Does "Abundance" Beat America’s Culture-Warrior-In-Chief?

Billionaires want Dems to talk about democracy, tout “abundance,” and play dead. But anti-oligarch politics is the only way to fight Trump

David Sirota is the founder and editor in chief of the investigative news outlet The Lever. Subscribe to The Lever’s free newsletter here.

President Donald Trump is often perceived as an ideological paradox — at once populist and plutocratic, pro-working-class and anti-labor, pro-growth and anti-trade, maverick conservative and Old Guard Republican. But for all of what looks like impulsive zig-zagging, there is a consistent throughline: He’s always focused on finding, spotlighting, and exacerbating the country’s most divisive cultural flashpoints.

So far, the strategy is working. Polls show Trump is historically unpopular, but still more popular than his Democratic opponents. Democrats have spent Trump’s first 100 days following the advice of the Clinton clan’s political strategist James Carville, who instructed them to “embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.”

When Democrats have woken up, they’ve toggled between berating their enraged rank-and-file voters, purging critics from their party, eschewing blame for the 2024 campaign — and now invoking TED Talk buzzwords like “abundance” to repackage their tepid agenda that keeps losing elections.

As the economy burns, the opposition party still seems unable to formulate a response to the central question of this moment: How do they combat a GOP leader with a different political formula than past Republicans — a president who sees the culture war not as secondary skirmish to entertain a rabid conservative base but as the central unifying cause animating his government?

Can an opposition to MAGA fight and win a different kind of culture war?

A Different Kind Of Republican

The first step toward an answer is understanding what Trump represents. Sure, he embodies the rise of oligarchy, the end of civility, the spread of misinformation, the normalization of corruption, the electoral irrelevance of job experience, and the embrace of pathological dishonesty.

But at his core, he’s more than the sum of those parts. Above all else, this Roy Cohn mentee who cut his political teeth enflaming the Central Park Five brouhaha personifies the new supremacy of cultural conflict.

Consider Trump’s executive orders, which are the most unvarnished declarations of presidential priorities. Trump’s edicts are a smorgasbord of culture-war virtue signaling positioning him as the brave warrior defending America against the bogeymen haunting conservatives’ nightmares — what the White House depicts as biased media snobs, non-English speakers, anti-Christian apostates, trans athletes, radical environmentalists, academic elites, crime-ridden cities, uppity minorities, woke language police, and scary criminal aliens stealing America’s wealth.

Whatever archetype you see in Trump — a Bonfire of the Vanities villain? The Joker? Bulworth? — he clearly views cultural inflammation as a feature of his political program, not a bug.

The incendiary language in his orders betray their real mission: They tout “beautiful clean coal” (trolling the climate movement); deride the alleged “forced use of paper straws” (trolling enviros); lament “anti-Christian bias” (trolling secular liberals); and pledge to “prevent illegal aliens” from obtaining benefits and to “repel invasions” from the southern border (trolling immigrants). There’s even one for a “Loyalty and Law Day, USA” to insinuate that MAGA critics are this generation’s flag-burning, America-hating hippies.

Trump’s devotion to the culture war explains why he’s always weighing in on the zeitgeist conflict of the moment, even if it has nothing to do with his job (most recently, he stomped into Major League Baseball’s oldest controversy and reframed it as a fable of the Persecuted White Guy). It also explains why his cabinet is teeming with Fox News personalities rather than subject-matter experts. These carnival barkers weren’t hired to run government bureaucracies, but to use federal agencies as media platforms for the news cycle’s cultural skirmish (Trump’s Fox News host-turned-Defense Secretary literally installed a makeup studio in the Pentagon).

Those conflicts are mostly manufactured by Trump, who designs them to not only crush dissent, but to also caricature his opponents as defenders of right-wing bugaboos and to focus the discourse on conservative grievances.

His threat to strip Harvard’s tax status aims to bait Democrats into defending Ivy League universities.

His crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives aims to lure Democrats into caricaturing themselves as annoying HR consultants.

His arrest of protesters and his deportations seem designed to help conservative media cast the left as overly focused on protecting allegedly undesirable (often non-white) dissenters rather than Middle America.

His blocking of most asylum seekers while boosting an influx of allegedly persecuted white South Africans who don’t like their home country’s post-apartheid government – it is yet another effort to stoke the mythology of white grievance and persecution.

Trump has so successfully stoked social conflict that he and his party are now creatively weaponizing the culture war for his donors’ class war. Indeed, Trump is right now defunding white-collar criminal prosecutions (from their already historically low levels) in the name of better funding his immigration crackdown, and congressional Republicans are using Medicaid cuts to fund a special new tax break for purchases of gun silencers.

