Politics, for all its stagecraft and saccharine homilies, is not about "service" or "community" or any of the other treacly euphemisms politicians recite like Gregorian chants. Politics, as Christopher Hitchens might have acidly reminded us, is about power.
The taking of it.
The wielding of it.
The keeping of it.
Everything else is embroidery.
And the surest road to political power today is not identity pandering, culture-war theatrics, or the solutions, untethered from economic reality, of much "climate action". It is energy — affordable, abundant, reliable energy. Energy is not a plank in the policy platform. It is the platform.
It is the oxygen of prosperity, the lubricant of peace, the arbiter of survival.
Those who grasp this axiom will inherit the Earth. Those who don't will be reduced to muttering slogans over the ashes of their credibility.
The Revolt of the Overcharged
Consider the improbable rise of two entirely different figures: Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani. Ideological opposites, united by a single brutal insight: voters are furious about affordability.
Trump put it plainly: "I won on groceries." Bacon, eggs, apples — if the price doubles while wages stagnate, you can spend billions on messaging and still lose Ohio. Mamdani, from the opposite end of the spectrum, beat the same drum: "New York is too expensive. I’ll lower costs." Did his proposed remedies make sense? About as much as medieval bloodletting. But he read the room correctly — voters were howling for relief.
This is the lesson. It isn’t ideology. It isn’t clever branding. It’s not even competence. It’s the perception — however implausible — that you can make life less ruinously expensive.
The Energy Elephant in the Room
Which brings us to the elephant crushing the furniture: energy. The cost of keeping the lights on, the servers humming, the food refrigerated, the wheels turning. Cheap, reliable energy is the hinge upon which affordability swings.
The American public knows it intuitively. As Roger Pielke Jr. and Ruy Teixeira have observed, voters broadly support an “all‑of‑the‑above” energy policy. They want fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear — whatever delivers reliability and keeps costs in check. What they do not support is a climate approach that drifts into overzealous or economically detached prescriptions, especially when those prescriptions ask ordinary people to bear steep costs for minimal environmental gain. Most Americans believe climate change is real and worth addressing — but they also believe that solutions must be scientifically grounded, economically sane, and compatible with rising living standards. People will not choose policies that make their lives materially harder when better‑balanced options exist.
Meanwhile, our economic adversary, China, has understood this with the cold precision of an engineer. Beijing has decided that energy abundance beats energy sermons. The result? A kilowatt-hour costs under ten cents there. In the U.S., depending on where you live, you’ll likely pay anywhere from 30% to 250% more for the same electricity — the financial equivalent of shooting ourselves in both feet, then politely handing China the starting pistol.
Free Markets, Not Fairy Tales
Here’s the part politicians can’t bring themselves to say aloud: free markets work. China — a nominally communist state — is quietly embracing market pricing to generate cheap, stable energy, while America — land of the supposedly free — ties itself into regulatory knots and engages in performative subsidy theater.
Even our supposed tech vanguard is sounding the alarm. Artificial intelligence, for all its promise, is a glutton for electricity. Data centers don’t run on slogans. The sudden, unignorable demand for baseload power has done what decades of climate reports could not: forced lawmakers to confront reality.
The physics don’t care about your narrative. You either provide abundant energy, or you fall behind.
The Path Forward
If you want power — real, electoral, enduring power — promise voters affordable, abundant, reliable energy. And mean it.
Not with incoherent subsidies. Not with punitive regulations. Not with magical thinking that wind and solar will replace baseload overnight. But with sober policies rooted in engineering reality and price transparency.
Give the American voter energy at less than ten cents per kilowatt-hour, and they will give you Congress, the White House, and the keys to the kingdom. Fail, and watch as Beijing writes the terms of the 21st century.
Energy is the root. Prosperity the trunk. Jobs, security, peace, and dignity — the branches. Everything else is foliage.
In politics, as in physics, power is everything.
Ralph Benko serves as co-founder and general counsel to Washington Power and Light, a DC-based policy institute. He is the co-founder and general counsel for F1R3FLY Industries and has worked in or with three White Houses, two executive branch agencies, and the Congress, as well as many political and policy institutes.
Jeff Garzik is the founder of Washington Power and Light and a foundational pioneer of digital infrastructure. He was one of Satoshi Nakamoto’s four core Bitcoin developers, wrote much of the Linux/Android code powering billions of devices globally at Red Hat, and is now the founder/CEO of HEMI.xyz
