A month ago, Democrats seemed like a party without a concrete policy agenda, surfing a wave of anti-Trump rage and discontent but without a clear or widely shared vision for what to do with real political power, should they win it in 2026 or 2028. Then this month we got a flurry of policy proposals in quick succession — to my eyes, the most substantive ones the party has offered in President Trump’s second term. They aren’t exactly a road map, but they tell a pretty coherent story about the Democratic Party testing the appeal of ambitious, redistributive populism.
Not that long ago, “Tax the rich” was a factional slogan that scandalized people when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore it on a gown at the Met Gala — both those horrified that she really meant it and those who thought putting the phrase on a designer dress meant she really didn’t. Today Democrats are even more widely caricatured as the party of the well off and well educated, but if you ask what holds their coalition together, talk about the billionaire class seems suddenly as binding as anything else.
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, the winds seemed to be blowing Democrats toward policy moderation and the political center. Now — with public frustration about affordability and cost of living undiminished and the second Trump administration behaving like a self-dealing cohort of self-interested oligarchs — the rhetorical weather looks as though it has changed. But not everyone is reading the patterns in exactly the same way: If the Democrats want to reposition themselves as the party of the people, they have different ideas about what that should entail.
First, Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced a major wealth tax proposal — an annual 5 percent tax on the wealth of the America’s 938 billionaires, sufficient, they said, to raise $4.4 trillion over the next decade, restore funding for health care, build several million homes, guarantee $60,000 minimum annual salaries for teachers and send $3,000 checks to every citizen with yearly incomes under $150,000. Then Chris van Hollen proposed a plan that would eliminate federal income taxes for half of Americans and pay for that relief by applying a surtax on income over a million dollars a year. Then came Cory Booker with a similar proposal: Eliminate federal income taxes for individuals making under $37,500 and couples making $75,000 annually and partly pay for those cuts by closing loopholes and raising taxes on the very rich.
Each of these tax proposals is as much a positioning signal as a ready-to-pass law — Democratic policy entrepreneurs trying on various populist costumes and seeing what fits and what takes. And the party’s governing agenda probably won’t be firmly set before the 2028 primaries, with arguments between now and then probably secondary to the verdict of the midterms and the choice of presidential nominee. But at this point in the cycle, I think it’s pretty healthy to be thinking of policy in terms of the tax code, given how much more constrained the fiscal picture looks post-Covid, how much additional revenue is needed for any ambitious new federal spending and how much latent rage there seems to be out there about the very rich.
On March 4, James Talarico won the Democratic primary for the Texas Senate race, emphasizing that the country’s real conflict wasn’t left versus right but top versus bottom. In Maine, Graham Platner appears to be opening up a commanding lead for the state’s Democratic Senate nomination with an antiplutocratic message it’s not hard to see as, effectively, a Tea Party of the left. A wealth tax just passed in Washington State, and a controversial one proposed for California is favored to pass, as well — that is, if it appears on the ballot. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has been publicly lamenting the American plutocracy, even as he opposes that possible wealth tax, and talking about tax fairness in terms of the 1 percent and the 99 percent.
One of the candidates who could succeed him, the billionaire Tom Steyer has taken to answering questions about whether people like him should even exist by saying to entrepreneurs, “You did not make your own money. You are not self-made.” Khanna’s district, which encompasses Silicon Valley, has the densest concentration of billionaires in America, but he has been pushing to tax their wealth and hammering what he calls the “Epstein class.” The phrase has also been picked up by the presidential hopeful Jon Ossoff of Georgia, a moderate by temperament who has voted mostly as a centrist since riding an anti-Trump wave to the Senate in the 2020 election. “Even before he came on the scene, America had the most corrupt political system in the Western world,” Ossoff declared in a speech last year, referring to Trump. “This is, in fact, a government of, by and for the ultrarich,” he told Stephen Colbert last month. Even Rahm Emanuel is worrying about the system being rigged by and for the rich. So is Lloyd Blankfein, a former chief executive of Goldman Sachs.
