Put another way: billionaires are bad — unless they hold the right progressive views.

Our Revolution’s Steyer endorsement is a betrayal of the old labor Left that sought to empower workers relative to employers. The endorsement is not, however, a betrayal of the kind of NGO-friendly technocratic progressivism that sums up Steyer’s campaign and increasingly drives the Democratic Party. Since he’s the sort of billionaire who funds technocratic, single-issue NGOs, his bid for governor amounts to the perfect fusion of progressive capital and what John Judis and Ruy Texeira call the NGO “shadow party” that continues to define how the Democratic Party operates and what it stands for — including a double standard for the progressive rich like Steyer.

Our Revolution isn’t the only progressive NGO to endorse Steyer. The billionaire also enjoys the backing of California Environmental Voters, the Climate Center Action Fund, Third Act, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, and Courage California, among many others. That last group explains: “He aligns with Courage California on multiple issues, including our top legislative priorities: single-payer health care, comprehensive health care for undocumented Californians, abolishing ICE, climate action that centers frontline Black and brown communities, progressive reform of our criminal-justice system, and corporate accountability.”

Why are these supposedly anti-oligarchic groups rallying around — ahem — an oligarch? Steyer amassed his estimated $2.4 billion fortune by founding one progressive nightmare, a hedge fund, Farallon Capital, which invested in other progressive nightmares including coal, oil, gas, and private prisons before reinventing himself as a Green crusader in the 2010s. 

Of course, in the past there have been rich presidents and governors, some of them reformers who were praised or denounced as traitors to their elite class. But the greatest of the rich individuals who made it to the White House or the governor’s mansion — unlike Steyer, or Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to say nothing of Donald Trump — patiently rose to the highest office by serving in lower offices first. 

President George Washington, one of the wealthiest men at the Founding, served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and was a delegate to the Continental Congress before becoming commander in chief of the Continental Army and presiding over the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Theodore Roosevelt rose through the political ranks as a New York state representative, assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, and US vice president. His relative Franklin D. Roosevelt followed a similar cursus honorum, as a New York state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, and governor of New York, before being elected president. John F. Kennedy was wealthy, as well, but he served his apprenticeship in the House of Representatives and then the US Senate before becoming president. Even Herbert Hoover, a wealthy mining engineer, ran the United States Food Administration during World War I, winning great admiration for his efficient management of postwar aid in Europe, and served as commerce secretary in the 1920s before he became president. 

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If you look in the annals of American history for a rich amateur who never served in public office before becoming president and yet became a great and successful president, you won’t find any. For confirmation, you need only look at the unpopular and incompetent billionaire amateur who currently occupies the Oval Office. 

Which brings us back to Steyer’s NGO backers. His amateurism should be a red flag for these groups. But, tellingly, it isn’t.

NGOs involved in politics are donor-funded “astroturf” organizations — fake grassroots outfits. To name one example, Third Act is fiscally sponsored by the Sustainable Markets Foundation, which, in turn, has received grants and donations in the last few years from the center-left Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Sequoia Climate Foundation, and the Aspen Community Foundation — a roll call of nonprofit foundations endowed by billionaires and millionaires. For NGOs like these to denounce the existence of billionaires as a public-policy failure and a flaw in contemporary capitalism is thus to bite the hands that feed them. 

This kind of nonprofit advocacy by donor-funded astroturf groups by its nature is inimical to democracy, which depends upon debate among those who hold different views and compromise among groups with different interests. The technocratic strain of progressivism, which goes back more than a century in the United States, is particularly suspicious of legislatures in which debates and compromises take place.  

The idea that legislatures, controlled by “special interests,” are natural enemies of the “public interest” — as discerned by “experts,” of course — explains the enthusiasm among American progressives for institutions that weaken or circumvent legislative bodies: strong governors and presidents; technocratic city managers ruling on behalf of marginalized mayors and city councils; and ballot initiatives and referenda, which allows citizens to bypass legislatures and make laws directly.