In all of his machinations, Trump presumes that if 21st century politics is just a battle for attention, then an ever-more spectacular culture war can overwhelm Americans’ senses and distract us from the smell of our money burning up as GOP donors quietly feast on policy favors and the president enriches himself.

Democrats Never Miss An Opportunity To Miss An Opportunity

In prosperous economic times, Trump’s formula makes sense as a political gambit — when the vibes are good, betting on bread, circuses and Internet clicks is a decent wager in a social-media-addled society that forgets its entire world every 15 minutes under a flood of text messages, emails, spam calls, and TikTok videos.

But as the macroeconomy now contracts and fears of a recession intensify, it’s a dicier gamble — a bet that a White House-led, cable-news fueled filibuster of nonstop conversation about cultural conflagration will prevent anyone from noticing the potential economic calamities on the horizon.

It’s such a risky bet at this point that even some Republicans seem freaked out.

In recent weeks, GOP senators have tried to rescind Trump’s reckless tariffs, which threaten economy-wrecking shortages in the coming weeks — and which are projected to hit various red states particularly hard.

Now, some Republican lawmakers are also sounding the alarm about Trump’s “big beautiful” budget bill, which Congress’s own budget office projects to be one of history’s largest upward transfers of wealth in American history. At a moment when survey data show GOP voters want higher taxes on the wealthy, the legislation proposes to finance six-figure tax breaks for billionaires with Medicaid cuts that could eliminate health insurance for more than 7 million Americans — many of whom are in MAGA country.

“I don’t understand the argument that says, ‘Yes, congratulations working folks, you voted for Donald Trump, and now we’re going to take away your access to health insurance.’ It seems insane to me,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has called for his party to back off Medicaid cuts and to prioritize the child tax credit rather than high-income tax cuts. “We increasingly have an economy in this country that does not work for working-class people. And as Republicans, we need to do something about that… We need to preserve social insurance programs that they rely on — and pay into.”

MAGA icons like former Trump strategist Steve Bannon are making a similar case, creating GOP fissures for Democrats to exploit. But Democrats still haven’t capitalized because their dominant faction still wants nothing to fundamentally change. So far, their political strategy appears to be:

• Shrieking the word “democracy,” while crushing it inside their own party; reelecting their congressional leadership; and trying to conjure a “liberal Joe Rogan” by throwing cash at TikTokers and YouTubers.

• Voting for Trump’s nominees, courting Trump’s Silicon Valley cabal, and feigning ignorance about Biden’s cognitive impairment.

• Presenting Gotham supervillain (and Trump pal) Andrew Cuomo as a presidential contender; repackaging Chicago’s human personification of revolving-door corruption Rahm Emanuel as their party’s anti-corruption crusader; and trotting out former CIA analyst-turned-Bush White House official Elissa Slotkin to flip off Bernie Sanders and offer up some forced profanity and odes to patriotism — as if this is still the 2004 election with John Kerry reporting for duty.

Beyond circulating slide decks about the party’s message and holding lanyard conferences reviewing the party’s brand, this coterie of Democratic elites is now onto an allegedly new “Ezra Klein-pilled” policy agenda — one championing the billionaire-financed “abundance” movement amplified by the New York Times’ liberal whisperer in his book of the same name.

That movement essentially argues that environmental, city planning, clean air, and tech regulations pushed by an allegedly all-powerful American Left are the primary obstacle to prosperity. Recently, this faction demonized the idea of requiring real estate moguls to guarantee breathable air in their rental properties and pushed Republican congressional legislation preempting state limits on artificial intelligence, even when it is being used to fleece renters and deny medical claims.

In absolving robber barons from blame for this new Gilded Age, the supply-side messaging is exquisitely crafted for Democratic politicians, operatives, think tankers, and influencers whose careers have relied on finding an ever-narrower path between the demands of their big donors and the rage of their party’s voters.

Through “Abundance,” they are attempting to sell their party’s increasingly affluent (and shrinking) voter base on the plutocrat-approved idea that — rather than being a generational catastrophe — conservatives’ deregulatory assault on the New Deal hasn’t gone far enough.

Of course, that’s Trump’s own economic ideology and message — a reminder that corporate Democrats still believes they can compete with Trump by merely offering a more polite, stable, and culturally refined version of the boorish president.

This repackaged version of deregulation is the same election-losing algorithm Democrats used in the 2024 campaign and that they’ve been amplifying for a generation: On economics, it’s incrementalism, technocratic neoliberalism, and corporatism that placates donors; on culture, it’s identitarianism, social libertarianism, and lawn-sign liberalism that generates plenty of Internet memes for YouTubers and Instagram influencers — but so often alienates voters.

To be sure, refusing to adapt and playing dead could work for Democrats in the short term if things get bad enough. Maybe Trump will so decimate the economy that impoverished voters will briefly return Democrats to power out of total desperation.

