How much has anti-billionaire sentiment pervaded the Democratic Party? Even the billionaires are getting in on the action.

In the ultra-competitive primary for California governor, businessman Tom Steyer has sold himself as “the billionaire who wants to tax billionaires.” He has spent much of the campaign touting the plutocrats and corporations who oppose him as a signal of credibility. And he has emphasized his commitment to the Giving Pledge, meaning he and his wife intend to give up most of their money while they’re alive; as he put it, “I will not die a billionaire.” (That makes 342 million of us.)

Steyer and his team recognize where the energy can increasingly be found in progressive politics. In a nation reared on Horatio Alger myths of self-made tycoons, 18 percent of Americans see being a billionaire as “morally wrong;” that figure is one in three among young people. Over half of American adults now believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. And as more blue states consider wealth taxes, it’s clear the public is increasingly demanding a reckoning with extreme inequality.

Yet right now, the person who may be best positioned to lead the charge against billionaires—in the state where the highest number live—is one of their own.

It’s a reflection of a catch-22 that’s long challenged progressives: For the long-term health of democracy, the systems that have allowed the ultra-wealthy to exert unlimited financial influence over politics must be dismantled. But can those systems be toppled without the help of their billionaire beneficiaries?

Excessive wealth inequality in the United States isn’t new; we’re not heading into season four of The Gilded Age for nothing. Yet it continues to soar to record highs. The top 1 percent of Americans now hold over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth; in no other industrialized country is that number greater than 28 percent. There are now roughly a thousand billionaires in America, with a collective net worth of around $6.9 trillion. Meanwhile, the median American’s wealth now lags behind their peers’ in countries like Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

No matter how you measure it, the richest Americans are jealously accumulating more wealth every day at the public’s expense. But the hoarders might finally be due for an intervention.

As the political analyst and Pitchfork Populism author Bradford Kane has described, America has a long-standing split personality: “rugged individualists on the one side, and communal collectivists on the other.” Over the centuries, the tension between those two groups has boiled over, time and again, into populist movements.

Kane argues that in 2016 and 2024, Trump successfully channeled this resentment into a kind of faux populism that empowered himself over the masses. (The true progressive populism of Bernie Sanders also energized broad swaths of the public but faced an uphill battle against the Democratic establishment.) Now, as Trump approaches his final midterm election as a historically unpopular president, he’s dropped the veneer and no longer even pretends to care about the economic struggles of everyday Americans. Progressives, meanwhile, are running and winning with platforms laser-focused on affordability and inequality.

In states like California, New York, Washington, and Maine, lawmakers are pushing for new taxes on millionaires, ultra-millionaires, billionaires, and owners of pieds-à-terre. This has led to cries from some oligarchs that such taxes will cause the so-called job creators in liberal havens to flee to DeSantis Country.