Last month, I wrote a short post about how some people — particularly wealthy liberals — are trying to rob “the 99 vs. 1 percent” framing of its inherent class politics in order to turn it into a new form of privilege-checking.

My argument was that the so-called “one percent” was better understood as a class than either an accumulation of arbitrary privileges or even a specific payscale — though that’s certainly a much better start than whether you’ve smoked meth. Furthermore, I argued that by diverting attention away from this ruling class at the top, we were instead turning inwards and letting the real power players in our society get off scot-free.

Sections of the working class are without a doubt more oppressed than others, but I wrote the piece because right now Americans are inundated with a variety of liberal politics that try to turn what should be political reckonings against the truly powerful into an epidemic of guilt and complicity in which a huge portion — or, sometimes, nearly all of us — are to blame.