The most striking change in American society in the past generation—roughly since Ronald Reagan was elected President—has been the increase in the inequality of income and wealth. Timothy Noah’s “The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It” (Bloomsbury), a good general guide to the subject, tells us that in 1979 members of the much discussed “one per cent” got nine per cent of all personal income. Now they get a quarter of it. The gains have increased the farther up you go. The top tenth of one per cent get about ten per cent of income, and the top hundredth of one per cent about five per cent. While the Great Recession was felt most severely by those at the bottom, the recovery has hardly benefitted them. In 2010, ninety-three per cent of the year’s gains went to the top one per cent.

In America, financial inequality has soared over the past few decades. But the issue has had surprisingly little political traction. Illustration by John Cuneo

Since rich people are poorer in votes than they are in dollars, you’d think that, in an election year, the ninety-nine per cent would look to politics to get back some of what they’ve lost, and that inequality would be a big issue. So far, it hasn’t been. Occupy Wall Street and its companion movements briefly spurred President Obama to become more populist in his rhetoric, but there’s no sign that Occupy is going to turn into the kind of political force that the Tea Party movement has been. There was a period during the Republican primary campaign when Romney rivals like Newt Gingrich tried to take votes from the front-runner by bashing Wall Street and private equity, but that didn’t last long, either. Politics does feel sour and contentious in ways that seem to flow from the country’s economic distress. Yet much of the ambient discontent is directed toward government—the government that kept the recession from turning into a depression. Why isn’t politics about what you’d expect it to be about?

Traditionally, class figured less in politics in America than in most other Western countries, supposedly because the United States, though more economically unequal, and rougher in tone, was more socially equal, more diverse, more democratic, and better at giving ordinary people the opportunity to rise. That’s what Alexis de Tocqueville found in the eighteen-thirties, and the argument has had staying power. It has also been wearing thin. During the five decades from 1930 to 1980, economic inequality decreased significantly, without imperilling “American exceptionalism.” So it’s especially hard to put a good face on the way inequality has soared in the decades since. Even if you think that all a good society requires is—according to the debatable conservative mantra—equal opportunity for every citizen, you ought to be a little shaken right now. Opportunity is increasingly tied to education, and educational performance is tied to income and wealth. When it comes to social mobility between generations, the United States ranks near the bottom of developed nations.

Like the competitors on cooking-contest TV shows, writers who are presented with these socioeconomic ingredients do quite different things with them analytically, but nobody approves of the situation and almost everybody blames the élite. Charles Murray points out, in his new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” (Crown Forum), that indices of social disorganization at the bottom of the income distribution—imprisonment, joblessness, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing—have been rising substantially. “Coming Apart” reprises elements from all Murray’s previous books, most notably “Losing Ground,” from 1984, which counterpoised a liberal élite and a socially dysfunctional underclass, but the differences are telling. In “Losing Ground,” the underclass being examined was mainly black, and the argument was that the élite had helped to create that underclass by enacting social-welfare programs. Poor people reacted to their perverse incentives by losing an ethic of work and family, and the social fabric of their communities disintegrated. But the social program that was the main villain of “Losing Ground,” Aid to Families with Dependent Children, doesn’t exist anymore, and Murray no longer blames misguided policies for the behavioral problems of the poor.

Instead, the malign influence of the élite is purely a matter of ethos, or moral tone-setting. The élite—who, in Murray’s account, live in unprecedented geographic and social isolation from poor and working people—are themselves hardworking, unlikely to divorce, dedicated to their children, and even comparatively religious, but, unlike the élite of Victorian England, they don’t “preach what they practice.” Somehow this manifests itself in the breakdown of social mores at the opposite end of society.

“Coming Apart” is, in effect, an analysis of inequality that rules out a program of redistribution. In Murray’s view, trying to shift resources away from the élite wouldn’t do much good, because (as Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued, in far more detail, in “The Bell Curve”) the élite are genetically endowed with higher intelligence: as long as the United States is a meritocratic society, and as long as these people keep meeting at selective colleges, marrying, and improving their breeding stock, they’ll keep doing better than everybody else. Anyway, what the non-élite need isn’t money, Murray thinks; it’s better values. Very little of “Coming Apart” is devoted to government policy.

