Hijacked by the Elite: How the Ruling Class Keeps Us Distracted And What Happens When We Start Listening to Each Other

When we stop mistaking each other for the enemy, we can finally confront the forces that actually hold us back.

Jul 27, 2025

Introduction

There is a growing sense in this country that something is fundamentally wrong. That despite our differences, most Americans are being asked to play by a set of rules that were never written for us. The game feels rigged because, in many ways, it is.

For decades, we’ve been told that the central divide in American life is ideological—Democrats versus Republicans, liberals versus conservatives. But that framing has become a smokescreen. The more closely I observe our political and economic system, the more convinced I am that the real divide is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom.

It is a small, entrenched ruling class versus the rest of us.

A Manufactured Divide

Today’s political culture thrives on conflict—particularly conflict that distracts. Social media platforms, cable news networks, and attention-driven algorithms reward division and outrage while burying nuance and shared interest. Understanding doesn’t trend. Cooperation doesn’t go viral. The Murdochs, Zuckerbergs, and Musks of the world have built empires on monetizing our distrust of one another.

And as we shout past each other online, the real consolidation of wealth and power continues almost entirely unchallenged.

Conversations that should unite Americans across all political backgrounds—about affordable housing, healthcare, wages, taxes, education, and public safety—are constantly reframed through culture war narratives that inflame but do not improve. Even sincere policy debates are twisted through an algorithmic lens that rewards polarization over problem-solving.

We are being distracted on purpose. And the longer we stay locked in battle with each other, the less we recognize who is benefiting from our division.

The Cost of Corruption

Corruption in America is often subtle, legal, and systemic. It’s not always the envelope of cash or the backroom deal. More often, it’s embedded in the policies that get passed or blocked. It’s in the tax code that rewards passive investment over active labor. It’s in the quiet influence of lobbyists who write legislation, the pharmaceutical executives who set prices, and the corporate landlords who control entire housing markets while ignoring tenant pleas during emergencies.

This is not an accident. It is a system designed to concentrate power and wealth at the very top while leaving everyone else to compete for increasingly scarce resources. A system where political access is sold to the highest bidder, and elected officials are pressured more by donors than by voters.

The consequences of this corruption are not abstract. They show up in the form of unaffordable prescriptions, crushing student debt, stagnant wages, and broken public services. They are why working families feel like they are falling behind even when they do everything right.

And too often, instead of holding accountable the small class of people truly driving these outcomes, we are encouraged to blame one another.

Division Is a Tool—Not a Truth

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: the people in power benefit from our division. The longer we are taught to hate our neighbor over political identity, cultural differences, or social values, the less time we spend examining who is really writing the rules we live by.

We’re told to distrust the person with a different yard sign. We’re told to fear each other over differences in race, language, religion, or gender expression—urban versus rural, immigrant versus native-born, trans versus cis. We’re told to argue endlessly over public school curriculums, corporate slogans, or whether a drag queen can read at a public library—while billionaires buy up neighborhoods, raise your rent, and block minimum wage increases without ever entering the conversation.

These cultural flashpoints are designed to inflame, not inform. And while many of these issues deserve discussion, they are often weaponized to obscure what’s really going on: an economic order in which power and wealth are extracted from the many and hoarded by the few.

The longer we are kept distracted by symbolic battles, the easier it is for corporate monopolies, political insiders, and billionaire donors to tighten their grip on our economy and democracy.

We are more alike than we are different. That isn’t idealism—it’s a strategic truth. The working family in Kentucky and the gig worker in California both want fair wages, affordable housing, decent healthcare, and a future for their kids. But we’re taught to see each other as threats rather than potential allies.

This is not by accident. It is by design.

We don’t need to agree on everything to recognize what’s broken. We don’t need to share every political belief to understand who is actually pulling the strings. And we certainly don’t need to keep falling into the same trap—divided, distracted, and powerless.

Because if we were ever to stop fighting each other long enough to look up, we might realize we’ve been fighting the wrong people all along.

