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If you are a member of the 1 percent, be wary. The politicians are coming for you. They’d like a donation to their campaign.

Given all the talk about income inequality, you might have worried that they’d be supporting policies that could hurt you. Rest easy: Control of the Senate hangs in the balance this election year and the political system needs your donations more than your hide. Pollsters and strategists are telling candidates that targeting the rich or talking too much about income inequality isn’t a smart strategy.

President Obama has said that addressing income inequality will be the centerpiece of his remaining time in office, but when he recently spoke to the Democratic National Committee, he didn’t mention income inequality. Democrats support “opportunity for all,” he said, whereas Republicans support “opportunity for a few.”

Nevertheless, to some, like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the president’s toned-down rhetoric is just a sleight of hand. The president is still focused on redistributing wealth and stoking class warfare, Ryan recently told CNBC.

The president’s budget, released on March 4, is designed to highlight tradeoffs that define Republicans as the party of the wealthy and not the middle class.

It includes a provision that would pay for the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and child tax credit-programs that benefit low-income and middle-income Americans-through the elimination of loopholes that benefit the wealthy, including the “carried interest” tax loophole, which allows private equity and venture capital executives to treat such income at a lower tax rate.

This budget is a purely political document and will never become law. Ryan and his House colleagues offer a firewall against whatever the president might be plotting in the White House basement. No tax increases on the wealthy are going to pass on their watch, but that is no comfort to some in the gated community. For some conservatives, the very mention of “income inequality” means pitting one class against the other.

There’s obviously an increase in sentiment against the rich-polls show a modest increase in those who believe the wealthy unfairly benefit from the current economic system-but you don’t have to travel all the way to Nazi Germany to see whether today matches the past.

Today’s wealthy face nothing approaching what their predecessors did. “The 1 percent should count themselves lucky,” says Yale historian Beverly Gage. “If this were the turn of the century, they would be afraid of bomb-throwing anarchists.” Gage is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded, about the largest terrorist attack on American soil before the Oklahoma City bombing. That was just one of the violent acts that sprung from ideological class-based violence at the turn of the 20th Century.

In 1892, Henry Clay Frick was shot three times and stabbed during a steel strike. John D. Rockefeller and executives of Standard Oil faced several bomb plots. Labor unions tried to redress the imbalances with crippling work stoppages like the Pullman strike and the Homestead strike. Ironworkers were engaged in a multiyear bombing campaign that culminated in the destruction of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910.

Compare that level of action with Occupy Wall Street. The movement managed to take over some parks and irritate some people with its drumming. It did change the public conversation but still never achieved anything near the influence of the Tea Party, the other grass-roots movement of the age, which is responsible for changing control of the House and reshaping American politics for the past five years.

President Obama’s rhetoric has never approached the level of his predecessors. The starkest example of this was the president’s speech in Osawatomie, Kan., which was designed to echo the one Teddy Roosevelt gave at the same location a century earlier. In the president’s 2011 speech and the one he gave last December in Washington, which was meant to echo its themes, Obama never came close to the wealth bashing of Roosevelt’s original. T. R. raged against “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” and said government’s “prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.”

Roosevelt, who coined the phrase “malefactors of great wealth,” was campaigning in support of the graduated income tax and the estate tax on the theory that without them a moneyed royalty would rise, a direct threat to a functioning democracy. Twenty years later, FDR took up the same charge against the wealthy, campaigning against “economic royalists” who built “new kingdoms … upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital-all undreamed of by the Fathers-the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.” Are people so enraged today that there might be social unrest? Political strategist Doug Sosnik thinks so. The former Clinton adviser wrote that the question of the next election will be “which side of the barricade are you on?” James Madison warned that the greatest danger to democracy was the factions that were created by “the various and unequal distribution of property.” But for some time, the theory has been that while Americans recognize economic inequality, they tolerate it because they believe success is the result of talent and hard work, not a tilted playing field.

“The rich have made themselves a smaller target today,” says Michael McGerr of Indiana University, an expert on the Progressive Era of economic and political change that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. “There are fewer ways that they are villains. There was a time when the rich lived an alien lifestyle. They had pleasures others didn’t. In the last 50 years, in part because of New Deal tax policy, ordinary people live a lifestyle that is closer to what the rich has. Some of the mystification is gone.”

What might lead to more restlessness, however, is if people feel their opportunity to share in the American Dream is disappearing. Views about opportunity have changed with economic conditions. At the end of the prosperity of the 1990s, according to Pew Center polling, 74 percent of the country believed that people who were willing to work hard would get ahead. That number has now dropped 18 points down to 60 percent.

But just because people believe opportunities are shrinking doesn’t mean that they blame the rich. Since the mid-’80s voters have told pollsters that government should do something to level the disparity between rich and poor, but it’s not clear what role people want government to take. In 1984, 60 percent said money and wealth should be evenly distributed, almost the same figure as today, but when Walter Mondale suggested raising taxes to do so, it led to such a resounding defeat it is perhaps the most oft-repeated truth in politics that no one can campaign on raising taxes.

There is still no national cry for higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy. One explanation may be that increased tax rates would just bring more money to the government, an institution people don’t trust-81 percent of the public tells Gallup they trust government only some of the time or never.)

The most overt recent attack on wealth in American politics took place in the 2012 Republican primaries, and it was smashed almost instantaneously by Democrats and Republicans alike. Newt Gingrich tried to frame Mitt Romney as a rapacious fat cat who made his fortune at asset management firm Bain Capital and was immediately denounced by his fellow Republicans. When the Obama campaign tried to pick up the charge, Bill Clinton stood up for Romney’s business career and made a broader claim about the wisdom of evaluating the morality of a person’s work. “I don’t think we ought to get into the position where we say this is bad work; this is good work,” said the former president.

Why were high-profile Democrats defending private equity? Because they were raising a lot of money from people who worked at Bain Capital or companies like it. As a whole, Congress is not only more dependent on the money of the 1 percent, it also looks more like them. For the first time in history a majority of Congress members are now millionaires.

Unlike the previous century, there is no global socialist or Communist revolution to attract American adherents or even a domestic agrarian revolution of the kind that fed the Populist Movement. “People 100 years ago thought they had an alternative,” says Gage. “There were these transformative social visions people really believed in. People thought they were headed into this terrifying or fabulous future. And today, what are those ideas?” Still, inequality continues to grow, the economic recovery is weak, and the public view is souring. On the left, Peter Beinart argues that the millennial generation might lead the next ideological revolution. Its members have suffered under a prolonged period of shrinking wages and falling benefits, and they believe in redistributive government action. The spirit of Occupy isn’t over, Beinart argues, it’s just sleeping.

On the right, Ben Domenech has written about how libertarian populism is also becoming energized by today’s inequities. The target of that movement is not the wealthy in general, but the elites who profit from working the current system-the lobbyists, cronies, rent-seekers, union bosses, and overpaid school administrators. But Domenech’s solution isn’t more government but less of it. “The important thing is that this wealth (and power) is naturally determined (and checked) by the market, instead of artificially determined by the state,” says Domenech.

People’s frustration is going to find an outlet somewhere, but it’s not certain that it will be aimed at the wealthy. President Obama is a more likely scapegoat than rich people. Public dissatisfaction with Obama’s stewardship at home and abroad could simply lead to support for a Republican who promises to promote the opposite of all that Obama stood for. That fellow will be asking for a donation from you, too.