There are a number of good reasons that explain why the emergence of what Kevin Phillips in his book American Theocracy described as the "new indentured servitude" and the growth of plutocracy in America were largely met with silence or grudging acquiescence in contemporary American culture before the economic collapse of 2008. The first, and perhaps the most tenacious, is the myth of the self-made man. Most Americans still cling to this fantasy which is a resilient exemplar of the powerful influence that the liberal ideology of individualism continues to exert in the consciousness of Americans to the present.
In The European Dream, Jeremy Rifkin describes a Newsweek poll of 750 American adults conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates on June 24 and 25, 1999. Fifty-five percent of all of the respondents under age thirty who were asked whether they believed that they would become rich, answered yes. When asked, as a follow-up question, however, how they would get rich, 71 percent of the same respondents, all of whom were employed, did not believe that there was a chance that they would become rich from their current employment. Seventy-six percent of them believed that Americans were "not willing to work as hard at their jobs to get ahead as they were in the past."
Since the advent of the Protestant Reformation, as R.H. Tawney and Max Weber have chronicled, there has existed a pronounced link between the dour predestination of Calvinism and a work ethic which has emphasized material success: The accumulation of wealth was incontrovertible evidence that Providence had blessed the successful and marked each as one of those as chosen for redemption. In the United States, an entire cottage industry of books from Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale and his successors have extolled the power of "positive-thinking" as the key to personal advancement and success.
As opportunities for financial success in the workplace diminished for most Americans throughout the later part of the twentieth century, rampant speculation, get-rich schemes, real-estate "flipping," day-trading, the purchase of lottery tickets, and gambling became the substitute vehicles for this pursuit of success. They continued to fuel the fantasies in which ordinary citizens invested their dreams and hard-earned money.
The increasingly desperate behavior of American employees and their families who were being "hollowed-out" by our economy's "race-to-the-bottom" presaged the emergence of a meaner, less-caring America. The problem was that few were paying attention then and that fewer still seem to have noticed since.
