Not long ago, I was sitting with a friend who is building his own business. He works long days, serves people well and is doing what Americans always have been told to do: Work hard, take responsibility and keep pushing forward.
But he was tired — not simply physically tired, but tired of working harder without being able to see whether he was getting ahead.
I suspect millions of Americans know the feeling. You can work 10 or 12 hours a day, pay your bills and do almost everything right and still wonder why security remains just beyond reach. Then you read about fortunes growing beyond anything most of us can imagine.
Stuart C. Lord
That conversation helped me name something I had been struggling to see.
There are at least three Americas: One increasingly protected by wealth and power; one increasingly targeted or constrained; and one working, paying bills and trying to hold on without enough margin to feel truly secure.
These are not separate populations. They are overlapping realities. And if so many Americans are living with some form of insecurity, why have they not built a coalition powerful enough to demand something different?
Perhaps because economic pain does not arrive with its own explanation.
The protected
For some Americans, the economy works differently. Wealth does more than purchase comfort. It creates distance from the emergencies that can upend other people’s lives. A rent increase is manageable. A medical bill is absorbable. A job loss may be disruptive without becoming catastrophic.
“Whose security is public policy most capable of protecting?”
At the highest levels, wealth can provide something more: Influence. The 2025 tax law made permanent major provisions of the 2017 tax cuts and raised the federal estate-tax exemption to $15 million per person beginning in 2026. That does not mean every wealthy person controls government or success should be treated with suspicion. But it raises a question: Whose security is public policy most capable of protecting?
The problem is not simply that some Americans have more. Wealth increasingly determines who can absorb disruption — and concentrated wealth has far greater capacity to organize and protect its interests than a family struggling to make rent.
The targeted
While one America can increasingly insulate itself, another experiences public decisions as a narrowing of opportunity, security and belonging.
For some communities, a shift in public policy can do more than create uncertainty. It can weaken pathways to opportunity that took generations to build.
Consider Black federal workers. Federal employment has long provided an important route into the middle class, offering stable jobs and opportunities often denied elsewhere. Black workers also have been disproportionately represented in the federal workforce. When that workforce is dramatically reduced or restructured, the policy may be described in universal terms — efficiency, downsizing, reform — but its consequences do not necessarily fall evenly.
That distinction matters. A policy does not have to name a particular group to leave that group more exposed.
“A policy does not have to name a particular group to leave that group more exposed.”
The same concern arises when immigrants become symbols of economic decline, diversity programs are treated as stolen opportunity, or communities begin to wonder whether their place in the country has become conditional.
For this America, political change can become a question of whether opportunity, security and belonging are narrowing.
The struggling
This third America may be the easiest to overlook because many appear to be doing fine. They have jobs, pay taxes, raise families and contribute to their communities. Some own homes or have college degrees. Many never would describe themselves as poor.
But they are precarious.
“Only 63% of adults say they could cover a $400 emergency expense entirely with cash.”
A record 22.7 million renter households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, including 12.1 million spending more than half. And only 63% of adults say they could cover a $400 emergency expense entirely with cash or its equivalent.
Millions are paying the bills until the bill arrives that the budget cannot absorb: A rent increase, medical emergency, child care expense or car repair.
This America is rural and urban, white and Black, Latino and Asian. Its members do not share the same histories or barriers. But many know the exhaustion of working hard without feeling secure.
And yet shared hardship does not automatically produce solidarity.
The politics of division
Why not?
Economic pain does not arrive with its own explanation. A family struggling with housing costs still has to decide why housing became unaffordable. A worker worried about the future still has to decide what changed and who is responsible.
Politics rushes into that uncertainty with answers.
“Politics rushes into that uncertainty with answers.”
Immigrants are taking jobs or consuming resources. Diversity programs are giving opportunities to someone else. Public workers have protections you do not. Another group is receiving help while you are being asked to wait.
The message underneath is remarkably consistent: Someone else’s gain is the reason for your loss.
That does not mean people are simply being manipulated. Concerns about immigration, government spending, merit and cultural change can be sincerely held. A democracy must debate those questions honestly.
But something changes when every difference becomes a competition and every gain by one group becomes evidence that another has been forgotten. Economic insecurity becomes fertile ground for a politics that tells people not only why they are hurting, but whom they should resent.
The wealthy win when the struggling are taught to resent the targeted.
“The wealthy win when the struggling are taught to resent the targeted.”
Not because every wealthy person is conspiring to divide the country or struggling people cannot understand their own lives. But fragmented citizens possess less collective power than organized wealth. People who might otherwise ask together why housing is unaffordable, health care remains precarious or work no longer guarantees security instead argue over which group deserves less.
The struggle over America’s future is partly a struggle over explanation: Who gets to tell people why they are hurting? Whom should they blame? And with whom should they stand?
The Christian moral question
For Christians, this cannot remain only a political question. It is also a question about the kind of moral community we are becoming.
Scripture does not give us a modern economic platform or settle every policy debate. But it does give us moral criteria. Isaiah warned against unjust laws that deprived the vulnerable of justice. Amos refused to separate worship from how a society treated people. Public life, in the biblical tradition, is not morally neutral.
Jesus pushes the question closer to home.
“The politics of division asks which group threatens us, which group is receiving too much and which group does not belong.”
The politics of division asks which group threatens us, which group is receiving too much and which group does not belong. The Good Samaritan asks something different: Who has been left beside the road, and will we cross the boundary required to become a neighbor?
That question does not require us to demonize the wealthy, reduce the targeted to victims or patronize the struggling. Every person in these three Americas possesses the same human dignity.
Human dignity is not a scarce resource. Another person’s belonging does not require my displacement or diminish my humanity.
Perhaps that is where a different kind of coalition begins — not by pretending our experiences are the same, but by refusing to believe we must become one another’s enemies.
The coalition we need
History tells us this kind of coalition is possible. It also tells us how difficult it is to sustain.
In the 1890s, Black Republicans and largely white Populist farmers in North Carolina built a biracial coalition that won real power. Racial prejudice did not disappear, but they found enough common purpose to act together. Opponents then mobilized racial fear and, ultimately, violence to help destroy the coalition.
Decades later, Martin Luther King Jr. reached toward a broader vision. His final major campaign sought to bring poor people across racial and geographic lines together around economic dignity. He was not asking Black Americans to stop talking about race or poor white Americans to pretend their struggles were identical. Different histories of injustice still could produce a shared interest in changing the conditions keeping so many people insecure.
That may be the coalition America needs now: not one built on sameness or asking smaller communities to disappear into a larger “we.”
Our struggles are not identical. Our futures are connected.
History offers another warning: Coalitions do not survive on sentiment alone. They require trust, institutions, shared purpose and something tangible to build together.
Coalition is not something we declare. It is something we build.
What we build next
America cannot indefinitely sustain three realities living alongside one another — one increasingly insulated by wealth, another increasingly constrained, and another working harder without feeling more secure.
Nor can we continue persuading the last two that their greatest threat is each other.
We have built broader coalitions before — imperfectly, sometimes briefly and often at great cost. History already has answered whether people with different identities and wounds can recognize a shared future.
They can.
The harder question is whether we can do so without requiring anyone to surrender their dignity or disappear into someone else’s definition of unity.
Our struggles are not identical. Our futures are connected.
The question is no longer whether such a coalition is possible. It is whether we are willing to build one again.
Stuart C. Lord is a leadership scholar, educator and CEO of Y Solve Foundry. Based in Boulder, Colo., his work focuses on leadership, public trust and strengthening communities.