A Nation Divided... On Purpose
Or: Settle down, children. Act like you’ve been here before.
It’s been less than two weeks, and I’m already exhausted—both by the Trump 2.0 administration’s relentless policy upheaval and by the preemptive blame for the fall of democracy being laid at the feet of Trump supporters by my fellow left-leaning Americans. I doubt I’m the only one who can’t hear himself think between the cheers and the jeers, but one refrain is coming through loud and clear in the deluge of coverage and commentary: “stop hitting yourself.”
Yes, the administration’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach to governance is gonna raise eyebrows (and legal challenges). But the last time I checked, “man of action” was still near the top of the mythical American Hero requirements list. You have to break a few eggs and all that. Nobody who voted for Trump is going to feel bad about big words like “authoritarian” and “oligarchy” in the middle of a cage match when their guy is landing all the punches. Instead, Trump’s naysayers manage to somehow come across as both hysterical and also boring, all while playing into the classic strategy of ruling classes everywhere: distract and divide the masses. I’ll bring the bread if you bring the circus.
At the same time, my fellow Americans that lean to the right seem to have forgotten what made “their guy” their guy in the first place. Trump 1.0 was the story of a wealthy reality TV star surfing a wave of economic populism into the oval office, only to find that tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation don’t bring about a working-class revival. Most peoples wallets were no fatter after four years of “Sleepy Joe” Biden, and they were angry enough about the cost of eggs to reboot the Trump franchise. But all the action so far has been aimed at reducing political equality and civil rights—like making sure “man” remains at the top of the American Hero requirements list—rather than increasing fairness in economic outcomes. Behind the curtain of DEI and immigration rage, it’s the same old schtick: more for them and less for us.
Division. Distraction. Domination. Sic semper populo.
The result: both sides have done such a thorough job of “othering” their fellow working class Americans that we’ve forgotten our common values. This is intentional. The people in power have been trying to convince us that American values are a zero sum game; that we can’t have more of one good thing without less of another.
Tell me what you want, what you really, really, want.
Most of us value fairness. Sure, there’s always someone quick to point out “life isn’t fair, kid” in a well-intentioned attempt to cheer you up after the cheater wins—but even this sad little chuck-under-the-chin acknowledges that we all think things should be fair. That’s what “values” are: how things should be, regardless of how they are.
So what is fairness in economic terms? Here’s a definition I’d feel comfortable spouting in any bar, in any part of town: fairness is a system where prosperity is broadly shared; a system where everyone who contributes to the wealth of the nation also benefits from it. If you work hard, you should be able to build a decent life, right? And if all our combined effort generates excess wealth, we take care of those among us who can’t work: the elderly (because they’ve done their part already), the children (because they are the future, after all), and the disabled (because we’re not assholes).
And before the anarcho-capitalist libertarian in the back of the bar can get a word in edgewise (sit down, asshole) let me emphasize that “fair” is not the same as “equal.” Fairness is about proportional reward and support—recognizing effort, need, and contribution. A fair system allows those who contribute more to the economy earn more, but also ensures that no one is left so far behind that they can't participate in society at all. Don’t let the super rich and their paid politicians get you muddled up with their “equality” straw dog argument. You know, the one that goes “people who want economic fairness just want everyone to have exactly the same things.”
So… fairness is not equality. But equality itself is also a core value, and there’s one place where Americans have historically agreed that it belongs: political power. It’s the spirit of democracy that each person gets an equal vote, that each citizen’s voice carries the same weight when we choose our leaders and determine our collective future. It’s the same principle behind the rule of law—that everyone stands equal before it, no matter their wealth or status. This isn’t some niche, partisan belief; it’s the foundation of the American system. When we talk about one person, one vote, when we insist that no one is above the law, we’re acknowledging that equality matters—not in the sense of everyone having the same life outcomes, but in the sense that no one’s rights, voice, or access to justice should be greater or lesser than anyone else’s.
That’s why fairness and equality have always gone hand in hand. When economic fairness was at its peak, political fairness was expanding too. More Americans had access to the ballot box, civil rights protections were broadening, and the principle of equal participation in democracy was stronger than ever. And yet, over the past 50 years, we’ve been convinced that these two ideas—economic fairness and political equality—are somehow in conflict, that progress for some must come at the expense of others. That was never true. But it was a damn effective way to keep us fighting each other instead of the people who actually took our wealth and power.
