Mr. Brooks is of course angry and defensive when he reviews The Piketty Phenomenon. But the anger and defensiveness manifests itself as that shopworn Conservative old saw: envy of the rich. The beating heart of the middle class, the professionals, is envy of the privileges of the rich.That middle class i.e. those Left Wing Progressives hold in their inmost being an animus toward the rich,in fact, it is the ruling pathology, that Mr. Piketty’s book simply reinforces: thus the enthusiasm for it’s theses. And true to form, Mr. Brooks trivializes the ‘Phenomenon’ as equivalent to Beatlemania.The power of Mr. Piketty’s book to utterly transform the national conversation on inequality has generated in Mr. Brooks a pathetic sarcasm wedded to desperate invective.

Political Cynic