For the entire history of this country the elites have pitted the working class against itself along racial lines. The failure of Reconstruction to enable Black

For the entire history of this country the elites have pitted the working class against itself along racial lines. The failure of Reconstruction to enable Black agency or punish slaveholders deeply scarred the country and it may never heal from it. The media and political class continually manufactures the racial divide. We see this now with the culture war about crime narratives. A Americans lack class consciousness in part because a plurality of Americans do not have the lived experience of the "working class". The decimation of the labor movement over the past 50 years didn't help either. And those who experience class divide the most, the very poor and homeless, are totally politically disenfranchised.