Why Are Americans So Divided?

America feels broken. Red vs. blue. Rural vs. urban. Rich vs. poor. But beneath all the noise, there’s a deeper story — one most politicians won’t touch.

In this episode, we dig into how capitalism quietly shapes our political divides — and why it keeps getting a free pass. As democracy expands rights and inclusion, capitalism turns that promise into insecurity: higher costs, unstable jobs, and working-class exhaustion. The more equal we try to be, the more the system shifts to keep power tilted.

This is more than politics. It’s about the soul of America — and the cost of never asking who the system really serves.

Transcript

Every week, it's something new in the headlines. Another state bans trans kids from playing sports. Another school pulls classic books off the shelves. Another round of campus protests, this time, Gaza, or speech rights, or both.. Everyone's angry or scared, or just mean. Everyone's picking a side. But here's the real question. Why are these battles? Why now? Why are we spending so much energy arguing about bathrooms and books or student rallies, while wages stagnate, trust crumbles, and our future feels like it's cracking apart. Maybe it's not just chaos. Maybe it's not just outrage culture. Maybe these fights are symptoms of something deeper. Something older, something no one wants to name, but if we could see it, we might finally understand why everything feels so broken right now. Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Today, I want to talk about what's going on underneath all of the seeming chaos that we see in the United States today. It's not just about politics. It's not even just about culture. It's about how our whole game has been set up. Capitalism, as we live it today, is unstable, and it always has been, not because people are lazy, not because there's no opportunity, but because it rewards some people for owning things and others only for working. Here's how it works. One person owns a business, and another person works at that business. Only one of them gets rich, because the excess wealth that's produced ultimately goes to the owner of the capital in the business, not the person doing the work. That's not a mistake in the system. That is the system. That's capitalism. Like if you work at a restaurant as a fry cook and make a $10 hamburger, let's say $5 of that goes to cover all the costs, like the meat, the cheese, the bread, as well as the other things, like the cost of renting the building or supplying the electricity or maintaining the flat iron grill gas for the grill, whatever. Okay. So $5 then is left over in profit per hamburger. How does it get divided then, between the worker and the owner? More than likely, you're on a fixed hourly wage. So let's say you make $10 an hour. Okay, fine. So after the first two hamburgers you sell, you are now working for free for the rest of that hour. Every additional hamburger you make is profit only for your boss, the business owner. So if you make four burgers in an hour, you and your boss split the profit it's 50-50. But if you make 100 burgers in an hour, you make $10 and your boss makes $490. This is the problem. So under capitalism, in order for some people to win big, most people have to lose a little bit, every day, every single time. On a long enough timeline under such a system, working pays so little that you can't even afford to live through your labor, and you become what Thomas Malthus calls the surplus population. These are people who cannot profit the owners of capital and so have no value in a capital society. And so are basically treated as disposable. If you have no value to offer your society, in this case, meaning the world of the owners, then you are ought to just go off and die. This is not a system of mutual success. It's a zero-sum game. And when you play that game long enough, you get a society where wealth ultimately piles up at the top and the stress, the debt, and the insecurity all pile up at the bottom. Everybody knows this. It's an open secret in America that this is how the economy works. We pretend that capitalism is the best system in the world, and then we gripe all day long about how terrible the economy is. Well, capitalism is the economy. Even when it's doing good, workers are still in some slow decline over the years. They get more and more desperate. And without any kind of organization, they ultimately turn on each other. They fight over sports bands, over books, over culture because they're told those are the real issues. Meanwhile, the rules of the game don't change. Until, that is, things become so unstable that the entire system is on the verge of collapse. The first time we saw that happen in America was over the issue of slavery. Slavery is a supposed fix for the problem of capitalism's inherent instability. It does this by designating a permanent underclass, the slaverylaves, which mostly consisted of race and gender distinctions. Right? So black people were going to be the slaves, and they were going to be a permanent underclass. We could have a measure of stability under capitalism then because we knew that all of the people who were doing the bulk of the getting exploited were going to be these people. No one else had to be exploited because we knew that was what race was for, was for black people to be exploited. And it worked, at least to a limited extent, as long as you happened to be wealthy and white and male, like you didn't get exploited, or you got exploited less. Once, however, we decided not to establish a permanent slave underclass in this country, the problem of capitalist instability quickly resumed. So that by the time of the Gilded Age, America was once again facing the brink of ruin. Raids on black businesses and attacks on women's rights flourished during this period as we attempted to create some sort of economic stability, the only way people really knew how, and that was through