Inequality isn't just about the 1 percent

The signature issue of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign is economic inequality. He talks about it constantly. It’s at the top of the list on his site’s “issues” page; items two through five are really about inequality, too.

He does this in the language you’d expect of a national candidate of the left, post-Occupy Wall Street: broadly populist language addressing the 1 percent and their large slice of the income pie, and the .1 percent and their even larger slice of the (even tastier) wealth pie. Bernie’s stats and graphs leave people offended by the new Gilded Age we’ve entered—and they place 99 percent of voters on the side of the offended rather than the offending.

Framing inequality in this way puts the wild success of the superrich in sharp relief. But it also lets the regular rich off the hook.