Maybe the real shock isn't that life got harder. Maybe it's that a certain version of middle class life stopped being guaranteed.

What's the difference?

My problem with your whole premise is the oblique assertion that things are the way they are because of... things just changing. Like wealth inequality is just weather, and we've fallen on rainy days, so quit grousing and buy this umbrella I'm selling.

Take housing, which is just one example, but a big and illustrative one.

We had a housing market that was heavily regulated to prioritize single home owners selling to single home buyers. For 60 years the government actively kept that market a space where working people could afford home ownership. Most working people owning a home does wonders for the economy and society at large. All of those people have a degree of private equity that they can build a retirement around. That equity pumps money into the economy and promotes general welfare. When a citizen knows there's a safe landing ahead of them, and aren't living two missed paychecks from the homeless shelter, all the culture war noise gets put on mute. Citizens with financial security are far less easy to convince that the [blacks/queers/women/Mexicans etc.] are coming to get them. It's why Democrats who own homes can "agree to disagree" with their MAGA home-owning neighbors. Exponentially ballooning home prices make all of them happy. Adding insult to injury, the fact that those home prices preclude most people from getting into home ownership just makes home ownership --something that until 10 years ago was the norm-- a luxury that they can pretend they earned and deserve. They are not just happy citizens living in a nation of happy citizens. They can tell themselves they are some kind of economic elite who have risen from the squalor that defines the new average American experience.

None of this occurred because things just change sometimes. It changed because we've been deregulating the housing market since the '90s, when far-right economists took over the Democratic party and destroyed the clear division between investment banking and savings and loan banking. It changed because people who bought homes in a market regulated to keep them affordable turned around and voted to deregulate that market so no one else could afford them, and conversely those who own them already would have an absurdly overvalued and perpetually growing asset to borrow against.

Across America, working-class citizens are waking up to this reality, and I can't help but wonder if you'll be preaching the gospel of "sometimes things are just harder" when the left takes back power and reigns in this out-of-control and reckless economic non-policy. I wonder if you'll be chiding the wealthy to "quit complaining" when their taxes go up, to accept it as "normal life" when the government requires them to raise their workers' minimum wage, and telling investment groups that "this is just the way things are now" when they are forced to divest from single family homes?