Since the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, technocrats to the Left of center have put their hopes in a succession of elites who, unlike corrupt, deal-making politicians, might be able to generate and administer enlightened public policies in the national and global interest. In the first half of the last century, the ideal was the altruistic career civil servant, guided by the latest teachings of social science. Contrary to conservatives who claim that the New Deal foisted all-powerful democracy on America, the actual New Deal system was based on interest-group corporatism and mass-membership organizations: labor unions, farmers’ associations, employer groups, religious organizations and their volunteering arms, and so on. The New Deal state saw its role as corporatist-style mediation between these groups and the massive social forces they represented.

Progressives and free-market libertarians alike denounced New Deal-style “interest-group liberalism” as the embodiment of squalid corruption. In response, in the 1960s and ’70s, Ralph Nader and his allies modeled a new kind of technocratic progressive champion: the public-interest lawyer. Rather than pursuing legal and regulatory reforms by the democratic means of electing reformers to public office, Naderite progressives sought an end-run around representative democracy and the need to generate voter support. Instead, they directly sued corporations and government agencies. In the realm of civil rights, issues like abortion and LGBT rights were similarly removed from the realm of elected politics and determined by federal courts with the help of legal briefs by contending attorneys.

The affinities between this tradition of technocratic progressivism and autocratic rule are as evident in the 21st century as they were in the twentieth. If public policy should be based on science — social science in the old days, climate science and gender science and woke pandemic science today — then debate is pointless and dissenters are either ignorant or corrupt. “The science is settled,” to use the motto of contemporary progressives.

In a regime based on science — rather than popular superstition or the icky wheeling-and-dealing of elected politicians — public policy should be made by scientifically trained experts. If there is any role for elected legislatures at all in the technocratic progressive utopia, it is merely to delegate sweeping powers to enlightened bureaucrats and to passively ratify the rules and regulations they issue.

And if strong executives are needed to impose top-down progressive reforms, over the objections of lobbyist-ridden legislatures, then what better executive than someone like a self-financed billionaire candidate who has never been corrupted by having held civilian public office before? That’s Tom Steyer.

Indeed, his candidacy was prophesied nearly two decades ago by none other than Nader. In 2009, the green crusader published a utopian fantasy titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! In the novel, a group of enlightened billionaires and celebrities — including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Yoko Ono — band together to save America from the greatest threat to top-down progressivism: normal democratic politics. On the assumption that ordinary elected officials of all parties are merely corrupt pawns of corporations, Nader’s fictional billionaires fund — what else? — nonprofit community groups with leaders untainted by electoral experience.

The dream goes back even further. More than a century ago, another leading progressive figure published a similar utopian novel. The Texan political operator Colonel Edward Mandell House (the “Colonel” was a political honorific), an important adviser to Woodrow Wilson, published his own work of fiction titled Philip Dru: Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935. In House’s progressive fantasy, Philip Dru, an idealistic soldier and graduate of West Point, literally goes to war with corrupt capitalists, kills thousands of Americans in a second civil war, and becomes the dictatorial “Administrator of the United States.” Before he resigns, this benevolent American Caesar by executive decree promotes women’s suffrage and labor rights, breaks the power of corporations, and establishes a British-American alliance that rules the world. 

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Once you appreciate the influence of the technocratic-progressive fantasy on the American center Left, it is easy to understand the hostility of many in the NGO-industrial complex to Xavier Becerra, who has rapidly risen in the polls to be a rival of Steyer among Democratic candidates for governor. Becerra is the opposite of Tom Steyer: unlike the billionaire, he has worked his way up the ladder of California politics, from the state legislature to the US house to a Cabinet role in the Biden administration. It is precisely because Becerra is a conventional, pragmatic career politician, willing to compromise and eager to avoid doomed symbolic fights, that he is by definition a corrupt member of the establishment, according to the anti-political ideology of technocratic progressives.

Purists on the Left are attacking Becerra for not being zealous enough in advocating the unrealistic policy of single-payer health care at the national or state level; for not engaging in the publicity stunt of suing oil companies for causing climate change; and other litmus tests of the single-issue nonprofit advocacy groups on the Left. Rich amateurs like Steyer, having no record in office at all, have no history of compromises. They are free to share the most extreme positions of the most utopian activists. 

