2016 Postmortem

when a lot of Americans think like this:

We can't have a handful of individuals having the combined wealth of millions of Americans and expect people not to be swayed by "it's that other group of poor people's fault".

The fact that people are swayed by "it's that other group of poor people's fault" is WHY we can't restructure society. A huge part of Steinbeck's observation of the American (white) poor seeing themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" is that the psychological wage of racism allow themselves to see themselves as superior to "those people" instead of seeing themselves as objectively in the same class. Therefore they don't need "handouts" or "assistance" because they're "hard working" unlike "those people"