress over several decades.

Back in the early 1980s, most benefits other than Social Security and unemployment insurance were exclusively for the very destitute. Medicaid eligibility was tied to eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (as welfare was called before 1996), and in most states, that meant only families well below the poverty line.

Beginning in the 1980s, Democratic legislators led by California Rep. Henry Waxman decoupled Medicaid from AFDC. They linked it instead to family income, starting at 100 percent of the poverty line, and then slowly ratcheted it upward — in some cases permitting states to cover more kids and parents, and in other cases requiring it. The generous programs in states like Vermont and California stem from that long incremental expansion, with the Affordable Care Act as the most recent big step toward broader coverage.

At the same time, the US was building other supports for working families, often with bipartisan support. The Earned Income Tax Credit was created in 1975 and expanded six times since, often with enthusiastic support from Republicans, who argued that it was preferable to an increase in the minimum wage. The child tax credit was created in the 1990s and expanded since. Funding for child care, including the Child Care and Development Block Grant, has increased steadily, including in the budget agreement earlier this year.

All of this has led to a huge shift in the US social contract, from one in which supports are based on poverty — often limited to deep poverty — to one in which programs are based on need and children. (Childless adults without disabilities get very little under either the older or newer approach.) Under the old model, poor adults who went to work would immediately lose whatever benefits they had, while often incurring new costs such as child care.

As paltry as AFDC and other benefits were, and although even minimum-wage work brought much more income into the family, the cost of moving off programs was high (usually losing health coverage as well as income). This created a trap that was identified by researchers on both the left (David Ellwood, whose book Poor Support influenced Bill Clinton) and the right (Charles Murray, in Losing Ground).

One response to that situation, from the right, was to treat benefits as too high or to put up barriers such as work requirements and drug tests, to filter out the “undeserving poor.” The better response, though, was to extend program benefits further up the income ladder, to include more families with at least one full-time worker. The cost of a transition to work, then, would not be a steep cliff in benefits, but a slow ramping down while income from labor increased.

This work-based social contract lowered the barrier for individuals to enter or reenter the labor market. It also reduced the cost of employing them, since the government was, in effect, boosting their wage through the EITC and providing benefits such as health care that the employer would have to pay for otherwise. These tax and transfer payments have also demonstrably boosted the incomes of families whose market income — wages, salary, and tips alone — have stagnated.

But there was a trade-off in shifting those costs to government: In some ways, it let employers off the hook, freeing them from the obligation to pay more and provide benefits. At times, there were direct choices between the two approaches: employer obligation or public subsidy. Whenever pressure for a minimum-wage increase built up for too long to ignore, conservatives suddenly became advocates for the EITC as a better way to achieve the same goal. (That’s when conservative think tanks dust off misleading studies showing that the benefits of the minimum wage often go to teenagers who aren’t their families’ prime earners.)

The progressive approach over these decades has been to strike a balance between expanding programs and forcing employers to recognize their obligations to employees — approaches sometimes differentiated by the terms “redistribution” and “predistribution.” Even the Affordable Care Act reflected that attempted balance, mandating that employers with more than 50 workers provide coverage, coupled with the subsidies through both the exchanges and Medicaid expansion.

The time may be ripe for a reexamination of the balance between the responsibility of employers and the public. Beyond raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and requiring employers to provide paid family leave, asking them to assume more health care and other costs for all employees is likely to create a high barrier for employment. And if small and medium-sized employers are exempt (the Sanders bill threshold is 500 employees), a majority of workers won’t be helped anyway. In a system that put most of the burden on employers, we’d need a much more expansive social safety net for those not working: perhaps a universal basic income or a public-sector job guarantee, which would also include publicly funded benefits.

Alternatively, we might switch much of the responsibility besides wages to a public system, through policies that decouple health care from employment (of which Medicare-for-all would be one of several options), or create a new social insurance program for child care. Such an approach would have the advantage that it could be financed in part by taxing the very wealthy who hold capital, rather than directly by employers.

Fresh thinking within the Democratic Party should and will include an overdue debate about the balance of obligations in the social contract. But it should begin by recognizing ways in which progress has been made, through a long process of building programs that support families and children as they move up the economic ladder, and not just the very poor. Sanders and Khanna, with all the best intentions, are suggesting that they would go back to a system in which only the near-destitute were deemed deserving of public support. That’s why their bill generated such a negative reaction.