LDuring the 2024 elections, Elon Musk made a tempting and far-fetched offer: a sweepstakes offering $1 million a day to voters who pledged to sign his petition proclaiming their support for the First and Second Amendments. This operation raised questions about money in politics, but also about the use of what appeared to be a lottery to influence voters’ choices. Later, the political action committee admitted that he would select the “winners” in advance and not by chance. So it’s not a lottery, after all.

But it was a ploy well suited to our times, where elections are big business and the rules of the game are subject to much manipulation: misleading textshours-long lines to vote in some precincts and, of course, the mysterious Electoral College that determines how campaigns are run and whose votes are considered valuable. Musk’s so-called lottery made sense in America’s gambling-obsessed culture, where it’s not enough to see stock markets rise and fall during elections; instead dedicated prediction markets now allow speculators to bet on electoral results.

The widespread adoption of gambling, betting and lotteries is a regressive method of shoring up revenue for public goods in an era of austerity and tax cuts. Lotteries therefore reflect and increase inequality, while offering the promise of a huge windfall for individual winners. Indeed, the same political and economic conditions that gave rise to the popularity of lotteries, gambling and speculation also marked the beginning of a new political era, shaped by Donald Trump – who, after all, built a career in casinos. Uncertainty and insecurity have made us a nation of gamblers, betting that the wheel of fortune, rather than shared investment in our democracy, will bring prosperity.

Lotteries have a long history in the United States, dating back to colonial times. Then legislatures used lotteries to raise funds for colonial governments, poor relief, and universities, among other public goods. However, during the 1820s and 1830s, many states took steps to ban public and private lotteries after scandals regarding rigged and unfair games emerged. Reformers criticized lotteries were considered regressive and harmful to workers, and state constitutions soon banned them.

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After the Civil War, lotteries became popular again. Southern states saw it as an easy way to increase revenue without imposing new taxes. Soon, people were buying Louisiana State Lottery tickets by mail, not only within the state but across the country. Concerned about the corruption of public morals and, as President Benjamin Harrison Put simply, “theft from the poor,” Congress used its power to regulate interstate commerce to suppress state lotteries in the late 19th century.

But legal gambling reappeared in the 20th century. Nevada legalized casino gambling during the Great Depression. State lotteries followed, beginning with New Hampshirein 1964. The Granite State was one of some states without income or sales taxesand the lottery the profits were to be donated to the public school system. Registration cost $3 and people dreamed of winning the winnings, which were tied to a horse race. People could walk away with a price tag ranging from a few hundred dollars to $150,000.

People played enthusiastically, and other states quickly followed in the 1970s and 1980s, as cities and states faced increased financial hardship, thanks to inflation, low corporate taxes and to the veneration of the free market. Politicians were reluctant to raise direct taxes on citizens, for fear of losing re-election, and so lotteries became a popular method of fundraising.

Some states have turned to casino gaming as another source of revenue. In 1976, New Jersey voters chose to legalize gambling in Atlantic City, a move that attracted casino operators to the famous boardwalk in droves over the next decade. The town was once a popular destination for visitors hoping to enjoy the sun and sea on the shore, but the town fell on hard times. Casino games were seen as a good bet to revive tourism and increase revenue.

In 1984, Trump made his first foray into Atlantic City’s casino business, and he would expand his empire to three casinos over the next decade. He did well, but his the casinos didn’t do it— projects took on excessive debt or failed to turn a profit, and each suffered bankruptcies (Trump Taj Mahal in 1991, Trump Plaza and Trump Castle, 1992) before finally closing or changing hands. Neither do the townspeople; people’s homes had been emptied to make way for the casinos that were choking the seaside town. And yet tourists flocked to the growing opportunities to succeed. In 1986, Atlantic City welcomed 30 million visitors, making it the nation’s top tourist destination.

In the 1980s, the culture—like President Ronald Reagan’s administration—revered the acquisition of wealth, and the expansion of the financial sector was accompanied by Hollywood films like Wall Street And Working girl. Even when speculation and deregulation led to crashes like the savings and loan crisis and “Black Monday”, October 19, 1987the Americans have doubled their risk-taking and their markets. Instead of creating a system aimed at meeting everyone’s needs, the logic of markets and competition has triumphed and applied to all aspects of life.

This logic even extended to the immigration system. Since 1965, the system has largely limited the granting of visas to immigrants supported by a close family member or a sponsoring employer. Yet more and more people want to immigrate to the United States, attracted by better opportunities. In 1990, policymakers decided to create a way for them to obtain visas. Perhaps reflecting the glorification of risk-taking dominant in the culture, they made it a game of chance. The new Visa Diversity Lottery has given people from all over the world a chance to obtain an immigrant visa.

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Allocating valuable but scarce goods via lottery made sense to policymakers for practical reasons; it was less expensive to administer this method than to sift through and evaluate detailed applications, weighing the pros and cons of each aspiring candidate. But it was a fortuitous choice: making luck the program’s guiding principle also appealed to aspiring immigrants who believed that luck offered better opportunities than restriction-minded bureaucrats.

This lottery, like others, recognizes the randomness that shapes our lives, particularly in the 21st century, as countries like the United States have reduced social safety nets and embraced deregulation, allowing inequality to shape our society and making rights dependent on things largely beyond our control: where we were born, our gender, the state in which we reside. The resulting precariousness only aggravates our feeling of insecurity and mistrust.

Luck shapes our lives more than we are comfortable admitting, and the explosion of lotteries and gambling in our society in recent years recognizes and reinforces this fact. When hard work and dedication don’t reliably bring us stability, it makes sense to turn to lottery tickets and gambling in hopes of scoring a big win, even when the odds are against us.

Yet even though lotteries are popular and generate needed revenue, they are a poor substitute for solid investment in the public goods we all depend on, like schools, health care, infrastructure, and housing. Such insecurity and uncertainty can undermine our trust in each other, in government, and in democracy itself, which allows us to provide what we need to survive and thrive. After all, almost everyone who enters a lottery loses; the luck of the winner depends on the lack of luck of others.

Access to a good life seems more than ever to depend on luck. Today, by sending Trump back to the White House, the electorate appears to have turned the wheel of democracy itself, giving us hope that the luck we have had thus far in building our fragile democracy in our history will not be exhausted.

Carly Goodman is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University Camden, editor of Made by History at TIME, and author of Dreamland: the American immigration lottery in the age of restrictions (UNC Press, 2023).

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the TIME editors.