During the first Trump administration in 2017, when congressional Democrats hesitated to impeach the president for fear that the effort would backfire, Steyer founded and funded an outfit entitled “Need To Impeach.” Earlier, in 2013, when many Democratic politicians hesitated to alienate construction unions by blocking the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Canadian tar sands to the United States, Steyer campaigned against it, eventually achieving his goal in the Biden years. Far from proving Steyer’s moral purity, stances like these merely demonstrate the ability of an arrogant rich man freed from constraints to strike dramatic poses to please single-issue zealots.

Like Meg Whitman — the former eBay and Hewlett Packard CEO and Republican candidate for governor of California who lost to Jerry Brown in 2010 after spending $144 million of her own money — Tom Steyer may yet go down to defeat. But in Illinois, progressive Democrats for the most part don’t object to Hyatt hotel heir JB Pritzker, who, before becoming governor, had never held public office. On the contrary, Pritzker supports most of the positions favored by the Left, from abortion to outlawing assault weapons and legalizing marijuana, so that the fact that he is not only a billionaire but also a super-rich nepo baby is not held against him. Similarly, when Michael Bloomberg won election as Democratic mayor of New York, the fact that he had never been elected to any office before was not held against him by most New York City Democrats. Indeed, this was an advantage in progressive technocracy’s fundamentally anti-political frame.

The elitist, technocratic variant of American progressivism has gathered strength as labor unions, local politics, and mass-membership groups have declined. Whatever happens in the California governor’s race, its adherents can be counted on to privilege rule by experts over political contestation, and to choose rich activists over the messiness of electoral democracy. And they will continue to hope for salvation by a deus ex machina, even if the untainted savior who descends from above is the kind of plutocrat that traditional labor leaders and social democrats viewed with suspicion and disdain.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Swalwell probably knew he had a problem. Several of them, actually: allegations of propositioning and sexually assaulting staffers and interns had followed him for years. Why, under those circumstances, did he choose to run for governor? The same reason any gambler keeps going after a long winning streak: if you go long enough without losing, you forget you can lose it all in a single hand.

The house, it turns out, always wins. Days ago, the congressman looked like the frontrunner in California’s gubernatorial race, a polished liberal with a strong anti-Trump national profile and impeccable #MeToo credentials. In 2018, few voices on Capitol Hill were louder in opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court; and Swalwell’s argument rested squarely on the principle of “believe all women.” That fall, when President Trump’s Department of Education directed universities to tighten their definitions of sexual harassment, Swalwell tweeted: “Support survivors. Believe survivors. We are with you.”

These maxims lost some of their force as liberals reckoned with the excesses of movements like #MeToo in the years that followed. But they were never entirely retracted. Swalwell’s career, in other words, was unraveled by the very principles he weaponized against others.

In an account first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday, an anonymous former intern accused the congressman of assaulting her twice while she was too drunk to consent. (Swalwell’s attorney had sent her a cease-and-desist letter the previous night; this failed to prevent the story from coming out.)

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Then came a second report, this one featuring three named accusers. Their accounts ranged from unwanted touching to unsolicited explicit photos and Snapchat messages soliciting nudes in return. One woman said he exposed himself while she was at the wheel. In a video published online, Swalwell called the allegations “flat false” and vowed to fight them “with everything I have” — though, peculiarly, he apologized to his wife in the same breath. (In an interview with CNN, Swalwell’s lawyer refused to specify what, exactly, Swalwell was apologizing to his wife for.)

Swalwell is hardly eager to apply the principle of “believe all women” to his own case. And he may regret his previous fiery rhetoric, now that women who, in some cases, may have engaged in consensual activity with a powerful man have later claimed sexual assault. But his staff have been less circumspect. By Thursday, when rumors of the forthcoming allegations began circulating internally, staffers had begun to quit. By Friday, nearly all of Swalwell’s top advisors had resigned. And by Saturday, each of the 23 Democratic leaders who had endorsed his campaign, including his closest allies on Capitol Hill, had rescinded their support. 

