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A few years ago, a Goldman Sachs banker, still shy of his 40th birthday and worth, I was reliably told, some $80 million, told me that he wasn't in his line of work for the money. "If I was doing this for the money," he said, with no trace of irony, "I'd be at a hedge fund."
What to say? Though such a statement is perhaps only fathomable on a small plot of real estate in Lower Manhattan at the dawn of the 21st century, it suggests how insular and debauched our ruling class has become.
For several years I've predicted that a new wild card in American life -- the presence of economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of our income distribution -- would become a powerful force for reform. The SEC's fraud case against Goldman Sachs may be the first shot in what I think of as the revolt of the "lower upper class."
Lower Uppers are doctors, accountants, engineers and lawyers. At companies they're mostly people above the rank of vice president and below the CEO. Their comrades include well-fed members of the media (and even part-time Post columnists who earn their livings as consultants). They include government officials -- and, yes, SEC lawyers -- who didn't make or inherit fortunes before entering public service. Lower Uppers are professionals who by dint of education, hard work and good luck are living better than 99 percent of anyone who has ever walked the planet. They're also people who can't help but notice how many people with credentials much like their own seem to be living in the kind of Gatsby-like splendor they'll never enjoy.
There's only so much of this indignity a smart, vocal elite can take. It's only a matter of time before the dam breaks and the new class war begins -- not some retro showdown between proletarians and capitalists, but between the Lower Uppers and the Ultrarich.
Think of SEC vs. Goldman, then, as the Lower Uppers' Lexington and Concord. As Lower Uppers lash out, the public will cheer. Eliot Spitzer's crusade against Wall Street when he was attorney general was hugely popular. Voters who distrust government tell pollsters they still want greedy bankers brought to heel. There's a political opening for a "comeuppance" agenda that starts with the financial regulatory reform President Obama is pressing this week.
But it hardly ends there. The next big skirmish will be taxes. And it brings out the beast in even rumpled Lower Uppers.
free-loading is not as easy as I had dreamed it would be...
