Race War, Class War, Same War: Both Will Tell You How to Live
The country of ideas
Some days ago, on stage at the University of Chicago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told the audience that the American Revolution had been a war “against the billionaires of their time.” When the predictable backlash arrived, she doubled down. Then tripled. The framing was deliberate. It was also historically inverted: the colonists who started the war did not hate the wealthy, they were the wealthy. George Washington was among the richest men in the colonies. Hancock, Franklin, and Jefferson were comfortable men. The grievance against the Crown was constitutional: no taxation without representation, the consent of the governed, the natural rights of free men. Historical accuracy, for AOC, was beside the point. The point was the frame.
On the right, the framing has been steady for years. Tucker Carlson, on his Fox News show in April 2021, said the Democratic Party “is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” He repeated the framing across more than four hundred episodes. Charlie Kirk, before his death last September, put it more explicitly: “The great replacement is not a theory. It’s a reality. They are replacing white rural America with something different.” The “they” was unspecified and shifting. The threat was demographic. The politics were ethnic.
Each had taken a complex, multi-dimensional civic life and collapsed it into a single identity axis. AOC’s axis: class. Kirk’s axis: race. Each had identified an enemy category, the billionaire or the demographic replacer, and called for the in-group to defend itself. Each had located salvation in the destruction or removal of that category. Each had asked their audience to stop thinking about politics and start feeling about it. Each had succeeded.
Two different stages. Two different audiences. Two different grievances. Same move.
This is the architecture of American politics in 2026. The right is fighting a race war. The left is fighting a class war. Both have stopped fighting for anything in particular. Both are toxically empathetic in one dimension and adversarial in every other. Both have abandoned the founding premise that made this country possible.
A Canadian marketing professor named Gad Saad recently published a book called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. His argument: when empathy overrides the universal rules that allow strangers to coexist, the empathy becomes pathological. The reception has been predictable. On the left, he is an apologist for white nationalism, an enabler of cruelty, a man who pathologizes compassion to license the persecution of immigrants and minorities. The historian of psychology Susan Lanzonia, writing in Salon, called the book “a structured attempt to dehumanize people who might be in need of empathy.” On the right, he is a brave truth-teller against the woke mind virus.
Both readings are wrong, and the way they are wrong is the diagnosis.
Saad’s target is a particular behavioral disposition: the disposition that lets empathy override the enforcement of universal rules. The empathized-with party in his framework is anyone, immigrant or native, rich or poor, friend or stranger, who is permitted to violate the reciprocal rules that make peaceful coexistence possible. The criminal who is excused because he is sympathetic. The assailant who is excused because she is marginalized. The vandal who is excused because his cause is righteous. Saad is identifying the suspension of the universal rule, not the population to whom the rule should apply. The framework is functional. It identifies a kind of behavior.
So many writing about Saad’s ideas are making the same mistake. Operating at the surface, with no understanding for what is being argued. That, or they are in bad faith.
We have lost the muscle for function-thinking.
Two questions, two societies
This is the underlying claim of The Open Society and Its Enemies, the book Karl Popper wrote in wartime exile in 1945 while watching the most educated civilization in Europe eat itself. Popper’s diagnosis was epistemological. The closed society asks: who should rule? It thinks in identities, in categories, in the question of which tribe gets the throne. The open society asks a different question: how do we design institutions so that bad rulers can be removed without bloodshed? The first question is identitarian. The second is functional. The whole architecture of the open society is the capacity to operate at the second register.
When that capacity erodes, the texts that depend on it become unreadable. Popper’s own famous footnote, that a tolerant society cannot extend unlimited tolerance to those who would destroy it, is now routinely quoted to justify the preemptive suppression of disliked speech. But Popper, in the very next sentence, wrote that suppression of intolerant philosophies “would certainly be most unwise” as long as rational argument and public opinion can counter them. The right to suppress activates only when the intolerant refuse to meet on the level of rational argument, when they “answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.” Popper was naming a functional condition. His readers now hear a tribal identification.
Or, more explicitly: people love mob censorship when they agree with it and call it fascist when they disagree with it. Only the second judgment can be correct. A worldview that reduces politics to good versus evil cannot hold both judgments at once.
Saad’s reception is the same failure on a smaller scale. He names a functional disposition. His readers, friend and critic alike, translate it into a group target. The translation tells you nothing about Saad. It tells you everything about the readers.
We see the label and miss the relation. We see the group and miss the function. We see the tribe and miss the architecture.