the oppression of certain groups. After the demise of slavery and the building up of massive amounts of wealth during the Gilded Age, we saw the potential for collapse realized in the Great Depression. The rich had held too much wealth, and they just couldn't squeeze another drop out of anybody else. The instability here became so strong that the whole system was teetering on the edge of collapse. This time, however, there was a growing socialist movement that had begun to put pressure on capitalists to conform to like union demands and this idea of a better and alternative system. And once, just once, we actually did something big about this problem. People were starving. Banks were folding. The whole system was on the brink. And out of that chaos came what we now call the New Deal. It wasn't a revolution, and it certainly didn't end capitalism. In fact, it saved capitalism from itself. The deal was this. Big business would agree to higher wages and safer work conditions, and some government regulations. Big labor would agree not to push too far. That is, they wouldn't advocate for a socialist alternative anymore. They would allow capitalism to remain intact with these new protections in place. And big government would then step in to smooth out all of the edges with things like Social Security, certain kinds of worker protections, education, opportunities, job programs, and rules that basically helped keep the game fair-ish. Essentially, then, the socialists had to go. But, of course, with them went the stick that made Big Business comply with their end of the deal. Pretty much as soon as the socialist alternative was taken away and the two-party system fell back into place, both being capitalist, big business began chipping away at all of the rules, all of the regulations and the government, labor unions, the whole thing. They began attacking all of it again, trying to return back to that gilded age sort of capitalism. But nevertheless, for a time, working people had real backing, a minimum wage, no child labor, public services, and a 40-hour work week were all coming about around this time. It felt like the country was finally investing in its own people. And of course, that deal did not include everyone. Black Americans were once again left out by design. Most farm workers and domestic workers, jobs held disproportionately by black people and immigrants and women, weren't covered by the labor laws or by Social Security. Women were still expected to stay home and remain economically dependent on their fathers or their husbands, and immigrants were largely treated as disposable labor when convenient, and as scapegoats when it wasn't convenient. So, yeah, the New Deal created a kind of economic stability, but only for part of the country. It built a middle class, and it also built a ceiling. For those locked out, the game stayed just as rigged, and this is the problem all over again. We repurchased our economic stability again at the price of equality. That deal saved capitalism, but it also baked inequality deeper into the system. This inequality gave rise to the civil rights movement that we see in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr. summed it up by saying that a check had been written to Americans, a promise that if they worked hard and they played by the rules that they could have a measure of freedom and economic security. But that check had bounced, he said, for black Americans. So if the New Deal was the compromise that saved capitalism, the decades that followed were the slow unraveling of that deal, especially when it started expanding to more and more marginalized groups. This is the liberal dilemma that Democrats faced from FDR onward. In the 1960s, President Lyon Johnson tried to take things further. He called this idea the Great Society. They would offer Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights laws, and more help for the poor. On paper, there was progress. But to a lot of white Americans, it didn't feel like progress. It felt like their slice of the pie was shrinking and because their privileges were being eroded. Again, the exclusion of certain peoples protected certain jobs and positions for these white people. If anyone can have a job and anyone could be qualified, it might not be them that got the job. Someone else might come along who was better, even if that person happened to be black or a woman, or so on. And of course, that is exactly what happened. They had been told that the American dream was theirs for the taking. And now, they were seeing it extended to black folks, immigrants, and poor people. All of them were now getting government help that they thought had belonged exclusively to themselves. Instead of seeing the system expand for everyone, they saw it as someone else cutting into their line. And a negative reaction to the government, and especially to government aid, began to form. Essentially, these people felt that if black people could get their access to the New Deal, then the deal should be off. That resentment it became political fuel, and it helped launch a conservative movement that would dominate American politics for the next 40 years. Race never became completely the successful issue that it wanted to be, but other issues began to form around it, such as abortion or gun ownership rights or things like that that conservatives could congeal a certain amount of resentment or anger around. Ronald Reagan promised less government more freedom and law and order. What he delivered was union busting, tax cuts for the rich, and a war on welfare and education for the working classes. people. When Democrats came back to power and Clinton, Obama, and even with Biden, they didn't undo any of this. They didn't challenge the deeper rules of capitalism. Instead, they tried to manage the damage. They were trying to keep everything just hobbling along. They kept the markets prosperous, even though that advantages the rich more than the working class. They praised businesses as job creators, even though they often weren't creating any new jobs. Or if they were creating jobs, they were low-wage jobs. They offered just enough help to keep people afloat, but not enough to challenge the way wealth and power were being stacked up in the country. That's neoliberalism. It says, we can't really change this system, but we can make it a little less harmful. But here's the hard truth. You can't fix a rigged game by simply being polite. You have to change the rules. And that's the part that neither part in America has been really willing to touch. Everyone knows capitalism is broken. The problem for liberals is how to keep it running, using nothing but duct tape and bubble gum. Meanwhile, the right wing of the country has moved well beyond capitalism. They don't want capitalism anymore. What they want now is some sort of techno-feudalism and a new serfdom. The problem for the right is how are they going to demolish democracy in order to reinstitute the permanent underclass that keeps them insanely wealthy? Democracy is the enemy here because it keeps trying to promote equality. And as we've seen, this form of equality ultimately promotes economic instability because of capitalism. In essence, the right wants a new slavery system, but they're not really sure how to institute it yet. Should it be using the old models of race and gender? Or should it be built on something else? And this is where we find ourselves today. Things feel stuck, broken, exhausting. And the big reason why is that we're caught in the liberals' trap. Today, Democrats talk a really big game. They speak the language of justice, of racial justice, of gender equality, of LGBTQ rights, of inclusion. They say all the right things when they're at the mic. They tweet the right hashtags. They put their slogans on T-shirts and corporate ads. But when it comes to real power, that is to economic power, to economic stability, to autonomy, and to independence for the working class of any race or color, they don't really seem to touch it. They've accepted the idea that class hierarchy is permanent, that billionaires can just keep running the show, that giant corporations can just set the rules, that the market will somehow fix things if we just maybe nudge it in the right direction. Maybe just a few more college credit programs or scholarships are just going to solve all of our problems. But what do we get instead of all this? Well, we mostly get empty symbolism from them. We get progress on paper, we get representation without any kind of real redistribution. Ultimately, we have more diverse boardrooms, but the same low wages, a rainbow flag flying at City Hall, but no more affordable housing. Finally, we get a woman in the CEO's seat, but the same people are working two jobs a day to stay afloat. I'm not saying representation isn't important here, but it's not everything. It's not even close. Without the rest, representation is just a kinder, gentler form of slavery. This is what I mean by the trap, then. Liberals and the Democratic Party that represents them promise a more just society without ever changing the system that makes it unjust. And that creates confusion, disappointment, and distrust. People look around and say, Wait, wasn't this supposed to be getting better? Where are your lofty ideals now? And they turn on them. The working class turns on the Liberals and the Democratic Party. It's like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house, but the house has got a cracked foundation. It looks good from the curb, but it's likely to collapse and kill your family if you try to live in it. And when people get tired of these broken promises, that's when they tune out. Or they lash out or they fall for easy scapegoats or they culture war rage or they give in to conspiracy theories or cynicism, or they join the cult of the techno Bros' new feudalism. All of this, all because the real issue, class, still sits there, untouched at the root of it all. I spent most of this episode breaking down what's wrong and the history behind it. It's a rigged and unstable game. It's a broken promise, politics stuck in the past. But I want to ask a different kind of question now. What if we stopped playing this game altogether? What if politics didn't have to be about winners and losers, but about who climbs to the top while others stay at the bottom? What if we built a system that gave everyone a stable floor to stand on? Not just a shot at success, but the security to live with dignity kind of no matter what happens. That's not a pipe dream. That's not utopia. That's what a sane society would want for themselves, for their children. Take something like a guaranteed income. It's simple. Every person gets a basic kind of income, no matter what their living situation is. We could tie it to employment, but we don't have to. We could say everyone gets this. It's a basic universal income. We could do it many different ways. The point is, is that you're guaranteed to not be left in the lurch. If things don't work out for you, if the markets move on, if you get laid off because your industry is converting and there's just nowhere for you to go, you don't get to see your dreams crushed. Instead, you're going to be taken care of by the guaranteed income. I think most of us would love the opportunity to be taken care of by our fellows when we're in need of it. And most of us would enjoy actually giving back to others when we could afford it. We might fear that some people could take advantage of such a system. In fact, that's probably the biggest thing that people will say is the problem here. I don't want people gaming the system. Who will work? They will say. But if you think about what is happening now, the way the owners of capital game and take advantage of the current system, that sort of injustice would be small potatoes. