“We need a Democratic Party that is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country,” Senator Bernie Sanders declared at a rally in Boston last week. This has become a very common refrain for Sanders specifically and the progressive left generally. After the election, Nation editor at large D.D. Guttenplan declared that liberal elites who spurned populism are responsible for President Donald Trump, while Chris Hedges argued last month that Trump’s greatest allies are, unwittingly, liberal elites.

“The elites, who live in enclaves of privilege in cities such as New York, Washington and San Francisco, scold an enraged population,” he wrote at Truthdig. “They tell those they dismiss as inferiors to calm down, be reasonable and patient and trust in the goodness of the old ruling class and the American system.”

Those damn liberal elites! They sip Starbucks in their Priuses while headed to a Harvard lecture about Hollywood film—or to the Hollywood set of a film about Harvard. These corrupt effete meritocrats are the truly powerful ones in America. May populism rise up and destroy them, so that inequality and smugness alike will vanish from the Earth.

But it’s worth asking: If all these full-throated attacks on liberal elitism ended with the ascension of a racist, sexist authoritarian who has a gross history of mistreating working people, then is attacking liberal elitism really the proper strategy for the opposition to Trump? Maybe the left should think about going back to attacking a more tried and true bugaboo: the wealthy.

Many on the left use “liberal elites” as a substitute for “wealthy,” of course, but it’s a confusing substitute, not least because rich people tend to be more conservative and to vote Republican, as they did in the last election. Meanwhile, bloated plutocrats like Trump, the Koch brothers, the Bushes, Carl Icahn, and Paul Ryan embrace openly regressive policies. And yet, pundits across the political spectrum hardly ever inveigh against the “conservative elite.”