OK, Krugman: How will hypocrisy help us?

Paul Krugman, Jeremiah of galloping income inequality in the United States, today manages a rather half-hearted tribute to the nation's long-term fidelity to its founding ideals. Half-hearted, because seeing those ideals subverted by encroaching oligarchy, he takes rueful solace only in our national hypocrisy:

Of course, our democratic ideal has always been accompanied by enormous hypocrisy, starting with the many founding fathers who espoused the rights of man, then went back to enjoying the fruits of slave labor. Today’s America is a place where everyone claims to support equality of opportunity, yet we are, objectively, the most class-ridden nation in the Western world — the country where children of the wealthy are most likely to inherit their parents’ status. It’s also a place where everyone celebrates the right to vote, yet many politicians work hard to disenfranchise the poor and nonwhite. 

But that very hypocrisy is, in a way, a good sign. The wealthy may defend their privileges, but given the temper of America, they have to pretend that they’re doing no such thing. The block-the-vote people know what they’re doing, but they also know that they mustn’t say it in so many words. In effect, both groups know that the nation will view them as un-American unless they pay at least lip service to democratic ideals — and in that fact lies the hope of redemption. 

So, yes, we are still, in a deep sense, the nation that declared independence and, more important, declared that all men have rights. Let’s all raise our hot dogs in salute.

Left unspoken here is how hypocrisy helps. It's said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue -- bad conscience with a cover. The question is, how productive will our ethical unease prove? Now that our income distribution (and opportunity distribution) has reverted to roughly where it was before the Great Depression and the New Deal, will this retrogression prove, to borrow a bit of econ-speak, 'secular or cyclical'?  That is, will we readjust, as Obama in '08 argued we must, from a 30-year Reaganite right turn turbo-charging pressure on wages powered by automation and globalization? Will we find means to train our youth to create and fill "good-paying jobs of the future"? Or was the relatively weak American version of the welfare state merely a one-time strategic retreat by elites that have more recently tightened a now unshakable proprietary grip on the means to prosperity?