In Praise of Inequality

Occupy Wall Street no longer occupies Wall Street, other public spaces around the country, or the nation's attention. Whatever accounts for the demise of that movement, which stopped moving without ever settling on a political destination, the culprit cannot be lack of encouragement from prominent writers. In 2010, as the Tea Party was poised to propel Republicans to big gains in the midterm elections, Timothy Noah, a journalist then working for Slate, lamented that despite growing economic inequality, "the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote." Why, he asked, isn't "the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?" A year later, Occupiers were in the streets, and even calling themselves the 99%. Noah, by that time a senior editor of the New Republic, was enthused. "[P]rotesters are finally taking notice of America's 30-year income-inequality binge." Like American capitalism's need for reforms "more drastic than anything under current consideration within the polite mainstream," the emergence of a populist egalitarian movement to demand those reforms was "long overdue."