“Have I committed myself to a political agenda that works against my own interest?”

How we each respond to the answer to this question should be informed by the answer to this second question:

“Is my best interest in opposition to the greater good?”

It is impossible to make sense of everything that is going on these days if we cannot see the motivating force behind all the dizzying craziness. It is not sufficient to claim that Trump is an aspiring authoritarian. That answer does not explain why so many of the powerful have gone along without objection.

But everything becomes clear—the cruel pursuit of over-the-top immigration enforcement; the re-emergence of White Supremacy and attempts to erase Black history; the Republican Party’s rubber-stamp approval of Trump and its relentless effort to destroy health care and all the other government-provided safety-net services; even the insane advocacy of weapons of war within the general public and the efforts to oppress women and criminalize women’s health issues—when we realize that there has always been a class war being conducted in the political sphere. This war, sometimes more in the shadows and sometimes more overt, is not being waged by the plebeians. It is a war being waged by the super-elite against the rest of us. It has always been there operating in the background, but now it has flared out into the open (see Class Warfare Erupts Openly—Can you see it?).

A brief history
Since our inception as a nation, we (American people) have always been engaged in a village discussion about how to govern ourselves. Since the end of WWII, opposing views about how to proceed have been expressed more or less respectfully and with the general understanding that all were more or less working toward the common good.

However, in the 1990s, as the Republican Party achieved numerical parity in Congress as a result of the passage of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, it became politically advantageous to conduct a no-comprise form of politics. A few people began to yell and scream their views and stopped working toward finding common ground for the greater good. But most of us continued to work as if we were operating within a well-regulated debating environment among people of good intent. Then in 2015, the political punches really began to fly; nevertheless, we still tried to function as if political business was operating as usual. In 2025, the knives and guns came out and people actually began to die.

Why is this happening now?
The answer is because the super-elite have been winning their shadow war against the rest of us, but their tools are wearing out and their gains are in danger of a complete reversal. If they don’t achieve total victory now, it will be another three or four generations before they have a chance to assert themselves again.

Likewise, if we let them win, our fates will be sealed as surfs for the next century.

A different form of politics
We are no longer operating in our accustomed political space, and if we don’t quickly identify the underlying, causative activity and respond with this knowledge, then the populace will be cut to shreds and we will be doomed to live in an oppressive society for the next 75-100 years (because that’s the way American cycles of history roll).

Outrageous immigration enforcement; the re-emergence of White Supremacy; the steps towards authoritarianism; the wars on social benefits, healthcare, and women… these are all in service of the bigger project of class warfare that has been operating in and out of the shadows throughout our history. FDR put the super-elite back on their heels when he betrayed his class with the New Deal that created useful work for the unemployed, brought the miracle of electricity to rural America, and established the first social safety net. But the super-elite have been quietly gaining leverage since Ronald Reagan. Their success depends on division within the populace, and up until the election of Barack Obama, there had been sufficient fragmentation to sustain the shadow war. Interestingly, the remarkable success of the Civil Rights Movement and other social liberalizations have created the real possibility of transcending the racial hatreds and disagreements about issues like women’s health and gun control that have under-pinned the class war. These disagreements assured support from large sectors of the populace for a political agenda that worked against their economic interests. But now, although we have the well-known but still shocking income/wealth disparity and we live among a population where 40% of us could not absorb a $400 emergency, we have generations of younger people who don’t feel the social duty to enforce—through lynchings, if necessary—the “proper place” of an “uppity” member of the racial underclass.

Hope if we seize it
It is heartening to see such a broad swath of the population recoiling at Donald Trump’s cruelties and standing up for the rights of their neighbors—even though they may not even speak the same language. But we must not fight just to get back what we had. Donald Trump correctly brought into the light what many of us had felt: that the system is rigged against us. The Epstein Files illustrate that we have a two-tiered system of justice for all—and clemency for the rich. (What he didn’t say was that he intended to push that rigged system to the ultimate in order to achieve his life-long dream of being accepted into the super-elite class. Note: No matter how rich he becomes, he will never be respected in the super-elite circles of society.)

We must fight to retain our democracy, but we must also re-imagine a new social contract with institutions that uplift the lives of all our people. This is the time to purge the toxin of racism from the blood of the body politic because an oppressive oligarchy cannot flourish in a truly egalitarian society with free and fair elections. It is also the time to recognize the social harm of treating productivity growth within a few sectors of the economy as personal value to which the individuals who control those sectors have a rightful claim (see The Baumol Effect—More Relevant than Ever). There are reasons why so many of us living in the richest economy the world has ever known are struggling on the edge of subsistence.

Let us all rise together as Americans.