[AnimalMuppet]

For at least some people, envy and spite are very strong motivations. If you are making rivers of money, and they are making a little trickle, and they see no path for them to get to where you are, at least some people will decide that the game is rigged, and therefore that the appropriate move is to destroy the game board.

My personal take is that the 1950s were such a great time for blue-collar workers not just because the US was the dominant economic power, but also due to the threat of the ideology of communism. Capitalism faced a competing ideology, and business owners restrained their own greed out of fear that their workers would decide that a communist revolution was the answer.

On this reading, what went wrong for the American worker was the fall of the USSR plus the switch of China to a capitalist version of communism. After that, the owners felt free to get greedy, and to leave their workers with no real hope of things ever getting better for them.