This Is the Issue That Must Unite Democrats—and It Isn’t Donald Trump

It’s a problem that’s far more enduring than Trump. And any Democrat who isn’t serious about reining it in deserves zero 2028 consideration.

The self-pity of some people knows no bounds. Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, said this week that the phrase “tax the rich” is hate speech on a par with other well-known slurs. “I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’—quote, tax the rich—when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Mr. Roth said on an earnings call Tuesday, as reported by The New York Times.

Roth was peeved because Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed a video celebrating Governor Kathy Hochul’s embrace of a tax on pricey second homes in New York in front of a building (developed by Vornado) containing a penthouse owned by hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin. Griffin bought it in 2019 for (sit down) $238 million, which made it at the time by far the most expensive single residence ever bought in New York.

I could maybe see an argument against Mamdani specifically singling out one person in that video. Griffin himself was quick to point out that Hizzoner “seems to have forgotten that the C.E.O. of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York,” referring to Brian Thompson of United Healthcare. There are a lot of wackos out there. Although if God forbid someone shot Griffin tomorrow, it would not be Mamdani’s “fault,” any more than right-wing anti-government rhetoric was responsible for Justin Mohn shooting and then decapitating his federal-worker father in 2024. Only killers pull triggers. You’d think the people who preach at us constantly about personal responsibility would agree with that.

But let’s get back to Roth. What a crybaby. What he refuses to understand, or at least to admit, is: Nobody hates him personally. (a) Nobody cares enough about him to hate him personally, and (b) odds are he’s a relatively nice man and a good father and all that. This has nothing to do with hatred of individuals.

What millions of Americans hate is the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the United States. Back in March, a New York Times analysis of donations in the 2024 election campaign found that just 300 billionaires and their families made a staggering 19 percent of all contributions to federal campaigns. That was more than $3 billion all told, either directly or through political action committees. The money helped elect Donald Trump, of course, but also new senators like Montana’s Tim Sheehy, who raked in $47 million from billionaires in his win over Democrat Jon Tester.

This is sick. This is not democracy. These people have no sense of limits, no sense that democracy requires that restrictions be placed on their power. Or maybe they do recognize that fact and have contempt for it, in which case it makes them opponents of democracy.

“I have the right to spend whatever I choose to promote what I believe,” David Koch once wrote, criticizing the landmark 1974 law that sought to impose caps on campaign expenditures. Fuck you. No you don’t. I mean, you do, right now, under the current laws of the United States, where the Supreme Court has held that money is speech and as such needs to be as “free” as speech is. You may think I’m referring to the infamous Citizens United decision of 2010, but actually the court initially made this holding in 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo, which came long before campaigns were so awash in lucre. That year, the average Senate race cost $595,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $3.8 million now. In 2020, Senate races averaged around $30 million.

Koch is wrong. Money isn’t speech. Money is money. The difference is easily provable with the observation that all of us can speak equally but we cannot spend equally. If Koch and I are standing in the town square advocating for opposing candidates for mayor, I can speak on behalf of my candidate as endlessly as he can. That’s speech. But his ability to hand his preferred candidate $100 bills is rather more infinite than mine. That isn’t speech. It’s money. It corrupts the process. Someday, this will be obvious to a different Supreme Court.

You’d think these people would be satisfied with the way things are, so heavily stacked in their favor. But they aren’t. They want more. They always want more. This year, billionaires who want to keep AI free of any restrictions or regulations are pouring eye-popping sums into the midterms: Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC founded by venture capitalist Marc Andreesson and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, has amassed a war chest of $140 million. Their goal is to defeat candidates like Alex Bores in New York, who vows to lead a charge to regulate AI if he gets to Congress, and to promote candidates who’ll lie back and let them do what they want.

Why are they so hot on AI? Well, it’s pretty simple, isn’t? More AI means fewer human employees, with their oh-so-burdensome salaries and benefits and occasional illnesses. Claude Anthropic can’t agitate for a union. More AI means they get richer. The millions who lose work? Well, that’s progress. If they lose work, it’s what they deserved for not keeping up with the times. (Fancifully, some AI evangelists claim to support universal basic income as a solution to the mass immiseration their products will cause. But we know exactly which side they’ll be on if Congress ever takes up such a measure.)

