The rise and rise of Elizabeth Warren

This is what makes Warren so remarkable. Her 20 or so percent in the polls is largely coming from people who were firmly behind Hillary Clinton in 2016. She has managed to convince moderate Democrats to support a platform that is, if anything, even more radical than the one proposed by Sanders: banning the world’s largest corporations from operating and using their online platforms, slashing apart monopolies, a much higher top tax rate and a much lower threshold for the estate tax, a 2 percent tax on assets above $50 million which increases to 3 percent at $1 billion, $500 billion for new housing, and, of course, single-payer health care.

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How has she managed to sell mainstream liberals on all this? By being a team player. Instead of criticizing her party’s establishment and attacking other candidates, she emphasizes unity and the importance of winning back Democratic control of the Senate. (Good luck with that one.) In public, when she is asked about her views on health care, she smiles and says, “I agree with Bernie”; in private conversations over cups of tea at her townhouse in Washington, she assures Democratic bigwigs that she is not going to start a Bernie-style “revolution.”

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