Inequality Fuels Today’s Rage: A Selection from Stephen Marche’s The Next Civil War (2022)

“You know the problem of inequality is serious when rich people have started to worry that they’re too rich. In the United States, the wealthiest of the ultrawealthy, the kind who wouldn’t notice $10 million one way or another, are forming political action committees opposed to the concentration of wealth in their own hands. The Patriotic Millionaires formed in 2010 with two extraordinary goals: to lobby politicians to increase their taxes, and to explain to ordinary Americans how unjust the economic order is. Two of the richest men in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have publicly called on the government to raise their tax rates. . . .

The rich know what historians know: every society in human history with levels of inequality like those in the United States today has descended into war, revolution, or plague. No exceptions. There are precisely zero historical precedents that don’t end in destruction. Since 1980, inequality has been growing globally, but in the United States the growth is most dramatic. In 2015, the top 1 percent of American families made 26.3 times what the 99 percent did, garnering 22 percent of all income—the highest share since the peak of 23.9 percent before the Great Depression. In 1965, a CEO made roughly twenty times the typical worker’s pay. Now it’s 271 times. From 1980 on, the poorest 50 percent of the population has consistently seen a decline in their share of income. American inequality is now worse than it was in 1774.

All of the political loathing . . . the hyper-partisanship and disunion, the sheer rage—all of it dates, in large part, from the 2008 financial crisis. That’s when sovereign citizenry spiked; that’s when negative partisanship, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, originated.”—Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022)