When a conservative scholar leads his think piece with a gentle ridicule of, rather than an uneasy defensiveness against, liberalism's principal propaganda campaign, you know the latter has probably squandered an excellent political opportunity -- again.
Such is the frame of political scientist James Q. Wilson's op-ed, "Angry about inequality? Don’t blame the rich," which opens with this mild mock of a yawning ho-hum:
There is no doubt that incomes are unequal in the United States — far more so than in most European nations. This fact is part of the impulse behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members claim to represent the 99 percent of us against the wealthiest 1 percent [italics mine, ridicule his].
From there we enter an argumentation minefield of obscure statistical bloodshed -- did you know the Swedes' "Gini index" is much lower than America’s; or that Greece's "went from 0.413 in the 1970s to 0.307 in the late 2000s"? -- chiefly because OWS was foolish enough to slap a specific (not to mention far too narrow) percentage on the target of its justified anger (much as Mitt Romney was foolish enough to conjure a specific numerical creation of jobs). That is, by limiting its valid indignation to the huge incomes of the 1 percent, OWS necessarily disregarded the grossly inequitable structural advantages among the 99th percentile, the 98th percentile, the 97th, and so on.
In other words, in favoring the "income inequality" argument over exposing the much deeper injustice of wealth's far broader maldistribution, OWS let the intellectual quarry slip away. The movement also allowed this sort of easy counterpoint to be made, as Prof. Wilson easily does:
The "rich" in America are not a monolithic, unchanging class. A study by Thomas A. Garrett, economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found that less than half of people in the top 1 percent in 1996 were still there in 2005.
In yet other words, much of the physical quarry -- not merely the intellectual -- slips away. Again, had OWS not restricted its volleys to the 1 percent, the above point would have been rendered utterly pointless.
Of course we can always ask, But what have the practical results of OWS's propaganda been? (Note: I am not using "propaganda" pejoratively here.) Wilson gleefully answers:
[A] December Gallup poll showed that 52 percent of Americans say inequality is "an acceptable part" of the nation’s economic system, compared with 45 percent who deemed it a "problem that needs to be fixed."
Shortly after that poll's release, a rather stunned and definitely disconcerted Charles Blow, of the NY Times, noted the results with an infinite dreariness:
A Gallup poll released on Thursday found that, after rising rather steadily for the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who said that the country is divided into "haves" and "have-nots" took the largest drop since the question was asked.
A squandered opportunity. No one of any thoughtfulness is questioning the sentimental nobility behind OWS's efforts; Wilson, certainly, does not, nor do I. It's just that the organized left, disorganized as it is, always seems to hit its target with so little strategic effectiveness.