Historically, the American people were pretty poor.
Before the industrial revolution, they were farmers. Then, they were poor factory workers in the gilded age. Then we had the Great Depression.
The idea i’m referring to is that they had more empathy for people in the same situation. And this made them more interested in ideas about common cause with humanity.
If they started to do better, the idea of giving a bit to help others wasn’t anathema, it was moral.
The rich never had that empathy. In the eras I mentioned above, they were happy slave owners, and then robber barons, and then Wall Street fat cats or economic royals.
There’s an old saying that behind every great fortune is a great crime. But with the wealth gap between post-WWII America and the still-impoverished third world, that empathy and common cause is reduced.
The American people are now thinking more like the rich of earlier periods — don’t take their money to help others.
They don’t feel that common cause with the rest of the world, that obligation to help others so much. Old sayings about it become empty platitudes — while they are actually rather happy to benefit from the cheap labor abroad much as the slave owners of old happily benefit from the fruits of that labor.
I think this might help explain why politics of economic justice are not as popular as they should be.