It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America - the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one - perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world - the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity - become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then? <...>

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

Mr. Frank is the author of "The Wrecking Crew," forthcoming from Metropolitan Books. He will begin a weekly column each Wednesday in the Journal on May 14.