The is a democrat Elizabeth Warren claimed in a widely publicized speech at the National Press Club on Monday that she has two competing plans to “pick up the broken pieces from the 2024 election.” “One vision says we need to shape policy and adjust rhetoric to appeal to the extraordinarily wealthy, who are looking for a party that solidifies their economic interests,” she argued. The other vision is, as you might imagine, her vision, noble and pure.
Warren’s explanation for the division within the party is nonsense and agitation. There’s almost no one in the Democratic Party — probably. literally No one believes that messages should be designed to appeal to selfish billionaires.
However, the existence of internal divisions is very real. And the fact that Ms. Warren, who has long presented herself as an intellectual and political leader of the party’s progressive wing, has to resort to misrepresenting the grotesque figures of her opponents within the Democratic Party shows how far her side of the argument has gone over the past year and a half.
THe makes the actual argument that moderates often make. As for why their party lost in 2024, it was because they were unable to credibly distance themselves from the harmful social policy positions that Kamala Harris adopted during her 2020 campaign. Most notable was her pledge to support taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery for prisoners and detained immigrants. She also did little to distance herself from the Biden administration’s unpopular governing record.
Many progressives reject that analysis, especially the first part that suggests the party needs to abandon unpopular positions. They argue that the social views held by a majority of voters are (as one progressive strategist puts it) “unacceptable.” Rather than compromise with those who hold these unacceptable beliefs, Democrats simply need to focus the public’s attention on the evils of the billionaire class, and that message is thought to be strong enough to overcome the political resistance generated by non-negotiable social policy positions.
Warren’s speech clearly articulates this strategy — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that execute This strategy was done by ignoring or mischaracterizing the opinions of her internal Democratic critics and instead portraying them as puppets of the wealthy.
Warren repeatedly argued in her speech that a reasonable analysis of Democrats’ shortcomings is that they lost because they couldn’t raise enough money because they offended the rich. She decried the “temptation, in this moment of national crisis, to try to chip away at our edges to avoid hurting anyone, especially the rich and powerful who may be funding candidates.” She argued that a Democratic Party that is more concerned about angering big donors than serving working people is a party doomed to failure.
Apparently, Warren did not mention the names of Democrats who hold this influential belief. But through innuendo, she tried to associate it with proponents of the abundance agenda. “Reid Hoffman sends copies of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s books on abundance to everyone he knows and supports candidates who support abundance,” she warned. “Acting on small, vague ideas that can also cost families more than real economic populist ideas is a terrible plan for winning elections.”
In fact, the wealth agenda is not small, vague, or a plan to win an election. This is not a political strategy, but a series of policy arguments that have captured the attention of liberal intellectuals. This agenda, in short, argues that cities should be allowed to build more housing, that governments should make it easier to build public infrastructure, and that governments are too bound by procedures and regulations that prevent them from acting quickly.
The Wealth Agenda is intended to make it easier for the government to implement the vigorous initiatives that progressives want, and its fragile details have sparked serious debate. But it’s drawing numbing fire from the left, perhaps because it blames the very progressives who hold the government together. In particular, it accuses leftist interest groups of supporting well-intentioned rules that are expensive and time-consuming to govern and freeze the built environment. Progressives like Warren believe in maintaining strong alliances with the very groups that the prosperity agenda denounces.
The affluence agenda intersects with political claims made by moderates, as both affluence proponents and moderates decry the group’s undue influence. Many who believe the Democratic Party should move to the center also embrace the politics of abundance as a set of governing priorities. But despite some shared goal setting, pro-affluence proponents and moderates are not the same thing.
Perhaps the biggest reason why some progressives dislike the wealth agenda is that, like Warren, they are wholeheartedly committed to an axiomatic populist analysis of American politics in which all problems are caused by nefarious wealthy interests.
For example, at one point in her speech, Warren claimed that Donald Trump was “trying to get rid of the Federal Reserve Chairman and complete a corrupt takeover of America’s central bank so that he can serve his own interests with his millionaire friends.” Is it true that President Trump’s billionaire friends could profit from undermining central bank independence? Billionaires don’t do that. seems to be I’m particularly excited about this aspect of Trump’s power grab. Another explanation for President Trump’s actions is that he doesn’t understand monetary policy well, rather than implementing a clever scheme to enrich his allies. But for populist monomaniacs, there are no stupid ideas, only conspiracies.
