It’s taken about 45 years for a politically potent supermajority of Americans to come together and realize that they’re on the losing end of a class war, but better late than never. Besides, they’re not the ones responsible for the snaillike pace of this awakening: Their political institutions and the mainstream media didn’t even begin to confirm this massive shift in income and power until relatively recently, and the only institutions to consistently point this out—unions—were all but wiped off the map of most of the United States during this time as well.

More from Harold Meyerson

Today, the signs of this awakening are everywhere, even as Democrats’ response remains insufficient. Yesterday (Monday), both The New York Times and The Washington Post ran front-page stories noting that the share of the nation’s income going to workers has reached the lowest point in many years, while the share going to the richest 1 percent, 0.1 percent, and 0.00001 percent has been soaring. The Times piece cited the findings of UC Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez (whose work I reported on for the Prospect five years ago), who documented that at the height of the late-19th-century Gilded Age, the 20 wealthiest Americans had a combined net worth that came to 3 percent of the nation’s yearly economic output (its GDP), while today the 20 wealthiest Americans now are worth 12 percent of our GDP. The Post piece reported that total worker compensation during the first three months of this year constituted the lowest share of the American economy since the government started these measurements in 1947.

The 20 wealthiest Americans now are worth 12 percent of our GDP.

Both pieces concluded that Americans’ daily struggles with unaffordability, coupled with their understanding of where, broadly speaking, their income, wealth, and money had gone (upwards), were likely to be reflected in their voting this November. Further confirmation of this now massive awareness of our class war (subcategory: being-on-the-losing-end-of) was provided today by the most recent YouGov poll, in which respondents were asked to assess the economic power, cultural power, and political power of 40 different subgroups of Americans. By a wide margin, the group that led in all three categories was “billionaires,” with “CEOs” coming in second in economic and political power, and fourth in cultural power. “Workers” finished 29th in economic power (at a level that came to about one-eighth of the billionaires) and lower than that in political and cultural power. Conversely, when asked which groups’ gain in power would help the country, “workers” won in a walk, coming in first with 64 percent saying that power to the proles would create a better America, with “small-business owners” (at 54 percent) and “women” (51 percent) rounding out the top three.

You might think from all of this that Democrats view this as an opportunity to stamp themselves as progressive populists devoted to ending the massive upward redistribution of the nation’s wealth to the wealthy and to reversing the flow back to workers. If you did indeed think that, you’d be half right.

Two distinct groups of Democrats plainly disagree. The first are the third-way types who are stuck in the deregulatory muck of the Clinton ’90s. The second are those pols who came to office embedded in the world of great wealth, often Silicon Valley wealth, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose very public opposition to the wealth tax initiative on the state’s November ballot has plainly hurt the measure, and San Francisco Mayor Dan Lurie, who led the opposition to an expansion of the city’s higher corporate tax rate on companies whose CEOs make 100 times or more what their median employees make—a San Francisco ballot measure that was narrowly defeated in this month’s primary.

What’s particularly galling, however, are those Democratic pols and institutions that agree that the demands of both justice and smart politics require diminishing the economic and political clout that the very wealthy wield, yet decline to back, in a way that matters, the very policies and measures that would begin the diminishing. On the same day that the overpaid CEO measure was defeated in San Francisco, with 47 percent of the vote, a ballot measure in the city of San Diego that would have put a tax surcharge on the second homes of wealthy residents that are vacant for more than half the year (similar to the pied-à-terre tax that the New York legislature enacted, at Mayor Mamdani’s urging) was also defeated with the same 47 percent level of support.

Today On TAP

This story first appeared in our free Today On TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.

A look at each measure’s list of endorsers shows that virtually every union and liberal organization in those two cities backed their respective measures. San Francisco’s CEO tax backers ranged from Bernie Sanders to Nancy Pelosi. What both campaigns lacked, however, was money and precinct walkers. A veteran San Diego political consultant told me that the city’s DSA local turned out a good number of volunteer door-knockers, but nobody else showed up. A similar lack of resources, both monetary and human, doomed the San Francisco measure, too. Both cities, of course, are heavily Democratic. (In San Diego County, which encompasses areas not as liberal as the city, the Democratic gubernatorial candidates on June’s ballot outpolled the Republicans by a 62 percent to 38 percent margin, while voters in San Francisco gave billionaire anti-billionaire Tom Steyer 39 percent of their vote—not just well more than any other candidate but also his highest level of support in any of the state’s counties.) Despite these proclivities, the measures died more from obscurity than from opposition.

My fear is that kindred lip service and misgivings may doom California’s one-time wealth tax on the state’s 200 or so billionaires come November. The misgivings are understandable; the wealth tax is a politically potent and economically mandatory measure that has been poorly executed. The initiative was conceived by a single SEIU local of hospital workers, and it directs almost all the revenue it could generate to the hospitals where its members work—contravening the state law that directs a substantial share of new revenues to K-12 public schools. That understandably upset the state’s two teachers unions, which also fear that the avalanche of billionaire money against the proposal will drag down a different ballot measure (which had secured ballot status before the wealth tax proposal was even conceived) that will renew a progressive tax that will help fund the state’s schools. Since they can’t see their way to backing the state’s wealth tax measure, the least they could do is prod their national organizations (the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association) to back a national billionaire wealth tax in the next session of Congress. (And if such a law drives billionaires out of the country, well, those billionaires will lose the right to contribute to political campaigns.)

Problem is, Democrats need to identify themselves right now as the party that seeks to redistribute back to the American people the wealth and power that the very rich have taken from them. If Democrats are to have a future as a viable party, perhaps even a party that can gain enough support to break the stalemate in American governance, that’s the one call they most need to answer. Backing wealth taxes and overpaid CEO taxes should become a union and a party priority. Ponying up serious funding for the Montana ballot measure (whose campaign announced today that it has qualified for the November ballot) that will change the state’s corporate charter law to deny corporations doing business in the state the power to contribute to political campaigns would be a good place to start. Now that most Americans fully understand and are mightily pissed that they’ve been on the losing end of a class war, the worst thing the Democrats can be is AWOL.

Before you go.

I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we’re able to publish stories like this — free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall — is because readers like you step up to support our work. 

The Prospect doesn't answer to advertisers or billionaire owners. We answer to you and to our commitment to pursuing the truth, wherever that leads us. 

Independent, reader-supported journalism is critical at a time when the free press is under assault. 

If you believe this kind of reporting should exist and remain free to read, we hope you'll consider chipping in. Every contribution, however modest, makes a real difference.

David Dayen
Executive Editor