A Happy 2025 By-Product: Revulsion at the Rich
Save for fans of white Christian autocracy and vindictive stupidity in high office, I doubt 2025 is going to be missed by most Americans. Polling reveals not only considerable revulsion at Donald Trump, his hatreds and his policies, but also substantial movement in opinion against Trump, due chiefly to his floundering economic policies, from such crucial swing constituencies as Latinos and the young.
But polling also shows a broad public turn toward progressive populism: the kind that seeks to reverse the upward redistribution of income and wealth to our billionaires and to make life’s necessities affordable for the majority of the American people.
Consider, for instance, last week’s Siena poll of New York state residents, which found two-thirds support—not just among New York City Democrats, but New York state Democrats, Republicans, and everyone else—for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to tax millionaires to provide funding for universal free child care. Or, as another example, a national YouGov poll from mid-November that showed supermajority backing from the American people for raising taxes on corporations and millionaires (69 percent support) and for providing free child care for children from six months to five years (66 percent support).
Indeed, 2025 is notable as the year when a large number of Americans became disenthralled with the very rich. For this, we owe a debt to Elon Musk, whose acts of self-aggrandizement rivaled Trump’s in their megalomaniacal scope and pettiness—but not only to Elon. The tech oligarchs who flocked to Trump’s inauguration have so dominated administration policy that some of the MAGA base (including Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene) have complained that Trump has abandoned his working-class supporters in favor of enriching the already filthy rich. In his efforts to block states from setting regulations on AI, for instance, Trump has clearly placed the interests of the seven tech behemoths that dominate the stock markets over those of parents— both left and right—concerned about AI’s potential to harm their children.
A wiser billionaire class might opt to be more discreet, but discretion doesn’t look to be an option for the likes of Musk or Venetian bridegroom Jeff Bezos. The self-dealing of the billionaires actually serving in the Trump administration—beginning, of course, with Trump himself—has also begun to permeate at least a lobe or two of public consciousness.
Such classic and justifiable populist resentment has even prompted a onetime Republican presidential nominee—Mitt Romney—to write a remarkable op-ed, which The New York Times posted last Friday. In it, Romney warned of the rage “that will surely grow as unemployed college graduates see tax advantaged multibillionaires sailing 300-foot yachts.” To forestall such horrors, he recommended implementing such remedies as actual estate taxes and eliminating the tax exemption for carried interest that private equity moguls enjoy. Romney’s recommendations fell well short of the Piketty-Zucman standard—say, implementing an actual comprehensive wealth tax—but coming from a pillar of what once had been the Republican establishment, it was a remarkable testament to the political unsustainability of Republican tax policy in the age of Musk and Bezos. Romney, after all, was the guy whose 2012 presidential candidacy was sunk in part by his being caught on video bitterly complaining about the 47 percent of “entitled” voters with incomes so low they don’t pay federal income taxes. Truly, times have changed.
So, can Democratic leaders at least catch up with Romney? If the Democrats retake the House and Senate next November, will they not only repeal the tax cuts for the rich that Trump had stuffed into his One Big Beautiful Bill (Trump, of course, would veto that repeal), but also go after the carried interest loophole that Chuck Schumer has preserved for decades lest some private equity gazillionaires cease their contributions to the DSCC? Will Kathy Hochul realize the breadth of public support throughout New York state for funding universal child care through a surtax on millionaires, as Zohran Mamdani has requested? Such moves would be widely popular; the only reason why a Schumer or a Hochul would resist them is, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois, they have always depended on the greed of the rich.
In the America of 2025, much less the America of 2026, that dependency comes at too high a price. Democrats will either go full progressive populist, or they won’t go anywhere at all.
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