How the rich are fueling America’s division

The USA voted. Mid-term elections were held there last Tuesday, mid-term elections in the middle of every four-year presidential term. Each of them is a mood test of how the current president is received. So many use their ballots as reminders. Now it should be called discord, if only because Donald Trump (76) has poisoned the political climate. I haven’t thought about anything since then, not even last Tuesday.

My Wicked Country is the title of a book just published by American journalist Evan Osnos (45). The editor of the acclaimed The New Yorker returns home in 2013 after ten years as a correspondent in the Middle East and China and doesn’t recognize the country. Osnos wants to get to the bottom of the alienation and makes a “journey through the divided states of America,” as the book’s subtitle titles it.

Chicago, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Clarksburg, West Virginia, are his stations: the metropolis where his family came from, the affluent New York suburb where he grew up, and the small town where Osnos got his first job as a journalist. Wherever he meets people, he uses them to trace the major changes in political culture between September 11, 2001 (the attacks in New York) and January 6, 2021 (the storming of the Capitol). Drama that is over 20 years old.

“If the history of the United States is one of relentless balancing—between greed and generosity, industry and nature, originality and assimilation,” writes Osnos, “then the country is so out of balance that it has lost its center of gravity.” Since Trump’s election in 2016, the focus has been on “those left behind.” “But the best explanation for inequality was that the rich rushed ahead,” Osnos said.

Billionaires are running at lightning speed with their wealth from state structures. “Many wealthy people defend tax evasion on the grounds that they only do what is legal,” writes Osnos, adding that “great efforts have been made and large sums have been invested to rewrite laws in the interests of the rich.” Which brings us back to the interim deadlines, which deal with the replacement of the legislature by the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Anyone who wants to have electoral chances needs more and more money, as Osnos calculated: in the 2014 midterm elections, a candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives needed twice as much campaign budget as someone who ran in the 1986 midterms . And so there are more laws for the rich, and inequality is growing. Which, in turn, has an impact on society, as a Yale University study shows: “Inequality makes people less cooperative and unfriendly.”

Evan Osnos, “My Angry Country – A Journey Through the Divided States of America”, Surkamp