In 2004, George Bush gave a little talk to the National Association of Home Builders. "For millions of our citizens, the American Dream™ starts with owning a home," he said. This December, housing unit sales were down 40 percent from a year ago, in an era of of heightened stagflation and possible loss of homes, as millions of cruddy-termed mortgage payments are coming due.

"Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker," writes Naomi Klein in the Nation. The ownership society was an excellent scheme, too, she points out—it worked to recruit voters to the right when that monster Margaret Thatcher put London public housing on the market. Those who purchased their flats went Tory about half the time. (Double win: Those who became homeless were probably less likely to show up to vote!)

So now Bush & Co., if anyone is paying attention, will reap the rewards of the complete failure of their scheme to invest Americans with the mores of the propertied classes. (Couldn't they have taken a lesson from Starbucks and its employee-owner system that brainwashes wage workers into being their own management? It looks like an easy thing to do—but apparently not.) Klein writes:

The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots—nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool—and progressives have gained one.

If only they can figure out how to put that idea to use.