Last November, during an interview with CNBC, a New York hedge fund manager was asked about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential prospects. “We need a unifier in that position,” complained the billionaire CEO Leon Cooperman, “because the country is being torn apart.” Dismissing Warren’s wealth tax as “idiocy” he even teared up, briefly, at the thought of what Warren might do to him, and other denizens of Wall Street, if she ever wielded presidential authority. Shortly afterwards, Warren’s campaign started selling cups emblazoned with the phrase “Billionaire’s tears” – a nice riposte to the Trumpian ‘liberal tears’ – and these quickly became some of their website’s most popular merchandise.
Earlier this week, Warren lived up to her billing as a potential nemesis of American plutocrats when she skewered Mike Bloomberg during the Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Counterpunching immediately after his rather smug comments about the viability of his candidacy, she slyly began: “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians.’” Then, unsheathing her rapier, Warren moved in for the kill: “And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk. Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this: Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”
When Bloomberg tried to downplay nondisclosure agreements with his accusers Warren challenged him to say how many of these agreements there were, then she asked him to release the women from their silence, right now “on national television”, if the issues were as harmless as he claimed. Chastened, Bloomberg stared blankly into the middle distance, clearly at a loss for words.
At a stroke, Warren laid to rest key doubts about her candidacy. She showed how deftly she could skewer Trump – far less wealthy, confident and articulate than Bloomberg – if he had to debate rather than simply insult her; she exposed the hollowness of the ‘electability’ arguments which have been used to sideline both herself and Sanders from the media coverage they deserve; and she proved that how badly rumours of her campaign’s demise had been exaggerated. (She went on to have her most successful day of fundraising.) But even if Warren fails to catch, or overtake Sanders – the clear frontrunner –her late surge suggests that America’s political mood is already fully polarized in readiness for the election ahead.
Most pundits believe Trump’s re-election will hinge on the US economy. The stock market has risen and the economy is growing at just over 2 percent, but much of these gains have come through over-hasty deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy which have nudged the annual federal deficit beyond a trillion dollars. A foolish trade war with China and Trump’s weak record on almost everything else (most egregiously his improvised foreign policy and the open-ended embarrassment of impeachment), mean that even a slight faltering in the economy could quickly undermine his appeal.
By contrast, both Warren and Sanders seem to have read the country’s economic anxieties correctly and the early voting in the Democratic primaries suggests that the populist anger which brought Trump to power is still alive but trending left, away from what Sanders correctly calls ‘socialism for Wall Street’ and towards ideas that would be fairly centrist in any other developed country: a better minimum wage, higher taxes on the wealthy, universal healthcare and affordable, or free, university tuition.
While Bloomberg’s vast wealth and profligate ad-spending will keep him in the Democratic race for as long as he wants, this week’s debate showed that after three years of Trump’s neurotic governance Americans are not as impressed by wealthy people as Republicans (Bloomberg’s affiliation for most of his life) might like to think. With Sanders pulling away from the field and the only slightly less progressive Warren still competitive in forthcoming primaries, there is good reason to believe that come November, America’s plutocrats may well find themselves, like Bloomberg, facing a political reckoning that is decades overdue.
