“I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians,” wrote John Steinbeck of his fellow Americans. “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”

There’s a grain of truth in this. Americans have more faith in upward economic mobility than nearly anyone. We have a special — which isn’t to say totalizing — attachment to the idea that class origin is not destiny, and that anyone who works hard and is smart enough has a shot at a high standard of living. This meritocratic conviction sometimes shades into a belief that rich people’s wealth is deserved while poor people are lazy and unintelligent. Consequently, it’s not too hard for your average New York Times reporter, say, to find non-affluent Americans who do empathize and identify with the rich over the poor, confirming the stereotype of the “temporarily embarrassed capitalist” with objections to increased social spending or defenses of tax cuts for the mega-rich.

But such people are anomalies. Americans are more concerned about wealth inequality than we’re given credit for, and the popular image of working-class Americans siding with the rich, or ignoring the social importance of class, is overblown.