In an optimistic interview, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi confidentially predicted that the Democrats will regain control of Congress.

This optimism is not entirely unfounded. President Donald Trump’s favorability is faltering, MAGA stalwarts have begun to show dissent, and special elections have provided Democrats with a ripple of victories. And still, the Democratic Party could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Just as the Republican Party continues to wrestle with its MAGA takeover, Democrats too remain engaged in a battle for the direction of the party. The latest fight is over the incorporation of a state wealth tax in California. Governor Gavin Newsom has vowed that “Wealth taxes are going nowhere.” Despite Europe retreating from failed wealth tax experiments, progressives in the states have remained steadfast, following national leaders like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Democrats must recognize what Trump initially grasped in 2016: Americans do not resent business success—they admire it, provided it is earned rather than extracted through ill-gotten advantages. The Marxist prediction that workers would develop class consciousness against the wealthy never materialized in the U.S. Even when over 25% of the U.S. working-age population was unemployed during the Great Depression, socialism did not fully take root. Historians Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Wolfe Marks explain that the U.S. has never nurtured a strong socialist movement due to factors like the absence of a feudal past and the cultural focus on individual opportunity shared by immigrants and longstanding citizens.

Instead, as Thorstein Veblen observed in his 1899 work The Theory of the Leisure Class, Americans aspire to join the successful, not tear them down. His terms of “emulation” and “conspicuous consumption” captured the striving spirit of Americans who celebrate the successful among us, as long as they did not cheat to win.

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Meanwhile, even the MAGA base has begun to question the extremes to which Trump has

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