I suspect most of us are more tired than angry. Tired of the sorting. Tired of being told that everyone on the other side of a two-letter label is a fool or a monster. Tired of watching the same shouting match run on every screen while the rent goes up, the paycheck stays flat, and the people doing the actual taking never seem to appear on either channel. That exhaustion is a signal, and it is worth listening to.

This piece does three things:

The fight that matters runs between who takes and who gets taken from. Everything else is staging. Let us start with the numbers on the staging itself.

We are not guessing that people feel this way. The Pew Research Center asked Americans how they feel about their own politics in September 2023, and the answers read like a national sigh:

Read those last two together. A majority says the fight itself is over-covered, and nearly four in five say the things that actually shape their lives are under-covered. These are perceptions, not proof that anyone is pulling strings. The survey measures what people believe about their politics, and what they believe is that the argument has swallowed the agenda.

I take that seriously. When tens of millions of people across every affiliation report the same hollow feeling, the feeling is data. The question is what fills the space the argument occupies. To answer it, we have to stop looking at the jerseys and start looking at the structure.

Bullies and parasites are those in our neighborhoods and nations who steal from others and reduce them to slaves. They exploit lives to subsidize their own. This happens in dictatorship and democracy. In communism and capitalism. In government and industry. The pattern does not care how you vote, because the pattern predates your ballot by several thousand years.

The three actors are simple to name:

Reviewers noticed something about this framework that matters here. The U.S. Review of Books wrote that the book's criticisms are "not rooted in any particular political ideology or party affiliation." I told Publishers Weekly the book is neither a defense nor an indictment of any political party. That was not a marketing position. It is the whole point. A taxonomy that only worked on one party would be a campaign flyer. This one works on systems, and systems are bipartisan about extraction.

So if the theft runs through every system and every party, why do we spend our energy fighting each other instead of it?

My father and brother were both involved in stage magic, so I learned firsthand how many illusions and close-up tricks work. One key technique is misdirection: drawing the focus of the audience away from one thing and toward another. Both hands are shown empty. The right hand flings outward, fingers stretched, and your eyes lock onto it while the left hand palms the coin. You never saw the steal because your focus was expertly moved. Professional magicians have sophisticated versions of this. So do human parasites. Only they steal, not entertain.

Misdirection works by shifting your attention away from what matters, in order to steal it from you. Its larger cousins show up wherever attention is worth money:

That last one deserves a hard look, because it is the engine of partisan sorting. Bullies and parasites demonize others to turn them into your enemies. The smear is old and recycled: it has been aimed at the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Germans, Mexicans, Arabs, Asians, Muslims, Catholics, and Hispanics in their turn, and at Native Americans before any of them. The costume changes. The function holds. A population busy fearing its neighbors is a population not watching its ledger.

Here is the caution I want to be honest about. None of this requires a smoke-filled room. I am not claiming the two parties meet on Tuesdays to coordinate your distraction, and the survey data above cannot prove anyone's intent. What the pattern shows is simpler and older: division pays, whether or not any individual planned it. Propaganda is cheaper than violence. When keeping people sorted into warring camps is cheaper than answering their material needs, the sorting tends to continue on its own momentum. You do not need a conspiracy when you have an incentive.

If the argument is the staging, the ledger is the show. And the ledger is public. You can read it yourself, no pundit required. Three federal data sources, none of them partisan, tell you where the material stakes actually sit:

Notice what none of these tables contains: a party column. Wealth concentration, wage floors, and employer-tied insurance do not sort by ballot. They sort by position in the structure. The family in the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution holds that position whether they watch one cable channel or the other. The hotel housekeeper near the wage floor cleans the same rooms either way.

I honestly don't care if some people are far richer than others. I just believe everyone should have their common needs met, by everyone, and we can do it. The ledger is not an argument for envy. It is an argument for attention. Look where the wealth pools, look where the dependence concentrates, and then ask who benefits when your attention is elsewhere.

Does the extraction cause the division? Here we owe you precision, because the honest answer is narrower than the satisfying one. The research establishes some things and stops short of others:

So we hold the claim at its true size. The measured world shows extraction and division rising together and increasingly tracking each other. The book's argument is that this pairing is an old and recognizable pattern, one the twelve parasitic techniques predict, with distraction and invented enemies on the list by name. You can accept that reading or contest it. What you cannot do is find the answer inside the left-right frame, because the frame is the thing under examination.

Every law, existing or proposed, should be judged by a simple test: Does it foster mutual care, or does it unfairly benefit some at the expense of others? If it's theft, expose and reject it. If it advances mutual care, support and sustain it. The compressed version: "If it favors or enriches bullies or parasites, reject or repeal it."

Run it honestly and the question embarrasses both team colors:

And no, the test is not smuggled-in ideology. "Mutual care isn't a communist or socialist conspiracy. It works just fine in a capitalist economy; you just have to decide to do it." One question. Any law. Any party. The test does not ask who proposed it. It asks who it feeds.

The sorting machine will keep running whether you cooperate or not. Cooperation is the only part you control. Start here:

I suspect most of us don't want to fight our neighbors. We were handed the fight, along with the jerseys, and told it was the only game in town. It never was. The real contest is older, quieter, and it is being won by the people who profit most when we never look up from the scrimmage.

Stop picking a team. Start picking the question.