There are people in the SF Bay Area who have full time service jobs and can only afford to live in their cars. It should worry everybody when there is a large - and growing - segment of society that follows the rules and can’t scrape by. That doesn’t last for long.

You don’t need to worry about the crack heads, worry about the people who can hold a 9-5 and aren’t getting a living wage. All they need is a charismatic leader to organize them, and they’ll actually get shit done.

Does it not? The entire developed world seems extremely destabilized right now. Old-line Conservative, Labour, and Liberal parties have either been defeated by, or are under serious threat from, populist-nationalist and leftist parties throughout the West [1]. The only thing these latter groups have in common is populist rhetoric and a sense of "I'm not getting my fair piece of the pie".

The existence of the modern welfare state owes its genesis to this idea, courtesy of (amazingly) Otto von Bismarck of all people, probably the most consummate and effective conservative of his time. Bismarck was not at all subtle about his reasoning:

> Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy, assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old. If you do that, and do not fear the sacrifice, or cry out at State Socialism directly the words “provision for old age” are uttered,—if the State will show a little more Christian solicitude for the working-man, then I believe that the gentlemen of the Wyden (Social-Democratic) programme will sound their bird-call in vain, and that the thronging to them will cease as soon as working-men see that the Government and legislative bodies are earnestly concerned for their welfare.

I might not think this is the right reason to be concerned about inequality, but he's right about the realpolitik: a state whose subjects feel the state does not act in their interest have little reason to defend or support the state and all the reason in the world to attack it, or at least that is going to be their perception.

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[1] Yes, even the recent UK and French elections are an example. Labour's vote share was not very high - but the Conservatives, in the process of being supplanted by the more-nationalist Reform, split the right-wing vote such that Labour could win a share of seats far exceeding what you'd expect for its minimal vote share. In France, Macron's centrists still lost to a left-wing party, and that was after an extraordinary alliance of parties to block Le Pen's RN, which would likely have been the largest party without such maneuvering.