CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Perhaps the deepest conflict is not between red and blue, but between power and powerlessness.” – George Packer , “The College-Educated Working Class,” The Atlantic, April 2026

“Perhaps the deepest conflict is not between red and blue, but between power and powerlessness.”

– George Packer , “The College-Educated Working Class,” The Atlantic, April 2026

Power here is economic power, not of a national GDP but of individual income and wealth.  Red and blue conflict is not simply political party conflict but what Packer labels “multicultural America versus heritage America.”

Multicultural here doesn’t mean different ethnic, religious and racial groups but a recognition and respect for different values and meaning in relation to any privileged unity, all of which has triggered insurrection and mutiny while concurrently the top 1 percent of households hold 31.7 percent of wealth, the highest share on record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the figure in 1989.

Long standing traditions, customs, norms that forge a unified sense of heritage above and beyond diversity now face mutinies on every front while concurrently the top 1 percent of households hold 31.7 percent of wealth, the highest share on record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the figure in 1989.

Clearly, there should be a mutiny based on our wealth/power divide but it’s not happening, absorbed and deflected as we are with our blind mutinies. Our grifting president’s use of power, most recently in a $1.776 billion bequest to himself and those who claim unfair treatment by previous administrations (January 6th rioters), as well as our wealth royalty’s defiling at the Bezos Met Gala of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s egalitarian vision are excreta of affluenza and plutocracy.

An obscene wealth gap in a democracy that first announced “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence is not, amazingly, the driving cause of mutiny. The mutiny we have is not a class warfare, Haves vs. Have........

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