Here’s the thing they don’t want you to figure out.
If you’re working two jobs and still can’t cover rent — the problem is not your neighbor. The problem is not the immigrant down the street. The problem is not the family across the political aisle. The problem is the system that pits you against all of them so you stay too busy fighting sideways to look up.
That’s what this song is about.
US Against Them is the third song in the Enough Is Enough campaign, after Party of One and Living the Dream. It’s a working-class anger song. Piano-driven, raw, plainspoken. No anthem, no chant, no slogan. Just the math of what it feels like to live in a country where one set of rules applies to you and a completely different set applies to the people who write the rules.
The whole song is built around one idea — the bridge line that gave it its meaning:
we owe, they own
blame your neighbor, that’s the con
The con is the trick where you spend your energy resenting the family next door for the food stamps they qualify for, instead of resenting the hedge fund that bought every house on your block and tripled the rent. The con is the trick where you blame the immigrant for low wages instead of the corporation that fought a minimum wage hike for thirty years. The con is the trick where you scream at the other party every four years while the same donors own both of them.
None of that is new. You already know it. The point of putting it in a song is that songs get past the part of the brain that has its defenses up. A column you can argue with. A Facebook post you can scroll. A chorus you’ve sung along to twice before you realize what it’s actually saying — that one sneaks in a side door.
Most people, regardless of who they voted for, can agree on a small list of plain facts:
- Working forty hours a week should cover housing and food.
- Healthcare should not put a family in bankruptcy.
- A starter home should be possible for a young couple with steady jobs.
- The rules should be the same for the person on top as the person on the bottom.
That is not a partisan list. That’s a list almost everyone in this country agrees with when you ask them straight, without the team colors attached. The reason it never becomes policy is not because we disagree. It’s because the people who write the policy are not us. They never were. And they have spent a lot of money making sure we keep arguing with each other instead of asking why.
The song doesn’t preach. It just walks through what an ordinary week looks like — the bald tires, the split pills, the rent that ate the paycheck, the grown kids back home because nobody can afford to move out — and contrasts it line for line with what the other side of the same country looks like. Private jets. House-call doctors. Bentleys. Bailouts. Donors buying presidents while the rest of us buy pizza on a credit card.
Take one example. March 2025, on Fox Business with Larry Kudlow, Elon Musk pointed at federal entitlement spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — and called it “the big one to eliminate,” suggesting up to $700 billion a year could be cut. The White House spent the next day insisting he only meant waste and fraud. The quote is on tape. The math doesn’t work without touching benefits. That’s the song line “they gut the system, call it fair / while yachts drift by like we’re not there.” It is not a metaphor.
That contrast is not subtle. It is not supposed to be.
The chorus is the whole argument in four lines:
You blame me, I blame you
but that’s the part that isn’t true
it’s not neighbor against neighbor
it’s us against them, not me against you
A music video is coming. So is a new blog series — BrokeCon by Design — that lays out how the con actually works, mechanism by mechanism, with receipts. (Yes, the series got its name from a song title I retired. Waste not.)
For now, here’s the song. Listen to it once with the lyrics in front of you. Then send it to one person you’ve argued with about politics in the last year — somebody on the other team, somebody whose vote you cannot understand. Not to convert them. Just to see if maybe, on this one thing, you actually agree.
That’s the whole point. That’s where we start.
The curtain’s up.
Enough is enough.
US Against Them is part of the Enough Is Enough project at eventhatsodd.com. Read the research behind the platform: Americans Agree on Almost Everything — We Just Don’t Realize It
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