Among the changes... The wages payed workers have stagnated, while the share of income among the richest 10% has skyrocketed. Union membership has declined, and the proportion of blue collar workers who enjoy the kind of middle class incomes that, say, auto and steelworkers enjoyed in the fifties and sixties, has decreased. The costs of higher education have increased far faster than incomes, and the resources available to help the able but needy students to attend college --especially the more elite, private colleges-- have gone down. A whole raft of dangers against which the old economic order collectively protected working families --job security, health insurance, guaranteed retirement benefits-- have now increasingly fallen on the individual famlies, making their ability to hold onto what they have ever more insecure.
I expect someone more knowledgeable than I on these matters, could elaborate this picture at length.
But I think that the overall point is valid: for many millions of Americans today, there is a lot more reason for fear about losing what they've got, and a lot less reason to harbor strong hopes of working their way much higher in the circle of winners closer to the top of the American social hierarchy.
This is no small thing. The ideal of social mobility has been at the core of America's self-definition for generations. The land of opportunity. The Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story. A shift from that to a sense that one is stuck in a losing position is no small shift.
And I'm positing the possibility that this change in the American experience --not for everyone, but for a very sizeable portion of the American people-- is what underlies the apparent shift in the game-show world.
The drama that captures the essence of the American experience is less the crowning of the winner than the fall of the loser. Americans are less apt to identify with the one who comes out on top, more apt to identify with the one who's declared expendable, and is carted off the stage.
Or maybe it's not a matter of IDENTIFICATION, in the Survivor/Apprentice/American Idol model as it is a kind of scapegoat-choosing, schadenfreude-engendering, I'm-glad-it's-not-me separation from the one who gets the ax. Like the zebras grazing while the lion feeds on SOME OTHER poor striped son-of-a-bitch. NOT ME, this time.
In either event, the idea is that in perhaps today's America it is the experience of losing, of failing, of being rejected --more than that of rising to the top, in the winners circle-- that captures the deeper emotional current that people now experience in relation to the social order.
And the game shows are structured to enact that drama of human sacrifice on the altar of unattainable success.
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