Let's imagine one pizza pie, divided into eight equal slices, shared by eight people. Communism, at least on paper, means each person gets one piece of the pie. In reality, we know that the party elite always got more, so the distribution was more like 1 person getting 2 slices, and 2 people sharing 1, with the middle 5 each having a slice. In theory, this wouldn't have been half-bad, except that communism yields small pies. Without the profit motive, people simply don't produce very efficiently. Under communism most people might be equal, yes, but (mostly) equally poor.
Capitalism involves an acceptance that the pie will not be divided equally, reflecting both a recognition of what makes people work hard and the need to reward enterprise. In the modern age, that's been generally tempered by a political consensus that some of that wealth needs to finance varying versions of the welfare state. In Western Europe, this roughly works out to the richest guy at the table getting 2 slices of pie, the next 2 sharing 3, and the bottom 5 splitting up the 3 slices that are left. (Of course, when a recession hits, everybody's slice gets smaller. Debt piles up in a desperate attempt to maintain the size of pie by borrowing dough from growing economies like China's.)
In the United States, the richest person at the pizza party used to have 3 slices, and the middle class, representing the next 4 down, used to have 4 slices (leaving the poorest 3 to divvy up 1.) Not very fair, but fairly tolerable, as long as the pie kept growing. Then came the Bush tax cuts, transferring trillions to the rich, while the size of the pie stagnated. Now that one guy has 4 slices to himself, leaving the rest of us 7 to divvy the other 4 pieces as best we can. Those in the top half manage to hang on (even 15% unemployment is still 85% employment), but those in the bottom half fight over less and less pie. It's class warfare all right: the rich are waging war on everybody else.
Since corporate America is more interested in hoarding than rehiring, the New Poor are going to be around for awhile. Everyone has been so focused on the froth of the Tea Party that no one seems to be considering the long term political impact of this giant pool of recently disenfranchised Americans. They may have temporarily fallen for all the misdirection about the source of their woes, but over time, the most likely targets of their ire are going to be the most visible beneficiaries of their own lost wealth.
The economy will continue to suck until the fat man at the pizza party gives some of his slices back. And it's in his best interest to do so. Many of the New Poor have lost not only jobs, but their homes and their dreams for the future. They don't have much more to lose. The resulting blowback is going to be a bitch, particularly if the Teapublicans gain power and can no longer blame Obama for everything.
A second American revolution might well be brewing. But watch it come from the opposite direction everyone is expecting.
Follow Mark Olmsted on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MarquisMarq
The study didn't address the causes of economic inequities and the participants actually showed a high level of consensus as to what the ideal wealth distribution should be. The problem was that they believe that the wealth distribution is far more equitable than it is; therefore they don't perceive any sense of urgency in changing the status quo. They also tended to have a distorted belief in the upward mobility potential in American society. The authors theorize that this perhaps explains why even people who are not in the upper quintiles when it comes to wealth tend to support the current system--(1) they don't recognize the severe wealth inequities, and (2) they believe that they too can climb the ladder to wealth.
It hasn't been officially released yet but it's already available online. It makes for interesting reading and pairs well with your analysis. http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf
Just read this very interesting Truth Out on the situation in France. http://www.truth-out.org/why-france-matters-here-too64536 The French example gives hope to a U.S. scenario that a backlash from the left could follow the one from the right--which, lets admit it, has far less to do with the tax burden of the tea partiers (less under Obama) then with the color of the President's skin and what that represents to them.
Of course, the French blowback may also have something to do with their much higher level of basic civic and political literacy , and their absence of anything resembling Fox news.
What continues to astonish me is how the hopefulness and enterprise of the American spirit is being used against the vanishing middle and lower classes. Those groups by far outnumber the true class elites, but because of that 'can do' spirit, we allow political leaders to make laws that favor the rich and powerful going against our own best interests. That is why something like health care is allowed to flounder and tax cuts for those at the top make sense, even though the infrarstructure is crumbling and the very programs that support the people, are being cut and gutted.
Whew!
Income inequality may well be leading to a Third World America, but these new poor have a history of upwardly mobile expectations. I think we can safely wonder if some counter movement as potent as the Tea Party is in the offing. (The Russian Revolution was only inevitable in retrospect: at the time is took most by surprise.)