We’re in a situation where we have so many people who are disconnected from possibility that it is on the brink of social dynamite. Huge swaths of this country have lost everything that defines their culture.

Our own U.S. Capitol has played a seditious role in our economy. They have used their political power to rig the tax laws to shift the wealth disproportionately to the top, and they used that same power to break the back of organized labor in the private sector by the wholesale export of our industries.

Last weekend's demonstrations do not necessarily reflect a new sense of class consciousness, but they do suggest the potential for it. The idea of a class system where only a handful can ever be truly wealthy intrudes awkwardly on a culture rooted in notions of self-advancement, personal reinvention and rugged individualism, even if it is closer to reality. Old habits die hard. The weekend protests, after all, were organized under the banner "Save the American Dream."