AWOL in the Class War

[Celerity]

Today on TAP: Americans realize they’ve lost power and income to the very rich. Too many Democrats, even too many unions, have yet to go to war for them.

https://prospect.org/2026/06/16/democrats-unions-awol-in-class-war/



It’s taken about 45 years for a politically potent supermajority of Americans to come together and realize that they’re on the losing end of a class war, but better late than never. Besides, they’re not the ones responsible for the snaillike pace of this awakening: Their political institutions and the mainstream media didn’t even begin to confirm this massive shift in income and power until relatively recently, and the only institutions to consistently point this out—unions—were all but wiped off the map of most of the United States during this time as well.

Today, the signs of this awakening are everywhere, even as Democrats’ response remains insufficient. Yesterday (Monday), both The New York Times and The Washington Post ran front-page stories noting that the share of the nation’s income going to workers has reached the lowest point in many years, while the share going to the richest 1 percent, 0.1 percent, and 0.00001 percent has been soaring. The Times piece cited the findings of UC Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez (whose work I reported on for the Prospect five years ago), who documented that at the height of the late-19th-century Gilded Age, the 20 wealthiest Americans had a combined net worth that came to 3 percent of the nation’s yearly economic output (its GDP), while today the 20 wealthiest Americans now are worth 12 percent of our GDP. The Post piece reported that total worker compensation during the first three months of this year constituted the lowest share of the American economy since the government started these measurements in 1947.

Both pieces concluded that Americans’ daily struggles with unaffordability, coupled with their understanding of where, broadly speaking, their income, wealth, and money had gone (upwards), were likely to be reflected in their voting this November. Further confirmation of this now massive awareness of our class war (subcategory: being-on-the-losing-end-of) was provided today by the most recent YouGov poll, in which respondents were asked to assess the economic power, cultural power, and political power of 40 different subgroups of Americans. By a wide margin, the group that led in all three categories was “billionaires,” with “CEOs” coming in second in economic and political power, and fourth in cultural power. “Workers” finished 29th in economic power (at a level that came to about one-eighth of the billionaires) and lower than that in political and cultural power. Conversely, when asked which groups’ gain in power would help the country, “workers” won in a walk, coming in first with 64 percent saying that power to the proles would create a better America, with “small-business owners” (at 54 percent) and “women” (51 percent) rounding out the top three.

You might think from all of this that Democrats view this as an opportunity to stamp themselves as progressive populists devoted to ending the massive upward redistribution of the nation’s wealth to the wealthy and to reversing the flow back to workers. If you did indeed think that, you’d be half right. Two distinct groups of Democrats plainly disagree. The first are the third-way types who are stuck in the deregulatory muck of the Clinton ’90s. The second are those pols who came to office embedded in the world of great wealth, often Silicon Valley wealth, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose very public opposition to the wealth tax initiative on the state’s November ballot has plainly hurt the measure, and San Francisco Mayor Dan Lurie, who led the opposition to an expansion of the city’s higher corporate tax rate on companies whose CEOs make 100 times or more what their median employees make—a San Francisco ballot measure that was narrowly defeated in last month’s primary.

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