Americans Are Looking Strongly Into Pitchforks

I’m always a little queasy seeing someone pull into my driveway, getting out of a non-company vehicle, and delivering a package to my front door. 

This has become a part of everyday life in the United States over the past five or seven or however many years: Working people taking on a second or third job, using their cars to pick up people and drive them to airports or deliver Jeff Bezos’ various wares or bring hideously overpriced burritos to hungry people pressed against their kitchen windows. People grinding their asses off at all hours of the day, sacrificing leisure time and sleep and a decent diet not to get ahead, not to reach that next, precarious step on the economic ladder, but simply to get by, to satiate their creditors and pay their landlords and maybe get a new pair of shoes because their shoes or their kids’ shoes are disintegrating on their feet. 

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None of it feels right. Every economic graph and chart you can find online shows Americans working harder and longer for the same or less money than they did a generation ago. Life is a grind, and the grind is celebrated in all manner of media. That includes the McDonalds radio ad I heard recently in which a young woman gets McDonalds breakfast while headed from her night job to her day job – an economic condition that would have been unrecognizable to Americans of a previous generation. Why would one need two jobs? When does one sleep in such an arrangement?

I hate that I participate in their system, which is not so much capitalism as it is feudalism, not the till-the-earth kind but the dystopian technological kind. It seems like half the country now works in one way or another for the most obscenely rich CEOs and their world-destroying algorithms. I do my best to stay abreast of when Amazon workers (or Starbucks workers for that matter, though Starbucks coffee is bad) are picketing or on strike, and I avoid those services even when it represents an inconvenience. Does it matter? I don’t know. Probably not. 

More than a few times a year, when I see a haggard person peeling themselves off the driver seat of their modest car to deliver some stupid piece of shit to my door, I think about an essay written way back in 2014 by a filthy rich investor named Nick Hanauer warning his fellow oligarchs that it would not be too long before they faced popular revolt from a working class – joined by an increasingly strained and desperate middle class – left no choice but to show their dissatisfaction (white hot fury) over the accelerating capitalist concentration of wealth. 

We’re Going To Need Steam Control

“This needs to be the new norm.”

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

In the relative calm of the second Obama administration, with Republicans rapidly hardening into an explicitly anti-democracy party, Hanauer begged ultra-wealthy people in the United States to recognize the historical context of their butt-clenching levels of wealth. This, Hanauer said, could not last forever. All the great TV in the world couldn’t keep working people docile forever. 

Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.  And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.  If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Hanauer wrote in the 2014 essay that he had issued these warnings to American oligarchs face to face, only to be politely dismissed or laughed off. Inequality, Hanauer’s economic peers said, wasn’t so bad “because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time,” he writes. 

Enter bad faith, a key ingredient in denying the extraordinary wealth inequality western democracies face today. If I see a poor kid with a nice phone or a high-end TV in a small, rundown home, or a newish car sitting in the parking lot of an apartment building, this means everyone is OK. It means there is no problem, everyone is fine. I can have my multiple vacation homes and boats and private jets and I can buy elections and they can have their sleek little gadgets and we can go on like this forever and ever. This is the reality-creation made possible with bad-faith interpretations of current events, with no eye toward the past and no understanding of how long-gone empires had made similar misjudgments that proved catastrophic.

What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.

I couldn’t help but think of Hanauer in early December when a healthcare CEO was assassinated in New York City – not because the assassin positioned himself as a populist hero who had struck a blow against the oligarchical machine that oppresses us all, but because the public reaction to the shooting was one of unrestrained glee with a dash of bloodlust. Regular people, turned into the Joker, were happy with the slaying. It was, for millions and millions of Americans, a justified act. That Luigi Mangione has since become a folk hero for many is both chilling and predictable.

The assassination made terribly clear just how sick and tired (very much figuratively and literally) Americans are with the healthcare status quo, which of course is a product of a heedless capitalist system designed to maximize profit at any human cost. "Capitalism left unchecked," as Hanauer wrote, "tends toward concentration and collapse."

There’s no getting around the anti-human nature of capitalism. My kids learned this a few weeks ago when they played Monopoly for the first time and were utterly miserable by the end. They hated the fucking game. I had ended up with all the property and money on the board and they were left with nothing but frustration and consternation. It’s why anti-monopolist Elizabeth Magie created the game in the first place. 

The Year of Billionaire Populists 

2025 will be largely defined by the fake-ass right-wing populism that animated the 2024 Trump campaign. Trump and his billionaire allies, more than their Democratic counterparts, recognize the broiling fury of the masses and plan to do fuck all about it. They’re about to spend an enormous amount of time and political capital on passing hundreds of billions in tax cuts not for the poor folks who voted them into office, but for Hanauer and Bezos and Shadow President Elon Musk.

They hope to accomplish this by eviscerating the last vestiges of the American social safety net. Trump backers don’t believe any of this will happen, naturally. As one desperately poor Trump voter in Pennsylvania recently told The New York Times, why would Trump take away her welfare benefits after she voted for him? The implication was clear: I voted for him so he would hurt people I hate and fear, not me, not my loved ones.

Capital’s Footsoldiers Will Do Anything To Fuck Over The Poor

House Republicans, in their bad-faith attempt to pretend they give a shit about the nation’s debt, are once again pushing the nation to the brink of financial catastrophe. Forgetting how badly this blew up in their faces during the Obama years, Republicans are refusing to raise the country’s debt

Bad Faith TimesAnthony Reimer

Hanauer’s warning of the coming pitchforks in our feudal society are almost quaint ten years after he published them and drew the ire of every CEO and investor and capitalist-friendly media outlet (all of them) in the country. There will be no pitchforks, of course. The pitchforks are high-powered guns – weapons of war – available to anyone and everyone in the United States. This is why corporations wiped their websites of the names and bios of their executives after the healthcare CEO murder. They are afraid of what is coming. Many of them backed Trump in 2024 because they think he can stop it, and maybe he can further delay the revolt simply by occupying the White House and triggering the libs by threatening to buy Canada or whatever. It’s Trump’s policies that will only accelerate wealth concentration, leaving regular folks more desperate, angrier, and without political recourse. 

That’s precisely what Hanauer warned about ten years ago. A population without viable political solutions and with nothing to lose is a dangerous population, one ready to blow. It’s why I have to believe right-wing populism – which has always been a bad-faith tactic to rally people to the fascist cause – has its limits. The price of grapes will not go down in the next year, and when it doesn't, people will have to be told why it didn’t, and who to blame. Perhaps the right wing’s capture of mainstream media and social media will make these dots impossible to connect for many Trumpists wondering why their economic situation is getting worse. 

Maybe this is how feudalism is managed: Through a well-tuned propaganda pipeline that brainwashes a critical mass of people. But maybe it’s not, and maybe Hanauer was right when he warned of pitchforks back in 2014. Maybe dousing the flames of right-wing populism requires well-meaning folks to talk with the apolitical or red-pilled among us and help them understand the situation from which they are so terribly alienated. This burning anger with the status quo can be directed in constructive ways, or it can burn out of control in ways no one will be able to control, ways that I don't want to imagine, for fear of dooming. 

Hanauer was not wrong. He was only early. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.