This is true. The hardest people on the poor, who are in favor of cutting welfare, are the almost poor. Which is why they shouldn’t be listened to and why leade

This is true. The hardest people on the poor, who are in favor of cutting welfare, are the almost poor. Which is why they shouldn’t be listened to and why leaders need to lead. Another motivating aspect is that it’s “easier” to attack and defeat a nearly equal rival than it is to defeat a much stronger enemy. For example, people attack the weaker and poorer than themselves much more readily than they attack their actual common enemy: the very rich. Instead, most people are bitterly divided-and-conquered, ensconced in their separate, partisan echo-chambers, accomplishing nothing. This is not to say adversarial partisanship doesn’t have its place: two or more strong parties function as countervailing powers to prevent either from gaining an upper hand. These days however, when corruption is too extreme and too hedged, the major parties become different flavors of tools of the rich. Furthermore, when the established order appears weak or imploding, people tend to move more naturally to the extremes of right and left, seeking utopian solutions and populist demagogues. What’s this means is that Marx was, inconveniently, correct about reality of concentrated wealth and greed’s externalities but subsequent splintering factions that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t necessarily correct about the prescriptions. These days people must realize that “a house divided cannot stand” and that vampiric billionaires have bought most governments and mass media to such an extent that they are extincting species at an incredible rate, doubling-down on climate change and causing a widening gulf of inequality that hasn’t been seen in a century. People who are relatively comfortable or are in destructive industries will do everything to reinforce their cognitive dissonance and destroy those who challenge them with inconvenient reality.