This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
In its more than two centuries of existence, the Democratic Party has, from time to time, demonstrated that it knows how to do politics. This may be one of those moments.
As historian Michael Kazin has demonstrated in his party history, What It Took to Win, Democratic successes have mainly resulted from advocacy for the economic interests of the working and middle classes, and against opponents who champion the interests of the rich. When Democrats fail, it’s often because they’re reluctant, or simply opposed, to advocate against the domination of big money, which also weakens their standing as working-class champions.
The most politically successful Democrat in history is surely Franklin Roosevelt, who led the Democrats to an unequaled victory in 1936. Since taking office in 1933, Roosevelt had put millions of unemployed Americans to work on public works projects and signed into law both Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act, which created workers’ right to collective bargaining.
Those achievements spawned a furious counterreaction from some of the nation’s wealthiest, most particularly the du Pont family, who held controlling interest in the nation’s largest corporation, General Motors. The du Ponts and their allies created the American Liberty League, drawing into their ranks some business leaders who’d figured prominently in the pre-Roosevelt, largely laissez-faire Democratic Party, and mounting an anti–New Deal propaganda barrage that dwarfed in magnitude and intensity anything that the official Republican Party put on display.
Roosevelt clearly understood that the Liberty Leaguers were a perfect foil. Business leaders in general were at an all-time nadir in public esteem, with Wall Street’s unregulated speculation having caused the 1929 crash, with corporate chiefs’ massive layoffs having caused record unemployment, and with the Liberty League having attacked the administration’s most popular programs. In a speech accepting his nomination at the Democrats’ 1936 convention, Roosevelt went after their attacks on democracy. “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” he said. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
In his final pre-election speech that year, to a thunderous crowd in Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt doubled down. “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” he told those in the arena and listeners to the national radio broadcast. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred! I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it, the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.”
A number of media commentators responded that Roosevelt had gone too far and that his remarks would endanger his re-election. Some Democrats implored FDR to walk them back. He did nothing of the sort. And three days later, Americans gave Roosevelt and the Democrats the greatest electoral majority that any political party has ever won. The president took more than 60 percent of the popular vote even as total voter turnout soared, carrying every state but Maine and Vermont; the Democrats’ supermajority in the House rose to 334 (out of 435) and 75 (out of 96) in the Senate.
The triumphs of the New Deal order, while partial, were long-lived. Social Security and its Great Society complement, Medicare, greatly reduced pervasive poverty among the elderly; widespread unionization created a more economically stable working class than ever before; progressive taxation and financial regulation thwarted the emergence of a new generation of oligarchs. By the end of the 1970s, however, the era of broadly shared prosperity began to unravel. Taxes became decidedly less progressive, corporations’ war on unions went unchecked, and finance recaptured the control of corporate behavior that it had previously enjoyed.
WHEN THE NEW DEAL ORDER still was in place, Democrats had understandably turned their attention to those who’d been excluded from its benefits and rights, chiefly Black Americans but also other racial minorities and women. The kind of economic inequality that had defined pre–New Deal America had substantially abated. The tax structure had stood athwart the creation of the kind of billionaires and robber barons who’d loomed over the nation in the early 20th century. But for the occasional oilman, it’s hard to find many billionaires during the high-tax, high-unionization years of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.
It’s taken an unconscionably long time, however, for the Democrats to truly reckon with the post-1980 changes to the American economy. Part of their failure was intellectual, an inability to see what was actually happening to their country. More precisely, most refused to look at the evidence of that change: The Economic Policy Institute’s famous chart of the growing gap, first emerging in the late 1970s, between increases in productivity and in median wages was published in 1994, but had little to no effect on the economic policies of either the Clinton or Obama presidencies.
Abetting this malpractice was the financial support those presidents and many other mainstream Democrats received from Wall Street and Silicon Valley interests. The Clinton administration enacted trade deals and financial deregulation promoted chiefly by banks and financialized corporations; Obama injected capital into banks but failed to save millions of homeowners in the wake of the 2008 crash, and declined to prosecute any of the miscreant bankers responsible for that crash.
Noting the steeply rising economic inequality in the 1990s while covering the recomposition of California’s workforce for the L.A. Weekly, I referenced FDR’s words while writing of Clinton: “Is there anyone whose hatred he welcomes?” But by that metric in particular, Clinton and Obama were clearly reflective of the party’s mainstream: unwilling and unable to stay some of the more predatory practices of American capitalism, and even more unwilling and unable to identify and attack particular predators.
