Libtard. Right-wing nut. Snowflake. MAGA moron. Commie. Fascist.
We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said some version of it. I know I have. And every time it happens, somebody wins — but it’s not you, and it’s not the person on the other end of it.
Americans are more polarized than at any point in my lifetime, and a lot of that polarization is engineered. When you’re pissed off at your neighbor, it gets a lot harder to notice the strings being pulled. Division keeps things exactly the same. So who benefits from things staying exactly the same? Not you. Not me. Not your cousin who keeps posting unhinged stuff on Facebook. The people benefiting are the people extracting wealth from the bottom 90%, and they need you angry at your neighbor instead of looking up at them.
The 2023 RAND Corporation working paper on inequality put a number on it: $79 trillion has been redistributed upward from the bottom 90% to the top 1% since 1975. In 2023 alone, the figure was $3.9 trillion. That’s not a typo. That’s the size of the heist that’s been running while we’ve been calling each other names.
I want to be careful here, because the manipulation isn’t symmetric. I’ll say it plainly: the right-wing apparatus — Fox News, talk radio, the algorithm-juiced media ecosystem — is more disciplined, better funded, and more willing to lie than anything on the left. It has built a sealed information environment where reasonable people end up believing things that are simply not true. That’s not a “both sides” wash. It’s an asymmetry that matters.
But the left has its own version of the problem, even if the mechanics differ. Means-tested programs designed to look reformist while quietly preserving the insurance industry. Endless calls to compromise with the same corporate donors who fund the other side. Messaging so academic and credentialed it can’t reach anyone outside the room. Different mechanism, same outcome: nothing structural changes, and the wealth keeps flowing up.
What both manipulations have in common is what they want from you. They want you mad at the other half of the country, not at the system extracting from both halves.
The labels themselves are part of the trick. “Conservative” used to mean fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, and protecting institutions that work — which is roughly the opposite of what modern American conservatism does in practice. “Liberal” in its original sense was closer to what we now call libertarian: freedom from government interference. Now it usually means the opposite. We’re using words that have been so deformed they no longer point at the thing they once described, and then we’re throwing them at each other like grenades.
The two labels that have actually stayed close to their original meanings are progressive and left. Both have always been about challenging concentrated power and shrinking the gap between the people running things and the people getting run. That’s what made Teddy Roosevelt go after Standard Oil in 1911, and that’s what makes modern progressives go after Amazon today. The targets change. The thesis doesn’t.
Here’s what the machine doesn’t want anyone to notice. A rural conservative factory worker in Ohio and an urban progressive barista in Portland have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire writing the checks that fund their division.
Both are working harder for less money than their parents earned at the same age. Both are paying more for housing, healthcare, and education than their parents paid. Both are watching wealth concentrate at the top while their own standard of living degrades. And both are being told their economic anxiety is the other one’s fault. Pick your scapegoat — immigrants, urban elites, billionaires, rural voters, whoever fits the script you’ve been handed.
The real division in this country isn’t left versus right. It’s up versus down. And up has spent forty years convincing down to fight itself.
So what do you do about it?
I don’t think it’s “have better arguments on Facebook.” We’ve tried that. It doesn’t work. What changes anything is structural. The system is rigged in specific, identifiable ways, and those rigs can be fixed.
A few that actually exist as live policy ideas:
Ranked choice voting, so you can vote your conscience without throwing away your ballot. It’s already in use in Alaska, in Maine, in plenty of cities. It works.
Campaign finance reform that actually limits what corporations and billionaires can pour into elections. Politicians who don’t need billionaire money stop serving billionaire interests. That’s not radical; it’s mechanical.
Breaking up media concentration. A handful of conglomerates control most of what most Americans see and hear. That’s not how a healthy information environment looks. The 1996 Telecommunications Act made the consolidation legal; subsequent law could undo it.
Independent redistricting, so politicians stop choosing their voters instead of the other way around. There are state-level versions of this that already work.
None of these are exciting. None of them have a great hashtag. They’re plumbing. But plumbing is what actually changes the flow of water — and we’re talking about the flow of money and power, which is the same kind of problem.
The next time you’re about to call someone a name on the internet — and I’m including myself in this, because I’ve done it — try this instead. Ask who benefits from the two of you yelling at each other. The honest answer almost never names the person on the other end of the comment thread.
The person you’re arguing with isn’t your enemy. They got fed a different set of inputs by a different set of algorithms run by a different set of media companies owned by the same handful of billionaires. If you’d been fed those inputs, you’d believe a lot of what they believe. That’s not a defense of what anyone believes. It’s a recognition of how belief actually gets manufactured.
Save the fury for the manipulators, not the manipulated. Save the fight for the system, not the neighbor.
The machine works as long as we stay divided. It stops working the second we don’t.
Even that's Odd 
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