Klein was right to make this scene the fulcrum of his novel. It raises the basic question of what to do about inequality—collective action or individual effort—raises it and then dismisses it with a glib call to go out and get some “skills.” It is the glibness of that dismissal, the professional-class certainty that has been repeated in a thousand presidential statements and Senate hearings and casual conversations on the Acela train, that explains the Democratic Party’s flat inability to rise to the challenge of plutocracy.