But the collapse of Swalwell’s campaign, several former Swalwell interns and staffers told me, had begun well before any reports became public. The former campaign intern who described the campaign as “uncomfortable” first grew uneasy at the California Democratic Party convention in February. People from “high circles” in Washington, he told me, were already whispering about Swalwell’s sexual encounters with congressional interns. 

As campaign staffers mulled over the rumors — many still reluctant to believe them — this intern made up his mind. His commitment to the campaign was over. He stayed on in name, but in practice he “just tapped out.” He remained, he told me, only because he was curious to see how the campaign would respond once the story finally broke.

He was not alone. Other staffers, too, had begun growing uneasy in the weeks before the reports became public. Many effectively checked out in the week before their publication. There were no public allegations — at least, not yet. But mere whispers were enough to begin the campaign’s slow internal unraveling. 

Early last week, a source within the campaign told me, the campaign began canceling meetings scheduled for later that week. By Thursday afternoon, many staffers and interns were already writing and sending in their resignation letters, bracing for the big Chronicle story. Some volunteers remained in denial: “There will be no big story published tomorrow,” one wrote in a campaign Signal chat. “It’s all hearsay to get us afraid.” But by the weekend, that position was no longer tenable. According to people in the campaign, a majority of staffers had resigned in response to the report.

I reviewed two campaign managers’ jointly written resignation letter, posted on a campaign Slack for interns Friday afternoon, which put it this way: “We came into this campaign looking to help elect a young principled leader to fight for the next generation and now it has been made clear that is not the case.” Half an hour later, that Slack had been deleted without warning. Several sources close to the campaign found the move perplexing, given that Swalwell, in his non-apology posted to X that evening, said he firmly intended to continue his campaign.

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But everything seems to be shutting down. “No one asked me to stay or defended him to me after I resigned,” a now-departed campaign coordinator told me. He told me Swalwell’s hypocrisy was “antithetical to the values of our party,” and that he wanted Swalwell to resign and admit his wrongdoing. In short, to heed the old Swalwell — the one who believed all women.

One intern recalled the internal Slack going “berserk” on Friday afternoon, though the messages described here are based on my sources’ best recollection, since the whole Slack has since been deleted. The quiet-quitting of the past several weeks had exploded into a staff revolt. “If you still support Eric Swalwell after this, you’re a piece of shit,” one woman wrote. “Hey, I thought we believe all women,” another quipped. There were plenty more remarks in the same spirit. That is, save for one naive intern who asked, “So does this mean we are all done, or is the campaign still going?”

Despite reports of mass resignations across both Swalwell’s campaign and congressional offices, some staffers may stay for reasons that have little to do with loyalty. In a public statement condemning Swalwell and expressing horror at the allegations, senior campaign staff noted that “not everyone — in particular our junior staff — can immediately forfeit their income and benefits without significant personal risk or consequence.” But, as one person who has since left the campaign told me, “this statement should have come from [Swalwell], not his staffers.”

Then there is the matter of secrecy. Swalwell has been mired in controversy over his camp’s insistence that no one in his congressional office was ever compelled to sign a nondisclosure agreement. On the campaign side, a Swalwell adviser carefully told Politico that he had “never asked someone to personally sign an NDA,” though he clarified that the campaign did have a privacy agreement meant to protect confidential materials. 

I’ve reviewed a signed copy of one such privacy agreement. It is a bizarrely skeletal, template-like document, still containing bracketed placeholders like “[TYPES OF CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION].” Whatever its legal force, given how sloppily it was drafted, the document may help explain why everyone I interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity. 

