I have long believed that the Left’s focus permanently rotates between race, sex, and class. The activist Left drives the movement along one axis. Then, as Americans tire of those arguments, activists shift to the next axis, retreating from unpopular positions and rewarding the next interest group. Everyone gets his or her turn.
We are again entering the class phase of this cycle. In 2020, the activist Left mobilized protests on the race axis. Then, as Black Lives Matter started to alienate Americans, the activist Left shifted attention to sex—specifically, to transgenderism, which, as some of us observed at the time, was even less stable and sympathetic than the racial narratives. With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the transgender movement splintered: hospitals and professional organizations retreated from pediatric gender transition and a spate of transgender-related mass shootings revealed the movement’s nihilistic center.
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Conservatives should celebrate the defeat of BLM and trans ideology. But they should also recognize that in politics, no victory is permanent. Those movements have gone into hibernation, so the Left is now pivoting to its third axis: socialist economics, built on distinctions of class, rather than of race or sex.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was the first on the scene. He quietly toned down his race and gender rhetoric (e.g., “Queer liberation means defund the police”) in favor of Leninist agitation about the “billionaire class” and the “warmth of collectivism.” His victory spawned class-warrior copycats, such as James Talarico in Texas and Graham Platner in Maine. Last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren reportedly encouraged Democrats not “to give billionaires too much room inside the tent.”
Instead of continuing to lose the argument on culture, the Left wants to use frustration about inflation, housing prices, and the cost of education to “tax the rich.” Progressives in California have proposed seizing 5 percent of the total assets of every billionaire under the state’s jurisdiction. Democrats in my home state of Washington have introduced a 9.9 percent tax on income over $1 million, though the state constitution prohibits a graduated income tax. Price controls are even making a comeback.
This new offensive has found the Right unprepared. One reason is disuse: in the 1980s, conservatives such as George Gilder, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell made decisive arguments about free-market economics that some on the Right have neglected. Another is that Trump has partially rejected supply-side orthodoxy. The president favors protectionist trade, rock-bottom interest rates, and, despite passing significant tax cuts in his One Big Beautiful Bill, shows little interest in reducing spending.
The Left senses an advantage. Democratic candidates across the country are framing their arguments along class lines—promising, falsely, that they will deliver “affordability” through taxation. Friedman could have demolished that claim in a few minutes. But modern conservatives, who have grown skeptical of Reaganism, seem to have forgotten those ideas.
We should relearn them. Though we might want to update our policies for the post-Cold War era, especially regarding China, the fundamental insights of supply-side economics remain correct. America cannot tax its way to prosperity, and we cannot let resentment drive our fiscal policy. If we study it closely, the Reagan playbook offers a number of counter-narratives to the socialist agenda: the recent uproar about “Somali fraud” is an updated twist on President Reagan’s rhetoric about wasteful government programs.
Eventually, America’s troubled finances—unsustainable debt, uncontrolled money-printing—will come to a head. If conservatives don’t arm themselves again with strong economic arguments, the Mamdani faction will prevail, to the country’s detriment.
Photo by Stephanie Keith 100584/Getty Images