If Democrats want to keep the blue wave going into 2028, they have to take on the billionaire class
Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Judd Legum shined a spotlight on the role of dark money in US elections. Today’s edition was written by Naomi Klein, Guardian US columnist and author of End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor.
To see the battle lines of the post-midterm era in sharp relief, look to Texas.
Just two days after her earthquake victory as the governor-elect, Gina informed reporters that she had already asked the parks and wildlife department to freeze a proposal to sell 1,300 acres (525 hectares) in a state park to SpaceX until she is sworn into her new office. The department complied with her request.
The Boca Chica state park is next door to Starbase, Elon Musk’s rocket launch facility and company town. That makes the park’s beaches and protected lands – a refuge for shore birds and sea turtles – the ideal location for SpaceX to expand.
“These are our beaches we’re talking about. I mean, selling our beach to Elon Musk is just something that is almost unimaginable,” Hinojosa told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “It’s unacceptable. Our beaches are enshrined in our Texas constitution as being free and open to the people of Texas.”
This was not about shutting down “Elon Musk and his companies”, she went on, “but it has to be on our terms. It cannot be just running over the people of Texas. And that’s what changes now that I will be governor.”
When Hinojosa’s clips circulated on X, she was roundly mocked by Musk’s many fans: imagine valuing some “empty beaches” more than the need for ocean-front launchpads to the stars! Imagine caring more about some lowly birds than Musk’s hulking, phallic, silver rockets! She must be a [insert vomitorium of misogynistic, racist and ableist slurs here]. Musk, his boys and bots predicted, will just pick up his expensive toys and move them to still-Republican Louisiana or Florida, leaving economic carnage in his wake.
So far, Hinojosa seems unmoved. In Texas, she and Senator-elect James Talarico shaped their campaigns as battles of the many v the money, a vertical struggle pitting the vast majority of Texans, struggling to get by, against the increasingly concentrated wealth at the top – perfectly embodied by the man flooding their democracy with cash. As Talarico reminded an audience of supporters in Austin last month: “Elon Musk wants our land. He wants our water. He wants our tax dollars. He wants his very own personal United States senator.”
The richest man in the world didn’t get his senator, or his governor, as the early clash over Boca Chica state park makes clear. What he did get – or rather, help produce – is an America polarized around a new political axis. On one side are ultrarich tech oligarchs, whose wealth is tethered to dreams of merging with machines and becoming multiplanetary, no matter the cost to our multispecies planet. On the other side are regular people, with human needs for things such as clean air, fresh water and healthcare – maybe even a day off at a public park – and who increasingly find themselves competing over these basics with sprawling datacentres and rocket launchers.
The oligarchs in this battle have no loyalty to the nations, states and cities that helped them grow their enormous wealth, thus the threats that Musk will soon ditch Texas if its newly elected representatives dare to keep their promises to voters (just as he dumped California and Canada before that). If all else fails, maybe he will join his friend Peter Thiel in Argentina, which Javier Milei is rapidly turning into techno-libertarian laboratory (Interestingly, Tesla just launched an Argentine division.)
The oligarchs in this battle seem to have no loyalty to the nations, states and cities that helped them grow their enormous wealth.
In sharp contrast, the masses of people in this battle, regardless of their political leanings, tend to be attached to where they live – to its cities, towns, public lands and to the only planet that we know of suited to human life. This is as true in Texas as it is in Tirana, Albania, where, under the banner of the “flamingo revolution” citizens have been in revolt for months against a different set of oligarchs who laid claim to a different beloved wildlife refuge for their private benefit.
In our book End Times Fascism, Astra Taylor and I characterize these as fights between “the leavers v the stayers” – and we make the case that they increasingly define our age. You can see these fault lines running through a great many of the hot-button issues that animated and energized this election cycle. There were the many ballot measures to tax the super-rich to pay for basic services, and entirely predictable tantrums from billionaires who threatened to pick and leave rather than pay up. There was the muscular, national backlash against artificial intelligence and datacenters, which focused on the ways this latest (final?) capitalist stage is devouring art, literature, incomes, lands, energy and wellbeing. (As the Guardian reported, “Voters approved nearly every datacenter moratorium that was on the ballot, dozens in total.”)
The commitment to place, and to one another, was equally evident in the rage at the US war-of-choice in Iran, and at Israel’s genocide in Gaza, with many winning candidates including Abdul El-Sayed consistently stressing that the money being spent to kill children far away should be used to care for children at home, and that all children are equally deserving of life and opportunities.
Similar dynamics were there, too, in the revolt against ICE: As Minnesota’s Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan said in her victory speech, the movement that lifted her to power all began when Minnesotans decided to stand up to “masked goons shooting our neighbors”. And the faultlines were clearest of all in the white-hot anger at the legalized corruption at the heart of the US political system, now widely understood as the wellspring producing all the other depravities.
Writing in this space one month ago, Rebecca Solnit astutely characterized the midterms as “a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serve”. Well, the results are in and they could scarcely be more decisive. The complicating factor, however, is that it is not only the GOP that is aligned with the tech overlords and their anti-human, anti-Earth agenda. Plenty of powerful Democrats have chosen to underwrite their political campaigns and their personal wealth portfolios by entangling themselves with the very individuals and corporations their voters just roundly and unequivocally rejected.
Shamefully, the campaign to defeat a California ballot measure that would have imposed a much-needed, one-time 5% tax on billionaires – one of few places where tech oligarchs clocked a victory last week – was only successful because powerful Democrats including outgoing governor (and presidential hopeful) Gavin Newsom sided with the billionaires (as did the incoming governor). Meanwhile, several Senate Democrats have joined with Republicans to push through a sweeping bill in the current lame-duck Congress that would dismantle a host of environmental protections and be a bonanza for fossil fuel companies and the datacentres that burn them.
This kind of betrayal is the surest path for Democrats to turn their historic midterm victories into entirely predictable defeats before the highly consequential 2028 presidential election.
In Texas, Hinojosa is showing a better way. By picking an early fight pitting public beaches against Musk’s private rockets, she is telling voters which side she is on – the side of life, not machines; the side of staying, not leaving. That is how the Democrats just won, and it is their path to continue winning.
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