When I became aware that you had upbraided Obama for fomenting class warfare, I couldn’t even imagine what set you off. It seemed comical. Here’s a president who brought Wall Street allies into his administration from the get-go.

[...] it could be that you are so sensitive or defensive about your privilege that any little jibe about riding on “your corporate jet” seems beyond the bounds of decent discourse. I’m going to strain here for the most charitable interpretation: you felt singled out. You have a simpleton’s idea stuck in your head that recognizing that one class of Americans is pitted against another is dangerous.

This is how it always is with plutocrats: they believe the concerted efforts they make to protect their power and standing is nothing more than their rightful participation in politics. Meanwhile, anyone who points to their manipulation of the system—and wants to reverse trends toward the concentration of wealth—is accused of class warfare. Look into the ways we’ve had several decades of top-down class war, Cooperman. Ask your researcher to tally up all the money the Koch brothers have spent to support candidates who defend the wealthy, or to explain the effects of the Citizens United ruling in American politics. Today’s vast inequality isn’t a random event like the weather: certain people made it happen. You.

Let us entertain, then, the possibility you are a successful man when it comes to understanding finance and that you have a knack for making money multiply but that you are a stupid man when it comes to understanding politics, history, and ideas. Why pretend otherwise? Like most people devoted to accumulation, you are a man of reaction, not reflection. There is a variety of boobus Americanus produced by the nation’s best business schools. They look a lot like you—spending most hours of the day playing the markets. They have no time in their life for literature, or for books that take ideas seriously. They have been trained to discard “normative reasoning” in business decisions as a potential violation of the shareholder’s right to a maximized bottom line. In other words, they have no capacity to incorporate questions of morality or justice into discussions of the economic system.

I saw a glimpse of that when you were grousing on CNBC in November. When Scott Wapner noted that people at the top are seeing “exponential” growth in income while people at the bottom see wage stagnation, your response was the equivalent of a shrug: “What are the causes? I don’t know. You’re raising issues that are beyond my scope.” If the problem of increasing inequality is beyond your scope, Cooperman, you are going to have a hard time understanding what makes people angry in American politics.