These people have to be stopped. They need to be taxed at higher rates, of course. And their political power has to be curbed. In fact, that has to be a defining issue in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary race.

Every Democratic candidate needs to be asked: What will you do to rein in the political power of the billionaires? They may not be able to do as much as we’d like, given the Supreme Court, but how they talk about it—whether they’re angry or sanguine, whether they convey alarm or spew out a bunch of stupid happy talk about being able to work with everyone—will tell us a lot about their character and their worldview.

It’s kind of a “price of entry” issue. That is, the price of being taken seriously as a candidate, whatever their other positions, is that they recognize this state of affairs for the five-alarm fire it is. If something isn’t done about this, by 2030, those 300 billionaires will account for 40 percent of all federal campaign spending. Or 50. And what remains of this democracy will be dead.

By the way, the other “price of entry” issue? It’s that the candidates will use every ounce of political capital they have to kill the Senate filibuster if they win control of Washington in 2028. Not reform it. Kill it. The filibuster in any form means continued paralysis, dysfunction, and a certain drubbing in the 2030 midterms that will return control of one or both houses of Congress to the GOP. No filibuster means passing 10 or 15 or 20 bills that make people’s lives better and stop monopolies from being able to rip people off the way they can now. It has the potential to revolutionize politics. Any Democrat who doesn’t see this at this point can’t possibly be taken seriously.

Kvetch away, Steven Roth. But maybe in the meantime, pause and give a little thought to what is required for a healthy democracy to function. Reflect, perhaps, on the fact that this country experienced its greatest growth, its golden era, when a third of the workforce was unionized, when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent, and when corporations generally understood that they had a commitment not only to shareholders but to community stakeholders.

Finally, as you reflect with justifiable pride on your own success, devote at least a few moments to the elements of public infrastructure—the roads, the rails, the computer networks that were all initially developed by the government—that helped make you so rich. If you and your class don’t want to be hated, stop doing things people hate.

John Roberts Is Either Dumb or Racially Obtuse. And He’s Not Dumb.

After the Supreme Court struck down school integration, guess what happened in the schools? The same thing that’s about to happen with congressional districts.

If Chief Justice John Roberts has uttered two quotable sentences in his career that will likely appear high up in his New York Times obituary, they are these. The first comes from his 2005 confirmation hearing: “My job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” The line was meant to convey to senators and America that he would be a neutral arbiter of constitutional interpretation, sans ideological agenda. It was later picked up by the entire conservative legal movement and repeated by numerous other right-wing judicial nominees at their confirmation hearings.

It was a lie. He was there, as we have subsequently learned many times, to bat. And not to spray dinky little singles—to swing for the fences. You may recall Jeffrey Toobin’s stunning 2012 article in The New Yorker detailing how painstakingly the chief justice orchestrated the 2010 Citizens United decision to make sure that it went as far as possible in removing limits on the financing of campaigns. The John Roberts of that article was no umpire. He was Mark McGwire juiced up on steroids, trying to smash the ball out onto Clark Avenue.

The subsequent 16 years have shown us the consequences of that decision, which will go down in U.S. history as one of the most corrosive and reactionary holdings of all time—if not right up there with Plessy and Lochner, then awfully close. It has handed our democracy on a silver platter to men who have nothing but contempt for it (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.).

The other quote is one that I suspect many people will remember, although they may forget the context: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Ring a bell? He said it early in his tenure, when the Roberts court handed down one of its first major decisions, concerning public school integration efforts in Seattle and Louisville.

The court had already restricted forced integration efforts in a 1991 ruling. Then, in 2007, in two joined cases emanating from the above-named cities, the court went further: It ruled that even voluntary desegregation efforts were out the window. Roberts uttered his famous line while reading his 5–4 majority opinion from the bench.

I remember well the predictions in the decision’s wake. Liberals warned that the public schools would likely resegregate. Conservatives said, Oh pshaw, you delicate little flowers; we’re such a different country from 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Things will be just fine.

