Wherever you live these days, you’re likely seeing plenty of evidence that political polarization is increasing all around you. Some of this polarization is reinforcing conventional left-right fault lines. Elsewhere in the world, other divisions — cultural, social, geographic, intergenerational — have ripped up and replaced those traditional polarizations.

Socio-economic inequality has, of course, long rated as one of those conventional fault lines. The right has typically seen inequality as an inevitable — perhaps even necessary and desirable — byproduct of the dynamism that drives prosperity. Inequality, this argument contends, incentivizes and rewards effort and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Inequality, those on the left counter, will always remain morally objectionable, for a wide range of reasons we need not rehearse here.

But, as with seemingly everything in politics these days, even this well-rehearsed debate no longer lines up along traditional left-right fault lines. Figures on both the right and left, as well as in the center, are sharing increasing alarm over how deeply socio-economic inequality is damaging our economies, democracies, and environment.

People who disagree over the fairness of inequality are now coming together to voice their concerns about inequality’s consequences, the negative spillover effects, if you will, that extremely high levels of socio-economic inequality create. Even right-wing populist leaders, in their own contradictory fashion, are occasionally nodding in this direction. At his inauguration in January, surrounded by billionaires, President Trump railed against an establishment that has “extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.”

In the UK, a growing chorus of conservative thinkers is beginning to question our economic orthodoxy. This dogma has created a situation that has companies making more money by owning assets — and extracting rents from those assets — than by actually contributing to the economy, a situation that has individuals’ life chances influenced more by what they own or inherit than what they earn. In the United States, conservatives like

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