DAVID BROOKS warns us that the current anxiety about income inequality is self-defeating. "Some on the left have always tried to introduce a more class-conscious style of politics. These efforts never pan out," he writes. "America has always done better, liberals have always done better, when we are all focused on opportunity and mobility, not inequality, on individual and family aspiration, not class-consciousness." Mr Brooks is quite right that this sort of thing has a long history. I was immediately reminded of a passage of precisely such class-conscious rabble-rousing that I happened to re-read just the other day:

[T]he most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.

The author of this radical, class-conscious vision of society was James Madison, America’s fourth* president and co-author of its constitution. Madison did not believe that it should be easy for the poor majority to redistribute the wealth of the rich minority. He worried, in fact, that since the poor always outnumber the rich, democracies will have a dangerous natural bias towards redistribution. He envisioned a republican system whereby elected representatives, probably drawn from the national elite, represented national interests rather than class-based ones. He believed that a large republic spread out over many regions would include a wide variety of interests likely to form shifting alliances on different issues.

Madison's analysis of factionalism was in many ways wrong. He didn't anticipate how necessary party politics would prove to democratic governance. But Madison would never have suggested that voters do not have class interests at all. He was a realist, not a utopian fantasist. He tried to design a government that would enable people to contend for their class interests without rendering society ungovernable or oppressive.

It bears noting that using democratic government to pursue economic self-interest is a good thing. That's what democracy is for! Liberal democracies economically outperform other systems of government precisely because they are better able to balance competing interests. Concerns over property rights and economic growth have to be balanced against concerns of social justice. Certainly, confiscatory tax rates and arbitrary seizure of property are both unjust and bad for the economy, and Mr Brooks would be right to argue that people’s efforts to pursue their class interests through the ballot box shouldn’t go so far as to damage the entire system.

But that is not what Mr Brooks is arguing.Rather, he's arguing that people should be persuaded that there are no contending class interests. He thinks the whole idea of talking about income inequality is pernicious. Never mind that the average income for the lowest quintile of families was lower in 2012 than it was in 1968. Never mind that the incomes of the top 1% rose 86% over the past 20 years while those of everyone else rose just 18%, or that 95% of the income gains from 2009-12 went to the top 1%. People concerned about income inequality, he thinks, are worrying about symptoms, rather than the "real problems" of bad schools, single motherhood, "de-industrialisation", bad behaviour by poor young men and so on: "Low income is the outcome of these interrelated problems, but it is not the problem." Perhaps Mr Brooks should ask some people who have low incomes whether they agree. When someone tells you that it is unproductive and bad for America to talk about class interests, the chances are good that he is representing his own.

Read more: Why policies to strengthen government safety nets may look popular in America, but are rarely put in effect. And why a modest raise in the minimum wage would do more good than harm.

* Correction: This post initially stated that Madison was America's second president.