The upper middle class in the US have it all: money, privilege and life chances, and they intend to keep it that way.

In accustomed style: Harvard University’s 365th commencement events in 2016 Paul Marotta · Getty

Barack Obama suffered an acute political embarrassment in January 2015. A proposal from the budget he’d sent to Congress was dead on arrival, and it was the president himself who had killed it. The idea was sensible, simple, and progressive: remove the tax benefits from 529 college saving plans, which disproportionately help affluent families. and use the money to help fund a broader, fairer system of tax credits. It was, in policy terms, a no-brainer.

But the president had underestimated the influence of the upper middle class in American politics. As soon as the administration unveiled the plan, the cream of the Democratic Party quietly started to mobilise against it. Representative Chris Van Hollen from Maryland (now a senator) called his colleague, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who happened to be travelling with Obama from India to Saudi Arabia on Air Force One. As they flew across the Arabian Sea, she persuaded him to drop the reform.

The episode was a brutal reminder that sensible policy is not always easy politics, particularly when almost every person writing about, analysing or commenting on a proposal is a beneficiary of the current system. Pelosi and Van Hollen both represent liberal, affluent, well-educated districts. Almost half of their constituents are in households with six-figure incomes. I should know: Van Hollen was my congressman at the time. My neighbours and I are the very people saving into 529 plans. As Paul Waldman noted in the Washington Post,the proposal ‘was targeted at what may be the single most dangerous constituency to anger: the upper middle class — wealthy enough to have influence, and numerous enough to be a significant voting bloc.’ Like an X-ray, the controversy revealed the most important fracture in American society: the one between the upper middle class, broadly defined as the top fifth of society, and the rest.

Inequality has become a lively political issue, but too often the (...)