Like a predator waiting on the periphery of a herd of grazing animals, Walmart has stalked the Great American Frontier, picking off isolated and vulnerable communities, implementing their now-infamous and systematic takedown of “Mom and Pop” retailers, what is essentially a strategic price war of attrition that dries up small business and sends them rolling through vacant Main Street shopping districts like so much drifting tumbleweed.

This is no longer news to anyone–even the uninformed, if not exactly reluctant Walmart patrons and employees left in the wake of these small town implosions, left with few other options. Walmart’s is the story of free enterprise, global supply chains, and market efficiencies. A story that has played out over ten thousand times across America, in just as many Walmart stores and Supercenters, these Spartan rectangular warehouses, oftentimes opening and closing in quick succession, their arrival and departure merely for the sake of annihilating competitive local business.

No other political or commercial entity so better embodies the profound class and political polarization America has undergone in the past twenty years than Walmart. And what legacy has Walmart left in the second decade of the 21st century? Having in recent years added to its list of public relations catastrophes, we find an impudent retailer owned by a family that boasts a total net worth of $102 billion, a sum exceeding that of the bottom 40% of all Americans combined. An employer fervently opposed to labor organization, keen to limit employee hours in order to evade health insurance, and accused of a gender discrimination class action lawsuit so widespread and varied that the Supreme Court in 2011 threw it out on the grounds it was literally too widespread and varied to qualify as a class action lawsuit.

Walmart has not shied away from any of these practices, and this could be in part due to the fact that grievous monopolistic practices in today’s America go unpunished by Federal regulators. Nor does the public seem to mind, as the inevitable consequences of are today associated with bedrock conservative values. Well, conservative consumers accounts for a large demographic, but what about the rest of us?

Walmart need not be concerned with the shopping habits of Liberals. Already largely absent from left-leaning regions typified by affluence and informed that Walmart brings little benefit to one’s own community, Walmart has emerged as a hyper-consumptive outpost for Americans too desperate, too ignorant, or too hoodwinked by a culture of immediate gratification to resist.

Public awareness has so far failed to gain traction in the face of bargain prices. Last November we saw the first clash between these two ideologies take shape. When a grassroots effort emerged and sparked protests on the ur-shopping holiday Black Friday in an effort to bring attention to Walmart’s unfair labor practices, the usual cadre of right wing media outlets rushed to their defense. Fox News lead the charge, evoking the bogeyman George Soros and imploring viewers to stand up to union thugs forcing fair labor practices on hapless Walmart employees. The 2012 Black Friday event that witnessed protests at over 100 stores did nothing to harm sales, in fact, a Walmart spokesman claimed it was the most profitable Black Friday ever.

Perhaps this was simply a matter of succès de scandale, that there is no such thing as bad press. Or could it be that Walmart’s rejection of fair labor practices serves as an advertisement for low prices? Or an appeal to those who are already politically derisive toward organized labor? Toward progressive politics in general?

Just as the practitioners of what Slavoj Žižek termed “cultural capitalism” will buy their own redemption from their consumer actions through organic produce or fair-trade coffee, so too will right-leaning consumers go out of their way to ally with a right-leaning retailer. Though the exact sales figures are not made public, Walmart is all but certain to be the nation’s number one gun seller, as firearms are sold at roughly half of Walmart’s 4,000 retail outlets. Walmart is also famous for its draconian censorship policy, which creates a distinction between two otherwise identical products—the normal version and the sanitized, “clean”, Walmart version. A particularly troubling example of this can be found in Green Day’s 2012 iUno! iDos! iTre! Album, scrubbed of offensive lyrics for the sake of Walmart’s puritanical demands. The famous line from the song American Idiot had been changed from “subliminal mindfuck America” to “subliminal mind America.” More often, however, the sheer size of Walmart’s retail market coerces artists to comply with Walmart and “clean” all publically released versions of their art—or risk losing the nation’s largest music retailer behind Apple. For instance, you won’t find the original American Idiot lyrics in the video for the song on Green Day’s Youtube channel any longer.

What began as an erosion of pluralism in American retail stores is now emerging as a multi-billion dollar cultural bulwark capable of creating and disseminating an agenda in compliance with its own moral code, backed by patrons that support its dodgy corporate practices. If Walmart continues to act with impunity, and if price point continues to win out against ethical consumerism and dollar voting, driven by an increasingly impoverished and desperate consumer population, we might not experience a war of retail political persuasion.

It may already have been won.