Umair,

I think America had a social contract at some point.

To be overly simplistic about it, the response to the Great Depression was the safety nets that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson put in place and paid for by taxes on the wealthy. America had a 70% tax on some forms of income by the wealthy. And it was understood that these high taxes would be used in part to maintain those safety nets. Winners wouldn’t win too big but losers wouldn’t lose too much either. This social contract was largely between America’s white rich and white poor and middle class (when the middle class still existed) and this eventually led to other Americans to agitate for their inclusion, culminating in the civil rights movements of the 1960s. But the idea of minorities being part of the social contract somehow agitated the wealthy white, who didn’t mind too much having to pay higher taxes if it helped their kind, but would be damned if their hard earned wealth would be used to subsidise minorities who didn’t share the same color, culture or even languages them.

As a result The social contract was systematically dismantled by the Republican Party beginning in the 1980s. Aside from the policies that saw tax cuts for the rich and entitlement cuts for the poor was an undermining of the social contract. As the rich were increasingly portrayed as dynamic hard working innovators who should be rewarded more, the poor were being painted as welfare cheats, deadbeat dads, undeserving of rich people’s charity.

The systemic adoption of policies meant to keep the rich rich were being combined with an unrelenting campaign to undermine the moral and cultural basis for the old social contract.