I used to be more aligned with what you're saying. An eye opening paper for me was this [2]. I ran into that when actually searching information on the chiseling out of the middle class. And that paper does describe that. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income, and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (well at least today as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% with the middle class left with 26%. There's even been a chiseling out of the middle class as a whole declining from 38.8% of society to 32% of society.
But the eye opener is this. This is the change in the size of each economic group between 1979 and 2014:
- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%
- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%
- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%
- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%
- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%
If you're concerned that partisan bias may be tilting those numbers (as such figures are certainly subject to a variety of different interpretations), wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [3]. Beyond that, that paper is quite readable and their methodology very transparent. It's extremely eye opening.
[1] - https://www.fa-mag.com/news/most-millionaires-self-made--stu...
[2] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...
This leaves everyone else without effective organization. Look at all the occupy stuff that was supposed leaderless; did it accomplish anything?
More fundamentally the problem is that in America there is a very distorted sense of self. A total of 4% of Americans think they are less intelligent than the average American. [1] And so the vast majority of people in this nation who are not particularly meritorious think they absolutely are, or at the worst no less meritorious than average. Yet that, no matter how you measure it, is simply not the case.
[1] - https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/05/11/intelligence/