It’s Like the Elites Want Us Raging Against Each Other

The Charlie Kirk assassination instantly felt like an inflection point for the United States, which is already on precarious ground amid ricocheting political crises and the severe lack of material improvements to people’s lives.

If you feel unsettled, you’re right to be. Chaos abounds.

A genocide in Gaza, fueled by the U.S. A period of war with Iran, a fever dream for the neocons who’ve made parts of the economy reliant on endless war.

Troops in American cities.

The military at the border.

Immigrants disappeared off the streets.

A strike against a Venezuela-departed ship in the Caribbean without a declaration of war.

An economy seemingly teetering toward crisis mode since the pandemic shock (if not full recession).

An omnipresent feeling. At home, at the grocery store, the pump, dinner with friends.

A tension hangs over us—daily.

Anything and everything is existential.

Whatever had been hanging in the air seemingly erupted when an assassin’s bullet fatally hit Kirk in the neck at a campus event at Utah Valley University. The horrifying scene played out in real-time on people’s social media feeds, giving everyone interested a front-row seat to his demise.

Quickly, the shock turned to bitter, explosive outrage. The online rhetoric was nothing like I’ve seen before, even after Butler, Pennsylvania, likely because Kirk was as synonymous with the online right (especially among the young) as anyone had ever been.

In one fell swoop, the right was blaming the left, accusing Democrats of constant violence; the left responded by reminding people that a right-winger only recently allegedly killed a Minnesota state lawmaker, a Democrat, and lest we not forget, Paul Pelosi, the husband of prominent Democrat Nancy Pelosi, was assaulted in his house by someone who allegedly espoused right-wing conspiracies. Then came the taunts from the right: With many confessing that the slaying had a “radicalizing” effect, to what extent we can only speculate.

Tit for tat. An unceasing exchange of blows from each “side,” with social media algorithms fueling the outrage machine, deepening the division—an omnipresent cacophony of online tribal warfare.

Watching this unfold, I couldn’t help but think of the establishment forces that have brought Americans to the brink—the corporate-captured media, elected officials themselves, the donor base that gives them political legitimacy and the corporations that have been siphoning away resources and wealth at astronomical levels. All the while, intensified culture wars keep the public distracted, obstructing our ability to see who the chief perpetrator of America’s deep polarization really is.

There have been charged political eras before, most notably the ‘60s, when John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were all assassinated within five years, from 1963 to 1968.

The difference today is we have cable news—the original outrage machine—and social media fueling the sense of constant anxiety. Whenever you log into X, whatever Meta owns, YouTube, or elsewhere, there are scenes of violence—often from the Gaza genocide—people talking about violence, or people yelling at other people commenting on violence.

Meanwhile, paralyzing economic inequality has taken root across the political spectrum. Consider this: the top 1 percent of earners make 139 times as much as the bottom 20 percent. No doubt, you’ve seen this or similar figures before, but we’ve yet to reckon with this reality. The nation’s leaders and media elites make it appear as if there’s no turning back, that the income disparity is capitalism functioning as intended, that solving such a crisis—one that is actually existential—would somehow delegitimize the corporatist lie that is American individualism.

Even as America’s working class fights for crumbs, the political and economic power of the world’s wealthiest continues to grow. The number of billionaires grew between 2023 and 2024, from 2,565 to 2,769, and their combined wealth soared from $13 trillion to $15 trillion—what Oxfam described as “the second largest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began.” Oxfam put the billionaire class’s massive financial wealth in perspective: “…even if they lost 99 percent of their wealth overnight, they would remain billionaires.”

Want more? The wealthiest 1 percent’s share of economic wealth in 1989 was 22.8 percent. In 2024, it jumped to 30.8 percent. Worse yet, there’s no sign of a significant retraction.

Extreme inequality breeds instability, distrust of institutions, despair, and, naturally, an eat-or-be-eaten psychology.

As Nolan McCarty and Keith T. Poole wrote in the 2006 book Polarized America:

“What many public commentators miss…is that polarization was not a soloist but part of an ensemble, partnered with many other fundamental changes in the American society and economy.”

 

“It is important to note that inequality rose in a period of increasing prosperity, with the added riches going much more to the haves than to the have-nots,” they added.

The marked wealth concentration in recent years also has direct electoral consequences, further undercutting the credibility that ostensible democracies require. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 indeed opened the floodgates for dark money spending to pour in—and it also increased the disparity of political expenditures between the rich and everyday Americans.

“In short, thanks to the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, a tiny sliver of Americans now wield more power than at any time since Watergate, while many of the rest seem to be disengaging from politics,” the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in 2015.

The discrepancy is stark: “In 2016 top 100 super PAC donors contributed 72.94 percent of the money; in 2020 it was 68.74 percent; in 2022, 72.92 percent; and thus far in 2024, 73.05 percent. This year (2024), the top 1 percent of donors are responsible for a staggering 96.47 percent of the money.”

What other conclusion are Americans supposed to make other than that the system is “rigged?”

It seems the only people who are either willfully ignoring this reality or simply enabling it are the corporate media (which has increasingly become consolidated over the years of yawning inequality) and elected officials, who are beholden to the donor class.

Add in the instability younger Americans feel because of the rise of AI, the inability for people to purchase a home—the current market is dominated by baby boomers, not the people who, in theory, should be in position to secure a mortgage—millennials and Gen Z—the underdiscussed “loneliness” crisis, particularly acute among younger men (“The U.S. stands out for younger men having significantly higher levels of loneliness than other residents”), the broken healthcare system creating cost barriers that prevent people from seeking mental health care, world-leading levels of gun saturation compared to other developed nations, and the list can go on.

To top it off, the corporate media has completely failed us. The emergence of cable news and, with it, the rise of infotainment for profit means that horse-race politics and superficial debates—which rarely get to the heart of actual policy prescriptions—result in elections that become a referendum on who has the most prodigious cult of personality, rather than ideas.

Who knows what the ramifications of Kirk’s assassination will be? What is guaranteed is that those in their ivory towers will call for civility, less bickering. Trump and his acolytes will weaponize their outrage to incriminate the “left,” regardless of whether the purported shooter’s motivations ever become clear, as they still haven’t in the case of the Butler gunman.

We’ll all be screaming at each other as the real perpetrators of our collective disgruntlement carry on unbothered.

Image Source

• Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.