The Great Divide: Why We're Fighting the Wrong War

The Origin of the Great Divide — Paris, 1789

The left/right political divide is a modern invention with a birth date — the French National Assembly, May 5, 1789. It wasn’t a philosophical discovery or a natural political law. It was a seating arrangement hastily prepared by carpenters the night before the first assembly.

As the delegates began their first day as the National Assembly, a peculiar thing began to happen. The deputies who were aligned with the King and the monarchy, what we call conservatives, traditionalists, or royalists, lined up along the right side of the speaker.

Meanwhile, those who were in favour of the revolution, the progressives, liberals, constitutional monarchists, or republicans, lined up along the left side of the speaker. In the center were the moderates — literally, the centrists.

And as the days went by, this seating arrangement gradually became the norm. One right-wing member, Baron de Gauville, exclaimed:

“I tried to sit in different parts of the hall and not to adopt any marked spot, so as to remain more the master of my opinion ... but I was compelled absolutely to abandon the left or else be condemned always to vote alone and thus be subjected to jeers from the galleries.”

A seating arrangement accidentally became the basis for the political spectrum of Western politics for the next two centuries. It spread worldwide and the party system followed in the wake of this seating arrangement — the Blue Team and the Red Team.

The initial political clubs during the French Revolution, such as the Jacobins, Cordeliers, Exagerés and Montagnards, evolved into full-fledged political parties over time. Although there are additional teams, such as the Green Team fighting on behalf of the environment or the Orange Team fighting for labor, the main two divisions of right and left have remained constant to this day.

To be fair, these simple party distinctions give the governing body and the general public some real benefits: it simplifies understanding the issues and offers a clear, visual way to categorize ideologies—left for progressive/reformist views, right for conservative/traditionalist ones. Every issues is quickly divided up between the left and the right, for or against.

This greatly facilitates public debate. It enables dialogue and discussion by identifying core disagreements on state intervention, equality, taxation and social issues. Having a dedicated opposition ensures that each side is always under scrutiny by the other, and held in check. The opposition acts as the watchdog of the ruling party.

Everyone understands the playing field of every country because the left/right divide has become universal globally and it helps to understand and compare political systems across national borders.

Why the Great Divide Failed

The Left/Right divide has failed because capital went overseas and politics didn’t.

The globalization of money has not resulted in the globalization of politics. We are still debating nationally, vainly attempting to force our national leaders to deliver policy changes that will benefit the working class and middle class, but our national leaders are impotent, helpless and compromised by the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) who do not have to answer to them.

BlackRock manages $14 trillion in assets across 100 countries, making it the world’s largest asset manager. Larry Fink cannot be reigned in and forced to comply with many national regulations, tax requirements or financial oversight because the assets he manages are not strictly national. These assets are sourced globally from U.S. institutional investors, foreign governments, pension funds, endowments, and individual investors. While BlackRock is headquartered in New York and subject to U.S. regulatory oversight, over one third of BlackRock’s $14 trillion, a considerable share, is invested outside the direct control of U.S. law.

When Apple makes profits on products sold in Ireland, created by California innovation using Taiwanese manufacturing, it is difficult, if not impossible for the left/right model to apply. Which nation owns which slice of Apple pie?

When a Russian oligarch buys a yacht with Euros, built in Germany, registered in the Cayman Islands and docked in Monaco — the left/right framework has no tools to regulate this.

The party system was built for a world where wealth had a national address.

The political consequences are complicated. The left keeps fighting for higher taxes on corporations that have escaped national taxation. The right keeps defending “national” industries that are owned by shareholders who do not owe allegiance to any nation. Both are shadowboxing with a capitalism that no longer resembles the one their ideologies were created to engage.

Transnational capitalism does not need to answer to national interests.

The culture war issues that dominate American politics — abortion, guns, immigration, gender, crime — are the issues where the TCC has no real stake. They are genuinely contested among ordinary people, they generate enormous emotional energy, and they consume the political bandwidth that might otherwise be directed at wealth inequality, cost of living crisis, homelessness and the declining quality of healthcare. Added to this, the distraction of cultural angst keeps the billionaires off the radar.

