Everything’s coming up Dollar General. “The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer,” its CEO, Todd Vasos, recently informed The Wall Street Journal. “We are putting stores today [in areas] that perhaps five years ago were just on the cusp of probably not being our demographic and it has now turned to being our demographic.” Joyful news for Vasos, who earned $8.5 million in 2016, and for his company, which is enjoying rising profits. His cashiers, who make minimum wage, have less to celebrate. Dollar General says it’s courting customers who make under $40,000 a year. Its pay scale means it’s producing those customers, too.

This is not to make Vasos a scapegoat. In fact, he is more honest than most about what is happening in America’s free market economy. He is certainly more honest than the Republicans in power, who insist, with barely feigned conviction, that wealth will eventually trickle down. He understands that the moment we live in is advantageous to him, and that what is good for Dollar General is not necessarily good for workers. And he knows that the government wants to keep it that way.

The term “class war” is out of vogue. The Democratic Party doesn’t use it, wary of its Marxist heritage. Mainstream outlets avoid it, at least as a serious way to describe how elites are perpetuating their command of this country’s resources. When it is used, it is mostly to denigrate class agitation in the opposite direction: those on the bottom end who dare to criticize the wealthy. But the Donald Trump era has been clarifying in so many respects, not least in showing that the Republican Party, in league with the upper classes, is engaged in an all-out class war against the working and middle classes. In every area of policy—tax, environment, health, energy, even the management of the nation’s national parks—we have seen a sustained disdain for common people and an allegiance to the rich. It is class war, and they’re winning.

The paeans to trickle-down economics and limited government are belied by the hard facts. Severe poverty increased in 2016; the Pew Research Center reports that three in ten families in poverty made at least $15,000 below the poverty threshold. Rich families, however, are getting richer. “In 1963, families near the top had six times the wealth (or, $6 for every $1) of families in the middle. By 2016, they had 12 times the wealth of families in the middle,” the Urban Institute revealed this year. Social mobility, meanwhile, is decreasing. Data compiled by The Financial Times shows that in 2016, 30- and 40-year-olds earned significantly less than their parents did at the same ages.



The Republican tax bill, the latest and most successful expression of a long campaign, would exacerbate these trends. Even objective outlets like The Washington Post find that the Senate version of the bill—which slashes corporate taxes, allows significant exemptions to the estate tax, repeals the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, and weakens public employee unions—“is weighted to wealthier Americans.” As one conservative economist told Bloomberg, “It’s death to Democrats.” But it’s much more than that; it’s also an attack on the GOP’s own working-class voters, who Republicans hope will stick with the party despite higher taxes and stagnant wages and more expensive insurance because of the country’s other great battle, the culture war.

In terms of actual policy, however, Republicans are working for their obscenely wealthy donor class. They have drafted a bill that shifts wealth from one class to another and concentrates it, where it becomes a lasting testimony to the superiority of the few in contrast to the inferiority of the many. It becomes a value judgement, a determination of worth. And that value judgment can be seen in all areas of this Republican-controlled government.