I have very, very strong doubts about basing judgments about American social feelings and attitudes of such things as survey results. Surveys don't tell you much about what people actually think and feel about poor people, for example. Surveys tells you much more about what people think they think, and what they think they feel. Even worse, they often just tell you something about what people think they ought to say when someone asks them a survey question.

So where you see a gap between values and policy preferences, I am much more inclined to see a gap between declared values and actual values. My estimations are based on a number of years teaching American undergraduate students, and noting their responses and attitudes as expressed in discussions about social and political questions.

My sense is that Americans are not very egalitarian at all. They do have a genuine commitment to the idea of equality of political status and rights under the law for all citizens. But very few of them have strong commitments to equality of social and economic standing. They think the poor are shiftless and lazy, and that their poverty is generally a mark of ineradicable moral or biological deficiency. And even if they don't say these things when they go to church, they feel them in their bones. Every American has been indoctrinated from birth to believe that personal economic outcomes are almost always a measure of personal merit, and that people generally get what they deserve. That is the American religion.

Not only do most Americans not resent economic inequality or regard it as a social problem. They actively worship millionaires and billionaires. Contempt for those who are worse off is a much stronger motivator in American life than resentment directed toward those who are better off. When an American looks at a country-sized individual like Bill Gates, he thinks, "The reason he is on top, and I am where I am, is because Gates is a high-performing and socially valuable go-getter, and I am just a dumb and/or lazy schmuck. He's a winner and I'm a loser. Three cheers for Gates and boo for me."

This is not to say that Americans are not driven by class resentment. But the classes they care about are cultural classes. They are often much more resentful of the latte-loving college grad who doesn't make much more than they do than they are of the self-made robber-barons who are paying their underlings peanuts so he can pay themselves a fortune, and buy themselves mountains of luxurious junk that nobody needs. Whereas an ordinary French or Russian worker might have been disposed to march down to Wall Street with a gang of like-minded intellectuals from the coffee shop, armed with a guillotine, an American is more likely to go round up a gang of wealthy investment bankers to help him throw hot foamed milk in the faces of the smarty-pantses in the coffee shop.

Even when Americans actually do bring themselves to wish that things were different, and that they might have more and the wealthy might have less, they have been trained to believe that only evil, godless socialists and communists would dream of actually implementing policies and making laws to create the society that they might wish they lived in. They believe interference with market forces is akin to interfering with the fundamental cosmic forces of justice and providence.

Most Americans are sincerely committed to equality of "opportunity", but not equality of outcome. But that amounts to acceptance of a lot of romantic and sentimental views about the nature of opportunity. Unless one adopts a system where children are raised as wards of the state and thus educated in a system of schools that are the same everywhere, it is simply impossible to have genuine equality of opportunity in a society without a commitment to substantive equality of outcomes, becuase the outcomes for one generation become the opportunity baseline for their children.

A lot of Americans believe life is a struggle in which the superior survive and thrive, and rightly so, while the inferior fall by the wayside, and rightly so. They are currently fascinated by a vast assortment of "reality shows" that reinforce precisely this message: Life is a contest in which the stronger, the least scrupulous, the cleverer and the more attractive get jobs, get money, get laid and get attention. Above all, they get to stay on the show and move on, while the human trash is thrown out. It is hard to see anything egalitarian in this outlook.

Such a question... 8^)

I can't help but reference Orwell's maxim from Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Americans are "more equal", in several ways.

As a socialist and student of language, Orwell wrote a lot not only about equality, but about how words very often don't mean what they seem, or even have double meanings. The words "socialism" and "equality" were two of his own examples.

Here's a policy for you that I think, as a socialist, pursues a more truthful meaning of both words. Orwell noted that a dictionary definition of socialism was something like "common ownership of the means of production," while noting that it was an insufficient definition.

Let's make the definition a policy towards the end of more equal wealth distribution through "common ownership." Let's use eminent domain to convert private corporations that operate on the scale of government, to public ownership. I.e., buy out, not bail out. This policy could be applied now to oil companies, health insurance and drug companies, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and the like. Making such corporations publicly owned, even if they continue to operate as they do now, could at the least have the effect of redirecting their profits to public use.

I dare suggest, however, that you won't find many Americans who would support this kind of policy. The Soviets did too well at confusing socialism with its opposite (relative to the question of equality), authoritarianism/totalitarianism. That confusion of language was a the core of "1984."

Capitalism tends as much towards authoritarianism as true socialism ever would, because it doesn't deal with the issue; true socialism, in seeking equality as a matter of policy, would deal with it. But I might suggest that the biggest fear about socialism is that it inexorably leads to authoritarianism, as Hayek suggested in defense of capitalism. Hayek was just wrong, however, about various things; among them is that the economic calculation problem has been solved, by the likes of Wal-Mart, and with the help of modern technology. So, we have ownership of the means of production on the scale of state - by global corporations - it's just not public or common ownership; it's ownership by a very inequally wealthy few.