Progressives should adopt taking stakes in companies that align with progressive values like clean energy and strategic minerals. Under the Trump Administration shares in the company Critical Metals surged over 60 percent after word spread that the U.S. government might take an equity stake in the company’s Greenland rare-earths deposit. The Trump Administration has created a permission structure for state‐backed industrial policy advancing public ends via market mechanisms. However, his moves are not strategic, incompetent, and more for personal grift than for the benefit of the American people.
We are in end-stage capitalism and conventional free-markets are failing. Corporate consolidation, stagnant wages, and ecological collapse have all exposed how laissez-faire capitalism leaves society at the mercy of profit-seeking and short-termism. Democrats have spent too long trying to patch the system rather than reshape it. They argue about regulation, redistribution and tax codes but this only fiddles with the system at the margins and is easily overturned. If the party wants to deliver climate justice, worker uplift, and technological sovereignty, it must pivot to ownership, not just oversight.
The Trump administration is too incompetent to advance this agenda. Trump has shown time and again that governance takes a backseat to his ambition. Democrats could drive a public-commercial coalition in clean-energy, critical-mineral and strategic-industry sectors, aligning corporate innovation with democratic goals.
Embracing government stakes does not mean abandoning innovation but channeling it. A public equity stake means real leverage: governments can demand green processes, worker protections, democratic oversight, and reinvestment in communities. Conservatives are unlikely to build such partnerships with clarity or long-term vision; it will stumble, politicize, privatize, and leak advantage to the connected.
Democrats cannot cede the future to a Republican style of corporatism. The time has come for the party to act boldly: pick winners aligned with our values, invest public capital, and build an economy that reflects our climate, equity and innovation commitments.
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