The political consequence is the collapse I have just described. AOC and Carlson are mirrors who mistake each other for enemies. Both have abandoned function-thinking for identity-thinking. Both have located evil in a category of person rather than in a kind of behavior. Both are profiting handsomely from the abandonment.
Look at the class warriors’ own behavior. In the 2026 California governor’s race, the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed Tom Steyer. Steyer’s resume: Stanford MBA, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, a private-equity career, the founder of a hedge fund whose portfolio included private prisons and coal. By the DSA’s stated criteria, Steyer is the precise category of person the organization exists to oppose. The endorsement made sense by the unstated criteria. He was on the right team. The DSA was self-aware about it, writing in their voter guide that “his wealth was earned through the exploitation of the working class” before endorsing him anyway as “the most progressive of the current viable candidates.” The class war’s enemy is the billionaire from the wrong tribe. The billionaire from the right tribe gets a press release.
The right operates the same way. The anti-elite Republican Party is led, at almost every level of its current political class, by Ivy League graduates. JD Vance went to Yale Law. Ron DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard. Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley: Harvard, Harvard, Yale. The populist insurgency against the credentialed elite is the credentialed elite running the show. The principle is identitarian in operation, functional only in costume.
The principle was a costume
Watch the No Kings rallies that filled American streets through the late winter and into spring. The concern was constituted by January 6th. Donald Trump courts the strongman aesthetic, and the concern that he might not relinquish power on schedule is a grounded one. And yet many of the same demonstrators chant “No Kings” against Trump while elevating Bernie Sanders and AOC as moral authorities, receiving their pronouncements on what should be confiscated, who should be excluded from civic standing, what counts as legitimate accumulated wealth, as if they descended from a more enlightened mountain. The No Kings protester sees the royalism gathering on the right. She misses the royalism gathering inside her own ranks. Both are royalism. Both are asking the closed society’s question: who should rule? The open society would ask something else.
Eric Hoffer saw this coming in 1951. The True Believer is the foundational 20th-century text on mass-movement psychology, and its uncomfortable insight is that the content of a movement matters less than what the movement offers psychologically. The frustrated individual (Hoffer’s term) seeks self-renunciation, belonging, a clear enemy, and an explanation for personal failure that locates the cause outside the self. Any movement that supplies these will do. Which is why people convert between movements that seem ideologically opposite. The communist becomes a fascist. The religious zealot becomes a political radical. The costume differs left and right. The psychological function is identical.
Hoffer would not have been surprised that the leading anti-billionaire and anti-immigrant figures are competing for the same recruits. Both are selling refuge from the burden of selfhood. Both are offering a category onto which the frustrated individual can project all that ails him. The class warrior says: your suffering is the billionaire’s fault. The race warrior says: your suffering is the immigrant’s fault. Neither says: your suffering may be partially your own, and your work, and the slow accumulated weight of choices you have not made. Mass movements cannot offer that. It would empty the seats.
I’ve written elsewhere about the asymmetric historical sequence: the left shifted first and further through institutional capture, and the right shifted reactively after. That account stands. This essay describes the present moment, in which both tribes have arrived at the same structural place from different directions. A politics collapsed into a single identity axis, executed with identical mechanism even where the political content differs.
The class warrior and the race warrior are drawing from the same well.
There is a further problem on the class side that compounds the diagnosis. The policy menu the class warriors propose (confiscatory wealth taxes, mandatory dissolutions of large fortunes, the suppression of accumulated capital as an existential threat) does not just fail to grow the pie. It actively shrinks it. And shrinking pies produce scarcity politics. And scarcity politics produce violence. The historical signature is consistent across every redistributive-by-force movement of the modern era. France 1789. Russia 1917. Cambodia 1975. Venezuela. The class war produces the conditions that justify the class war. The doom loop is the whole structure.
Adam Smith identified the substrate two and a half centuries ago. Commercial society, by which Smith meant the positive-sum cooperation of strangers across vast distances under a system of stable property rights, is what made the modern world’s civility possible. Take away the substrate and you get the war of all against all that Smith and Hobbes were trying to climb out of. The class warrior who promises to redistribute the pie has not yet noticed that her policies first shrink it, then poison the conditions of its regrowth, then create the politics under which her further escalation becomes possible.
The race warrior has his own doom loop. The great-replacement framing corrodes civic trust. Corroded civic trust produces tribal sorting. Tribal sorting produces ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflict justifies more aggressive ethnic defense. Each turn of the spiral produces more demand for the next.
