Divide and rule

Divide and rule is the book’s governing account of how the Ownership Class preserves power despite being vastly outnumbered. Rather than relying only on direct coercion, the strategy fragments the 99% into rival camps, encourages them to misidentify their enemies, and turns potential class solidarity into competition, resentment, and obedience.

Definition and Operating Logic

Divide and rule begins from a stark numerical contradiction: the 1% are far fewer than the 99%, yet the majority remains subordinate. The book explains this through the master–slave dialectic associated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The master risks everything to seize power, while the slave values survival more than the will to power and therefore submits. Applied politically, the elite’s dominance depends not only on its own force and ambition but also on the majority’s willingness to accept hierarchy and seek direction from above. The method works by preventing the 99% from recognizing themselves as a unified class with a common opponent. The book describes confusion as an elite task and identifies division as the core doctrine: people are presented with multiple, apparently competing elites until they can no longer determine whom they are trying to overthrow. Conservative and liberal elites, political and economic elites, media, police, military, intelligence, diplomatic, banking, corporate, cultural, and celebrity elites are treated as separate formations, producing an intricate map of antagonisms that obscures the alleged underlying unity of the Ownership Class.

Manufactured Political Conflict

The most consequential division is the opposition between liberal and conservative political identities. The book argues that the Democrats and Republicans differ theatrically while sharing support for negative liberty and predatory capitalism. Their public conflict therefore functions as a spectacle that gives voters the impression of meaningful choice without challenging the economic structure that benefits the 1%. Donald Trump becomes the clearest example of this mechanism. Although he is described as a senior member of the economic elite, a billionaire plutocrat, and part of the Ownership Class, he presents himself as the enemy of the political and liberal media elites. His supporters accept this distinction because they oppose the elite associated with institutions and culture while retaining admiration for extreme wealth. The resulting pseudo-conflict permits Trump to campaign against “the elite” while remaining an unmistakable member of it. The book also records Bernie Sanders’s explanation that Trump attracted people who felt abandoned by economic and political elites. That grievance is treated as real, but the book argues that it is redirected rather than resolved. Dissatisfaction with elite neglect becomes support for another elite figure, allowing anger at the system to strengthen the system’s authority.

Resentment and Downward Division

The strategy reaches its most destructive form when resentment is directed horizontally or downward instead of upward. The book links Trump’s voters to ressentiment, describing their anger toward cultural elites in government, universities, and coastal regions, but insists that this anger does not become opposition to plutocratic power. Because many of these voters support a billionaire, their resentment is redirected toward groups below them in the social hierarchy. Racial hierarchy is presented as the decisive instrument of that redirection. White conservatives are described as accepting rule by a wealthy elite so long as they remain above Black and Hispanic people. Trump’s promises concerning immigration, a wall, policing, and national restoration are interpreted by the book as coded appeals to restore a racial order associated with the 1950s and the white supremacist Confederacy. In this account, the conservative slave revolt is not a revolt against the masters but a struggle to preserve relative privilege among the enslaved. The same pattern is extended to religious submission. The book argues that Abrahamists worship an archetypal dominant authority and interprets obedience to God, including Abraham’s willingness to murder his son at divine command, as evidence of a desire for absolute rule. Trump supporters are consequently portrayed as people who do not seek to abolish hierarchy; they want the elite to recognize, select, and place them above other subordinated groups.

Elite Support and Social Consequences

Divide and rule converts the dominated into collaborators. The book calls Trump’s supporters lackeys and puppets of the rich and claims that a substantial minority of the population works to increase the power and wealth of the Ownership Class. Their political loyalty is therefore treated as a material consequence of misdirected identification: they defend a billionaire leader because they imagine that his success, authority, or hostility toward designated outsiders elevates them as well. This logic also explains the book’s insistence that the Trumpanzees do not oppose the elite. They revere the elite, cannot imagine a world without a rich ruling class, and long to be led, ruled, and bossed by it. Their language of freedom is thus presented as internally contradictory: the same people who celebrate personal liberty support a plutocratic billionaire as their leader and resist social arrangements aimed at equality and merit. The strategy becomes especially urgent when economic conditions threaten to produce genuine solidarity. Technology and automation are described as eliminating middle-class as well as working-class jobs, shrinking the middle class, and concentrating wealth in an ever-smaller group. The book compares this emerging landscape with the conditions of Karl Marx’s era, when workers stood close to violent revolution. In response, the elite allegedly places one of its own in the White House and deploys racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and patriotism to keep working-class and middle-class people from uniting.

Resistance and Narrative Significance

The book treats the French Revolution as a historical warning and model: when the working class and middle class join together, the elite is doomed; when they remain divided, the elite survives. Divide and rule therefore names more than a campaign tactic. It is the central obstacle to the book’s proposed transformation toward positive liberty, meritocracy, and social capitalism. The recurring command to “Divide and Rule” gives the principle the force of a refrain. It appears as an “Elite Code,” turning the scattered examples of partisan rivalry, racial resentment, religious submission, and hostility toward social justice into one explanatory system. The book’s counter-position is that opposition to the elite must reject every artificial subdivision that protects the Ownership Class, rather than choosing one elite faction as an ally against another. The rule also governs the book’s interpretation of right-wing politics. Attacks on social justice are read as support for social injustice, while efforts to weaken the State are presented as attempts to free capitalists, religions, and right-wing families from regulation and accountability. In the book’s final formulation, domination persists because the ruled accept the hierarchy, admire the dominant, and are encouraged to fight one another before they can recognize the common structure governing them.