At long last, this has begun to turn around. Just as the New Deal reforms were partially derived from more aggressive Socialist Party platforms of the preceding two decades, so the Democrats’ current attacks on oligarchy began on the party’s left fringe with democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, and were then amplified by fellow socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, as well as progressive Elizabeth Warren.
This April, such perspectives finally assumed fuller form. Within a few days of each other, both the Working Families Party (WFP), which functions as a social democratic group within the Democratic Party, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) unveiled progressive populist agendas for the upcoming midterm elections. The agendas are poll-tested; Data for Progress’s poll of the 11 proposals on the CPC’s list shows majority support even among Republicans for all 11.
Using the affordability crisis as a jumping-off point, the recommended policies not only call for innovations in economic policy but also explicitly target the current crop of economic royalists responsible for the mess. As CPC chair Greg Casar (D-TX) told my colleague David Dayen, “Trump villainized immigrants, Trump villainized the LGBT community. If Democrats want to fight back against that scapegoating, we need to take on the real villains taking your money.”
Indeed, each of the CPC proposals comes complete with two sets of villains: corporations that drain consumers, and the Republicans from Trump on down who protect them. One proposal calls for the public manufacture and sale of drugs like insulin, naloxone (which arrests the effects of opioid overdoses), and asthma-preventing inhalers at greatly reduced prices. Other proposals would impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies, eliminate Big Ag’s patent power over seeds (enabling farmers to simply replant seeds on their own), ban “surveillance pricing” (the ability of retailers to target prices to individuals based on their online personal data), and enable federal regulators to have expanded power to prevent utilities’ exploitation of consumers due to their monopoly status.
With or without the CPC’s version of a Contract with America, many Democratic candidates are already highlighting these kinds of economic issues, from Graham Platner in Maine to James Talarico in Texas. One key difference between the CPC agenda and the WFP’s is that the latter is specific about the tax increases the wealthy would have to pay to finance some of the proposals common to both groups’ lists. Obviously, to finance such proposals as providing $20,000 for down payments for first-time homebuyers, tax increases on the rich—such as what Mamdani has proposed in New York City—would be required.
FORTUNATELY FOR DEMOCRATS, the very rich have been hard at work convincing the public to hate their guts. Where Steve Jobs was once hailed as an innovator providing smartphones to the world, with a personal profile that tended more toward asceticism than conspicuous consumption, the current crop of Silicon Valley billionaires are not only ostentatious in their spending but overtly hostile to employee rights, consumer interests, democratic forms of government, racial egalitarianism, and, at least in the case of Elon Musk, normal life. Through their indifference to the effects of social media on children (and the rest of us), and their huge investments in AI and the data centers required to power it, they’ve become the promoters of the most widely feared 21st-century phenomena. Not since John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Henry Clay Frick have we had such a crop of oligarchs. That the Musks and the Bezoses, the Zuckerbergs and the Brins, the Thiels and the Andreessens have turned themselves into the financial base of Trumpism—both the man and his madness—has likely created a reciprocal downward pull on the approval rating of both Trump and themselves.
Democrats should be climbing over each other to welcome their hatred.
There are still limits, unfortunately, to most Democrats’ willingness to seriously take on the very rich. The governors of the two largest blue states—California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Kathy Hochul—oppose wealth taxes. As I write this, only one of the six main Democrats running to succeed Newsom supports the one-time wealth tax placed on the November ballot in California to prevent a collapse in state services. That Democrat is Tom Steyer, who, as a billionaire himself, likely gains from the perception that he’s willing to pay higher taxes, just as Roosevelt gained from the perception that he was a traitor to his class.
Absent such taxes, even the most ambitious Democratic proposals ultimately come up short. The fundamental reason why we have an affordability crisis is the upward redistribution of income and wealth during the past 50 years. As I noted in my article in the Prospect’s special issue on affordability last year, if the median American worker commanded the same share of the national income as in 1975, that worker would have made roughly $28,000 more in 2023. (Using mathematical tools a gazillion times more sophisticated than mine, the Economic Policy Institute has since calculated that said worker would have made roughly $30,000 more.)
Undoing a change of that magnitude, nearly 50 years in the making, will require a fundamental assault on the inequality now hardwired into American capitalism. The class war was not lost in a day, nor will it be won again quickly, or through half measures. It requires movements and elected officials who think and act as class warriors, and who welcome the hatred of the economic royalists among us.
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
