David Brooks has a recent column in which he argues that the “Red [State] Inequality,” between college-educated and non-college-educated people is more momentous than the “Blue [State] Inequality” between the 1% and the 99%. After all, college grads, on average, make 75% more than non-grads. (That’s less than double, for those who didn’t do so well in math.) The super-rich, on the other hand, make three-figure multiples of what most of us make.

Apart from a few fanatics — and Right-wingers looking for straw-men to beat up — nobody on the Left is looking for the kind of absolute equality that would strain at the gap between the more educated and the less. And the nice thing about education is that it can be made available to people from unprivileged backgrounds. (That’s how my family got where we did.) So why focus on that particular inequality? Two words: culture war.

Why bother addressing the fact that the capitalist economic system generates morally obscene — and ultimately unsustainable — levels of inequality when you can just encourage the 99% to point fingers at each other? The problem, after all, isn’t that a few people are getting rich by financial shenanigans — it’s that “snobs” and “elitists” use big words and put milk in their coffee (a.k.a. drink latté). And Brooks can’t resist the usual Right-wing dig at single mothers and other such miscreants.

Expect more of this in the months ahead. Hey, it’s easier than actually coming up with solutions that might pinch the real elites.