I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
For more than half the people in the US—those born after 1980 who make up about half of the workers today—this “fair economy” I’m banging on about must sound like a utopian pipe dream. But Pepperidge Farm remembers: I’m talking about the system Americans built in the mid-20th century.
My parents were born in the pre-war 1940s, part of a generation that came of age believing in The American Dream—a society where hard work and ambition could lift anyone to a better life. For them, and for many in their generation, that dream was real. Economic mobility—the ability to move up the income ladder—was higher in the 1950s–1970s than at any time before or since. Studies show that children born in the early 1940s had a 90% chance of out-earning their parents. By comparison, a child born in the 1980s had only a 50% chance.
The American Dream wasn’t just about personal determination—it was about structural conditions that made upward mobility possible. Wages rose with productivity, meaning that as the economy grew, so did the paychecks of ordinary workers. Higher unionization rates ensured that more people had good wages, benefits, and job security. Public investment in education kept college affordable, and federal housing policies expanded homeownership opportunities for working families (though with serious racial exclusions, which I’ll get to in a minute).
At the same time, corporations were still expected to reinvest profits into their businesses and workers rather than funneling everything to shareholders and executives. Stock buybacks—now one of the main drivers of corporate wealth concentration—weren’t actually legal until 1982. CEO pay was modest by today’s standards, with executives earning about 30 times the average worker's salary (compared to over 300 times today).
None of this happened by chance. The government plays an active role in shaping economic outcomes through taxation and spending. We love to hate the state today because we know the high price of eggs is a direct result of government policy — from 1981 to present. But that’s not how we rolled as a people from 1940-1980. The top marginal income tax rate was above 90% from 1944-1963 and never fell below 70% until the Reagan administration. Corporate tax rates were even higher.
That tax revenue didn’t just disappear—it was reinvested into the economy through government programs focused on infrastructure, education, housing, and social safety nets. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food assistance didn’t just keep people from falling into destitution—they gave working-class families the stability to build wealth and pass it down. The system ensured that prosperity was shared broadly rather than hoarded at the top.
There’s a reason why policies that ensured broad prosperity made sense at the time. A government elected by the people had every reason to enact policies that were good for the majority of people. The country wasn’t being run exclusively by and for the top 1%—it was a time when politicians actually feared the consequences of betraying the working and middle classes. Voter participation was high; unions had political influence; and corporate lobbying had not yet hollowed out democracy.
We are the middle children of history, man.
I was born in 1971, more or less the middle of Gen X. One of 65 million people who showed up just in time for the resurgence of the elite, brought to you by the politics of division and the manufactured consent media.
Relatively speaking, 1965-1980 was the sweet spot in US history when it comes to both economic fairness and political equality. Although structural racism and sexism meant it was far from being a utopia for all Americans, in terms of economic security and political representation, the end of the middle of the 20th century was the closest the US has ever been to a fair and free society for most people.
The economy wasn’t perfect—no economy ever is—but if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could expect a steady job, a house, and a decent life without spending every waking moment worrying about bills. A single-income household could afford a mortgage on a three-bedroom home, a new car every few years, and maybe even a vacation to Disneyland or the Grand Canyon without putting it on a credit card. College tuition? Dirt cheap compared to today. Public universities charged around $400 per year in tuition—or about $3,000 in today’s dollars—meaning you could work a summer job and come out debt-free.
The bottom 90% held over 65% of the nation’s wealth, meaning economic power was more broadly shared. The minimum standard of living had never been higher. The poverty rate was dropping, food insecurity was low, and thanks to programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and expanded Social Security, the elderly and disabled weren’t left to fend for themselves. A full-time minimum wage job—at about $1.60 an hour (over $12 adjusted for inflation)—wasn’t glamorous, but it could still cover rent in most cities. Even in the worst-case scenario, the safety net was stronger than it had ever been before or would be again.
In terms of political equality, 1971 was a paradox. On one hand, more people had a say in the system than ever before. On the other, plenty were still fighting for the right to be heard. When the US was founded, political power belonged almost exclusively to white men who owned property—a tiny fraction of the population. By the time I was born, that monopoly had been broken. Women had been voting for over 50 years, Black Americans had finally secured legal protections against disenfranchisement, and in just a few months, the 26th Amendment would lower the voting age to 18, recognizing that if you were old enough to be drafted to Vietnam, you were old enough to cast a ballot. The system still favored the powerful, but the average citizen had more political influence than at any prior point in US history—at least in theory.
