Top Democrats are fighting a billionaire tax in California. Their voters are on the other side |

Midway through this summer, a high-quality poll found that Democrats in California were overwhelmingly in favor of the upcoming ballot measure for a one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth.The ratio was more than 4 to 1. But the state’s most powerful Democrats – including the governor Gavin Newsom, his near-certain successor Xavier Becerra and the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass – have lined up with Silicon Valley billionaires who’ve raised upward of $340m to defeat the initiative.While Newsom has led the charge against the measure, most Democratic leaders in the deep-blue state have opted to duck. California’s senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff have stayed mum on Proposition 40. The same is true of the former vice-president Kamala Harris and the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.“Neither wants to alienate wealthy donors or their allies in labor by publicly opposing it,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted in mid-October. “But their silence on such a high-profile measure is giving cover to the billionaires” fighting the measure.Nine-tenths of the billionaire tax revenue from Proposition 40 would go to healthcare for Californians in need. As the New York Times reported this month, “California stands to lose around $100 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next five years, threatening healthcare coverage for millions of low-income residents, as well as the potential closure of hospitals and other facilities.”With so much at stake in human terms, refusal to back Proposition 40 runs directly counter to standard rhetoric from Democratic politicians about standing up to the ultra-wealthy on behalf of the disadvantaged.The stance of Newsom and other Democratic heavyweights in the state puts them on the side of billionaires in ongoing class war. The effect is that party leaders are offering a kinder, gentler oligarchy as an alternative to the far more corrupt Trumpist version.Overall, a semblance of party unity has taken hold with the midterm elections looming. But clashes between corporate Democrats and progressives will soon begin to escalate.The fact that the most prominent Democrats in the country’s most populous state are at loggerheads with the party’s grassroots on Prop 40 is a bad sign, but it’s hardly an anomaly.Every time a general election nears, party leaders fervently call for a huge turnout – but their disconnect from the party’s base discourages turnout. California’s billionaire tax proposal is unprecedented, but the response to it from Democratic party elites is part of a pattern that has undermined capacities to build populist momentum against Republicans, let alone advance progressive agendas favored by voters.Now being vilified by an onslaught of attack ads, Proposition 40 might get buried under the avalanche of billionaire cash (with nearly half coming from the Google co-founder Sergey Brin). The proposal’s foes have out-fundraised supporters by nearly 10-1.But whatever the election’s outcome is on 3 November, campaigning to tax the wealth of the country’s nearly 1,000 billionaires has enormous potential nationwide.In early August, the California Democratic Party executive board, hardly a bastion of class struggle, voted to give the party’s endorsement to Prop 40. But, undeterred, Newsom has gone all-out to fight the billionaire tax proposal as well as to boost another ballot measure that would nullify any such tax.When I contacted a former chair of the state party’s Progressive Caucus, he was matter-of-fact about the alliance of big tech moguls with the current and next governor. “When it comes to Newsom and Becerra opposing the billionaire tax,” said Amar Shergill, a Sacramento-based attorney, “you need know only two things. First, Newsom needs billionaire money for his presidential campaign. Second, Becerra needs to pay back the billionaires that made him governor. The rest of the corporate Democrats in office are some version of these stories.”Newsom became governor in 2019, following Jerry Brown’s second eight-year stretch in the job. His unique style aside, Brown has long been a kind of prototype for the state’s Democratic leadership now typified by Newsom.“The way you have to approach the political process is something like piloting a canoe,” Brown said in 1979 during his first stint as governor. He explained: “If you paddle a little bit on the left side, then you paddle a little bit on the right side, you keep going right down the middle.”This year, Brown has stayed out of the battle over Proposition 40. In late October, when I emailed the former governor to ask whether he supports it, he replied: “I have not discussed the proposition. There is already a plethora of opinions on the measure.”Weeks ago, during a BBC interview, Brown lamented: “The gains for those who succeed at the top are getting bigger and richer, and the sustenance at the bottom and the middle is getting less and less.” He added: “We obviously need a wealth tax. If Tesla wants to give Elon Musk a trillion dollars over 10 years, then the people have to take back 99% of it. Now, can you get that? No, not at this point. Can you get it in one state? No, that would not work. Can you get it in one country? Probably not. So it would take an international agreement to tax the very wealthy, so that you can’t accumulate at the level that they are today.”Brown and Newsom share a fondness for voicing lofty principles while kicking them very far down the road, tacitly equating deference to corporate power with realism. Newsom says – with scant details – that he would support a federal tax on billionaires. Meanwhile, he claims that approval of Proposition 40 would cause many of California’s more than 200 billionaires to move out of the state, with disastrous results.“Proposed tax hikes on the rich invariably produce grim warnings of millionaire flight which then don’t eventuate,” the journalist Harold Meyerson recently pointed out. “Even if they did in this case, as a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research has documented, the revenue gain of roughly $100 billion that the [billionaire] wealth tax would yield wouldn’t be offset by reductions in the income tax revenue produced by the flight of every one of those 200 billionaires until 25 years had passed. If just 50 of those 200 billionaires fled, it would take a full century.”A large majority of the 45 Democrats in the California delegation to Congress richly deserve the “corporate” label. The official website of the Proposition 40 campaign lists only two congressional endorsers in the state. One of them, Representative Ro Khanna, has emerged as California’s most visible and vocal politician advocating for Prop 40.“It’s the most important ballot initiative in America and in the world,” Khanna declared during a recent interview on MS Now. Looking ahead, he asked: “Are we going to continue to cater to a donor class that has hollowed out jobs, hollowed out the working class, and lost us two elections to Donald Trump?”That kind of rhetorical question could progressively reframe the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.“This is a fight for the soul of the Democratic party,” Khanna told me last weekend. “Will we be beholden to billionaire donors and offer platitudes without policy like Gavin Newsom, or will we reclaim our FDR courage and offer a bold vision for our nation’s future?”Exactly 90 years ago, speaking at Madison Square Garden on the last day of October 1936, the then president Franklin Delano Roosevelt scorned the rightwing plutocrats of the day: “They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.” Leaders of today’s Democratic party have failed to earn such hatred. Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy