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Valuable insight from Barbara and John Ehrenreich about the OWS movement, class and popular misconceptions propagated by the Right.

The “other men” (and of course women) in the current American class alignment are those in the top 1 per cent of the wealth distribution – the bankers, hedge-fund managers and CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in one form or another, but they only began to emerge as a distinct and visible group, informally called the “super-rich”, in recent years.

Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple 50,000 square-foot mansions, $25,000 chocolate desserts embellished with gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007-2008, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1 per cent to whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy, and our political system stood revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists and possibly sociopaths.

Still, until a few months ago, the 99 per cent was hardly a group capable of (as Thompson says) articulating “the identity of their interests”. It contained, and still contains, most “ordinary” rich people, along with middle-class professionals, factory workers, truck drivers, and miners, as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails and maintain the lawns of the affluent.

It was divided not only by these class differences, but most visibly by race and ethnicity – a division that has actually deepened since 2008. African-Americans and Latinos of all income levels disproportionately lost their homes to foreclosure in 2007 and 2008, and then disproportionately lost their jobs in the wave of layoffs that followed. On the eve of the Occupy movement, the black middle class had been devastated. In fact, the only political movements to have come out of the 99 per cent before Occupy emerged were the Tea Party movement and, on the other side of the political spectrum, the resistance to restrictions on collective bargaining in Wisconsin.

In-depth coverage of the global movement

But Occupy could not have happened if large swaths of the 99 per cent had not begun to discover some common interests, or at least to put aside some of the divisions among themselves. For decades, the most stridently promoted division within the 99 per cent was the one between what the right calls the “liberal elite” – composed of academics, journalists, media figures, etc. – and pretty much everyone else.

As Harper’s columnist Thomas Frank has brilliantly explained, the right earned its spurious claim to populism by targeting that “liberal elite”, which supposedly favours reckless government spending that requires oppressive levels of taxes, supports “redistributive” social policies and programmes that reduce opportunity for the white middle class, creates ever more regulations (to, for instance, protect the environment) that reduce jobs for the working class, and promotes kinky countercultural innovations like gay marriage. The liberal elite, insisted conservative intellectuals, looked down on “ordinary” middle- and working-class Americans, finding them tasteless and politically incorrect. The “elite” was the enemy, while the super-rich were just like everyone else, only more “focussed” and perhaps a bit better connected.

Of course, the “liberal elite” never made any sociological sense. Not all academics or media figures are liberal (Newt Gingrich, George Will, Rupert Murdoch). Many well-educated middle managers and highly-trained engineers may favour latte over Red Bull, but they were never targets of the right. And how could trial lawyers be members of the nefarious elite, while their spouses in corporate law firms were not?

A greased chute, not a safety net

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