Class warfare is smoldering in America — and it’s about to catch fire

In 1982, Harvard Professor Seymour Martin Lipset used his presidential address to the American Political Science Association to crow about the absence of working-class radicalism in this country — the kind that had so plagued European nations.

In Lipset’s view, America’s egalitarian ideology, rapid upward mobility, and individualism fostered what he called a “middle-class” outlook among workers. “The absence of an aristocratic or feudal past,” he observed, “combined with a history of political democracy prior to industrialization, served to reduce the salience of class-conscious politics and proposals for major structural change.”

Today, as I read the news about Chamel Abdulkarim, a worker who set fire to a warehouse used by a major corporation in Los Angeles, I wondered what Lipset would say.

On April 8, the arsonist filmed himself starting the fire that burned the warehouse to the ground. As he did so, he said, “If you are not going to pay us enough to f—ing live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this (setting fire to the plastic wrapping of a package of toilet paper).”

Then, as the fire spread, he said triumphally, “There goes your inventory.”

Not since Luigi Mangione allegedly shot an insurance company executive in New York City has there been such a crystallizing moment for the expression of the growing hopelessness and anger felt by people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Wealth disparities, the lack of upward mobility, the affordability crisis, and the impact of AI are all contributing to those feelings.

While the lionizing of Mangione has subsided since 2024, the frustration that led him to murder the head of United Health........

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