Extraction Doctrine

When my daughters were younger, they resembled electric cars that needed consistent recharging, usually by plugging into me — sitting on my lap, hanging on my arm, working to get all of my attention focused on their needs. Draining me of energy in order for them to refuel. It was worth it, yes, but left me depleted and drained, without energy to be thoughtful or considerate or make good choices in the way that you can’t when your bandwidth is too narrow to function properly. When you are too tired to be a good version of yourself.

This sort of extraction has its benefits, namely, enabling my kids to get what they needed. But it also has costs, like keeping me from adequately fulfilling other roles that I wanted and needed to do. Above all, though, it was my choice – no one forced me to have children. It’s a trade-off I made.

Contrast this autonomous and mutually beneficial system with our current mode of emotional subsistence living in America. Our institutions — government, corporate, philanthropic — have extracted everything out of us consumers, citizens and supporters. For many, this was not a choice we made, and the resulting bad behavior around us reflects how an extraction doctrine kills the social contract. Exhibit A: air travel!

Watching how citizen fliers and airline employees behave (drunken brawls, racist rants, failure to intervene in physical altercations - all cartoonishly selfish behavior) is to witness the full depletion of both for the benefit of the companies that own the planes. When you think you can’t go lower, give up more, be further demoralized, there is a another squeeze, an additional basic service you must pay for in order to sit on that plane and get where you need to go.

The staff at the service desks, the grim-faced flight attendants, the dead-eyed pilots, are barely hanging on, anticipating (rightly) all kinds of crazy and selfish behavior from the depleted hordes, and no matter how low it gets, there is always a new level of depravity. (See Insane LaGuardia Incident.)

It's the inevitable result of a ruling class that has systematically dismantled the shared cultural norms and expectations that once made civil society possible.

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That transformation didn't happen in a vacuum. It coincided with the broader financialization of American life, where every institution—from airlines to universities to intelligence agencies—became focused on extracting maximum value rather than serving their ostensible mission. The result is a society where basic social contracts have been shredded, leaving individual Americans to navigate increasingly hostile institutional environments with fewer and fewer guardrails.

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Any one who has tried, in vain, to obtain customer service for a broken appliance or an inaccurate invoice or an erroneously rejected health insurance claim recognizes this extraction doctrine in practice. You’re on your own. There’s no longer a social contract to rely on or to plug into for reinforcement or accountability.

The Trump administration works by a similarly extractive method. The Big Beautiful Bill concretizes and enshrines the goal of elites getting everything they can out of the remaining citizenry. It leaves everyone to fend for themselves, and if you are wealthy enough, you can thrive — for a time. (See, e.g., Elon Musk’s four months in government.)

Government officials and their cronies are, with impunity, extracting every dollar possible from their government-affiliated roles – whether in crypto or in the fossil fuel industry or by deploying a terrifying proportion of federal resources to build concentration camps rather than provide health care or food stamps or disaster relief. ICE literally, physically extracts people from their communities. This downgrading of humanity reflects the breakdown of a social system that puts individual interest above all else. Americans are depleted (even, at this point, some Trump voters).

Institutions (and the countries they exist in) don’t function well without the foundation of a social contract. There is no reason to trust other people, singly or as the face of the government or a corporation or an established institution. We are each, all of us, on our own. That is the feeling, more than any other, that governs our current national reality.

The diminishment of well-established NGO’s also reflects the breakdown in civil society norms. (See The End of the Age of NGO's.) What this Foreign Affairs analysis is missing, though, is the role that relentless fundraising has played in the demise.

Over the past twenty years, as the U.S.¹ economy became more extractive, the philanthropic fundraising model became more extractive, ever more dependent on the shrinking prospect of the ultrarich donor or the richly endowed, powerful foundation.² Rather than building a sustainable community of supporters, large NGO’s increasingly focused on the privileged few who could financially sustain the organization, such as the small circle of ultrawealthy donors who support social justice instead of seeking naming rights at private universities.

The complicated truth is that, as the social contract has worn away and people seem less and less likely to act simply for the greater good, NGO’s have needed to extract as much as possible from their shrinking donor base. In turn, these transactional relationships, based on an unequal power dynamic, ultimately made too many organizations beholden to donors in a way that became unsustainable and often unethical.

And now, as the U.S. government has jettisoned the idea that a greater social good has value, foundations and individual donors, the only means left to support those living on the margins of the social contract, have begun backing away, too. Foundations are pausing or delaying grants already approved, donors are concerned about their names being associated with organizations targeted by the government, and layoffs abound.

Extraction obliterates community. Cowardice is easier to activate because the relationship was purely transactional in the first place, and without the resources of a community, depletion and isolation reigns. To repeat: you’re on your own. And when you become so depleted, it’s hard to act. It’s hard to have empathy for others. And most importantly, it’s hard to fight for what is being taken away.

This helps explain the baffling lack of sustained, mass protest against the Trump regime. (See also Do Americans Need an Insurgency-In-Waiting?) There is, in fact

a model for a serious response. Disciplined, mass, nonviolent mobilizations can crack authoritarian systems. They brought down the British in India, Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines, Milošević in Serbia, apartheid in South Africa, the communist regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and, in the end, the Soviet Union itself. But the Democratic Party has never seriously tried to build such a movement, and shows no sign of grasping that it should.

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Here, now, we aren’t doing much to fight back. And watching, just witnessing, every new act of depravity and the correspondingly weak response, takes more out of us. (We could sure use a national, unifying leader, if anyone is interested.) After living through years of increasingly extractive enterprise, it is very tempting to give in to exhaustion and despair.

Instead, let’s go with a fantastical idea: that from this system breakdown, we will move beyond the extractive practices in our government, business and philanthropic relationships, allowing a new, stronger, more equitable social contract to emerge. Because there’s simply nothing left to extract in the current system.

Let’s take the decline of the social contract as a starting point rather than an end point. Instead of despairing, let’s believe that the past extractive means of living together have reached their endpoint. That we are not alone. That we can build systems to sustain us instead of deplete us and that we can do it without extracting every single bit from someone else.

1. I’m saying the U.S. here because such a large percentage of NGO funding comes from American donors whether they are living in the U.S. or outside of it.

2. Foundations employed their own extractive tactics, requiring NGO’s to fulfill onerous foundation-specific requests and goals to get even the most basic funding.