But theory and reality are rarely the same. Black Americans still faced voter suppression, especially in the South, where literacy tests had been banned, but intimidation, gerrymandering, and outright violence persisted. Women had political rights but not full autonomy—in most states, they still needed their husband’s permission to get a credit card, and marital rape wasn’t even a crime in much of the country. Indigenous people had only been US citizens for 47 years and were still fighting for control over their own land and governance. LGBTQ Americans had no legal protections, and simply being gay could get you fired, arrested, or institutionalized.
The dismantling of this system wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate. The people elected to run things simply stopped working for the many and started working for the few. Why? Because they were paid to, Democrat and Republican alike.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Gen X grew up in an America giving bipolar in the values department. My whole life, we’ve been on two separate tracks: one toward greater political equality, and another toward lesser economic fairness. While we the people were busy pushing progress, the rich and powerful were slowly buying the government out from under us and using their consolidated media holdings to sow the seeds of discord and harvest ever larger crops of working class division. These trends weren’t about party politics. Every administration from Nixon to Biden contributed something oversaw both a major step forward in political rights and two steps backward—one in economic fairness, the other in democracy itself.
It’s important to understand: these were not connected events. They didn’t have to happen together. One was the result of activism and mass political engagement; the other was the result of lobbying, deregulation, and deliberate policy choices. But thanks to a well-funded propaganda machine, many Americans were convinced that the first caused the second.
Like any good horror story, it all started with Richard Nixon. On the up side, political equality took a major step forward on his watch with Title IX in 1972, finally banning sex discrimination in education, opening doors for generations of women in academics and sports. But behind the scenes, the economic fairness that made the postwar middle class possible was unraveling. Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971, detaching the dollar from gold and setting the stage for financial speculation, inflation, and wage stagnation. At the same time, corporate America launched a coordinated counteroffensive, with Lewis Powell’s infamous memo urging business leaders to seize control of the courts, the universities, and—most importantly—the media. Nixon’s deregulation of media ownership allowed conglomerates to start buying up local newspapers and radio stations, replacing independent journalism with corporate messaging. The narrative shift was subtle at first: suddenly, unions weren’t blue-collar defenders but corrupt special interests, and welfare wasn’t a safety net but a haven for freeloaders. The message was clear—your real enemy wasn’t the CEO sending your job overseas; it was the single mother on food stamps.
Enter Jimmy Carter, the last POTUS too genuine for the job, and the last Democrat to enter office before corporations fully cemented their control over both parties. He expanded workplace protections for women with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, preventing employers from firing women for getting pregnant. But while civil rights activists were celebrating another hard-won victory, the seeds of economic decline were being quietly planted. Carter’s airline deregulation bill in 1978 was sold as “modernization,” but what it really did was break the back of unionized airline workers, opening the door for industry-wide union busting that would accelerate in the coming decades. And it wasn’t just airlines—Carter set the stage for deregulation in trucking, railroads, and banking, all under the banner of free-market efficiency. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buckley v. Valeo (1978) legally equated money with speech, opening the floodgates for corporate donations to political campaigns. In media, the old Fairness Doctrine—designed to ensure balanced political coverage—was being ignored more and more, laying the groundwork for what would become a hyper-partisan corporate news landscape. The new message? Government regulation was the problem. The free market was the solution.
Ronald Reagan gets the credit for putting the stake in the heart of economic fairness in the US. This guy didn’t just win an election—he launched a full-scale counterrevolution. While political fairness advanced with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, granting amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants, economic fairness suffered its biggest blow yet. Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, signaling to every corporate executive in America that the war on unions had officially begun. He followed it up with the biggest tax cuts for the wealthy in U.S. history, slashing the top rate from 70% to 28% and starving government programs that had kept the middle class afloat. Meanwhile, media deregulation accelerated, culminating in the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, opening the floodgates for right-wing talk radio and paving the way for Fox News a decade later. This was the moment when America’s working class was split into warring camps, with conservatives fed a steady diet of union-hating, welfare-blaming, government-is-evil rhetoric while liberals fought over the scraps of identity politics, too fractured to mount a real economic challenge.
For the next twenty years, Americans ping-ponged between two parties that both worked for the same corporate donors. George H.W. Bush gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, but also set the stage for NAFTA, the deal that would eventually gut U.S. manufacturing. Bill Clinton brought Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 1993, a flawed but meaningful step toward LGBTQ military inclusion, but also repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999, tearing down the last firewall between Wall Street greed and the savings of ordinary Americans. George W. Bush pumped billions into HIV/AIDS relief with PEPFAR, while slashing taxes for the rich and stacking the Supreme Court with justices who would soon deliver the Citizens United ruling, legally cementing the ability of corporations to buy elections outright.
