Tuesday marked the second night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC), with speeches from former President Barack Obama, former first lady Michelle Obama, and Rep. Doug Emhoff, among others. But two speeches earlier in the night highlighted long-standing divisions within the party.
Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent, Vermont) spoke “We’re going to have to go through a lot of hard work,” Sanders told the crowd earlier in the evening, waxing poetic about the trillions of dollars that have been wasted by inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic before launching into a list of familiar complaints.
“My fellow Americans, while 60 percent of Americans are earning their living before payday, the top 1 percent are better off than they’ve ever been,” Sanders said. He laid out a list of policies that are noticeably left of those pursued by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in office. “At the top of that to-do list is removing big money from the political process. Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primaries,” he said.
But Sanders followed by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has boasted about his wealth to criticize former President Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump claims he’s very wealthy, so he thinks we should trust him with the economy,” Pritzker said. said“But if you ask actual billionaires, the only thing Trump is rich for is stupidity!” Forbes Estimated value Pritzker is worth $3.5 billion, but Trump’s true net worth has long been Issues.
With a verbal appeal A real millionaireThe room erupted in cheers – in stark contrast to Sanders, who just 10 minutes earlier had blasted the very same man as Pritzker as an “oligarch.”
This stark contrast is due to the fact that Democrats and their voters Three Comma Club.
For example, Sanders said billionaires “[ing] Pritzker himself may be the worst offender in this election, including the primary. He ran for governor twice. It cost a whopping $323 million. In addition to his own fortune, in 2022 He donated another $24 million. He asked the Democratic Governors Association to run ads in the Republican primary endorsing state Sen. Darren Bailey, who was considered a weak opponent in the general election. defeat Bailey leads by more than 12 points.
Pritzker also Several finalists He was supposed to be Harris’ running mate in the presidential election. He was not selected in the end. There were at least two meetings They joined the campaign and submitted thousands of pages of documents for review.
Other Democrats and progressive billionaires, including businessman and environmental activist Tom Steyer, reject the claim that every election is won by the highest bidder. Spent over $200 million He ran in the 2020 Democratic primary Finished in third place South Carolina: Michael Bloomberg Spent over $1 billion That year, he won his only tournament in American Samoa.
Hungarian-born billionaire investor George Soros Considered the boogeyman Many Republicans routinely Donating hundreds of millions of dollars That’s on top of the billions he’s donated to Democratic campaigns. Promoting Democracy in the Countries of the Former Soviet Union.
And yet in recent years, some Democrats have expressed not just loathing for billionaires but a feeling that their very existence is obscene.
In 2019, newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said in an interview that the very existence of billionaires is a sign of an immoral society. “I don’t think it necessarily means that all billionaires are immoral,” she clarified, but said, “there’s something wrong with the system that allows billionaires to exist.”
Dan Riffle, a lawyer who served as a policy adviser to Ocasio-Cortez at the time, changed his Twitter handle to “Billionaires are Policy Fails.” He later said: To VoxDylan Matthews Society as a whole should prevent anyone from accumulating that level of wealth. “We could get all 300 million-plus Americans to vote and come up with an average amount that everyone thinks is a reasonable amount, but at some point there’s got to be a cap, right?”
Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have also proposed a wealth tax on those deemed to have too much wealth.
But that attitude may be fading in the Democratic Party. In her opening speech at the Democratic National Convention this week, Ocasio-Cortez eschewed Sanders’ billionaire-bashing populist style and made a more inclusive, positive case for Harris as the presidential candidate. Commenting on Ocasio-Cortez’s speech, Yair Rosenberg said: attention Atlantic Ocean “Progressive women in Congress no longer speak just to the left, they speak to the whole party.”
Of course, not everyone on the left agrees. “Billionaires are a policy mistake. Tax this guy into millionaire status before he leaves the stage,” says progressive journalist Ryan Grimm. Post to X Pritzker during his speech.
Still, this raises an interesting conundrum for Democrats: Should we condemn the wealthiest as a symptom of an immoral society, or should we reconcile with them because some of them are on the same team?
