The Most Important Divide in America Isn’t Republican vs. Democratic

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. Woke versus MAGA, Democrat versus Republican, liberal versus conservative, and pro-democracy versus authoritarian/far-right are all important divides in American politics today. But author and writer Hamilton Nolan says the most important conflict is capital versus labor. In the latest edition of Right Now, Hamilton discusses the problem of a small bloc of Americans having accumulated so much wealth and now using it to influence the political system. Democracy is about voting and elections but also a balance of power between various interests in a society, says Nolan. And right now, billionaires and corporations have too much power compared to other blocs in the United States. That makes adopting policies that take away some of that wealth, such as the proposed billionaires’ tax in California, so important, according to Nolan. Another critical way to rebalance power is by increasing the number of Americans in unions, says Nolan. He also discusses his recent pieces calling for journalists to realize that they are in a perpetual fight with the wealthy and powerful and urging Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president. Nolan is the author of the newsletter How Things Work and the book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.