To the left, we’re living in a second Gilded Age, with inequality soaring, workers struggling, and the one percent exercising way too much influence over government and the economy. There is plenty of hard data to support that conclusion, but the right sometimes disputes it, and sometimes simply dismisses it as irrelevant.
To the right, we’re refighting the Civil War, with the culture wars (most notably, but not exclusively, abortion) replacing slavery as the central issue. There is plenty of reason to believe that most of the right is more motivated by cultural than economic concerns, but the left, in its self-righteous blindness, mostly blows this off as “false consciousness” and refuses to take it seriously.
How can we reunite the country when we can’t even agree on the era we’re reliving?