David Wallace-Wells writes:

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to at least one-third of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Late last year, you couldn’t escape a chilling billboard campaign, meant to be cheeky, from an artificial intelligence start-up: “Stop Hiring Humans.” And on Saturday, somebody tried to AstroTurf a trollish Billionaires March through the city in defense of Silicon Valley’s 21st-century robber barons. Only a few dozen people showed up, heckled along the way by passers-by.

The billionaires themselves also seem to be on the move. In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have all purchased homes outside California, potentially bringing their hundreds of billions of dollars with them. Others have spent the past few months raging about the injustice of the state’s new politics of class warfare.

Why? A proposal — supported by the local congressman Ro Khanna but not the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and currently floating in limbo as a potential ballot initiative tentatively scheduled for the fall — that would impose a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, whose wealth has soared since the pandemic.

This isn’t exactly pitchforks in the streets, the nightmare entertained by every generation of aristocrats and oligarchs as a supremely flattering form of status paranoia. But about the symbolism, at least, the horrified billionaires and would-be billionaires are basically right. There has never been a tax of this kind so seriously considered in the United States before, and the policy would mark a genuinely new era of the politics of extreme wealth in this country.

Or is that new era already here? Politicians now casually invoke “the Epstein class” and more routinely name-check affordability than they ever campaigned on its close cousin inequality. Prominent plutocrats talk much more openly about their right to great fortunes and their hostility toward oversight and interference from the government, and leftists talk more openly about their hostility toward extreme wealth.

Last year was marked by class-warfare bookends: In January, as the tech right joined the president’s MAGA army for his inauguration in Washington, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man was handed close to unilateral control of the machinery of government, partly as a thank-you for political contributions of nearly $300 million. And in November a democratic socialist was elected mayor of the world’s financial capital, relying on public matching funds against the many millions spent opposing him and almost universal hostility from the banking class.

One big question is whether this backlash will go beyond lip service — whether the country’s partisan coalitions, which have seemed so unshakable in the time of President Trump, will be reshaped by antagonism for billionaires, and the response of those billionaires, as the sunset of Trump’s long reign comes slowly into view. [Continue reading…]