CHARLOTTE, N.C. — For almost 90 years, St. Peter's Church on North Tryon Street here was the only Roman Catholic church in the entire city. Established in 1851, it survived even that moment during the Civil War when a nearby ammunition depot blew up, nearly taking the church with it. On Tuesday, it was a cool and dark place, a refuge from the intolerable humidity and the intolerable security and the intolerably crowded sidewalks of this city. Some people had come together to talk about income inequality — and inevitably, by the very nature of that discussion, poverty in America.

Income inequality was supposed to be the big issue this year. It was the issue that the Occupy movement was supposed to have forced onto the national agenda. We are becoming a nation divided between a very small ownership class and and universe of underpaid clerks. Nowhere is that more clear than on the streets of Charlotte as the Democratic National Convention unwinds itself inside a rat's maze of iron barriers, cement roadblocks, and hundreds of men with hundreds of guns. None of this is a surprise. Political conventions these days occur in an atmosphere that has as much to do with democracy as Kim Jong-Il's last three birthday bashes did. Leave aside the Secret Service, and the multitude of private security firms and the flocks of glorified mall-cops hanging around on every corner. They've brought in police from all over the country; I met one from Chicago today, and another one from Louisville, and they seem to have deputized everybody with a badge in a three-state radius. So you wind up getting hassled by some jumped-up speed-trap cowboy from Bug Tussle who's been trained up to believe he's in Afghanistan. This is all to keep us safe. It also serves to keep unwanted opinions from penetrating the security perimeter.

Income inequality is one of those issues. Both parties have reached the independent conclusion that it will not be a part of their respective agendas. Like evolution and global climate change, it is one of those things in which conservative Republicans choose not to believe. To believe that it exists is to blaspheme against the essentially divine nature of "America." For their part, as they do with so many things having to do with the essential economic problems facing the people of the country, the Democrats sidle up to the gentlest demi-solution they can find. As good as Michelle Obama was on Tuesday night, there was an undeniable subtext to what she was saying about upward mobility in this country — that it is primarily a result of "hard work," and of overcoming obstacles. Any honest reading of that subtext would conclude that what she is saying is not all that much different from what all those Republicans said last week, except that they're a lot more direct about who to blame, and they're a lot more brutal in their applied Darwinism. The question of why the "hard work" is so damned hard, and why it can't be made a little easier, and why the permanent emotional and psychological infrastructure of a de facto plutocracy — which, by its very nature, implies a permanently impoverished underclass — is being installed in the lives of so many people never quite makes it past the barriers.

They talked about it at St. Peter's, though, a cool and dark place a block or two removed from the bubble. The panel was convened by NETWORK, a Catholic social-justice organization that is responsible for, among other things, the Nuns On The Bus tour that so bedeviled Paul Ryan about the zombie-eyed granny-starver's budget. "I believe we have to care about people, not just for our own well-being, but as a collective," said Terry Bolotin, a pastoral-care counselor at a medical facility outside Charlotte. "Even though I would be in a middle or upper-income status, our city and our nation and our world is not served well when everyone doesn't get what we need. What is being talked about here at St. Peter's is that we are talking about poverty. We have made the poor our scapegoats. Before that, it was drugs. Before that, it was African Americans, although it still is, to some extent. We have to have a scapegoat."

The one vehicle that might have brought income inequality inside the bubble — or, at least, might have attempted to bring it to the attention of people on their way into the bubble — was the Occupy movement. But, frankly, the performance of what is calling itself the Occupy movement here has been pathetic — a hundred or so people standing at barriers, yelling at the cops, and providing the networks with cheap-shot video that they can run forever. Back in the day, when the occupation of Zuccotti Park was really rolling, you could see the results of people willing at least to yell at the correct buildings. (They forced that appalling video of the young bankster types guzzling champagne on the balcony while the cops busted some heads. That is how you change the debate, or at least wedge yourself into a place in it.) Here, it's a claque of people sleeping in a park and the issue on which the movement founded itself gets lost in regularly scheduled daily wanking.

"I think it's kind of fizzled here," Terri Bolotin said. "There doesn't seem to be much here. Yeah, and I think there's something about yelling at the cops. The cops are not getting paid that much either. There's something about a class divide. You fight among each other rather than say we all have a stake in this. That kind of shouting, I don't find particularly effective."

There is all sorts of talk about economics here, and we are told repeatedly that the future of our democracy depends on solving our economic problems. But income inequality is the single most dangerous economic problem to the continued existence of political democracy. It is the one issue among them all that could render us a subject people, and already is halfway to doing so. The Republicans deny its existence, while the Democrats seem trapped in an endless cycle trying to mitigate its effects without ever addressing its causes. So I'd like to hear more about income inequality, and a damned sight less about Simpson-Bowles and all the rest of it.

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AND COMING TONIGHT: Tom Junod on Bill Clinton and the Democrats' Dirty Little Secret, and Charles P. Pierce on Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, and More

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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