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by stein1946 2 hours ago
"We are going to call the current situation anything but class warfare."

boomers vs millenials, reds vs blues, south vs north, city folks vs country ones

2 comments

Maybe a political conflicts are more complex than a guy 150 years ago thought.
I think you're demonstrating the reluctance to admit that class conflict is a real thing.

There has been a class war going on for at least four decades in the US, and the lower classes are on the loosing side. All you have to do is look at growing wage gaps in that period. We can come up with all sorts of just-so stories, but the simple answer is that the rich have captured the US government, and it is being governed primarily for their benefit.

If you look at the actual numbers, the trend over the last several decades is a steadily shrinking number of people in poverty in the US. If the only thing you look at are the wage gaps, you're ignoring the very real gains the lower end of the spectrum have made. If the choice were to be poor then or poor now, I'd much rather be poor now.
The number of people in the prison/jail/probation/parole systems in the US has gone up ~16x since the 1970s

https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration...

While the population of the US has gone up by ~1.6x during that same period.

Seeing as convictions aren’t spread evenly across income brackets, a poor person’s chances of being in the carceral system outpacing population growth by a factor of ten doesn’t really jibe with the whole “there’s never been a better time to be poor” thing

I'm not American but I can tell city - land conflict, geographic conflicts are a very much thing in the whole world. I mean we have more contemporary political research so why not cite these.

Oh, also communism, Marx ideas were a catastrophy for Eastern Europe. Greetings from my vacation in Bucharest

None of those things are classes in the sense of the times the notion of class warfare was first pitched, and many of them cross classes.

There's plenty of poor/impoverished boomers, blues, reds, city and country folk

I think that's exactly the grandparent's point.

Those conflicts are all the pretexts - they believe that it's actually class war and the other labels are all used to avoid calling it by its name.

It isn't class warfare if the two (or more) sides aren't divided by class.

What OP meant was the income and wealth gaps are they only things they care about, not the only things that are real.

No, it's the empirical fact that the US is a plutocratic oligarchy. The oligarchy runs the economy, the government, and the media for its own benefit, and is violently opposed to anything that challenges this.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...