{"id":84,"date":"2026-05-26T15:40:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T15:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=84"},"modified":"2026-05-26T15:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T15:40:13","slug":"arent-billionaires-people-too-yes-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=84","title":{"rendered":"Aren\u2019t Billionaires People, Too? Yes, but\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

How much has anti-billionaire sentiment pervaded the Democratic Party? Even the billionaires are getting in on the action.<\/p>\n

Read more An Alternative View of What\u2019s Next After the Trump-Xi Summit<\/a><\/p>\n

In the ultra-competitive primary for California governor, businessman Tom Steyer has sold himself as \u201cthe billionaire who wants to tax billionaires.\u201d He has spent much of the campaign touting the plutocrats and corporations who oppose <\/em>him as a signal of credibility. And he has emphasized his commitment to the Giving Pledge, meaning he and his wife intend to give up most of their money while they\u2019re alive; as he put it, \u201cI will not die a billionaire.\u201d (That makes 342 million of us.)<\/p>\n

Steyer and his team recognize where the energy can increasingly be found in progressive politics. In a nation reared on Horatio Alger myths of self-made tycoons, 18 percent of Americans see being a billionaire as \u201cmorally wrong;\u201d that figure is one in three among young people. Over half of American adults now believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. And as more blue states consider wealth taxes, it\u2019s clear the public is increasingly demanding a reckoning with extreme inequality.<\/p>\n

Yet right now, the person who may be best positioned to lead the charge against billionaires\u2014in the state where the highest number live\u2014is one of their own.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a reflection of a catch-22 that\u2019s long challenged progressives: For the long-term health of democracy, the systems that have allowed the ultra-wealthy to exert unlimited financial influence over politics must be dismantled. But can those systems be toppled without the help of their billionaire beneficiaries?<\/p>\n

Excessive wealth inequality in the United States isn\u2019t new; we\u2019re not heading into season four of The Gilded Age<\/em> for nothing. Yet it continues to soar to record highs. The top 1 percent of Americans now hold over 40 percent of the nation\u2019s wealth; in no other industrialized country is that number greater than 28 percent. There are now roughly a thousand billionaires in America, with a collective net worth of around $6.9 trillion. Meanwhile, the median American\u2019s wealth now lags behind their peers\u2019 in countries like Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

No matter how you measure it, the richest Americans are jealously accumulating more wealth every day at the public\u2019s expense. But the hoarders might finally be due for an intervention.<\/p>\n

As the political analyst and Pitchfork Populism<\/em> author Bradford Kane has described, America has a long-standing split personality: \u201crugged individualists on the one side, and communal collectivists on the other.\u201d Over the centuries, the tension between those two groups has boiled over, time and again, into populist movements.<\/p>\n

Kane argues that in 2016 and 2024, Trump successfully channeled this resentment into a kind of faux populism that empowered himself over the masses. (The true progressive populism of Bernie Sanders also energized broad swaths of the public but faced an uphill battle against the Democratic establishment.) Now, as Trump approaches his final midterm election as a historically unpopular president, he\u2019s dropped the veneer and no longer even pretends to care about the economic struggles of everyday Americans. Progressives, meanwhile, are running and winning with platforms laser-focused on affordability and inequality.<\/p>\n

In states like California, New York, Washington, and Maine, lawmakers are pushing for new taxes on millionaires, ultra-millionaires, billionaires, and owners of pieds-\u00e0-terre. This has led to cries from some oligarchs that such taxes will cause the so-called job creators in liberal havens to flee to DeSantis Country.<\/p>\n

Read more How Trump Got His Tacky Arch Approved<\/a><\/p>\n

This has not happened. Nearly six months into the mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani, departure threats from his wealthy detractors have proven, thus far, empty. You can also look at a state like Massachusetts\u2014which passed a 4 percent tax on income over $1 million in 2022\u2014where the millionaires have largely stayed put. With that revenue, the state has been able to bolster its transportation infrastructure and education, making it easier for young, working families to remain as well. As my colleague Michael Massing has written for The Nation<\/em>, the only lifestyle change that the ultrarich might experience from this sort of policy would be giving up a private plane, yacht, or 12th home.<\/p>\n

As the democracy-undermining effects of highly concentrated wealth become a staple of American political discourse, a plaintive counter-response is often invoked: Aren\u2019t billionaires people, too? Must we bash and blame the 0.1 percent? But, as Americans are forced to skip meals in order to afford healthcare, it\u2019s vital that the Democratic Party resist retreating from small-\u201cd\u201d populist policies when discussing wealth and class.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean that Steyer and the Patriotic Millionaires have no role to play in those discussions. In his endorsement of Steyer, Robert Reich recalled: \u201cWe\u2019ve had wealthy Democratic politicians before. FDR and JFK had tremendous fortunes, yet they enacted some of the most progressive policies in American history.\u201d<\/p>\n

If anything, Steyer\u2019s willingness to seek higher taxes for himself and his peers makes him a strong messenger\u2014immune to the accusation that advocates for wealth redistribution are merely suffering from class resentment. Instead, he has just as much credibility as anyone to call for the disruption of the structures that allowed billionaires (like him) to consolidate vast amounts of money and power in the first place.<\/p>\n

As the Bernie Sanders\u2013affiliated PAC Our Revolution explained in their tweet endorsing Steyer: \u201cWe\u2019ve never endorsed a billionaire\u2014but [he] is using his position to upset the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, as Inequality.org\u2019s Chuck Collins wrote in an incisive column for Inside Philanthropy<\/em>, \u201cIf we\u2019re waiting for the billionaire class to summon their urgency to step up and solve the pressing problems of our day, we are in trouble.\u201d Instead, undoing extreme inequality requires mass mobilization, and responsive electeds more accountable to the public than to big donors.<\/p>\n

Higher taxes on the ultrarich and redistributive policies may seem like an uphill fight in a nation that has long mythologized free enterprise and sky\u2019s-the-limit ambition. But the heyday of middle-class America has been just as mythologized. And at that time, the top federal tax rate was 90 percent, antitrust enforcement was robust, and a third of the workforce was unionized.<\/p>\n

Seeking a truly fair share from the ultra-wealthy isn\u2019t contrary to the American dream. It\u2019s what allows the rest of us to pursue it.<\/p>\n

Read more This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: The United States of Surveillance, Through the Years<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":83,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activism"],"yoast_head":"\nAren\u2019t Billionaires People, Too? Yes, but\u2026 - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=84\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Aren\u2019t Billionaires People, Too? 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