The relentless and obliterating inequality that warps every facet of American life is easy to see and increasingly difficult to ignore, but it can also be vexingly difficult to comprehend. The very idea of a billion dollars, for instance, is effectively a science fiction concept, not only for people who actually live off what they get paid every two weeks but also for your basic everyday rich person. It is one thing to know that a billion dollars is one thousand million dollars, but what a number that size actually represents does not just beggar belief; it defies understanding. The idiotic hierarchy that our deliriously wealth-besotted media imposes where this sort of thing is concerned—a millionaire is a successful person, whereas a billionaire is a very successful person—is something worse than unhelpful. It conflates things that have no right being conflated, but the outsize scale of both the broader cultural problem and the more specific comprehension-related one renders the compounded mistake somehow too big to see.

The scope and scale of this chasmic disparity is most readily seen through the bizarre abstractions that it throws off. In this chaotic Democratic primary, that distance has led to a darkly comic bifurcation on the question of what a president is and between those concerned with the airy vibological responsibilities of a candidate—to lead “a revival of decency and character,” per The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, or “to bring America to a place where we care for one another, where everyone is seen and included & where government has your back when you stumble,” as Samantha Power wrote in her endorsement of Joe Biden—and those more concerned with what a candidate might actually do. One priority seems more important than the other, but that’s markedly more obvious to those who can be harmed by political actions than to those who are merely unsettled by them.



Politics touches the lives of most Americans most clearly as pain—determining the cruelties that some people have to suffer and others do not, setting the variously occluded or intentionally dammed channels of recourse that are, but mostly are not, available as a result of various voluntary austerities and institutional cynicisms. From privilege’s higher ground, though, it’s all much cleaner, just as a football game naturally looks and feels and plays much different from a luxury box than it does from the bottom of the pile. It’s not just a matter of who gets dirty, although there is that. It’s what the field looks like and how the broader contest is experienced—the difference between whether it reads as a game or a desperate scramble in the mud.



Inequality shapes this, too, which is how this election season—one taking place as a pandemic bears down on a rickety and wildly vampiric health care system, during the rule of a bigoted wad of clammy old ham—has somehow played out as strange, character-driven television. The scale of what’s compromised and what’s actively collapsing is so great that it is only really legible as strange satire. Think of the billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer ending his brief, quixotic, extremely expensive presidential campaign by joining the rapper Juvenile on stage for a performance of “Back That Ass Up,” at a party that Steyer threw for himself. Think of Beto O’Rourke, who married into a vast family fortune that helped him launch a political career and whose much shorter primary campaign played out as a sort of metaphysical walkabout. Think of health care stocks yo-yoing up and down according to the political fortunes of Medicare for All. Or think of Michael Bloomberg, who spent nearly half a billion dollars in an abortive campaign that started late and ended, on Wednesday morning, with a chesty suspension announcement and an endorsement of Joe Biden.



On its merits, Bloomberg’s campaign sure looks like one of the greatest failures in American political history: Before his name ever appeared on a ballot, Bloomberg spent an amount of money that would also have enabled him to buy a different National Hockey League franchise every 10 days. He was humiliated in two debates and trounced in every Super Tuesday primary besides American Samoa’s. The twist, and the moment when the broader context briefly becomes visible, is that it might not quite be that. “Dropping half a billion on a campaign might probably still represent serious savings compared to what he’d have to face under a hypothetically revamped tax scheme,” the writer Patrick Blanchfield observed. That’s it, right there. That’s when you can see all of it, if just for a moment.