Murray’s élite live in an archipelago of “SuperZips,” mainly blue-state inner-ring suburbs, like Chevy Chase, Maryland. They are a type that sounds awfully familiar: Obama-supporting, kitchen-renovating professionals with graduate degrees, who, unable to rest comfortably in the knowledge that they have passed economically dispositive high I.Q.s on to their children at conception, obsess relentlessly over education. In David Rothkopf’s “Power, Inc.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), we encounter an even more exalted “Superclass”—a group Rothkopf introduced in a previous book by that title—whose members are the sort of people one might encounter at the World Economic Forum, in Davos. They are rich, rooted primarily in global banking and business rather than in any particular communities or set of social values, and ideologically committed to unimpeded markets above all else. Unlike Murray’s élite, they are not merely the product of inexorable natural processes. They flourish in a world they deliberately built for themselves, by expertly altering the rules. Rothkopf, who was a Deputy Under-Secretary of Commerce during the Clinton Administration and is now a globe-trotting consultant, writes as a quasi-penitent member of this group.

Rothkopf’s book is astonishingly ambitious. It traces the relationship between state and market—a relationship that, he says, has succeeded the relationship between church and state as the dominant conflict in societies—from the thirteenth century to the present. During the past thirty years, he says, we’ve adopted the view that politics and markets were actually allied: freedom in one realm meant freedom in the other. The result of this idea, along with the increasing influence of business within both political parties, was a series of policies that deregulated national currencies and banking systems and enabled the globalized economy of the Superclass.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of people still live in specific places and depend on local and national governments for social benefits, beginning with items as basic as stable currencies. Globalization, in its present form, strengthens a cadre of very large businesses that Rothkopf calls “supercitizens,” and diminishes government, which is becoming, in his nice phrase, “too small to succeed.” The result is that “there has been a decoupling of the interests of supercitizens and those of the ordinary people around them, between those who represent the views of people who must necessarily live within borders and those for whom borders no longer have meaning, between those who require jobs and capital flows and those who view people, villages, cities, and states as economic options, part of a constantly changing calculus in which efficiencies and profits rule.”

Rothkopf writes as a grand strategist, not as a reporter, but there are a few moments in his book when he visits members of the Superclass whom he obviously knows from having worked with them. Both Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers explain to him that the globalization and deregulation of finance that they helped to bring about when they were in government was a historical inevitability, not a policy choice. And Hank Greenberg, of A.I.G., bitterly describes the government’s rescue of his company, in September of 2008, as having been simply a way of protecting the interests of Goldman Sachs, which had a substantial stake in A.I.G.’s fate. Rothkopf doesn’t get very specific about what he proposes to do to reverse the power imbalance between governments and markets, but he makes it clear that he thinks that political decisions created the present situation and that only different political decisions will alleviate it.

Tony Judt—who died in 2010, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative disease that completely disables the body while leaving the mind intact—shares with Rothkopf an insistent disapproval of the current apotheosis of global finance. Immobilized and understandably in an elegiac mood, he dictated his book “Ill Fares the Land” (Penguin) to assistants. Because he has so much less historical ground to cover than Rothkopf, he is able to pay close attention to the vanished heyday of social-democratic politics in the West, a subject that Rothkopf skates past quickly to get to the present. The result is a startling reversal of our political common sense. If there’s anything we all think we know, it’s that Britain and the United States were in terrible shape just before Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power: drab, inflationary, prone to shortages and delays, incapable of dynamism, crippled by organizational failure. Not so, Judt says. Actually, those were wonderful days.

Some of Judt’s argument is particular to Europe. When American conservatives declare the “European model” to be obsolete—as Charles Murray does—they overlook how miraculous it seemed, during the second half of the twentieth century, for the blood-soaked ground of the Continent to be free of war, free of public ethnic hatred, democratic, and prosperous. In the United States no less than in Europe, the welfare state’s benefits—health care, old-age pensions, public transportation, and education—hadn’t existed as universal guarantees before the twentieth century. Dramatic increases in longevity and health coincided with rising and more evenly distributed prosperity. The achievements of social democracy were large, and its failures, by comparison, relatively minor.

