Ajay K. Mehrotra (Northwestern) has published a Lawfare review essay on a new book by Andrea Louise Campbell (MIT Political Science), Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes (2025). From the review:

Since the 1980s, tax cuts have been a cornerstone of national Republican economic policy. The 1970s property tax revolts began the obsession with limiting taxes, but the momentum continued well into the following decades and remains with us today. In recent years, the tax cuts fixation has even become bipartisan. National Democrats have surrendered in many ways to this policy preoccupation by limiting their commitments to increasing taxes to only those on the rich, or those who make more than $400,000 (or is it $250,000?). As a result, tax hikes have surpassed Social Security reform in modern American politics as the new “third rail” of domestic policy.

One of the great puzzles of the recent tax-cutting frenzy is why have so many everyday Americans agreed to this new policy prescription? Why aren’t the majority of taxpayers in favor of higher taxes on the rich? Why do they support limiting estate taxes, which affect only the wealthiest Americans, or cutting the corporate tax? Self-interest, after all, would suggest that the non-rich majority would favor higher taxes on the minority of uber-wealthy individuals and companies that have prospered in our New Gilded Age from growing inequality and greater concentrations of wealth.

In her fascinating new book, “Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes,” MIT political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell takes on that set of questions. More broadly, Campbell addresses the fundamental query: “Why is it so hard to raise taxes in the United States? Why is it so difficult to fund government?” As one of the country’s leading experts on public opinion and American politics, she naturally turns for answers to public attitudes toward taxes.

What she finds is surprising and counterintuitive. Unlike rich Americans who, Campbell argues, are well aware of their self-interest and thus have successfully waged a century-long war to reduce their taxes, the rest of us “non-rich,” in Campbell’s terminology, “have often been unwitting allies in the quest of the well-heeled to minimize their taxes.” She finds that many ordinary Americans have distinct tax preferences that counter their objective self-interest.