What’s going on here, I think, is that Clinton is savvy enough to recognize that “inequality” encompasses two separate but related issues. The first is the economic stagnation afflicting people in the middle and bottom part of the income scale. The second is the rapidly improving fortunes of the ultra-rich, who are leaving all the rest of us, even the kinda rich and merely affluent, very far behind.
When Democrats use the term inequality these days, they typically mean the latter phenomenon. A Pew poll at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement found that 91 percent of Democrats thought there was “too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations.” It’s really about plutocracy, in other words, and it makes sense that this would be central to our current understanding of inequality. The financial crisis and recession crystallized the economic and political power of financial elites, after all. And, over the last few years, more and more data has come to light illustrating how a tiny fraction of Americans is amassing an escalating share of income and wealth.
But the working-folks stagnation issue is certainly real and emotional enough that Democratic voters are quite concerned about it, too. (Even if it’s not new enough to merit an entirely new political term of art–we’ve been talking about it for decades.) And so Clinton is able to deliver a mostly compelling response to questions about inequality by focusing on this question, and mostly leaving the uncomfortable-sounding plutocracy stuff unmentioned.
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