The three tax proposals are attempts to put some kind of policy meat on those rhetorical bones. But that isn’t to say they are equally serious or even similarly directed. Populism isn’t one path forward for Democrats but several, offering a public test of just what kind of redistributive commitments the party wants to offer — and, perhaps, what kind of pledges the public wants to hear.
Already, skeptics joke about slopulism — a term for populist appeals that seem unserious or superficial, the equivalent of clickbait. Some of the budget math looks, even to progressives, a bit questionable, and it’s not clear, for all the talk of economic injustice, whether the party really means it. Are Democrats as a whole genuinely interested in going full “tax the rich” and antagonizing the country’s wealthiest? Or, as a progressive coalition with plenty of well-off voters, would it prefer a thinner form of populism, more easily discarded once returned to power? There are also divides between those who cheer more progressive taxation, thinking it should replenish public coffers and extend the social safety net, and those who want to see money simply transferred directly from the richer half of the income distribution to the poorer half — a kind of progressive version of a deficit-funded tax cut, in other words, that nevertheless accepts the right-wing argument against the value of public programs.
With its wealth tax rather than an income tax, the Sanders bill may sound the most aggressive, but it would reallocate the money raised toward greater social spending. By contrast, the van Hollen and Booker proposals are probably better thought of as progressive varieties of tax revolt, designed less to shore up or expand the fragile welfare state than to make good on a decade of talk about extreme wealth inequality by offering tax relief to working-class and middle-income Americans. In fact, Booker’s proposal would be a huge tax cut overall, as many budget wonks were quick to point out, with significant benefits for the relatively well-off upper middle class, in addition to the country’s working families.
Perhaps Democrats can’t avoid trying to have it both ways. For the past few years, the party has been caricatured as a coalition of out-of-touch meritocrats and elites positioning themselves to protect the status quo. The caricature was always imprecise, at best, though plenty of self-flagellating Democrats used it. But it did help describe the changing contours of the coalition, which has grown better-educated and better off as the party has become more progressive. Many of these voters like the sound of class politics, but it remains to be seen how much redistribution they really want — and how much the country as a whole will trust the party to shed its stereotype and deliver it.
Since the losses in 2024, the chastened coalition has been bound together primarily by the energy of resistance, by outrage about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, about self-dealing and corruption, about military adventurism and trade wars and all the rest of it. That may seem like a simple repeat of Trump’s first term, which first gave us the phenomenon — and the epithet — of the resistance, hardening the Democratic reputation as an institutionalist party (a reputation further cemented during the Covid culture wars).
But those were not just years of anti-Trump protest; they were also years overflowing with policy ambition among Democrats. This was the time when Democrats found themselves talking about a Green New Deal, about free college and a new minimum wage, about abolishing ICE and decriminalizing the border and far more aggressive antitrust enforcement, about the enormous care-economy investments that ultimately went into President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “build back better” agenda before being jettisoned in the negotiations that led to his climate bill (which Trump and the Republicans then largely repealed).
Trump’s first term was a different time, not least because low interest rates made money seem cheap and most liberals still regarded him as an anomaly and an accidental president rather than as the revealed face of the country. The Democratic project was about not just getting the cancer out but also extending the social-welfare vision of the Obama years into the future once the country was declared Trump-free.
And now? The interest rate landscape has changed significantly, and the party is considerably more worried about the risk of inflation, with budget hawks protesting a bit louder than they did six years ago. Some of those initiatives from the late 2010s remain in play for a future Democratic administration, but many in the party regard the expansive policy agenda that Biden carried into office in 2021 as a failure, with little political credit given to the administration for all that it did achieve. Others seem eager to test another theory, that it might be better politically to lead with class-based language, even if only modest changes follow. But the ideas primary is beginning, and it looks as though the populists are staking the first claim.
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