Class War: A Tale of Two Americas

As the wealth gap cuts deeper through the US—leaving the poor and an increasingly stressed middle class huddled in growing misery on one side, with an evermore bloated plutocracy sunning itself on the far lofty perch—we are witnessing the making of a new America. It is a country of jagged contrasts—of enormous, careless, Gatsbyesque wealth alongside a brutal landscape of homeless encampments, the working poor, and a distraught, shrinking middle class.

American journalism likes to focus on winners, the masters of the universe who amass fortunes with their brilliant brainstorms or their legalized thievery. But the reality for the vast majority of us bears little resemblance to the American Dream that politicians still celebrate, against all economic and social evidence. The two Americas have diverged so widely that even some far-sighted billionaires and their endowed economists have begun to feel uneasy, nervously eyeing the gray masses below them and wondering when they will finally rise up.

Now Evelyn Nieves, a reporter who covered poverty in American for the New York Times and Washington Post, travels through the country to record what she sees and to gauge the public mood in this winter of our discontent. Nieves visits homeless tent cities, Indian reservations and communities so economically shattered that the black market in prescription drugs is all that keeps them afloat. She also shares infused cocktails and organic, locally-sourced appetizers with the one-percent crowd, trying to figure out what makes them tick, and how they view their plush lives in the midst of increasing hardship.

Welcome to pre-revolutionary America…or the Disunited States.