“I was really hoping that his campaign would go to hell anyway,” one former campaign team member told me. His disgust ran deeper than the sexual allegations. He’d long found Swalwell personally unsettling and inauthentic. “He’s fake anyway, and a very, very weird person,” he added. “Meeting him, you knew something was off, especially after hearing of his allegations. I was hoping [the campaign] would go to the shitbin. The difference between me and [those who stay quiet] is I know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Perhaps Swalwell came to believe that his very public alignment with the politics of #MeToo offered a kind of insulation, that a man who had so conspicuously presented himself as an advocate for survivors would be harder to cast as the villain in such allegations. If so, his calculation now appears catastrophically foolish. A representative for the campaign didn’t respond to my request for comment by deadline.

Swalwell, of course, says he is being railroaded by a rush to judgment. So do a number of anti-woke commentators now rallying to his defense on principle. These are the very sorts of people the old Swalwell would have denounced without hesitation. During the Kavanaugh allegations, he posted “100% #BelieveSurvivors” and insisted that when “separate and independent” accusations all “look the same,” the “arrows point in the same directions.” What, he asked then, were the odds that “three or four women independently, who never met each other, would have similar experiences with one person?” 

Faced now with allegations of his own, that moral certainty has disappeared on contact. His staff, however, appear to have taken his #MeToo pledges more seriously than he ever did.

Freedom of movement, multiculturalism, global economic openness, and affirmation of the historically marginalized: these are the core principles that have become synonymous with the Brahmin Left’s vision of progressive capitalism, and which California’s particular fusion of elite and activist driven politics has done so much to shape.

The problem for Democrats pining for a Golden State hero to slay Trumpism is that the strength of these convictions is indelibly tied up with a record of aloof misrule and beguiling hypocrisy.  While some state Democrats have been in an uproar this week over Newsom’s proposed budget cuts, the state’s deep-seated economic challenges extend far beyond decisions over any single social program. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger left the Governor’s office in 2011, Democrats have overwhelmingly dominated California’s state politics, enjoying a “supermajority” in the state legislature free of Republican influence for over twelve years. With 43 of California’s 52 congressional districts in their hands, they have also shifted the poles of Democratic politics from the Northeast and Midwest to the West Coast.

Some progressives might assume this performance is a tribute to uncompromising values and smart party-building. Yet in this period, California’s image as a beacon for those seeking reinvention and the American Dream has been gradually but unmistakably sullied, a challenge Newsom’s second term in office is unlikely to reverse despite his sudden interest in slashing red tape around development.

For the world’s fourth largest economy, the state’s major indicators of development don’t inspire much confidence. Nearly a third of Californians live in or near the threshold of poverty, and nearly a quarter of the U.S. homeless population lives in California. The future isn’t bright for the state’s youth, either. One 2023 report on educational attainment placed California in the bottom half, far below most other states dominated by Democrats.

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And the “California Exodus,” first identified in the early 1990s, shows few signs of abating. The UnHerd contributor Joel Kotkin, a former Bill Clinton supporter, has blamed California’s woes on a green, liberal “gentry” motivated by a suspicion of development and expensive energy policies. Thronged, purportedly, by self-serving public sector unions, NIMBY lobbies, and zealous climate activists, California’s Democratic Party has succumbed to its worst instincts around managing its existing coalition. With a monopoly on state power, it has rewarded inertia while amplifying a caricature-prone conception of social justice divorced from the very real material hardships of the working-class.

Kotkin’s unsparing portrait is undoubtedly meant to provoke progressives who sincerely believe California is a policy leader and agenda-setter for the Democratic party. Many would proudly contend that, with an assist from the party’s delegation in the Pacific Northwest, California Democrats have the set bar for regulating carbon emissions and extending protections to minorities, and that they are focused on improving wages in California’s all important hospitality sector. If the state’s affordable housing crisis is less than excusable, they would add, at least Newsom and his allies are waking up to the issue.

This apologia fails to appreciate that when national voters think of the merits of one-party rule under Democrats, they now turn to California’s underwhelming performance. And the disenchantment cuts across the ideological spectrum. Cultural moderates and blue-collar conservatives believe the party’s priorities are elitist and dogmatic, while Left-wing populists see the state as ground zero for government capture by Big Tech.

