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populism
Billionaire Wealth Surge, Welfare Retrenchment, and the Politics of Populist Anger
If billionaires continue to shape political systems while states become hostage to corporate and neoliberal agendas, we should expect more authoritarianism.
Feb 04, 2026
The latest Oxfam report delivers a stark warning about the direction of the global political economy. In 2025 alone, billionaire wealth surged by $2.5 trillion, pushing total billionaire wealth to $18.3 trillion, the highest level ever recorded. Wealth at the top is now growing three times faster than in previous years, even as poverty reduction stalls and hunger rises. Oxfam calls this not just economic inequality but dangerous political inequality, a world in which the ultra rich increasingly shape laws, media systems, and public policy to serve themselves.
This builds on Oxfam’s earlier finding that the richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 95% of humanity. The organization describes the moment as one where the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over multilateral institutions, tax cooperation, debt relief efforts, and global public goods. Billionaires are not only accumulating wealth, they are accumulating influence, with an outsize presence in politics, corporate ownership, and media control.
At the same time, another long-term trend has unfolded. Over the last four decades, beginning with Reaganomics in the United States and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, neoliberal reforms normalized austerity, privatization, and shrinking public welfare. The welfare state was reframed as a burden rather than a foundation of stability and dignity.
This shift was not only economic but moral: Market efficiency displaced social solidarity, and welfare came to be viewed as dependency rather than dignity.
The irony is that once in power, many populist leaders deepen the very insecurity that propelled them to office.
Today the richest 1% have more wealth than the bottom 95% of the world’s population put together, while the welfare state has steadily eroded. What has followed has worsened inequality; fueled resentment; broken trust in state institutions; weakened the social contract; and led to feelings of exclusion, helplessness, and marginalization. The result has been a rise in populist anger and right-wing governments characterized by anti-immigrant sentiment and hostility to multilateralism.
This trajectory has not only reshaped economies, but politics itself. So who is to blame? Is it the right-wing populists who are now eroding democratic norms, or the neoliberal austerity that hollowed out welfare systems long before them. In reality, the link between the two is the helplessness and anger felt by ordinary citizens who feel invisible in a world marked by inequality and social injustice. As Oxfam International executive director Amitabh Behar notes, being economically poor creates hunger, being politically poor creates anger. It is this economic and political poverty that fuels today’s rage, and much of it traces back to economic disenfranchisement and austerity.
A recent report to the United Nations by Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Olivier De Schutter reinforces this picture. He warns that welfare retrenchment, harsher conditions for benefits, digital surveillance of claimants, and stigmatizing systems have increased insecurity and humiliation rather than reducing poverty. These punitive approaches erode trust in public institutions and create fertile ground for far-right movements that claim to speak for those left behind.
The irony is that once in power, many populist leaders deepen the very insecurity that propelled them to office.
The United States offers a clear illustration of this paradox. Donald Trump returned to power on a message of defending forgotten citizens and challenging elites. Yet recent policy directions have narrowed the social safety net. Cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, stricter work requirements for food assistance, and the expiration of enhanced healthcare subsidies have increased costs and reduced access for low-income households. Earlier efforts to weaken the Affordable Care Act and promote short-term insurance plans with thinner coverage followed a similar logic. While framed as efficiency or fiscal responsibility, these measures shift burdens downward even as tax and regulatory environments remain favorable to corporations and wealthy interests.
What the world needs now is a serious reset where the common citizen feels seen and their rights and needs are valued. The state must play its role as an active dispenser of social protection, justice, and welfare. As the UN Special Rapporteur De Schutter notes, social protection and welfare should not be seen as a cost to be reduced, but as part of a strategy that has been proven to deliver security and well-being for all
If billionaires continue to shape political systems while states become hostage to corporate and neoliberal agendas, we should expect more authoritarianism. The outcome will be deeper division, fragmentation, and conflict. The world cannot afford that trajectory.
What is missing in today’s political economy is empathy, a basic regard for human welfare that has been crowded out by indifference and market logic. Without restoring that moral foundation, neither democracy nor social stability can endure. Reclaiming democracy therefore requires not only restoring welfare states, but curbing the political power of extreme wealth through taxation, regulation, and democratic accountability.
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Ending GOP Authoritarianism Will Require Overcoming the Democratic Leadership
The Democratic establishment shuns the progressive populism that’s vital to effectively counter bogus right-wing populism. And so, the fight to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same fight.
Jan 20, 2026
The past year has completely discredited any claim that choosing between the Democratic and Republican parties would be merely a matter of “pick your poison” with the same end result. In countless terrible ways, the last 12 months have shown that Donald Trump’s party is bent on methodically inflicting vast cruelty and injustice while aiming to crush what’s left of democracy and the rule of law.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leadership persists with the kind of elitist political approach that helped Trump win in 2024. Hidebound and unimaginative, Senate leader Chuck Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries have been incapable of inspiring the people whose high-turnout votes will be essential to ending Republican control of Congress and the White House.
The Democratic establishment shuns the progressive populism that’s vital to effectively counter bogus right-wing populism. And so, the fight to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same fight.
Advocates for progressive change will remain on the defensive as long as the Trump party is in power. With the entire future at stake, social movements on the left should have a focus on organizing to oust Republicans from control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.
Counting on denunciations of Trump to win elections is a very bad strategy. It didn’t work in 2016, it barely worked in 2020, and it failed miserably in 2024.
