The question is in honest, good faith. The progressive era followed the era of robber barons. There was even more wealth asymmetry in America then than now.

The question is in honest, good faith. The progressive era followed the era of robber barons. There was even more wealth asymmetry in America then than now. Something happened to make that transition take place, something cultural, something that the abstraction called dollars couldn't sufficiently buy and sway. Concentrated money can't be the only determining factor in how change happens, or at least not in a sustained fashion. It's just one more leaky abstraction about legitimacy that breaks down from time to time when abused too far. Occupy Wallstreet (and the we are the 99 percent tumbler) has been responded to as a wildly outsized threat in the political discourse of establishment pundits that I follow, almost an existential threat. I guess I'm writing through all this to try to understand why they're so shaken by it - clearly, it's not like those dirty hippies and their bongos have giant war chests, either. The thing that makes the concentrated wealth in America so damn powerful, I'm increasingly convinced, far more than the pragmatic reach of the money, is the confidence of its holders in the moral rightness of the general order, their outsized belief in the narratives they tell themselves - and the complacency of the rest of us in going along with those stories. Money matters, in some eras much more than others. (Again, this is why I find the idea of Wikipedia going, essentially, on strike, so massively fascinating. How much money does Wikipedia have, and how much profit? And yet how much cultural and moral influence does it have?) Maybe the frustration and sense of helplessness that you're writing here, that so many of us write here, is exactly the thing that eventually whittles away the confidence up above, the thing that makes attacking the corruption possible? Or maybe not. But I'm toying with the idea of trying on just a bit of hope for tactical reasons after stewing in an awful lot of cynicism for quite a while.