In the US, as here, inequality is a middle-class issue.
The Daily Telegraph has invented the "coping classes", who are "overburdened by tax, crippled by mortgage repayments, and struggling to meet the demands of young people and elderly parents". The term allows the Telegraph to pretend to have empathy with almost anybody who might pick up the paper. As recession approaches, credit dries up and food prices rise, the coping classes will be struggling a whole lot harder.
It is easy for us lefties to sneer. The coping classes is another name for the self-centred, self-righteous, whingeing middle classes. The poor dears may have to forgo a bottle of wine each week, put off a new car and cut the children's violin lessons. But as I have suggested here before, inequality, in Britain and America, is becoming a middle-class issue. Rather than mocking, the left should exploit the discontent for its own ends. As the middle classes see it, they are being squeezed. Everybody else, they think, is doing better: the lower orders on tax credits and welfare benefits, the rich on lavish bonuses and tax dodges. The left should try to direct resentment against the second group, not the first.
We may prefer to appeal to more noble instincts: fraternity and solidarity, say. But in an imperfect world, we shall have to make do with base envy. Margaret Thatcher noted that the mass of middle-income Americans identified with the rich, not the poor. They opposed taxes or other inhibitions on the rich because they thought that, if they worked hard enough, they too could become wealthy.
Thatcher tried, with some success, to import such attitudes. However, a report this month from the Pew Research Centre in the United States (Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Life) suggests the climate there is changing, and it could well change here, too.
The middle of American society - families on incomes between 75 per cent and 150 per cent of the median - is being hollowed out, Pew reports. In 1970, 40 per cent of Americans fell into the middle-income category, against 35 per cent now. Moreover, whether you take the top 100th, top 20th, top tenth or top third of the American income distribution, each has pulled further away from the group just below it.
No surprises there, perhaps. More striking are three other findings. First, median wealth among upper-income families - those on more than 150 per cent of median income - has more than doubled since 1983.
Among lower-income families - those on less than 75 per cent of the median - wealth has risen 24 per cent. For the middle group, it is up by 29 per cent.
Second, median debt-to-asset ratios have risen among all income groups. As you would expect, the rich have a lower ratio than poorer groups. But in 1983 and 1992, the difference was quite small. By 2004, it had grown dramatically: 0.42 for lower-income families, 0.40 for middle-income, and a mere 0.27 for upper-income.
Third, again as you'd expect, everybody spends more than they did in 1980. But once more, the increase for the rich is dramatically higher: 32 per cent, against 15 per cent and 16 per cent respectively for those on middle and lower incomes.
This is against a backdrop where, since 1999, all groups have suffered a decline in real (inflation discounted) median household income. So the US recession, if it arrives, will come on top of several years in which most Americans have got poorer. The decline in real incomes would then, according to Pew, be the longest in modern history. But the most important conclusion, to my mind, is that, in the problems they face, Americans on middle incomes are far closer to those on low incomes than they are to the rich. The "coping classes" amount to more than two-thirds of the population.
Are these struggles changing American culture? Only a few clues emerge from Pew, and they come, not from people on middle incomes, but a larger group (53 per cent) who declare themselves middle-class. But it is interesting that 68 per cent of that group now say "having free time" is a very important priority. All other priorities, including "having children" (62 per cent), a "successful career" (59 per cent) and "being wealthy" (12 per cent) come lower. Moreover, 47 per cent believe the rich are rich because they know the right people or are born into it, against 42 per cent attributing success to "hard work, ambition or education".
The Democrats are better placed than Labour to create a new coalition between middle- and lower-income groups - and to exploit pressures that the credit crunch is creating among both - because they have been out of power since 2000. But it is surely not too late for Gordon Brown to present himself as a clean break with Blairism and its kowtowing to the rich. He should at least commission research as to how far the Pew findings also apply to Britain.
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