They left. Both of them. While I was paying attention to other things — raising a family, building a life, watching the news with a growing sense that something wasn’t adding up — the ground shifted underneath the labels and nobody announced it.
It’s like waking up and finding yourself a stranger in a strange land. Except you never went anywhere. The land moved. You just didn’t notice until you tried to take a step in the direction you always walked and found nothing there.
So I looked left. If I couldn’t call myself a Republican by the standards of what that word means today, maybe I was a Democrat. Except that didn’t fit either. The Democratic Party of the New Deal built the American middle class. It passed labor protections, created social infrastructure, and pointed at the people standing beside you and said — here is what you share, here is what you can build together. The Democratic Party of JFK spoke of sacrifice and responsibility and American strength without apology.
I don’t know what the Democratic Party of today is. And I don’t think it does either.
So I’m back to independent. Which has the numbers — somewhere between 40 and 45 percent of the American electorate by most honest measures — but not the official label, not the infrastructure, not the primary, not the power.
It’s like being a marionette with two sets of strings pulled from opposite sides of the stage. And if you cut the strings you have free movement but nowhere to go.
Here is what I think happened.
The wealthy have always used the rest of us. That’s not a new observation and it’s not a simple condemnation. The Carnegies and the Vanderbilts exploited labor — no unions, poor wages, dangerous conditions. We had to fight for every right we eventually won. But here is the difference that doesn’t get said clearly enough — they were building something. Railroads. Steel. Infrastructure. A physical nation that everyone eventually lived inside. We got something for our sacrifice, even if we had to bleed for it.
What does the new generation of concentrated wealth build? Platforms. Delivery systems. Social media that monetizes your attention and sells it back to you as connection. Electric cars for people who can afford them. The byproduct this time isn’t a nation. It’s a customer base.
We got something for our sacrifice. Now we want something for our tolerance. And nothing is being offered.
But here is the part that keeps me up at night. Most people didn’t notice. They bought stock. They got a 401k. They watched the Dow. The system handed them a small thread connecting their personal security to its performance and somewhere along the way they stopped identifying with the people beside them and started identifying with the people above them.
It was the most elegant capture imaginable. You don’t silence dissent by force. You give people a small piece of the thing they might otherwise resent and watch them defend it like it’s their own.
I have a brother. Smarter than me by any standard measure. He can’t see it. He watches his portfolio.
He’s not foolish. He’s captured. There’s a difference. And the system that captured him is the same system that pulled the strings on both parties until neither one represents the people who are actually holding them up.
The donkey and the elephant. I’m not sure either animal still exists in any form I recognize.