Meanwhile the actual defining questions of our times — who governs transnational capital flows, who sets the rules for AI development, who controls digital currency infrastructure, who has authority over pandemic response — exist entirely outside the national left/right framework. Neither Chuck Schumer nor JD Vance has a coherent answer to these questions because their political models were built for a different economic geography.

Added to this is the glaring observation that the Transnational Capitalist Class is not listening to the public and doesn’t care what they think or want. A widely cited Princeton/Northwestern study analyzed over 1,800 policy issues. It found that the preferences of the average American has a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy, while economic elites and organized interest groups have substantial near total influence.

This study reveals the painful reality that public opinion in the USA has virtually no impact on policy creation, especially on high-profile issues, where legislation is frequently passed in favor of the TCC rather than the general populace.

The Reality Theory

The truth is that the billionaires are taking over, or they already have taken over. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a reality theory. The data points to an unprecedented upward wealth transfer and the adjacent destruction of the working class. The mechanism is not hidden, and the causation is not complex: when wealth concentrates upward, the working class is pushed downward — into precarity, into poverty, into homelessness.

As of recent data, America’s billionaires hold a record-level concentration of wealth, with estimates placing their total net worth at $5.8 trillion to $7.8 trillion depending on the source and year of analysis. According to Americans for Tax Fairness and Forbes data cited in 2024, the 806 U.S. billionaires collectively held $5.8 trillion, nearly double their total from 2017, following major tax cuts. More recent estimates from 2025 suggest this figure may have risen to $7.8 trillion held by 905 billionaires.

This means that less than 0.001% of the U.S. population controls a sum comparable to the bottom 50% of households. While billionaires represent a tiny fraction of the wealthy, they are a key component of the broader top 1%, who control the majority of national wealth.

Media organizations owned by billionaires naturally emphasize stories that generate engagement. Critics of the TCC argue that mainstream media often downplays structural causes of wealth concentration. A 2021 FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) analysis noted that major studies on racial and gender wealth gaps received minimal coverage, despite their significance.

Media outlets, operating as profit-driven businesses, may prioritize sensational or consumer-oriented content over in-depth economic reporting, which is resource-intensive and less commercially rewarding.

Additionally, research suggests media frames wealth inequality more as “individual success” than systemic advantage, reinforcing cultural narratives that favor the wealthy.

This “advantage frame” (as opposed to a “disadvantage frame”) can subtly normalize extreme wealth accumulation while obscuring policy-driven mechanisms like tax loopholes, stock buybacks, and deregulation that facilitate it.

Politicians dependent on donor networks naturally avoid issues that threaten these networks. The result is a political system that produces intense conflict about everything, except the distribution of economic power. According to Oxfam’s 2026 report, billionaires are 4,000 times more likely than ordinary citizens to hold political office, and 100 American billionaire families funded one-sixth of all election spending in the 2024 election.

This deep entanglement creates a “cone of silence” around wealth concentration—politicians avoid policies like wealth taxes or anti-monopoly reforms that could threaten their funding.

The blue team and red team give ordinary people the psychological experience of political participation — a blue jersey, a red hat, political identity and tribal solidarity — a deep delusion that results in eventual disillusionment with the political process. You might feel like you’re in the good fight, but you’re in the wrong boxing ring. The fight is happening somewhere else, between people who don’t care about your issues.

The Real Axis — Vertical Not Horizontal

The horizontal war between left and right has almost completely obscured the vertical war between the top and the bottom. This is true on the national scale, as well as on the international level.

The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is not a new idea, and may even seem like a cliché, but what is new is the scale, the speed, and the degree to which the vertical war has been decisively won by one side, while the other side was too busy fighting a horizontal war that can’t be won, and only serves to obscure the real battle.

The numbers are unambiguous and worth stating plainly:

The Oxfam data shows the world’s ten richest men doubled their fortunes during the COVID pandemic, while the incomes of 99% of humanity fell. Former Canadian finance minister and WEF Trustee, Chrystia Freeland, in her book, Plutocrats, compares today’s rise of the global super-rich to the late 19th-century Gilded Age—the era of American "robber barons" like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. She argues that, just as rapid industrialization and new technologies concentrated immense wealth and power in the hands of a few during that period, today’s convergence of globalization and technological innovation has created a new transnational elite.

Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar is on record saying, “The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable. The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated — by three times — but so too has their power. The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed and bought by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, running the world’s largest economy … a stark wake-up call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few.”

The raw data of wealth transfer only tells part of the story. The more important metric is power transfer — and here, the case is even starker.

Wealth Transfer Equals Power Transfer

It is not possible to separate extreme wealth accumulation from political power acquisition. Those who actively hoard wealth are also actively hoarding power. Wealth can buy legislative access, regulatory capture, media ownership, think tank production, academic chair endowments, judicial appointments through donor networks, and the revolving door between the government and the private sector.

Chrystia Freeland documented this mechanism in Plutocrats. What has happened since 2012, when she wrote it, is that the mechanism has accelerated and become more visible — and the billionaire class has stopped feeling the need to hide it. “Political decisions helped to create the super-elite in the first place, and as the economic might of the super-elite class grows, so does its political muscle.”

Elon Musk didn’t just lobby the government. He was the government — running DOGE with no democratic mandate, no Senate confirmation, no accountability structure. Musk donated a whopping $288 million to a constellation of Trump-aligned and Republican-aligned efforts, enough to buy him a seat at the White House, making him a de facto co-president.

Peter Thiel didn’t just fund think tanks to influence policy — he installed his former employee as Vice President. Thiel hired Vance at his venture capital firm, Mithril Capital, and donated $15 million to his 2022 Senate campaign—the largest single contribution ever to a U.S. Senate candidate. Thiel also introduced Vance to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2021, and reportedly lobbied Trump to select Vance as his running mate in 2024.

Parallel to this, on the international level, the TCC has gained enormous structural power over states and political processes, promoting deregulation, privatization, and free trade — policies that weaken national sovereignty and labor power. The World Economic Forum in Davos is often cited as the key venue where this class consolidates influence.

According to scholars, like William I. Robinson, who has done intense studies of the TCC: “An epochal shift is underway to a new phase in the on-going and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, global capitalism, characterized by the rise of truly transnational capital and the integration of every country into a new globalized system of production and finance, a transnational capitalist class as would be global ruling class, and transnational state apparatuses.”

The Social Wreckage — Evidence the Vertical War Has Been Won

The cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, the homelessness epidemic, the substance abuse crisis — these are not policy failures in the conventional sense. Policy failures imply governments tried and fell short. These are the predictable outcomes of a political economy that has been systematically optimized for capital accumulation at the expense of everything else.

Housing is the clearest case. In Vancouver, Canada, for a real world example, the housing crisis is not mysterious. It is the direct result of real estate being treated as an investment asset rather than shelter infrastructure. The Vancouver housing crisis is characterized by extreme unaffordability, with a recent Royal Bank of Canada report describing the market as being in a "full-blown crisis" where median-income households need over 106% of their income to cover ownership costs.

When Blackstone and its equivalents can purchase residential housing at scale, when offshore capital can park wealth in empty condominiums, when zoning law is shaped by development industry lobbying — the outcome is inevitable. Workers cannot afford to live in the cities their labor built.

Blackstone is actively acquiring single-family rental homes and other residential properties in the United States, having added tens of thousands of units to its portfolio through recent major acquisitions. The firm purchased Tricon Residential in 2024 for $3.5 billion (adding ~37,000 homes) and Home Partners of America in 2021 for $6 billion (adding ~17,000 homes), bringing its total single-family portfolio to approximately 58,000–60,000 homes.

The homelessness and substance abuse crises are downstream of the housing crisis, which is downstream of the wage stagnation crisis, which is downstream of the union-busting and labor deregulation agenda that the billionaire class pursued systematically from the 1970s onward — through both red and blue governments, in both conservative and progressive jurisdictions.

This is the evidence that the Transnational Capitalist Class are winning the vertical war. There is resistance, there are partial reversals, the outcome is not yet fully locked, but the trajectory is unambiguous and has been unambiguous for fifty years.

The left blamed the right for it. The right blamed the left.

Both were wrong — or rather, both were fighting the wrong war. In order to point our guns at the correct target, we need to have an understanding of the nature and current status of the opposition.

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This is the first article in a series on the Transnational Capitalist Class — who they are, how they operate, and why their internal conflicts matters more than the conflicts between the left and the right.

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