Adbusters has an intra-left rant that conservatives will find instructive. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone works on the theme, unfresh but not uninteresting, that liberalism has become sociologically top-heavy. The New Deal coalition worked, politically, because working-class concerns were always high on the agenda. Highly educated and economically comfortable intellectuals deferred to this political reality, and often endorsed it.

Now, however, working-class concerns and sensibilities are ignored or disdained by upper-quintile liberals, who finance the Democratic party, shape its message and set its agenda. “Those interminable right-wing criticisms about liberals being ‘elitists’ are actually true,” Taibbi says. “Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 – the highest-grossing political category in America. They’re also the best-educated class, with over one in four being post-graduates.”

This observation leads Taibbi to a conclusion whose ferocity would have been at home in the pages of Human Events: “Rich liberals protesting the establishment is absurd because they are the establishment; they’re just too embarrassed to admit it. When they start embracing their position of privilege and taking responsibility for the power they already have – striving to be the leaders of society they actually are, instead of playing at being aggrieved subjects – they’ll come across as wise and patriotic citizens, not like the terminally adolescent buffoons trapped in a corny sixties daydream they often seem to be now.”

We’ll know that Taibbi’s essay has gained some traction if John Edwards takes the advice of one of his fans on MyDD and comes out against the immigration bill. Mickey Kaus takes note of the MyDD posting: “if you really care about incomes at the bottom of the distribution – which is what I thought Edwards’ campaign was all about – then you can’t not oppose this bill.”