The point isn’t that Democrats deserve to win – it’s that people certainly don’t deserve to live under Republican rule, and ending it is the first electoral step toward a federal government that serves the broad public instead of powerfully destructive and violent elites. Like it or not, in almost every case the only candidates in a position to defeat Republicans for the House and Senate this year will have a “D” after their name.
Democratic Party leaders have dodged coming to terms with reasons why their party lost the White House in 2024, preferring to make a protracted show of scratching their chins and puzzling over the steep falloff of support from working-class voters of all colors. The Democratic National Committee’s refusal to release its autopsy report, assessing what went wrong in the election, underscores the party’s aversion to serious introspection.
Cogent answers are readily available, but top Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries refuse to heed them. If the party wants to regain and expand support from working-class voters, it must fight for programs that they clearly want.
Extensive polling shows strong public support for major progressive reforms, such as raising taxes on big corporations and the wealthy, lifting the Social Security tax cap, boosting the federal minimum wage, and greatly expanding Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing coverage.
The multifaceted tyranny that Trump and his toady lieutenants want to impose is both abrupt and gradual. Relying on “big lie” techniques, they strive to turn this month’s shocks into next month’s old hat.
Yet counting on denunciations of Trump to win elections is a very bad strategy. It didn’t work in 2016, it barely worked in 2020, and it failed miserably in 2024.
If the party wants to regain and expand support from working-class voters, it must fight for programs that they clearly want.
Democrats on ballots this fall will need to be offering plausible relief to voters in economic distress. But it’s hard for Democratic leaders to come across as aligned with the working class when evidence is profuse that they aren’t.
In essence, Schumer and Jeffries—and the majority of Democratic officeholders who keep those two in the party’s top positions—represent the Biden-era status quo that was unpopular enough to return Trump to the White House. A key reason is a reality that Sen. Bernie Sanders described soon after Trump’s 2016 win: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”
Democratic Party leaders should be removed from seats of party power or bypassed as relics of bygone eras. Their ongoing refusals to distance from corporate power, rich elites, and militarism have alienated much of the party’s base.
As I wrote in my free new book The Blue Road to Trump Hell, “The Democratic Party enabled Donald Trump to become president twice because of repetition compulsions that still plague the top echelons of the party.” To eject Republicans from power – and to advance a strong progressive agenda – true leadership must come from grassroots mobilization.
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Warren Warns Democrats Against Letting Billionaires Dictate Their Economic Agenda
"If Democrats want to win elections, they need to read the room—or I should say, they need to read literally any room anywhere in America that isn’t filled with big donors."
Jan 12, 2026
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday warned the Democratic Party against reshaping its economic agenda in the hopes of winning over billionaire donors.
In a speech delivered before the National Press Club in Washington, DC, Warren (D-Mass.) argued that watering down a progressive economic agenda to appeal to big-money donors made little sense at a time when the richest in America are taking ever greater shares of wealth and US families are struggling to keep their heads above water.
Warren pointed to many US elites maintaining friendly relationships with the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, even after he pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor, as evidence of a broken system.
"Over the past generation, the wealthy have avoided accountability time and again," she argued. "Regular Americans must play by every rule or face real consequences. You don’t need to read every news article about Jeffrey Epstein and his good buddies like [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers and [President] Donald Trump to understand how consistently rich and powerful insiders protect each other, regardless of politics and regardless of how obscene the situation has become."
Warren acknowledged that Democrats needed to broaden their appeal to more voters given that they lost the popular vote to Trump for the first time in 2024, but she argued that targeting wealthy donors would not accomplish that goal.
"There are two visions for what a big tent means," she said. "One vision says that we should shape our agenda and temper our rhetoric to flatter any fabulously rich person looking for a political party that will entrench their own economic interests. The other vision says we must acknowledge the economic failures of the current rigged system, aggressively challenge the status quo, and chart a clear path for big, structural change."
Warren also criticized the "abundance" agenda that has been promoted by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein over the last several months as a way to fix Democrats' electoral woes.
The senator began her critique by touting what she said were good points that Klein and Abundance co-author Derek Thompson make about government needing to work more simply and efficiently to deliver benefits.
However, Warren said that what their analysis of government failures has often missed is that there are powerful interests that are working to keep these inefficiencies from being addressed.
"For years, I've fought for a simple, free government tax filing system so no one has to pay a couple of hundred bucks just to file their taxes," she explained. "Every step of the way, the giant tax prep companies have thrown up roadblocks to stop it. And when the [Internal Revenue Service] finally built a free—and wildly popular—filing option for American taxpayers, the tax prep companies swooped in to kill it the minute Donald Trump took office."
Warren also said that many major Democratic donors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, have been latching onto "abundance" in order to drive the conversation in the party away from US wealth inequality.
"We are now in a new election cycle, and according to Axios, Reid Hoffman is sending everyone he knows a copy of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book on Abundance and backing pro-abundance candidates," Warren explained. "On his podcast, Hoffman has used the framework to argue against regulations that slow down data center construction. That’s right—when families are already getting crushed by rising costs and a data center boom means even higher utility costs... Hoffman wants Democratic candidates to stand with the billionaires for higher costs."
The senator then said that "if Democrats want to win elections, they need to read the room—or I should say, they need to read literally any room anywhere in America that isn’t filled with big donors."
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