Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A recent New York Times editorial by Tim Wu, a former antitrust adviser for the Biden administration, caught my eye for the criticism it leveled at Democrats for making affordability a central issue ahead of the midterm elections. Wu contends that the party needs to go further and focus not merely on the high price tags of necessities, but on the unfairness of the entire economic system.

While this is a refreshing shift in the right direction, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s true that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum believe our economy is rigged in favor of the rich. But merely pointing out the obvious is unlikely to attract a huge shift in voting toward the Democratic Party.

Moreover, Wu says nothing about the racist rage that has defined President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s decimation of our democracy, about the devastation to communities of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized members of our society. Nor does he acknowledge the corporate harms that Democrats failed to tackle when they were in power and are now being accelerated under Republicans: fossil fuel emissions, tech domination, and AI, harms that disproportionately impact poor people and people of color.

To Wu and most Democratic Party consultants, these issues are distinct and, depending on the cultural tides, are either worth tackling or anathema.

In fact, they are intimately linked. White supremacy feeds capitalism by distracting poor whites from billionaire-fueled inequality and climate devastation using immigrants and people of color as scapegoats. To take on an unfair economy without addressing the systematically racist impacts of policing, immigration, corporate oligarchy, and the climate crisis does us all a disservice. Moreover, there is an absence of a radical vision for tackling economic and racial justice risks to prevent repeating the same crises in the future.

Democratic Party leaders are falling deeply short by offering little more than undoing Trump’s worst excesses. It is a conservative position to seek a return to the “good old days,” when a predatory capitalist system was........

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