Bashing billionaires isn’t helping progressives win the working class

Whether they march to the MAGA drumbeat or roost on the progressive left, populists share a need for scapegoats. To inflame public passions and convert them into votes, each side vows to stop nefarious villains from destroying America.

President Trump has built his political career upon demagogic attacks on “criminal aliens” and “radical left lunatics” who “hate America.” Progressive politicians, clearly envious of Trump’s grip on working-class voters, believe they can pry it loose by focusing their ire on billionaires instead.  

That’s a long shot. Trump is the greatest of all time when it comes to mastering what author William Galston, in an illuminating new book, calls the “dark passions” shaping today’s politics — anger, fear and domination.

Trump’s populist elixir is more potent because it fuses working Americans’ cultural and economic grievances. While progressives fixate on the uneven distribution of wealth and power, non-college voters have more immediate concerns — the high cost of living — and worry that Democrats still lean too far left on social issues.  

The Working Class Project, which has extensively surveyed non-college workers’ attitudes, is skeptical that the left’s pitchfork populism will make it more receptive to Democrats. “They do believe that our political system is broken — and that it has been influenced by the rich and powerful to make things easier on those at the top while failing to deliver for those at the bottom.” 

However, “working class voters have repeatedly told us that they interpret Democrats’ attacks on wealth as punishing hard work and success, when they really want us to crack down on corruption and those who abuse the system to benefit themselves.” 

As a white man from Texas put it in one of the project’s focus groups, “Politicians use billionaires as scapegoats for their own failures of not fixing the tax code, not fixing issues with this country.”  

Nonetheless, progressives insist that Democrats can only reach non-college voters by amping up the volume on class warfare. 

“Billionaires and corporate interests have captured our political system, but our party’s anemic response to the rigging of our democracy and economy in favor of the ultra-wealthy has eroded our credibility with working people,” Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy (Conn.), Adam Schiff (Calif.), Tina Smith (Minn.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) charge in an open letter to their party. 

Warren also slams “big tent” Democrats who say the party must moderate its stances on both cultural and economic issues if it wants to build large and lasting majorities. “Either we politely nibble around the edges of change, or we throw ourselves into the fight,” she said. 

Her argument recycles a hackneyed lefty trope: If only Democrats had the guts to call loudly for stricter government regulation of business and a bigger welfare state, they’d galvanize a hidden majority of Americans eager to import European-style social democracy.  

It’s fair to ask whether Warren and company have learned anything from the failure of Bidenomics to sway working-class voters. After all, it was tailored to progressive specifications: trade gave way to industrial policy and Washington spent massively on new social programs, clean energy, infrastructure and distributional “equity.” 

Democrats promised big change — and delivered inflation.  

Now the midterm races are heating up, and some leading Democratic candidates have picked up the anti-billionaire war cry. “The only thing the media wants to ask me about are trans athletes,” says James Talirico, who recently won the Senate primary in Texas. “What I would say is that the only minority destroying this country is the billionaires.” 

In Maine, Senate primary candidate Graham Plattner likewise vilifies the “billionaire class” while further ingratiating himself with “social justice” activists by endorsing Medicare for all and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and accusing Israel of genocide. 

Meanwhile, progressive legislators are flooding the zone with half-baked proposals for hitting the affluent with wealth taxes to finance middle class tax cuts or public services. Now, everyone wants the rich to pay their fair share. My institute, for example, calls for replacing the estate tax with an inheritance tax on unearned income. 

But as my colleague Ben Ritz notes, wealth taxes are notoriously difficult to collect and wouldn’t raise nearly as much revenue as their proponents imagine. Even in uber-progressive California, Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes a union push for a wealth tax, saying it would accelerate the exodus of businesses from the state.  

I have no special love or antagonism for the nation’s 900 or so billionaires. Some are public spirited (Bill Gates); some are wildly successful but loathsome (I’m looking at you Elon).

But scapegoating billionaires is a mere political side-show. Performative populism may give activists a dopamine rush, but it evades Democrats’ core challenge: convincing voters they have a serious plan to spur economic growth and lift worker productivity.  

That’s the indispensable precondition for raising living standards and unlocking upward mobility for all working Americans.  

Will Marshall is founder and president of Progressive Policy Institute. 

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