Meanwhile, media ownership consolidated at an unprecedented rate. By 2003, six corporations controlled 90% of all U.S. media, ensuring that no matter which channel you tuned into, you were hearing a narrative carefully crafted to keep you from asking why wages were stagnant, why billionaires were paying nothing in taxes, and why both parties seemed to serve the same masters. Instead, you were told to fear illegal immigrants, Muslim terrorists, welfare cheats, and inner-city crime.
By the time Obama took office, the game was fully rigged. He presided over the legalization of same-sex marriage, a monumental civil rights victory. But when the 2008 financial crisis hit, his administration bailed out the banks but not the homeowners, ensuring that the same predatory capitalists who crashed the economy emerged richer than ever.
Then along came Trump to reap the benefits of 45 years of divisive propaganda and feed the working class its own tail by reducing both economic fairness and political equality. Not only were his 2017 tax cuts another massive windfall for the wealthy, his administration and stacked SCOTUS managed to roll back established protections for literally every historically marginalized group—all thanks to his media empire allies who’d perfected the art of convincing working-class white Americans that the high price of eggs is the fault of immigrants, feminists, and diversity quotas, rather than corporate greed. Even the media outlets clutching their pearls over Trump did little more than amplify this message by constant repetition while conveniently leaving out the part where the people who own the media are the problem.
It’s hard to give Biden much credit for progress on the political equality front. Granted, he did what he could to fill in the holes that Trump punched in established protections, but pardoning his kid for making mistakes made by thousands of other kids with far fewer connections—some of whom are still doing the time—is about as unequal before the law as you can get. Points maybe for reminding us all that the ERA never actually made it into the Constitution but probably should have. Regardless, the economy remained a rigged casino, corporate profits hit record highs, and not one peep about raising taxes on the wealthy or the corporations they command.
So yeah, let’s lower the price of eggs by keeping trans people out of public bathrooms.
Wonder Twin powers, activate!
For 50 years, we’ve been fed the same lie: that economic fairness and political equality are mutually exclusive. That progress for marginalized groups comes at the expense of the working class. That taxation, regulation, and labor rights are “socialism.”
But history proves otherwise. We once had a system that allowed both political equality and economic fairness to grow together. It was dismantled, piece by piece, not by civil rights activists, but by corporate interests and their willing political servants, Democrat and Republican alike.
And they got away with it by convincing us to fight each other instead of them.
The truth is, we don’t have to choose between the civil rights gains of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and the broad economic prosperity of the mid-20th century. We can have both. We should have both.
We’ve been here before. The Gilded Age was the first great American experiment in extreme wealth concentration and corporate rule. Just like today, the rich owned the politicians, the media, and the economy. Just like today, they told working people that their real enemies were each other—immigrants, the poor, anyone who wasn’t in their tribe. And just like today, they nearly got away with it.
But they didn’t. Ordinary people organized. Unions, progressives, and populists forced the government to break up monopolies, tax the ultra-rich, and pass laws that protected workers from exploitation. They fought for decades, but they won. They proved that economic fairness isn’t a pipe dream—it’s a policy choice.
History isn’t a loop, but it does rhyme. The question isn’t whether the rich and powerful will ever give up their grip on the system. They won’t. The question is whether we’ll make them.
The first step is seeing through the lie—the one that tells us our enemies are our fellow working people, divided by race, gender, or political party, rather than the billionaires and corporations who actually control our economic fate. The second step is getting big money out of politics. The third step is demanding policies that put working people first—just like we had when the economy was at its fairest.
The powerful will do everything they can to keep us distracted, divided, and fighting over crumbs while they walk away with the whole pie. But we outnumber them. We always have. The only question is whether we’re willing to stop fighting each other and start fighting back—together.
Author’s Notes
Jul 24: Dick Dowdell, a fellow technologist and political commentator—and former Republican supporter—just published this piece on Medium that echoes both the analysis in my essay and its call to action. I’m sharing it here as a reminder of a time when support for this or that party reflected a difference of opinions about the best means to achieve ends built on values we held in common.
Creative Process Transparency: This article was collaboratively written using generative AI. The structure and key themes were developed by me, while ChatGPT provided assistance in expanding historical sections and refining arguments. The final voice, tone, and integration of ideas were shaped by me. Based on our established attribution model, this article reflects an approximately 80/20 division of contributions. You can read the whole transcript here.