He sounds more shocked than I would've been. The night was obviously in terrible taste. But was it any worse than President Obama joking about killing the Jonas Brothers with a drone? Or a Dick Cheney roast featuring jokes about his war crimes? Depraved humor can be harmless at times, too. Hang around a bunch of firefighters or doctors or teachers long enough and you'll hear tasteless utterances.

What isn't harmless are the subset of villains on Wall Street, the havoc that they wrought, or the socialized losses they imposed on us. Reminded of their misdeeds, Rod Dreher wonders why America seems to be back to business as usual:

Those elites get away with it because we either don’t know what to do about them, or can’t muster the political focus and will to do anything at all about them. After the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we couldn’t even get a proper Pecora Commission. Then again, Pecora got to be Pecora because the American public of the 1930s demanded it. Us? Not so much. Why not? ... What has changed about American culture to make us so unserious about these things?

By way of an answer, I want to challenge the premise of the question. The financial crisis triggered substantial grassroots movements on the right and the left.

The Tea Party reshaped the United States Congress. Occupy Wall Street inspired tens or hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets, and many thousands to camp out in the centers of numerous U.S. cities. The people behind these populist protest movements were earnest in their civic concerns and serious enough to spend time and money on organizing the like-minded.

Why have their protests been ineffective so far?

There are so many reasons, and some of them involve flaws in the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street themselves. I've written myself about their various shortcomings.

But their shortcomings should never have distracted us from their most valid critiques, any more than scattered "Bush = Hitler" signs at 2002 anti-Iraq War rallies should've distracted us from the fact that invading the country was bad geopolitics.

There are a lot of reasons that elites keep their place at the top even after being party to catastrophic failures. One reason is their success in delegitimizing their critics. There's often a lot of material to work with. If you spent any time at an Occupy Wall Street camp, you met a lot of great people, a number of ignorant protest groupies, and committees that chose the least workable form of group governance imaginable. Tea Party rallies were filled with both competents and crazies too. As were anti-war rallies.

The public was right to be wary of flaws and excesses, but anyone who dismissed these groups entirely because of them was part of the problem. And that was pretty common. For some reason, the press is complicit in a system by which groups challenging elites are deemed unserious due to the presence of any incompetent or radical fringe ... whereas, say, presiding over 9/11, and then responding with a radical program of torture and a catastrophic war gets a president reelected and celebrated; and a Wall Street meltdown is followed by a bailout and record bonuses. To be taken seriously, those who critique elites must be without flaws, whereas the elites themselves are forgiven their most egregious errors in judgment.