Some Americans are quite intelligent and despite decades of psyops and other issues still retain an understanding of what's real, and what the consequences of decisions will mean in economic terms.
In a classroom, its easy to poke fun at a nationalized economy, and draw the conclusion that hard work won't ever lead to economic gains. This understanding isn't applied to the real world though such as where an economy is silently nationalized through opaque entities that have politically captured the entire process.
There is quite a bit of literature by Mises and other classical economists who don't submit to the errors of Keynes; about what happens in fiat economies and how and why they fail. This subject matter goes into financial Armageddon talk quite rapidly with well defined impossible to solve problems.
Instead of choosing to avoid such chaotically mired problems at the outset, a generation of dilettantes who were given every possible benefit and education to choose a good future for all instead chose to sacrifice their children's future through expanding their power, debasing the systems, and silently transitioning and pivoting to fiat money-printing in the 1970s which within 50 years has devolved to the point just prior to collapse with the now grown children enslaved to economics to foot the bill of their unending thirst for funding.
Wealth inequality is high because those that situate themselves closer to the source of money in fiat currency systems have asymmetric advantage over those that are further away as inflation and its debasement of the currency makes its way through the system. While its all very cleverly disguised, the objective underlying systems have only one place to go which is the same as every other civilization that collapses from runaway money-printing.
That unfortunately is the sad truth, and the only sustainable future is to not store value or transact in such currencies. A dependency on such failure prone systems for food is a dependency that will result in extinction. The true factors that determine national/group wealth are based in productive distribution of labor with markets transacted in a stable store of value.
Unfortunately, markets today no longer have many of the required systems properties to be considered real markets. Price discovery (measure), and a stable store of value are needed to constrain n-body systems to stable orbits.