Heather McGee

I tried to find where did this idea come from, and what I found was that it was really crafted in the cradle of the United States.

We have to remember that this country was founded on an idea that denied the humanity of whole parts of the human race and created categories of humanity and a hierarchy of human value.

And if we look at what the colonial plantation class had to convince everyday European settlers of, had to convince them that there was this new taxonomy of race that gave them a sort of leg up over the people who were indigenous and African enslaved people.

And oftentimes in the 17th century, you had people

Europeans, Africans, indigenous people, all in sort of similar economic circumstances and various levels of indenture and unfreedom.

And yet, the threat to the colonial plantation elite of that time of having these categories of people band together was nearly constant.

And it resulted in a number of rebellions, including the most successful of which was the Bacon's Rebellion.

And after that cross-racial servant uprising, which burned the capital of colonial Virginia to the ground, we had in this country, what would become this country, a new set of laws that really created that zero-sum hierarchy that made a new race of people uniting European countries.

Settlers across country and religion into this uber category of white and put them above black and indigenous people in terms of their rights and their economic status.

And it was really a goal to break the bonds of cross-racial economic solidarity.

I bring that history up because it feels like we are in many ways experiencing that tension every 50 years or so.

When economic inequality gets really severe, people who are divided by race or color, language or origin start to realize that they actually have more in common than what sets them apart.

And that they shouldn't fear their neighbors or blame their neighbors for their economic status, but should be looking up the economic ladder at the people who have the power to set the rules.

And that's when you begin to hear the zero-sum story louder and louder from millionaires and billionaires, self-interested folks who want to keep the economic status quo just as it is.

And so one thing that I think we really have not understood is how much the zero-sum story is not just about race and civil rights and diversity, but it has been the framework for the economic story in this country.

You know, as a person with a background in economic policy, I learned an economic history of this country, which was that we had the Great Depression and the Gilded Age of inequality.

And then we had the New Deal, which was this strong, muscular commitment to the public good.

And that those policies, Social Security, massive investment in housing,

collective bargaining laws, wage and hour laws, all of these economic public goods, the GI Bill, massive investment in research and development.

And as I came to understand it, all of those economic public goods