Are Democrats Worried About the Wrong Rich People?
3rd October 2026
The New York Times, Paper of Record of the Crust.
Other than Donald Trump — who is himself worth nine figures — billionaires are perhaps the most common foil for Democrats running for office this year. Whether they’re trying to win a safe blue seat or a competitive red one, Democrats invoke billionaires as the root cause of the country’s political and economic malaise. “The American dream has become an American nightmare,” James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, told a crowd last month. “People are working hard, every day they’re playing by the rules, but those rules of today weren’t written for us. They were written for billionaires,” he added.
It’s hard to dispute this political logic. Several of the world’s wealthiest people have aligned themselves with Mr. Trump, at times literally: Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos were among those seated close behind the president at his inauguration. Elon Musk — briefly the world’s first trillionaire — was a fixture in the Oval Office for a few months last year. Billionaires are astronomically rich, arguably lightly taxed, often allied with Republicans and, in a gift to speechwriters, provide a unified theory of societal decline.
Two words: George Soros. “Arguably lightly taxed” is according to the leveling logic of progressivism, whose devotees feel that every dollar a billionaire has that the progressive doesn’t is some sort of oppression. Far from being a ‘theory of soeietal decline’, billionaires underline the fact that if you provide a service that a lot of people are willing to pay money for, people will give you a lot of money for it. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have provided more work for more people, and a better live for everybody, than any Democrat who ever lived. (Despite which they are notorious liberals. Go figure.)