A recession looms, and the nation’s C.E.O.s are growing fearful.

It isn’t the potential of downturn itself that has them alarmed — downturns come and downturns go, but whatever happens, chief executives, like cats, tend to land on their comfortably padded feet.

Instead, the cause of their fear appears to be something more fundamental. As Alan Murray, the C.E.O. of Fortune, writes in a cover story chronicling the C-suite anxiety: “More and more C.E.O.s worry that public support for the system in which they’ve operated is in danger of disappearing.” They’re worried that when the next recession breaks, revolution might, too. This could be the hour that the ship comes in: The coming recession might finally prompt the masses to sharpen their pitchforks and demand a reckoning.

[Farhad Manjoo answered questions about this column on Twitter.]

Company executives are right to worry. A downturn will mark the end of a record period of uninterrupted economic expansion. The American economy has been growing for more than a decade, stock indexes recently hit new highs, and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low.

And yet the vast majority of Americans will not look back on the last decade as years of fat and plenty. This was a gilded expansion, a decade of creaking wage growth and profoundly unequal outcomes. The number of Americans receiving food stamps is 40 percent higher now than in 2008, yet we have twice as many billionaires as we did a decade ago.