There are now two classes of people in America, where before 2025 there were three.
These are the investing class and the wage class.
The middle class, where most of us once lived, and where the transition between classes took place, has disappeared, like cartilage from an aging hip.
American life is now bone on bone.
Thanks to a little frugality and a lot of luck, I am in the investing class. I have money that works for me.
Most Americans are in the wage class, trying to get by week to week or month to month. This includes my children.
The late Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, described what it takes to cross the divide. “The first $100,000 is the hardest,” he said. Once you have $100,000 in liquid assets, your money can start to work for you.
This was never easy. Thanks to AI, it’s impossible. Young people are starting to realize this.
There are doctors, lawyers, and college professionals locked into the wage class. Some never chose to save. Others had their savings torn from them by illness or other circumstances.
Our betters pretend that is a moral failure. Usually, It’s not.
Trump didn’t harden our society. AI did. Tech executives are now locked in a “great game” to master the future, firing thousands of computer programmers and middle managers, claiming it’s “our culture.” They’re also cutting pay 20% of pay by forcing workers into the office, spreading fear throughout the Creative Class that we will soon be replaced with code.
A New Politics
This has not yet changed our politics. The investment class controls both parties. It owns all the media. All the “pundits,” on both sides of the aisle, are Schwab account holding members of the Investing Class. To these people, those who express sympathy for “the working man” are either class traitors or communists.
The “genius” of Trumpism is dividing the Wage Class based on superficial differences. Over 50 years the right turned sex, race, and religion into political signifiers, setting people off against each other, red against blue.
In 2025, however, the game has been revealed. Liberals screech that Trumpists have been “fooled,” but they were, too, giving in to the canard that minor differences in skin, or faith, or heart, ever mattered.
This New Politics doesn’t exist only because there’s no person, no movement, and no spark setting everything alight. We hate Democrats as much as we do Republicans because no one speaks to our real choices.
It is possible tomorrow’s Election Day will light that fire, as “experts” over-react to results that now seem obvious. More likely, they will downplay it, pretend it’s not happening, that it can be tamped down.
In these elections margin matters.
