Many people mistakenly think that the main battles in society are between the haves and the have-nots. But what’s really happening is that the haves are trying to seize money, resources, and status from the have-mores—and they disguise this motive as concern for the have-nots. You even saw this recently in New York, where Mamdani failed to win over poor and working-class voters. But he did win support from the upper-middle class. Then, when you move to the very top of the income scale, the dynamic flips again—the wealthiest New Yorkers were more likely to back someone like Cuomo. So a lot of these political battles, especially around socialism, aren’t being driven by the poor. They’re being driven by people who are doing well, but who are angry they’re not at the very top. It’s less about the 99% versus the 1%, and more about the 9% versus the 1%. The bottom 90% aren’t really part of that fight. I’m reading We Have Never Been Woke by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, and he makes a similar point. He notes that during the Occupy Wall Street protests in the early 2010s, most of the participants were white, college-educated, upper-middle-class people—people who were objectively doing fine, but were upset they were in the top 10% instead of the top 1%.

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