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
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 Nots, but a far less calculable platform, one where we are “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,” one wholly inchoate and yet primed for a Civil War clash. January 6thinsurrection is in no way a one-off given the continued presence of all that provoked it.
Here, habits of heart and mind are on a daily basis defending themselves against perceived corruption and crippling desecrations also perceived as seeking dominance by replacement of heritage beliefs.
Here, habits of heart and mind are on a daily basis struggling against the dominance of heritage forged over centuries by exclusion.
Donald Trump’s place here in this drama of blind mutiny is no more than a footnote. Much was coming to a boil and in need only of a voice offering recognition, like a good analyst, and promising instant relief. That he came to find that relief in his own grandiloquent self and convince others, like a good flimflam man that they should share his amour propre, is, as they say, another story, mindboggling for sure but only peripheral to the swelling levels of the real mutiny, detoured and over-written since Ronald Reagan, that is on going.
Neither a megalomaniac in the presidency nor lines of battle formed between Pronoun/DEI/ Woke Politics and so on and MAGA warriors fighting to help Trump keep Jesus in their lives can long defer a mutiny against a Monopoly game economic system in which we’re so equal 90% can’t hold on to Baltic or Mediterranean Avenues.
Marx felt that the exploited would at some point put a finger on who and how they were being f*cked over. He also felt that a class consciousness would unite the exploited. The reasons for a true mutiny against a dehumanizing capitalism would in time stand clear before all.
In regard to the first, what we see is both a multicultural America vs. heritage America, and a confounding of the communicative means by which exploitation can be objectively represented. Certainly, Trump is Calypso-like in casting dazed and confused spells, but determinate meaning had long since been under attack by post-structuralist and postmodern thinkers. In short, both liars and bullshit artists prosper when paths of knowing toward common understanding are imperiled and they have been imperiled long before Trump.
In regard to the second reason Marx gave as to mutiny, class consciousness is perhaps the greatest casualty of our moving on to cyberspace. The proletariat huddled back then in the Putilov Ironworks factory getting pumped for the Bolshevik revolution. Being together let them know who they were. Quite differently, Cyberspace offers innumerable silo hangouts, the intent of each is to live in a cyber space that is unique, totally self-chosen and constructed and so on. Our public space is now full of people with earbuds in. Relationship is a negative thing, a crushing and destroying of miscreants outside your tribe. Exposition of arguments gives way to ridicule; common understanding gives way to a simple-minded personal autonomy.
Packer’s essay is a review of Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. What Packer makes clear is that the immiserated do not join forces in that immiseration but have that connection brushed aside by the anger of their cultural warfare. All are not singing together The Internationale but each is in a war with each.
Passions aroused are like an army ill equipped to take on a protean foe.
There are many sly tactics of an insufficiently checked economic system to elide the terrible discrepancies of wealth in the U.S. We are born equal in opportunity. Some seize opportunity and win; others don’t. Winners deserve their rewards; no rational or moral argument can be made that the winners then must support the losers. Winners do no expect their government through taxation to do so.
I have been hearing these stories forever; they hold sway obviously for they repeat in every political campaign as if time and chance did not happen to us all, as if we did not owe the fruits of our labor to others, living and dead, as well as the play of Chance. Why irrationalities in regard to our stochastic economic system persist relate to our blindness to that system as one compelling mutiny. We are in awe of it as our Golden Calf. We are jacked up by our unrighteous and irrational economics to threaten blind mutinies, self-destructive ones where profit and property are kept safe.
Besides mounting more narratives than one mind can ever organize, cyberspace is a digital bread & circus, a cell phone in hand somehow empowering beyond the realities of bills unpaid, un-livable wages, illness, accident and education unaffordable.
Whether we face more mindless mutinies of January 6th or can stand up to another Great Recession Wall St. criminal offense and this time not punish the poor depends greatly on how much usable structure Trump Blitzkrieg leaves us with. Regardless, any life-world so wealth lopsided as our own will eventually get everyone’s attention, like our role in lobal warming, the inanities of returning to a past that sucked in ways we cannot imagine as well as the inanities of dismissing the real conditions of existence giving way in everyone’s mind to a recognition of the actual material conditions we must face in order to survive.
A country continuing to breed fear, anger and hate must by Natural Law face mutiny. Whether it will be more blind mutinies as thus far depends mostly on Time & Chance, as our rational pathways are quickly losing themselves in the circuitries of Cyberspace, AI our Virgil.