A staggering 80 percent of voters believe Americans are deeply divided on our nation’s most pressing issues, a 2024 Gallup poll shows. That level of division can make bipartisanship feel like a miracle, and lasting reform feel out of reach.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans are contending with rising costs in the housing market, in health care, child care, and at the grocery store. Families of every age are concluding that the economic system no longer works for people like them—that the American Dream itself is slipping out of reach.
As I wrote in a recent FREOPP newsletter, that frustration has helped move “democratic socialism” from the fringe to the mainstream. But it hasn’t stopped there. On the right, the old fusionist consensus around free markets and limited government is also fraying—replaced by tariffs and a growing comfort with using government power to pick winners and losers. Americans across the spectrum are losing patience with a system many believe has forgotten about them, and are increasingly willing to entertain solutions that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
In this environment, a familiar case for free markets won’t be enough. The free-market movement has earned some of this skepticism. Too often, defenders of economic freedom have sounded like defenders of the status quo: more interested in protecting incumbents and textbook abstractions than in confronting the very real ways families are struggling to afford a home, see a doctor, or build a career. When the loudest voices for markets go quiet on affordability and upward mobility, it’s no surprise that people look elsewhere for answers, even to ideas that run to the antithesis of American idealism.
That’s why the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity released its new mission statement. It’s more than a restatement of what FREOPP believes. It’s a rededication to expanding opportunity for the Americans who have been left behind by today’s economy and too often talked past by today’s politics.
FREOPP exists to empower Americans who need it most: those on the bottom half of the socioeconomic ladder. We believe the American Dream is a simple idea: that everyone, regardless of where they start, should have the opportunity to build a better life through hard work, agency, and a strong family and community. And we believe individual liberty, free enterprise, innovation, and pluralism remain the best tools for making that dream a reality.
That belief shapes three guiding principles behind our work:
- Expand freedom. Americans thrive when they have greater agency to make decisions for themselves and their families—and when government gets out of the way enough to let them.
- Lift up Americans on the bottom half of the socioeconomic ladder. An economy is only as strong as its ability to uplift those at the bottom. We focus our research and advocacy where the need for upward mobility is greatest.
- Pursue policy capable of earning broad support. We are independent and non-partisan by principle, committed to the people we’re trying to help rather than to any party. We build the evidence and the coalitions—left and right—needed to turn good ideas into law.
This is what sets FREOPP apart in a crowded and increasingly fractured landscape. We’re not interested in relitigating the same ideological battles or defending markets as an article of faith. We’re interested in the harder, more useful work of applying free-market principles to the specific problems keeping the American Dream out of reach: removing the zoning barriers that make housing unaffordable, advocating for market-oriented reforms that expand access to quality health care, tearing down the barriers to work that hold back job creation and wages, and putting children’s well-being at the center of child welfare policy.
The challenges facing our country are significant and we remain committed to solving them. We believe that there’s more agreement on these problems—and on their solutions—than today’s polarized discourse would suggest. Our job is to find that common ground, build on it, and turn it into lasting change.
We invite you to join us. Subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates, or make a contribution to support expanding opportunity for low-income Americans.