Well, guess what happened? In the 19 years since that ruling, the public schools have resegregated. Not to a mild degree. Not to a “concerning” degree. They have resegregated to a shocking degree.

In 2024, Axios published an article based on two recent academic studies and its own review of official data from 1988 to 2022. In the former year, about 7.4 percent of the nation’s schools were “intensely segregated,” meaning at least 90 percent white. By the latter year, that figure had vaulted to 19.8 percent. In addition, Axios’s Russell Contreras wrote at the time, “several states saw about a 20-percentage point or more increase in intensely segregated schools, from 1988 to 2021.”

Mind you, this happened while the racial demography of the United States went from 67 percent white to 58 percent white. In other words, you might have thought that in an increasingly diverse country, the schools would also become increasingly diverse. Instead, the opposite happened.

Now, fast-forward to this week’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on gerrymandering. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 6–3 majority, assures us that there’s nothing to worry about in the evisceration of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We’re a different country. We don’t need it anymore. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote.

The country has changed for the better in a number of ways, no doubt about that. But has it changed enough that laws to protect minority representation aren’t needed? We’re about to find out.

Consider the following statistics. Mississippi today has a Black population of 38 percent. One of its four congressional districts is majority-minority, for a representation rate of 25 percent. Black Mississippians are ergo underrepresented in Congress. In South Carolina, Blacks make up 25 percent of the population, and one of seven congressional districts was cut for Black representation. That’s 14 percent. So Blacks are underrepresented in that state, as well. And in Tennessee, Blacks are 17 percent of the population but hold zero seats in Congress (0 percent, obviously).

In some other states of the old Confederacy, Black representation is more on par. In Alabama, Blacks are 27 percent of the population and hold two of the state’s seven congressional seats (28 percent). In Louisiana, those population-representation figures are 33 percent and 33 percent (two out of six seats). In North Carolina, they are 21 percent and 21 percent (three out of 14 seats).

Hooray for those three states, I guess. But the question is this: What will those numbers be come 2029, or 2031? It’s hardly going out on a limb to guess that Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina will reduce or even possibly eliminate their majority-minority seats. They probably can’t quite get away with that right now in North Carolina, where there’s a Democratic governor. But Alabama and Louisiana, where the GOP controls the governor’s mansion and dominates both legislatures? Louisiana is already licking its chops: After this week’s SCOTUS ruling, its governor announced he was suspending the House primaries on May 16 so the legislature can redraw districts more favorable to the Republicans. It’s hard to believe they’d really have the gall to cut them down to zero. Then again, a lot of things have been happening lately in this country that once seemed hard to believe.

Speaking of which, I find it kind of hard to believe that Roberts, Alito, and other conservative justices this week did not think back to the aftermath of their fateful 2007 decision on school integration. Can they possibly be unaware that schools aggressively resegregated in the wake of that ruling? That seems impossible. And if I’m right, that leaves only one explanation for this week’s decision. They understand the potential consequences quite fully. They just don’t care. Mark McGwire has hit another one, and the bleak outcome, similar to the one liberals predicted in 2007, awaits us.

This article previously misstated the percentage of North Carolina congresspeople who are Black, the number its congressional seats, and which party controls the state Senate.

Let’s Hope America’s Dumbest War Doesn’t Become Its Most Tragic

Almost nine weeks in, let’s remind ourselves: Trump strengthened Iran and then came back and told us Iran was too strong!

As we barrel toward the ninth week of this two- or three-week war, virtually all of the reporting and most of the commentary is focused on the strategery of the moment: who really controls the Strait of Hormuz, when the ceasefire might actually end, what Donald Trump might do next. That’s all understandable. But it also means that this is a good time to take a step back and summarize exactly what Trump has done here, because if we look at it from 30,000 feet, we see exactly what so many of us knew was dangerous about putting this unstable and petty and frankly stupid man back in the Oval Office.

To put it in a phrase: He and he alone created the conditions that made war possible. He and he alone created the chaos that, he then told the American people and the world, made war necessary. Imagine the mayor of a town where there were acute ethnic or racial tensions taking office and inheriting a fragile but holding........

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