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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[pat_k]

1. Backlash against the perverse consequences of concentrated wealth has ...

Last edited Wed Jun 17, 2026, 02:09 AM - Edit history (1)

... been a primary driver in the right direction as we muddle toward "a more perfect union."

I think/hope we may be at a turning point like the backlash against the gilded age in the1890's or the backlash against the concentrated wealth of the 1920's that ultimately brought us the new deal (as Heather Cox Richardson often discusses).

Whether the nation as a whole is, or isn't, "there" yet, I'll be doing my little bits to fuel the backlash.

[Uncle Joe]

7. I'm thinking this has much to do with the dynamics of the predominant mass medium of the time

The gilded age ran predominately from 1870s to 1890s countered in time by the effects of print newspapers golden age from 1880s-1900 on increasing growing literacy rates among the people.

Radio ruled in the 1920s and 1930s taking the nation from high wealth disparity of the 1920s through the Depression and into the New Deal Age as mass communication dramatically increased in speed raising awareness even among people who couldn't read, but could listen to FDR's Fireside chats.

TV ruled the roost in one form or another from the 1950s until the early 1990s, but it was different from print or radio in that it was highly restricted, top down, hypnotic, mass communication which ushered in the McCarthy Era, Cold War, and the pullback from the New Deal Era. Reagan a T.V. star would dramatically speed up the process of transferring wealth from the masses to the top income earners as he reduced top income tax rates from 70% to 28% during 1980s while tripling the national debt. Even today the President of the United States without a doubt the worst in U.S. history owes much of his rise to power due to misperceptions of his business acumen created by T.V. for years during the 1990s, ie: The Apprentice. He is television's last gasp.

The Internet; beginning in the mid-late 1990s to today a mass, near instantaneous, two way communication format driven in large part from the bottom up is the primary driving force giving opposition to, and exposure of the record breaking mass income and wealth disparity created and hidden for years by one way top down television from the general public. As a result the oligarchs of today are doing what they can to take over, manipulate, and or restrict information among the people on the strongest forum of democracy to the point that some of them smelling of desperation are trashing democracy itself, not to mention empathy.

[WSHazel]

2. I seem to remember some on the left

Saying there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. How did that work out for us?

This is a progressive site. We need to stop repeating Republican rhetoric.

[calimary]

3. I can't help but suspect the aim, here, was to discourage Democrats from voting.

Maybe the “meh, what does it matter anyway?” dismissal, giving up the fight before the fight officially begins, is what’s at work here.

If you can just get a wee percentage of your opposition to stay home in disgust, you just might actually pull out a win!

[KPN]

4. Who on the left said that? I never heard anyone say that.

At least not any Democrat.

[orleans]

6. i remember hearing that from several people. you asked "who" and i could name names but i doubt you know

them -- they loved bernie, they are millennials, they are males, they were part of my kid's circle of friends. i know they were pissed that bernie lost and planned to not vote in the general election (because hilary & trump were both bad, they both sucked, blablabla) but i was never completely convinced that it wasn't also centered around them not wanting to vote for a woman. at any rate, i know one of them finally "caved" and voted for her (at least that was what he said), but i don't know about the others.

[oasis]

9. We could have taken incremental steps forward

but a stubborn few refused to listen to reason. Now look where we’ve landed.

[niyad]

8. KNR and bookmarking.

[leftstreet]

10. DURec