Recognizing Unlikely Truths

And here’s where things start to get uncomfortable. Because once you understand how deliberately we are divided, once you see how thoroughly corruption and concentrated power shape the choices we’re given, you begin to hear echoes of your own frustration in unexpected places. You start noticing that some of the most piercing criticisms of the ruling elite—the corporate consolidation, the erosion of local control, the vanishing American dream—aren’t just coming from your side. They’re also coming from voices on the other side you might otherwise dismiss.

You may not agree with their ideology. You may reject their rhetoric, their allies, their motives. But what if, on certain core questions—about who holds power and who pays the price—they’re not wrong?

Allow me to take you down a path that may feel uncomfortable at first, but trust me, it’ll be rewarding.

Take a moment. Read the following quotes:

“Our republic has never been more hierarchical, more driven by class, more managed by an elite than it is today.”
“I look at Lina Khan as one of the…people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”
“The number two threat to our liberty is big business, when big business is able to use the apparatus of government to wrap around its objectives.”
“Perhaps we can stop sending our sons and daughters to fight in foreign wars… or maybe our government would stand up for American businesses and American jobs and make the American people… their focus. These are the things that I care about deeply.”
“Market capitalism is not a religion…Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having.”

I agree with all of these. If you align with many of my views, it’s likely that you do too. What might surprise you is who said them:

I’m on the progressive left. I believe in economic justice, democratic ownership, and a government that puts ordinary people before the wealthy and well-connected. I respect leaders like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zorhan Mamdani, and Lina Khan—people who challenge corporate dominance and fight for a fairer, more accountable economy.

So it may shock you when I say this: I agree with Josh Hawley. With J.D. Vance. With Matt Gaetz. With Marjorie Taylor Greene. With Tucker Carlson.

Any other day, I’d call them right-wing demagogues, conspiracy peddlers, or unserious opportunists. And I’d still be right. But I agree with them here because they’ve tapped into something real, something most politicians either ignore or deliberately bury: that the American economy is rigged against the people who do the hardest work. That the system is structured to serve the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.

We use different languages. I call it corporate greed; they call it globalism. I talk about solidarity; they talk about sovereignty. But underneath those differences lies a shared recognition: working-class Americans have been sold out by corporations, by politicians, by the media, and by both parties.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t respect their willingness to say what so many Democrats won’t: that elites have prioritized profits over people, donors over voters, and corporate consolidation over community survival.

That truth isn’t left or right. It’s working-class.

Take Sen. Josh Hawley. He’s co-sponsored bipartisan bills to curb exploitative credit card interest rates alongside Bernie Sanders. He’s worked with Democrats to lower prescription drug costs, and he’s pushed to expand the child tax credit. In a New York Times op-ed, Hawley openly challenged his own party: “Will Republicans be a majority party of working people, or a permanent minority speaking only for the C-suite?” He rails against monopolies and has called Big Tech a threat to freedom.

To be clear, his reasoning is often drenched in traditionalist values—he supports the child tax credit because he believes one parent should stay home (usually the mother). But that doesn't erase the policy overlap. As uncomfortable as it may be for progressives, Hawley is staking out economic terrain that Democrats abandoned long ago.

J.D. Vance praised Lina Khan, the Biden-appointed FTC Chair, for cracking down on monopoly power. He co-sponsored legislation with Elizabeth Warren to claw back failed bank executive pay, joined Sherrod Brown to address train derailment disasters, and supported bipartisan efforts to break up Big Tech and rein in corporate mergers.

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is rightly reviled for her conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric, has struck a chord with working Americans. She’s spoken about ending endless wars, standing up for domestic jobs, and challenging a government that “serves the wealthy…and the powerful few.” On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, she went further, lamenting how “our children’s generation… can’t afford rent, can’t afford insurance, can’t find a good-paying job.” You don’t have to agree with her worldview to recognize that she’s speaking to real pain.

