Conor Lynch is a writer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the Week, the New Republic, Salon, Truthdig, and elsewhere.
Donald Trump won in 2024 by casting billionaires and blue-collar workers as allies against a liberal professional elite. As working-class voters lose faith in him, the Left has a chance to consolidate support around economic populism.
Spooked by anti-billionaire talk from the Democratic Party base, ultrawealthy donors are backing Republicans this cycle. That confronts the Democrats with a choice they’ve spent years avoiding: chase big money or build mass politics.
California Democrats just defied Gavin Newsom to endorse a billionaire wealth tax. The fight previews a national battle in which centrists push “pragmatic” alternatives that would barely make a dent in ultra-elites’ wealth or power.
As the Trump administration saddles Americans with new administrative burdens to cut taxes for the rich, the Mamdani administration has made cutting red tape to free up benefits part of its governing agenda for New York.
Billionaire wealth has doubled in five years, and there’s a growing movement to tax it. But there’s a problem: the fate of a national wealth tax may ultimately hinge on a few words buried in an arcane passage in the Constitution.
The SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire — and exposed the hollowness of the claim that the stock market has been democratized. Nearly 90% of stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10%, and that skew is only getting more extreme.
When Zohran Mamdani won the mayor's race, his critics predicted a mass exodus of wealth and business from New York City, cratering its tax base. It’s been nearly six months since he won, and market indicators suggest so far that the rich are staying put.
To tax the richest Americans, we need to go after their wealth, not just their income. Two proposals — one in California, one in Congress — could finally do it. The alternative is an ever-more-powerful billionaire class that threatens democracy itself.
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is trying to demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence. It’s high time the Left reclaimed the value of “efficiency” from right-wing forces of privatization and austerity.
Past conservatives devoted enormous energy to downplaying America’s history of brutal imperial expansion. But in the second Trump administration, the New Right is doing something different: it’s openly celebrating and seeking to revive it.
As Donald Trump’s GOP grows more and more fanatically xenophobic and rabidly anti-socialist, it’s worth examining how the American right has long fused its hatred of both immigrants and radicals to carry out a larger reactionary program.
Donald Trump’s profligate spending on America’s domestic militarization, coupled with tax cuts for the rich and continued military adventures abroad, suggests that much in American conservatism today remains similar to what it was under George W. Bush.