Neither doom loop is accidental. Each is a business model.
This is the part that should make us angry rather than philosophical. Tucker Carlson prospects for the great replacement rather than believing in it. He scans the discourse for the most engagement-rich toxic vein and inserts himself as its mastering voice. He is, as far as I can tell, simply tuned to elevating himself by any means available. Empty.
AOC is different in motive. Her heart, I believe, is in the right place; her alignment and her tactics are not. When the toxic vein of billionaire-hatred opened on the left, she stepped into it and mastered it. The motive differs from Carlson’s. The structural move is identical.
Both are operating, sincerely or cynically, inside a market that pays single-dimension identity politics on both sides far more than it pays for functional thinking. The philosopher Roger Scruton put the deeper mechanism this way: “Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”
The discourse economy of 2026 rewards race war and class war. It does not reward Madison. It does not reward Popper. It does not reward Smith. The function is invisible to the algorithm. The tribe is engagement gold.
But the function is the inheritance. This is the thing the class warrior and the race warrior have in common: they are both standing on top of an architecture they have neither read nor understood, and they are both busy dismantling it for parts.
James Madison wrote Federalist No. 10 in November 1787 to talk a divided New York into ratifying a constitution that was not yet a country. The essay is the most important short document in American political philosophy because it solves a problem the ancients had given up on. Faction, Madison wrote, is “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens.” “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” Faction cannot be eliminated without destroying liberty itself. Madison’s solution was structural. Extend the sphere wide enough that no single faction can become a national majority. Multiply interests until they check each other. Make the very multiplicity of factions the safeguard.
The architecture assumes faction of every kind: race-based, class-based, religious, geographic. It is designed to prevent any single one of these from capturing the state. What AOC and Carlson are each trying to do, collapse American politics into a single identity axis and mobilize a national majority along that axis, is the precise failure mode Madison built the Constitution to prevent.
This is the betrayal. Not the policies. Not the rhetoric. The architecture itself.
The country of ideas
The founders made a deliberate choice that almost every other country at almost every other moment in history did not make. They made America an idea rather than a bloodline. No religious test. No ethnic qualification. No noble inheritance. Citizenship by birth or by oath. The Constitution was silent on race because Madison and Hamilton were inconsistent men writing for an inconsistent country, but it was loud about function: what a citizen does, what an officeholder swears, what an institution must perform.
The asymmetry this produces is what makes America strange. You cannot become a different bloodline. You cannot become a different ancestor. You can spend a lifetime adjacent to a culture, marry into a family, raise children inside it, and you will still not be ethnically of it in the way the next generation will be ethnically of you. But you can become American. The country was set up that way deliberately. America is the only nation in the modern world that is constitutively becomeable, and it is becomeable precisely because it is an idea rather than a tribe. Citizenship is an act, not an assignment. You write your story by participating.
The class warrior takes this away from you in one direction. You are assigned: to a class, to an oppressor category, to an enemy line that runs through your bank account and decides your political weight before you have opened your mouth. The race warrior takes it away in the opposite direction. You are born: into a bloodline, a soil, an ancestry that fixes your civic standing before you have done a single act of citizenship. Both deny the founding. Both replace the idea with an identity. Both pretend that an axis the architecture was designed to neutralize is the axis on which everything must now turn. Both want you living inside their vision rather than writing your own. Both will tell you how to live. Neither will tell you how to become.
If we let them, the country they hand back to us will not be the one we inherited. It will be a country where your worth is your category and your category is your fate. We have a name for that country in the historical record. It is the country we crossed an ocean and fought a revolution to escape from, the one whose categorical assignments and inherited stations our founders specifically said we would refuse to recreate.
The honest defense is forward-looking. It refuses both the golden-age fantasy and the single-dimension capture. It runs on a simple test you can carry into the next political claim you encounter: is this naming a behavior, or is this naming a category of person? Behavior is judgeable. Behavior can be addressed. Category is fate dressed up as analysis. The first question keeps the open society open. The second one closes it.
The civic work that follows is designing systems people can flourish inside, rather than assigning identities people are stuck inside. The founders’ deepest bet was that ordinary people, given the right architecture, could participate their way into the country rather than be sorted into it. The bet held this long because each generation chose to make it again.
It is the work of citizens. Citizenship in the older sense, the sense the founders meant, was a thing you became by doing. We still, for now, get to choose to do it.
Sources and Inspiration
The Open Society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper
The True Believer - Eric Hoffer
The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind - Gad Saad
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left - Roger Scruton