The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

Brooks' claim, then, is that inequality is really a matter of the top one-fifth, not the 1 percent. Well, that's not what the Congressional Budget Office (10/11) says.

It's true that what you might call the upper middle class has done better than the middle class and poor over the past three decades or so--their income has grown by 65 percent, vs. 40 percent for the middle class and only 18 percent for the poor. But over the same time period, the income of the richest 1 percent has soared--by 275 percent. That's close to quadrupling.

So while the share of income claimed by the upper middle class has stayed about the same since 1979, the poor and middle class have gotten substantially less while the piece of the pie taken by the 1 percent has more than doubled in size. As it turns out, the real driver of inequality and unfairness--is the financial elite who hog society resources.

Score one for Occupy Wall Street--zero for David Brooks.

A third believe the U.S. is no better than Al-Qaeda, according to a New York magazine survey.

How would someone "survey" a leaderless, ever-shifting mass of protesters? I am not sure, and it's not really what New York did. They asked a series of questions--some of them obviously cheeky--to 100 activists at Liberty Plaza. As you can see:

Rank yourself on the following Scale of Liberalism:

Not liberal at all: 6

Liberal but fairly mainstream (i.e., Barack Obama): 3

Strongly liberal (i.e., Paul Krugman): 12

Fed up with Democrats, believe country needs overhaul (i.e., Ralph Nader): 41

Convinced the U.S. government is no better than, say, Al-Qaeda (i.e., Noam Chomsky): 34

It's not surprising that activists at Occupy Wall Street say they identify more with Chomsky than with Obama, regardless of whether you put a description that doesn't reflect Chomsky's worldview next to his name. It's hard to believe that the magazine took this very seriously anyway. But it does provided Brooks with useful anti-protester fodder for his column defending the top 1 percent.

Americans possess a long-standing wariness of power and its potential as a corrupting influence, especially in the hands of large institutions. That instinct bred our government system of checks and balances and, more recently, led members of the "tea party" to embrace the nation's founders (repackaged as a band of small-government crusaders) as the guiding lights of their movement.

So "wariness of power" and the "corrupting influence" of "large institutions" is what this is about. Huh. Then came New York Times columnist David Brooks (6/14/11), who wrote:

The Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country.

So that is what the Koch brothers are fighting for?

To the Editor:

I smiled when I read "Huntington's Clash Revisited," by David Brooks (column, March 4).

Eighteen years after Samuel Huntington wrote his Foreign Affairs essay "The Clash of Civilizations," Mr. Brooks has arrived at a conclusion that so many Arabs and Arab-Americans arrived at very soon after its publication.

Mr. Huntington's essay and subsequent book, in which he asserted that the peoples of the Islamic world were incapable of developing societies rooted in freedom and democracy, which he perceived to be essentially "Western values," sparked an extensive debate in the Arab world and among Arab communities worldwide. The Arab media covered it extensively, and what they said and wrote was totally ignored or dismissed by their Western counterparts.

My late husband, Edward W. Said, was among the prominent voices in strong opposition to Mr. Huntington's thesis. He wrote and published in English for the Western world. Very few listened to him. It took revolutions to finally hear our voices.

Mariam C. Said
New York, March 4, 2011