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather lose $10 a year to fraud than the tens of thousands of dollars we currently lose to capitalism. This income would mean you don't have to take garbage jobs just to survive. You don't have to stay in a job where you feel you're being mistreated because you just can't afford to transition to another job or do anything else. It means you can say no to exploitation. It means artists can sit around and make art. Parents can sit around and raise kids. People can breathe. And best of all, it would mean that we could have economic stability without the establishment of a permanent, oppressed class. Essentially, we would be banding together here to create a kind of economic stability that would allow us to all be taken care of, not just those of us in the privileged classes. Capitalism does not offer that option. Now, imagine we paired something like that with something even bolder, the abolition of rent, not just rent control or some kind of subsidy to help people afford things. I mean, ending the very idea that some people get to profit off of others just for existing, or being able to own someone else's business just because they happen to need startup money. In short, I really mean getting rid of the capacity in our economic system to make money from ownership alone. If we abolish it the same way we abolished slavery, where we say, you just can't do that anymore. If we did that, these ideas would ultimately flip the script. There would be no need to make more money than you needed than you could spend on yourself, because there would be no advances in doing so. There'd be no advantage in being a billionaire. There'd be no way to use that power over others because the cost of trying to earn that through the only means left for earning, which would be labor, would be too high. There's simply no way that you could work hard enough to make billions of dollars if that was the only way you could make money through your labor. There would be a kind of stability then that develops, security, equality, and perhaps for the first time ever in American history, an actual universal freedom. People would have the ability to spend money and make decisions on what they needed for their themselves as opposed to what can I get away with minimally, given the fact that I don't make enough money, even if I'm fully employed? This isn't socialism, nor is it communism. In fact, I'm not really sure what you might call something like this, but it's certainly not capitalism, because capitalism relies on this idea of rent, the idea of making money from one's money, of being able to own a business without having to work at it, of being able to lend someone money and then make a profit off of that loan of the ability of someone to rent someone an object, make them pay for it, and then still not own it. That idea is inherent in capitalism. Otherwise, there's just no way for a capitalist to make money. You know, if you loan someone money and they pay you back, you don't make any profit off of that. There has to be a way of adding a little something to it in order to make a profit here. Without the constant demand for more, there would be plenty to go around. Imagine if the richest people, let's say everyone who has more than $3 million worth of assets, got rid of all but that last $3 million. Well, there'd be no reason to own something like a house that you didn't live in, since the only thing it could do is cost you money to maintain, even though you can't put it to any use. You could let someone live there, but you couldn't charge them rent to do so.. That would be illegal. And so you wouldn't want to own that house. That would make housing very affordable for most people. You could work a part-time job and own your own home. And that would be a benefit for everybody. Again, combining this with the guaranteed income, many people could work 20 years of their life, and that would be it. You go to school for the first 20, you work from 20 to 40, and then you're retired and you can live on your excess earnings for the rest of your life. That would be the story most people would enjoy. I think that's a better world. And it's one that we don't have to fight over. We don't have to wage culture wars over, you know, whose gender something is or like whether this person should be allowed to have that kind of job or participate in this kind of sport or whatever. So let's just go back then to where we started with all this. Transport bands, book bands, campus protests. Every week, the headlines seem to have this new fight, and we get pulled in. We get angry, we get exhausted, we get divided. But if we ask ourselves, are these the fights that matter most? Or are they just symptoms of this deeper thing, a system that keeps us anxious, it keeps us distracted, and it keeps us fighting over scraps. Because while we're busy arguing over bathrooms and books, the rent is still too damn high. The jobs still don't pay enough. The billionaires are still the ones writing the rules. My challenge to you is this. What if we fought for something bigger, not just to win the next culture, war, skirmish, but to reimagine the entire game, to build a stable prosperity, not just for some, but for everybody, to share the freedom, not as a slogan, but as a lived reality, to create a politics rooted in dignity and not in domination. that starts with seeing things clearly. It grows by refusing to take the bait. And it takes all of us together, not as winners or as losers, but as people worth more than just broken system has offered us. So the next time the headline drops, ask yourself, what are we really fighting for? Thanks for tuning in to "American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New, full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us, and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visit American Socrates.buzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.