But at that point, what’s left to govern?

Without a more direct and compelling challenge to Trumpism and its culture war, what will the next Democratic presidency be beyond another brief interregnum between MAGA governments?

There Is An Alternative

This dark future isn’t preordained. Time doesn’t have to be a flat circle. There is another nascent faction inside the Democrats’ coalition — one that offers a different path in this political multiverse.

You can see it in the huge crowds flocking to rallies headlined by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the growing antitrust movement infiltrating the party, and in periodic labor uprisings across the country. You can also see it in the crop of new-generation populist challengers running for office, in longtime incumbents suddenly feeling the need to echo anti-establishment themes, and in the more honest discussions about the downsides of Democrats constantly avoiding economic populism.

“You get to what we call identity politics (which is) you’re Black you’re wonderful, you’re tremendous, you’re gay, you’re the greatest human being on Earth, rather than saying, ‘What do you stand for?’” Sanders said recently. “You’re gay, that’s fine, who cares … The issue is, what you stand for, which gets you back [to] class politics in the sense of which side are you on? Are you going to stand with working families?”

Though still inchoate and disorganized, this rag-tag alliance is built around a critique of concentrated corporate power and oligarchy. There, we find something that the donor-coddling Democratic political and media elite don’t want to admit: In an era that saw $79 trillion purloined from the bottom 90 percent of income earners over the last half century, the epochal problem isn’t a lack of abundance — it is that oligarchs are hoarding all of the abundance for themselves.

“You can’t make your rent because the guy that employs you is not paying you enough money,” said comedian Bill Burr recently in blunt language that most Democratic politicians still somehow can’t seem to muster. “There’s enough money, there’s enough food, there’s enough shelter for everybody — but these super rich [expletive] want too much for themselves and they are heartless.”

This is a truism that most Americans face in their daily lives. They see it in their credit card bills funding higher bank earnings, their rents fueling bigger landlord windfalls, and their health care premiums financing insurers’ profit margins.

That frustration makes the anti-oligarchy message a far stronger counter-argument to MAGA than Abundance Bros’ technocratic complaints about zoning regulations or #Resistance liberals’ paeans to democracy and identity. Moreover, unlike what Democratic leaders are offering, anti-oligarchy politics offers a direct contrast with Trump not just on economic matters — but on cultural terms.

Unlike the Big Tech-courting Abundance acolytes, anti-oligarchy is a challenge to the titans sitting in the front row of Trump’s inauguration. It’s a challenge that doesn’t just mock Trump-aligned moguls’ obscene wealth, but also makes a pro-family, anti-predator case against their business models that target kids, their surveillance pricing schemes that target your purchases, and their censorship crusades that target their critics.

Unlike Democrats’ Wall Street wing, this faction can indict Trump donors’ junk fees and price-gouging not just in inequality language for lefties, but also in culture-coded vernacular for normies. Anti-oligarchy Democrats can go to war with Trump’s private equity pals harming our elders, our hometown economies, and even our pets. They can attack the monopolies pricing us out of the hospitals we need, the communities we live in, the concerts we want to see, and the sporting events we want to attend (particularly critical for a party whose “bro” rhetoric tried to turn masculinity into a smear and now has a serious dude problem).

As important, anti-oligarchy offers a far clearer contrast for the electorate that sees Trump as merely a more honest — and more entertaining — version of both parties’ worst behavior.

To many disaffected independents, Trump doing favors for his Wall Street donors looks like Clinton, Bush and Obama doing the same; his foreign crypto scheme looks like the Clintons gorging on foreign cash and paid speeches; and his library accepting a $400 million Qatari plane looks like the 21st century version of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama library boondoggles. These voters no doubt see the Trump family grifting off the Washington swamp as merely a new reality TV episode whose previous seasons featured the Bidens and Pelosis.

Liberals are offended by Trump’s lack of manners in pulling off extreme versions of what their own party icons have done, but many Americans seem to cherish the Joker-like quality of Trump’s antics. They seem to appreciate that — unlike establishment Democrats — Trump at least doesn’t use a dog whistle to trick anyone. He uses a bullhorn to proudly broadcast and brag about his malfeasance — all while offering a captivating and distracting culture war along the way.

Swinging these disillusioned voters away from the authoritarian right is an imperative — not for saving the Democrats, but for saving the country. And yet right now, these voters are being offered only conservatives’ MAGA circus or liberals’ Davos cocktail party.

Something better is possible — particularly now as the economy teeters. But the working class will not be swayed by a Democratic Party more interested in creating a 21st-century version of Rockefeller Republicanism than in fighting the culture war.

It’s a war that Trump has spent his life fighting, but that can still be won — if a MAGA alternative channels the populist uprising in a different direction.