On the floor of the Senate this week, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican Minority Whip, criticized President Barack Obama for talking about the middle class. The mere phrase “middle class”—that most anodyne of demographic terms, the category to which half of all Americans polled identify, and into which Mitt Romney is always trying to shoehorn very, very wealthy people like himself—emerged, in Kyl’s evocation, as some kind of crazy-lefty bumper-sticker slogan. By alluding to “what he calls ‘the middle class,’ ” Kyl said, as though Obama had come up with the phrase, the President was “pitting these Americans” against the wealthy, “spreading economic resentment, and weaken[ing] American values and ideals.” Kyl went on: “We don’t need the current American President touring the country and defining every American’s values and status based on a class system that he’s made up. I don’t think there’s anything called middle-class values. I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It’s not what we do in America.”

Increasingly, it isn’t. Not if we’re in office or running for office, and especially not if we’re Republicans. America perpetuates a class system—and an income-inequality gap growing faster than that of most other countries—but American politicians try not to speak of it, because if they do, they get slimed. “What you could do for me,” President Obama told a group of Presidential historians in May, 2011, “is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality without being accused of class warfare.” A year later, it takes even less to attract that particular charge, even as it takes more rhetorical chutzpah to get around the reality.

It’s remarkable how far to the right the acceptable political discourse about the haves and have-nots has shifted—or perhaps it’s just moved into the realm of denial. In the not-so-distant political past, it was considered reasonable for Republicans to allude to inequality and even vow to try to remedy it. In an excellent recent article in Rolling Stone about the contemporary Republican party’s extreme attachment to tax cuts for the rich, Tim Dickinson quotes a 1985 speech by Ronald Reagan, a speech that somebody—maybe Kyl—would surely be calling “class warfare” talk until he heard who’d made it. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” Reagan vowed, adding that they “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10% of his salary—and that’s crazy.”

As Dickinson writes, “Today’s Republican party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan—which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits—is dead and gone.” In 1985, the Republican Senator Bob Dole led the effort to restore some of Reagan’s earlier tax cuts—and Reagan, who did see some need to pay for government functions, signed on. Sometimes that meant making speeches that alluded to fundamental fairness, and, by extension, to class: the millionaire and the bus driver.

There was a time in American politics when Presidents and Presidential candidates from both parties spoke about helping not only the vaguely defined but presumed virtuous “middle class” but the actual “poor” as well. Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty in 1964, vowing to help the Americans who lived “on the outskirts of hope,” and to “help replace their despair with opportunity.” Johnson, in his State of the Union Address that year, expressed a moral perspective on social inequality that we rarely hear from politicians today:

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent cities in which to live and bring up their children.

Richard Nixon, whose administration pioneered the earned-income tax credit for low-income workers, also called for universal access to health care, speaking of the “millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it.” (Nixon had grown up poor and had seen two of his young brothers die of tuberculosis; access to health care was actually an issue he cared about.) In this campaign cycle, when Mitt Romney said he wasn’t “concerned about the very poor” because “we have a safety net there,” Obama’s supporters attacked him. But Romney wasn’t actually saying he was unconcerned—he at least alluded to a necessary safety net he doesn’t usually give credit to—and in some ways, what was most striking about his quote was that he mentioned poverty at all.

In his remarks, Senator Kyl asserted that, in “our uniquely meritocratic” society, “we believe that everyone can achieve the American dream, regardless of background.” Some of us may believe that—but, unfortunately, it is no longer so. Family background now determines our economic chances in America much more than it does in most comparable countries. We are a less economically mobile as well as a less equitable nation than Canada and many western European countries. This week, the AP came out with a story predicting that when the new census figures are released in the fall, they will show the American poverty rate is at its highest since 1965: 15.7 per cent. One of these days, Kyl and politicians like him are going to have to realize that not talking about inequality won’t make it go away.

Photograph, of President Lyndon B. Johnson on his poverty tour, in 1964, by Cecil Stoughton/LBJ Library.