Judt candidly acknowledges that individual choice and economic growth weren’t the primary goals of social democracy; it was trying to create order and predictability, by building universal systems that bound people together. He evidently didn’t mind that when he was a child Britain had only one, government-owned broadcast network, which aimed for uplift, that London taxis had to be black, and that soccer teams were proudly local and uncommercial. The eclipse of social democracy resulted not from any failure on its part, Judt says, but from other factors—such as the rise of the individualistic New Left, the exaggerated preoccupation of influential Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises with the dangers of a powerful state, and the inexorable process by which social democracy’s beneficiaries, as their situations improved, began to think of the system as a burden. Of course, all these considerations would similarly explain why inequality hasn’t flourished as a political issue. Judt also cites the fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War. It’s clear in retrospect that the existence of the Soviet empire was a spur to social democracy, in the United States and in Europe, because it was a serious competitor whose main selling point was generous social provision. The West had no choice but to compete.

The United States never had a BBC or a National Health Service, but other, now diminished or vanished features of American society had some of the same effects. Before the late nineteen-seventies, corporations were not managed for “shareholder value” to the extent that they are today, and many of them offered de-facto lifetime employment and generous health benefits and pensions. The more regulated and localized American economy had all sorts of inefficiencies and trade barriers that created safe harbors for institutions like banks, department stores, insurance companies, fixed-commission stock brokerages, and middlemen in supply chains. Unions were more powerful. In the “new economy,” each line of business tends to have one dominant, global, mainly non-union player, such as Apple, Facebook, or Google. Judt isn’t naïve enough to believe that people will simply come to their senses and reinstate social democracy as it was during its prime, but he does insist, like Rothkopf, that we will have to find ways to shift power from the market and back toward the state.

At the top of most liberals’ list of what to do about inequality is to use the tax system to redistribute income—first of all by raising the top income-tax rate and the capital-gains rate. In “The Great Divergence,” Noah describes a number of other possible remedies: increase government employment, regulate Wall Street more tightly, strengthen labor unions, cut the price of higher education. President Obama has at least made gestures toward most of these. But, if these are the natural responses, at least from a Democrat, why aren’t such remedies at the center of political debate this year?

The left and the right give completely different answers to that question. On the left, Tony Judt complains that intellectuals “have shown remarkably little informed interest in the nitty-gritty of public policy, preferring to intervene or protest on ethically defined topics where the choices seem clearer.” Young people with activist inclinations may mistakenly believe “that, conventional avenues of change being hopelessly clogged, they should forsake political organization for single-issue, non-governmental groups unsullied by compromise.” Idealistic, rights-oriented campaigns soak up some of the energy that used to go into old-fashioned liberal politics.

In a bleak article published in The National Interest last fall, the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman took a more systemic view. Whenever the country is in an economically stagnant period, he suggested, the result is deep, bitter social fragmentation; people try to protect what they have against perceived attempts by others to take it away, and this defensive mistrust becomes a central theme of politics. “The unwillingness to entertain compromise with one’s political opponents on the central issues of the day is a phenomenon all too familiar in times when participants in a democratic society lose the sense that that society is delivering any material improvement in their lives,” he wrote. Americans supported a large expansion of government during the New Deal only because the Great Depression had an unusually wide impact: “Americans had a sense of everyone’s going down together—a condition certainly not shared in the most recent financial crisis, nor in the general stagnation of incomes and living standards that set in more than a decade ago.” So now we’re back to normal. Public-employee pensions and employment contracts, which Tony Judt thinks of as a socially binding force, are now—from Athens to Madison, Wisconsin—the object of hostility by people who don’t have them and of fierce, to-the-barricades protectiveness by people who do. None of this bodes well for a politics aimed at alleviating inequality.