It’s not about income – it’s about who sleeps soundly at night, free from that kind of low-grade financial anxiety that has become the background radiation of modern life for so many. This distinction – between those who experience financial stress as an ambient condition versus those who’ve been inoculated against it – explains so much about our fractured politics.
Our social and political divides aren’t just about income brackets or political parties, but about fundamentally different lived realities operating in parallel. A divide that is harder to measure; it must be experienced.