What do these events have in common? Jon Stewart's entertaining, meatless takedown of Jim Cramer....Rick Santelli's Chicago tea party....White House and Congressional anger over AIG bonuses....Republican distress over the 98%-earmark free omnibus budget?

These are all examples of the performance of populist outrage in the theatres of the elite. Their targets aren't exactly straw men, but you could be forgiven for wondering why CNBC, employment contracts, earmarks and mortgage assistance for non-delinquent homeowners come in for so much approbation. To paraphrase Megan McArdle, earmarks didn't persuade China to invest its savings glut in U.S. Treasuries; Jim Cramer didn't invent leverage (or greed, or the desire to make money in the stock market) and AIG's derivative traders profited from the government's desire to secure homesteads for as many Americans as possible.

Anyway, these performances make for good television and for better politics. But if this populist backlash extends beyond the circle of the elite, then it is probably grounded in more fundamental causes. Income inequality has (basically) been growing for thirty years; Republicans paid no need to it, believing it to be an artifact of the miscarriage between statistics and modern standards of living, and Democrats failed to figure out how to stop it. The American political class failed to anticipate the negative effects of globalization and failed miserably to educate its citizenry about the tradeoff between low prices and wage stagnation. Government conflated the idea of growth in the financial services industry with the health of the economy. Add to that anxiety over health care, infrastructure, education, and the rest.