In contrast, the abundance agenda is premised on the belief that at least some problems stem from misconceived ideas, including the diversity of the left. Wealth advocates are not defending the role of the wealthy, nor are they suggesting that Democrats should avoid taxing the wealthy or regulating harmful business practices. (Most prominent proponents of the abundance agenda, including Klein and Thompson, support such measures.) They simply some The problem is not entirely the billionaire’s fault.
Those who cannot imagine economic problems as anything other than the product of billionaire greed will naturally assume that anyone who sees the world differently is a pawn of the rich. But Democrats are completely in agreement on the merits of raising taxes on the wealthy and increasing benefits for the poor and middle class. The real divide has to do with Warren’s fixation on the interests of the wealthy as the root of all evil, and whether this style of politics offers her party a path to the majority.
WThere are three main methods The purpose is to gauge the political appeal of Warren’s message. First, she has run for the Senate three times. She won those races. But because she is a Democrat from Massachusetts, one of the most overwhelmingly Democratic states in the country, winning alone conveys little of her appeal. Warren won 9.4 points and 10.8 points in 2018 and 2024, according to election data analysis firm SplitTicket. lower than the average Democratic Party’s vote share Making her one of the worst performers in the party each cycle would have been achievable. The database does not include Warren’s first run for the Senate in 2012, when she trailed Barack Obama by seven points in the state, even though Obama was running against Mitt Romney, the state’s popular former governor.
Second, Warren ran for president in 2020 and performed miserably. Many candidates ran that cycle but were unable to break through. Warren has attracted support from big donors. The media covered her like a frontrunner. Her problem is that voters didn’t elect her. She finished third in Iowa, fourth in New Hampshire and Nevada, and fifth in South Carolina, but dropped out after losing her home state. Her high-profile defeat did not provoke any obvious condemnation. Warren’s campaign memoir She expresses bewilderment that her successful courtship of progressive activists did not translate into votes among black and Latino primary voters, and she does not question whether those activists represent a large number of real voters, not just the progressive donors who funded their efforts.
Third, and most revealing, despite her crushing primary defeat and firefight, Warren built enough of a reputation among Democratic Party elites to gain deep influence over both the eventual winner’s personnel and policy agenda. Joe Biden adopted and co-authored many of Warren’s campaign proposals as a candidate and president. Editorial I stayed with her and asked her advice often. “President Joe Biden is mobilizing a small army of former aides and allies to run the government.” reported politiko In 2021.
How did Warren’s speech handle the humiliating fact that her policy blueprint was implemented and Americans rejected it at the polls? Mostly by ignoring the entire 4 years.
Moderates have accused Harris of failing to distance herself from Biden, most infamously when she said: the view She couldn’t think of any policy that was different from his. The only time Warren specifically criticized the relationship between Harris and Biden in her speech was when she attacked Harris for failing to deliver on her promise to keep Warren’s favorite, Lina Khan, as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. (Warren, of course, blames this decision on billionaires.)
Warren’s speech also argued that “trust cannot be rebuilt by excommunicating the Biden administration’s law enforcement officials who are actually fighting for the first time in decades to hold corporations accountable for price gouging.”
Excommunication is generally a fairly severe punishment, and should only be applied for serious crimes, and ideally should be applied by the church. Still, it has become clear that the only lesson Warren has taken from the Biden administration is that Democrats should bind themselves to keeping his staff in place indefinitely.
Warren readily acknowledged that Biden aides held corporations “responsible for driving up prices.” But did this really prevent inflation? Or at least the public can now appreciate Mr. Biden’s efforts in combating inflation? The answer to both is no. But this is the blueprint she demands the party follow into the future.
In the hermetic world of populist logic, no evidence is needed to support Warren’s beliefs. Blaming corporations for certain problems is a truism, and the failure to accept this logic can only be explained by corruption. Warren warned Democrats that if they rebelled against her moral convictions, she would question their integrity. The lesson they should take from her speech is that questioning Warren’s doctrine is essential if they want to build a more durable majority than Biden.