POLITICS

The Government Is Starting to Fear the Consequences of Economic Inequality

Class anger has officially become a ‘security concern’

Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash

“Class-based or economic grievances.”

That, according to Ken Klippenstein, is a new addition to the Homeland Threat Assessment. He offers what he identifies as a leaked advance draft copy of the assessment here.

From Klippenstein:

The assessment doesn’t define what it means by “class-based or economic grievances.” The phrase could as much refer to an angry MAGA Midwesterner as it could any Mamdani-supporting urban dweller. But the focus is clear: the main threat to the “homeland,” DHS thinks, is the American people.

Everyone I personally know who cares about economic inequality and class issues is a peaceful person. We might talk your ear off, but we aren’t going to try to shoot it off.

But somebody out there might.

You do not have to favor violence to suspect it’s coming. You don’t have to have any psychic powers, either. A very light exposure to the news is enough.

Virtually everyone is angry about the cost of health insurance but most of us react by bitching. You might, however, recall the name Luigi. You do not have to condone what he allegedly did — I don’t — to understand that something like that was inevitable and is likely to happen again.

That inevitability is an indictment of the system, not a defense of violence

Economic exploitation is a form of violence

We’ve been skimming off most of the wealth produced from the workers and lavishing it on a small number of multi-millionaires and billionaires. Then we engineered a tax code that allows our very richest citizens to pay little or nothing at all.

Everyone including the upper-middle class pays their taxes. The ultra-wealthy largely do not.

At the same time, we’ve tightened every screw. Housing costs exploded. Healthcare premiums rose faster than wages. Childcare became unaffordable. Groceries, utilities and everything else required to simply live now eats up more of each paycheck.

When people who have done everything “right” and are working hard cannot afford basic necessities, that is not just an economic problem. It is a moral one, especially when we can all plainly see that the money exists but is simply not reaching us.

The age of guillotines is over but the anger is not

The age of economic-based violence never ended. Throughout history, the public has eventually risen up once exploitation reached a breaking point.

The French Revolution was one example. So was the American Revolution. We did not initially go to war with the British because we wanted independence. It began as fury over unjust taxation, but it did not stop there.

When material conditions become intolerable, politics does not remain polite.

Most people don’t want to riot

It takes a lot to make the average person turn off the TV and hit the streets. Mostly, people want ordinary lives. We want work that is useful and pays enough to support a decent standard of living. We want to avoid financial ruin if someone in our family gets sick. We want it to be possible to have children if we want them.

We are not asking for mansions or yachts. We are asking for a three-bedroom house, a reliable car, affordable healthcare, groceries that do not feel like a luxury purchase and some measure of security.

That is not radical. That is baseline stability.

We are, after all, the ones doing most of the work. That is why we are called the working class.

The danger isn’t that Americans will suddenly become more violent. It’s that we have normalized an economy that quietly brutalizes people until someone snaps.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe! I also have a Substack about economic inequality called *Untrickled and another aimed at authors who want to self-publish books called[ The Indie Author](https://selfpublishingbookauthors.substack.com/). My new book is[ Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJNRCQSJ). And yes, those are my husband’s actual boots on the cover! My most recent novel is[ The Trailer Park Rules](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTHT43L9).* Tips joyfully accepted via Ko-fi.

**All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way. ** — Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

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