The air of elitism cannot be overstated. Too often, support for California’s progressivism, both within the state and from afar, betrays the exact dynamic Kotkin and like-minded critics take issue with: the entitled sense of “stewardship” that drives the modern Democratic Party’s approach to governance. Rather than focus on broadening the pathways to middle-class prosperity and setting bold targets for poverty reduction, California Democrats appear to be in the business of merely managing economic insecurity through means-tested programs like food assistance. Judging by the numbers, they haven’t succeeded, despite plenty of legislation attesting to their support for active government.

It wasn’t always this way. Between the original Progressive Era and the early postwar boom, California had a competitive two party-system inflected by agrarian populism, anti-monopoly politics, and a growing trade union movement. The Second World War and federal New Deal policies rapidly industrialized the state, consolidating California’s status as a cultural, economic, and political counterweight to the East Coast and a place with expanding potential. Despite some hotbeds of hardline conservatism, California overall seemed to testify to the efficacy and popularity of strong government and public investment. Indeed, its extraordinary growth and the population’s sense of upward mobility seemed largely driven by the New Deal order.

But the former governor Jerry Brown transformed West Coast progressivism. Big developmentalist projects and courtship of the working-class gave way to a watered-down version of “New Left” autonomy, wellness culture, and (often superficial) ecological consciousness. While the Golden State’s notorious smog eventually improved as a result of stronger environmental standards, prospects for the working-class were less encouraging.

Since then, California’s stark economic inequality has, for all intents and purposes, become a Democratic problem. Economic progressives point with good reason to anti-government, budget-slashing Republicans in Congress as a major reason for America’s pockmarked welfare state and wealth inequality. But the fact is that in deep-blue California there is no obstructionist opposition party to blame for its limited horizons. Indeed, although Trump noticeably improved his margins there in the 2024 election, the state GOP is essentially a rump party (ostracized for its aggressive stance on restricting immigrants, yes, but also a victim of its own chosen irrelevance).

This inconvenient fact of one-party rule is beginning to bear down on other California Democrats hoping to lead their party out of the wilderness. While Newsom still enjoys the highest name recognition at the national level, the evolving situation might be best described as the Ro Khanna dilemma, in which aspiring party insurgents are tethered to the very upscale, Brahmin Left constituencies they must distance themselves from. Since winning his first House term in 2016, Khanna has built a profile as both an “economic patriot” who advocates for industrial policy and a sometime-adversary of monopoly power, particularly in regard to the tech industry. He co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, and has become a prominent interlocutor between the party establishment and progressive activists. His near ubiquitous media presence during Trump’s first six months back in office suggests he is either planning to run for president or play progressive kingmaker in the hopes of catapulting himself to the VP slot.

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Yet Khanna also represents the richest congressional district in the United States — a symbol of just how comfortable the once-Republican dominated upper-class are with Democrats, and how much the once-populist Democratic Party has ingratiated itself among America’s 21st century oligarchs and cultural elites.

That image of following the preferences of society’s richest will be hard to shake. Many progressive Democrats still like to think of themselves as New Deal-style social democrats focused on workers’ interests. Yet as Trump’s “triple-trending counties” prove, many parts of the country don’t see them that way. Fair or not, overcoming that perception is the main task for the Democrats. The question is whether the party’s would-be leaders have the stamina and authenticity to do so.

As Khanna illustrates, however, it will take Trumpian levels of chutzpah for elite progressives to convincingly run against their ossified establishment. Whatever his true convictions, Khanna seems unlikely to transform into a veritable tribune of the left behind, whether they reside in California or Western Pennsylvania. Needless to say, the odds of the same happening to Newsom are even more remote.

That’s not to say a healthy intraparty rebellion couldn’t ignite further in California. But given the state’s reputation for dysfunction and drift, Democrats desperate for new blood and new ideas might reconsider the faith they once put in their California delegation. Jejune fantasies of a “Left coast” paradise can no longer distract from the hard truth: In the age of Trump, Progressive California has been a drag on building real working-class power.