And at a recent Turning Point USA Summit, Tucker Carlson asked a simple, devastating question: “Can my kids afford a house with a full-time job at 27? 28? And the answer is: no way.” He continued, “If people don’t own things, they don’t feel ownership of the country they’re in... It’s really hard to have a family without a house. People want a little normal house. That is the actual American dream. And that is what is totally unattainable for young people.”

What unites both these voices and those on the left like Bernie and AOC isn’t party loyalty or ideology. It’s populism: a political framework that positions “the people” in opposition to a corrupt, self-serving elite.

The American populist tradition goes back more than a century. It was the farmers and laborers of the 1890s demanding an end to railroad monopolies and banker rule. It was the New Deal coalition taking on Wall Street and building Social Security. It was union organizers demanding dignity.

Both left- and right-wing populists are responding to the same broken reality: a political system captured by corporate interests, an economy that bleeds workers dry while enriching shareholders, and a government that listens more to lobbyists than to the people who actually keep this country running. That core insight—that ordinary Americans have been betrayed by an elite, bipartisan consensus—is not just valid. It’s essential.

It’s why Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley can both speak about corporate greed. Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and J.D. Vance can both criticize monopolies. Why Zorhan Mamdani and even Marjorie Taylor Greene can both claim to speak for the working class. They are all, in different ways and with very different values, pointing to a truth that most establishment politicians refuse to touch: this economy is not designed to serve working people. It is designed to extract from them.

But the similarities end there.

Progressive populism sees this injustice and fights to build power among the people themselves—through unions, public goods, democratic ownership, and mass political mobilization. It seeks to redistribute power, not just wealth, by making the economy and government more accountable to the many, not the few.

Right-wing populism, by contrast, often ends where the corporate donor class wants it to: with rhetoric, not results. It names the villains, but rarely punishes them. It champions “the working man” while voting against unions. It denounces Big Tech while defending billionaire tax loopholes. It speaks to economic pain, but frequently redirects that anger toward scapegoats: immigrants, trans people, “woke culture,” or globalism. In doing so, it leaves the actual economic power structure untouched—and in some cases, even more entrenched.

That’s misdirection.

The fight for working people is too important to be reduced to talking points or culture war theatrics. If we truly want to take on the corporate oligarchy, it will take more than slogans. It will take a populism rooted in democracy—not demagoguery. In solidarity—not supremacy. In liberation—not nostalgia for a past that never served everyone equally to begin with.

If nothing else, the last decade has made one thing clear: populism is popular. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—two political “outsiders” with wildly different worldviews—each built mass movements by breaking from the political establishment and claiming to fight for the forgotten American. Both spoke to economic despair. Both rejected the bipartisan status quo. Both mobilized millions.

But only one of them had a plan (or only one was telling the truth).

Trump channeled working-class anger, but governed for the ruling class. His tax cuts went to billionaires. His Cabinet was stacked with Goldman Sachs alumni. His “America First” agenda outsourced economic policy to corporate lobbyists and culture warriors. He talked about draining the swamp—then filled it with people who poisoned the well.

Had Bernie Sanders won in 2016 or 2020, we would likely have seen something very different: Medicare for All, tuition-free public college, a reinvigorated labor movement, and the breaking up of corporate monopolies. Bernie’s campaign wasn’t about him. It was about us. It was about building a political revolution rooted in working-class power.

So where do we go from here, in a soon-to-be post-Trump world plagued by inequality, alienation, and elite dominance?

We build a populist left that leads with clarity and courage.

That doesn’t mean diluting our values to win over the right. It means reclaiming the economic terrain that made right-wing populism popular in the first place. It means talking to working people in plain language, organizing across the country from big cities like LA to small towns in South Dakota, and fighting like hell to give people real material wins.

That may mean finding tactical moments of alignment with right-wing populists on issues like antitrust enforcement, war powers, or corporate welfare. Not because we share the same ideology, but because the working class finally deserves victories.

Hijacked by the Elite: How the Ruling Class Keeps Us Distracted And What Happens When We Start Listening to Each Other

When we stop mistaking each other for the enemy, we can finally confront the forces that actually hold us back.

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