Americans View Wealth as the Most Divisive Characteristic

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While Donald Trump may think that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” there are countless Americans who know that it is very real. That includes tens of millions of his own supporters who counted on the president to bring down the cost of living and put them first. That, however, didn’t happen. Instead, they are watching an administration of the wealthy and for the wealthy celebrate record stock prices that don’t help hard-working people one bit.

And more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that what truly divides them is not what they look like, how old they are, how long they went to school, or where they were born; it’s how much money they have in the bank.

In fact, according to a new poll, they believe that is the number one thing that divides them.

While Americans are fairly evenly split on whether things like gender, race, age, ethnicity, country of origin, and level of education are more likely to unite or divide them, by a margin of four to one, they believe that the two main factors that drive a wedge between them are party affiliation and wealth.

Along the same lines, 86 percent of people agree that those with money “can often avoid consequences that ordinary people would face for the same actions.”

Those are encouraging numbers, and just watch what happens if they ever figure out that the uber-rich exercise huge control over both parties and are using billions of dollars to keep the peasants divided over meaningless issues.

And it looks like they are slowly coming to that realization.

More than three-quarters of people believe that the American Dream is harder to attain now than in the past.

The only thing surprising about the figure is that it’s not much higher.

Unless, of course, the rest of them believe that the American Dream consists of struggling to make ends meet, being crushed by debt, and having to worry about being replaced by robots and computers in the near future.

For example, for the first time ever, more than half of Americans are no longer “cost secure,” which means that they cannot afford access to quality healthcare.

This doesn’t just affect low-income families. Even one-third of people living in households that make between $120,000 and $179,999 fall in that category.

In other words, that wealth divide keeps growing, and more and more Americans find themselves near its edge.

Of course, one of the best ways to illustrate this gap is that the value of the stocks of one person, Elon Musk, is now significantly higher than that of the stocks the bottom 50 percent of Americans own.

Obviously, this is not a sustainable path. The only question is when and how it ends.

For now, the ultra-wealthy still manage to run the country by pouring billions of dollars into political campaigns, getting the lawmakers they help get elected to write favorable tax laws and allow them to skirt any kind of accountability, and controlling the flow of information because they own the biggest media outlets and social media platforms.

Speaking of the latter, the same poll also shows that Americans are (rightfully) increasingly growing distrustful of Big Tech.

Ten years ago, nearly half of them said they had a great deal or quite a bit of confidence in the industry. Now, that figure is down to one quarter.

It should be much lower.

What is happening in the tech space is a microcosm of a society dominated by the rich.

For example, The New York Times reported this week that Trump’s Justice Department argued that Musk’s artificial intelligence company has the right to run polluting gas-burning turbines even without having a permit to do so.

Musk, of course, spent nearly $300 million to help Trump get elected (in addition to using his social media platform X for misinformation and propaganda). He then parlayed that influence into eliminating important government services in the name of “efficiency,” and now can apparently rely on the administration to do what he wants. 

While perhaps not on the same massive scale, this kind of stuff happens all the time and every day.

However, like the new poll shows, Americans are growing very tired of it. Not necessarily because they want to, but rather because the boots of the wealthy on their necks are choking them.

Maybe the uber-rich believe that they can keep this party going endlessly, but they may be underestimating what will happen when people get really desperate and realize that the country is primarily divided between the haves and have-nots.