"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves." (source: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck)
Ronald Wright somehow turned this into a quip about Gramscian false consciousness, in the great global game of telephone we're all playing with each others' words.
> “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
There's plenty of circumstantial evidence to back this up. The 2000 election is a good example although I can't find a good quote for this. Gore famously daemonized the "top 1%". An illuminating poll in 2000 revealed that 19% of Americans thought they were the "top 1%" and another 20% thought they would be someday. So 39% of the population thought of themselves as the "top 1%".
Americans also love the slippery slope fallacy. The idea, that you allude to, is that people will defend Jeff Bezos's taxes being raised because the next step is apparently them coming for the working class.
This too is propaganda. B does not necessarily follow from A. But political leaders and plutocrats are happy to use this argument to their own benefit. It's the sort of argument people make when they have no argument.
It's a byproduct of American exceptionalism [2].
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism