Steinbeck’s line has become famous: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” But Steinbeck actually said something different: that every American he had met was “a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” The famous line substituting “millionaire” is a 2005 paraphrase of a passage from Steinbeck’s America & Americans, published in 1966. Though the point of both versions is that the US lacks a self-identified proletariat, the switch from “capitalist” to “millionaire” marks an important step in the development of what media analysts Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi call “Lotteryism.”

Lotteryism is ubiquitous in American media. It’s an ideology in which individuals and groups compete for extraordinary rewards, rather than working together for mutual benefit. Goaded by breathless news articles, cities vie for a manufacturing plant or a corporate headquarters or a sports franchise. Television schedules bulge with winner-take-all game shows and talent competitions, while news anchors tell endless stories of individual success against long odds. Solidarity and cooperation have no part in Lotteryism; over and over, reality show contestants recite the mantra of atomism, “I didn’t come here to make friends.”

Lotteryism serves the elites that benefit when people who could organize to challenge them instead compete with one another. But the ideology can be a tough sell because human beings naturally possess both competitive and cooperative impulses. People selling Lotteryism have to ensure that individual self-interest will prevail, which is a lot easier when success doesn’t seem too far out of reach for too many people. In 1966, many “temporarily embarrassed capitalists” could believe they had a decent chance of realizing the American Dream because the economy was booming, and workers shared in that boom. They may have been mistaken, especially if they were women and people of color, but the goal did not appear preposterous. Now, with our cities full of tents and stable jobs giving way to gigs and part-time work, people are watching that goal slip away.

Some of them are, anyway. The others are deeper into Lotteryism than Americans have ever been — and into a version of Lotteryism that would astonish Horatio Alger himself.

Take Bob, the erstwhile handyman in my apartment building. One day last year, as he and I were discussing a new sales tax, I mentioned that our state’s tax structure had once again been dubbed “most regressive in the US.”

“Good,” he replied. “When I get rich, I’ll be able to keep more of my money.”

Bob says “when I get rich” a lot. So do some of my other neighbors. In fact, “when I get rich” is a phrase I hear often on my block, and I sometimes wince at the irony. From the front steps of my apartment building, I can see two rescue missions and the remains of a homeless encampment, now a fenced construction site. According to the 2010 census, the median household income in my neighborhood is only $13,800. The likelihood that any of us will become rich is infinitesimal, yet many talk as though the cosmic check is in the mail.

I have stopped being surprised by what once seemed an isolated delusion. According to a recent study, 40 percent of American men expect to expect to become millionaires, though only 2.5 percent actually will, most with the advantage of a family-funded head start. Women’s expectations lag behind, though the gap narrows among younger women. A different study found that, among men and women under 29, 54 percent believe they will become “rich” during their lifetimes, and most hold onto that belief until they hit 50. The comparison is impossible to make statistically, but I can’t imagine that anywhere near that percentage supports white supremacy or a wall at our southern border. It’s time to take the expectation of wealth seriously as a factor in political behavior.

I’ll admit, I’m fascinated by how this expectation works, how people accommodate themselves to a system that seems so obviously rigged against them. I once asked Bob how he was going to get rich. He didn’t have much in the way of resources, education, training, contacts, or talent that I could see (or hear, as he lived upstairs and liked to sing). He worked so erratically that he’d be fired from his handyman gig by the end of the year.

“You never know how it’s gonna happen,” he answered seriously. “But probably real estate, flipping houses like those guys on TV. Buy low, sell high. Got my apartment for free!” He gave me a thumbs-up.

This is the American Dream, version 2.0. It’s not about bootstraps so much as destiny. It’s not about progress so much as sudden transformation. Version 2.0 is about believing you have a sparkling new life hovering just out of sight, one that will manifest when physical and metaphysical conditions are just right, one that is somehow more authentic than the one you currently live. Hard work may be involved, but it’s not essential. The man who doesn’t realize he can’t sell his caretaker’s apartment will flip houses and earn millions because he can so clearly envision a life of wealth. Saying “when I get rich,” takes the place of planning and accomplishing a series of more modest, more attainable goals such as “buy low, move in.” Worse, it takes the place of organizing.

Where does such an idea come from? One major source is pop philosophy that sees the material world as obedient to human thought. According to self-help books, workshops, and videos, the universe operates via a “law of attraction,” in which your perception of reality manifests your actual reality. It’s not just that your expectations and your interpretation of events influence your experience, which is perfectly sensible. Instead, the law of attraction is mechanistic and absolute. Good health, true love, vast wealth, all these are attracted or repelled by your thoughts, and, if you’re sick, lonely, and poor, it’s because you’re not thinking correctly.

In 2006, an influential film stressed the importance of knowing exactly what you want to manifest, visualizing it as clearly as possible with as much emotional energy as possible. Having earned $66 million in steady DVD sales and now going strong on streaming services, The Secret describes the thought process as “like placing an order from a catalogue.” A vague desire for abundance is not specific enough; the giant cosmic warehouse might send you a huge belly instead of a huge bank account. You need to know exactly what to order.

That can be a dollar amount, and the official Secret web site helpfully supplies a check you can fill out, drawn on the Universal Bank. Printed on the check is a magic lamp and the bank’s motto, “Your Wish Is My Command.” But a large number on a check doesn’t really create the sensory and affective texture you need to fully imagine a new, wealthy life. For that you need to visualize the specifics of that life: the houses, the cars, the clothes, the food, the wine, the vacations, the parties, the art, the toys, the stuff. You need concrete information, lots of it, about the material lives of the very rich.

Television provides it, while also amplifying the desire. When I was a child, TV and film typically laughed at rich folks and their ostentation. That changed with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which ran from 1984 to 1995 and showcased what the host called “heroic excess”: flying palaces, yachts the size of aircraft carriers, underwater bars, and private islands. The new millennium brought imitators, including MTV’s Cribs, which presented, not just the heroic excess, but also the minutiae of wealth, peering into unglamorous utility rooms and even refrigerators to see what the rich ate and drank and flossed with. That the celebrity fridges often looked like store displays did not matter; the point was the illusion of full access to a complete material universe. Where Lifestyles treated viewers like awestruck tourists in moneyland, Cribs got rid of the tour guide and welcomed viewers as friends — or prospective neighbors. Luxury was becoming familiar, in both senses of the word.

Now, half the programming on TV could be subtitled “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Joining them are YouTube channels that dispense with drama and focus solely making the fantasy of wealth familiar. Millionaire Visualizations, for example, sets photos of luxurious homes to music to help viewers develop “Millionaire Mind.” The channel directs its 76,000 subscribers to “become one” with the images by viewing them daily or multiple times a day to “let the powerful law of attraction work in your life and enjoy the abundance of wealth and riches that it provides.” Should their imaginative skills falter, “Law of Attraction coaches” such as The Secret’s Bob Proctor have channels to funnel viewers into paid video courses.

The Christian version of the law of attraction is variously known as “prosperity gospel,” “prosperity theology,” “word of faith,” and “health and wealth gospel.” God, loving and abundant, wants you to be rich; poverty is an unnatural curse, which Jesus vanquished, along with sin, when he died on the cross. Wealth is your due if you have faith, which you demonstrate with good thoughts and holy actions, such as sending donations (called “seeds”) to churches or television ministries. As in The Secret, prosperity gospel emphasizes the need for a clear vision of the wealth you desire. The song “Name It, Claim It” by the Clark Sisters explains why.

You’ve got to meditate on it, You’ve got to focus and concentrate on it

And then wait on it you’ve got to wait on it It’s yours for the asking It’s your blessing Whatever you need

From the Lord.

Sometimes called “positive confession,” this process works —

eventually — because scripture guarantees material abundance to believers. Even before Christ’s sacrifice abolished poverty, God gave Adam and Eve dominion over all the things of this earth, including money. Moreover, God promised the chosen people a real land of milk and honey, and God doesn’t break promises. None of these benefits arrives automatically, however; they all require demonstrations of faith: thinking wealthy and acting wealthy, no matter how tiny your bank balance.

This new Promised Land is not the one that Dr. King saw from the mountaintop in his famous final speech. That Promised Land was a future of brotherhood, dignity, and economic justice to be shared by all. The new Promised Land is personal, just as salvation is now personal in many evangelical communities. Your faith lets you cross the Jordan River, along with whomever you allow to share your milk and honey. You’re not creating a new society, just gaining a better place in the old one. In other words, if the walls of Jericho fall, it’s because you’re remodeling.

In 2006, Time estimated that 17 percent of Christians subscribed to prosperity gospel, while a full two-thirds believed, more generally, that God desires their financial success. In the poorest American communities, particularly of indigenous people and first-generation immigrants, the percentage of prosperity believers is higher. But the gospel of wealth also dominates suburban megachurches, its money-positive message attracting large numbers of lapsed or inactive Christians. George W. Bush welcomed it to the White House by tapping megapastor Kirbyjon Caldwell for two inaugural benedictions, and Trump did him one better by inviting televangelist Paula White to give his inaugural invocation and to continue as his personal pastor and prayer partner. Prosperity gospel benefits Trump because it marks him as a man of immense faith in a country where that matters. He doesn’t need to demonstrate his belief with biblical knowledge or virtuous behavior because his billions of “blessings” proclaim it indisputably.

To help people envision themselves as destined for equivalent “blessings,” the media furnish an unending supply of examples. Though faith shouldn’t require such demonstrations, the truth is that reassurances such as “the universe is abundant” or “God keeps His promises” become more convincing in a culture that furnishes models of ordinary people acquiring large fortunes. Aspirants don’t have to strain so hard for belief in the face of continued poverty if the media regularly profile people who were once just like them but are now completely transformed.

The primary models, of course, are the people who get rich by telling other people they will get rich. Critics who condemn as hypocritical the vast fortunes of preachers such as Joel Osteen ($40 million), Creflo Dollar ($27 million), and Benny Hinn ($42 million), or their New Age counterpart Rhonda Byrne ($60 million), don’t understand that their followers see and admire their Ponzi schemes. Their $65 million private jets, $3.5 million Trump Tower apartments, and $23,000 toilet seats inspire, not disdain, but confidence and optimism. Those teachers were once just like you, struggling to survive and worried about the future until they set out on the very path you now follow!

Lottery winners, as we might expect, are even better models. After a long period of dormancy, legal state lotteries returned in 1964 when New Hampshire tried one in lieu of further taxes. Twenty years later, multi-state lotteries began with New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont pooling their operations. Powerball followed in 1988, Mega-Millions (originally The Big Game) in 1996, and by 2000 jackpots were no longer a paltry million or two but hundreds of millions of dollars. Last year, Powerball posted a $1.6 billion prize. Aggressively promoted, these lotteries rely on Cinderella stories to drive ticket sales. Even though your chance of winning that $1.6 billion Powerball prize was one in 292.2 million, or about the same as landing an actual fairy godmother, the media churn out endless stories about struggling people whose lives are instantly and utterly transformed by a $2 ticket.

Reality television is another important source of models. While reality show prizes and salaries can’t compete with lottery payouts or televangelists’ incomes, some reality stars parlay television exposure into huge fortunes. There are the Kardashians, of course. According to Forbes, Kim banked $51 million last year, and five more family members earned $10 million to $18 million. “Real Housewife” Bethenny Frankel ranks just below them on Forbes’s list of top earners, and three more from the same franchise just miss the list, as do four cast members from Jersey Shore. The most common observation about these celebrities is that they are “famous for being famous.” Somehow, their inability to sing, act, or score touchdowns means that the American obsession with fame has unmoored it from achievement and made it entirely self-reflexive.

I disagree. The seeming lack of talent in these performers doesn’t mean that fame alone matters; it means there’s positive value in not displaying talent. The value lies in providing minimally distorted mirrors for the audience, nearly all of whom can plausibly say, “I could do that.” A show such as Survivor emphasizes the permeable boundary between audience and performers by regularly casting fans, who talk endlessly about “getting up off the couch” as though only a little gumption separates viewers from contestants. In fact, as with the lottery, it’s numbers. Any time Survivor issues a casting call, tens of thousands try out for the handful of spots not reserved for former cast members and semi-professional recruits. Nonetheless, the show works hard to maintain the appearance of continuity between your couch and the winner’s circle.

Social media abound with other models of ordinary people making it big as “influencers.” Almost every day sees new stories of regular folk stumbling upon wild, improbable, success — so many that surely your chance of comparable success is excellent! It doesn’t matter that the number of successes is meaningful only as a fraction of the number of attempts, which is unimaginably vast. So-called “denominator blindness” is widespread, yet, with faith or the law of attraction on your side, the denominator doesn’t matter. The chance of success doesn’t have to be reasonable; it just has to exist.

That said, I think the election of Donald Trump reveals some anxiety about the denominator problem. I haven’t mentioned The Apprentice because so much ink has already been spilled about the importance of that series in Trump’s rise to power. But so far pundits have missed part of that picture: Trump’s role as gatekeeper, not just wealthy himself, but the one who decides who else can have money. On reality television, particularly the competitive shows, most contestants don’t become rich. It’s not always the winners who end up the wealthiest, but you have to stick around for most of your season to have a shot, and Trump was the one who decided who would. Though he fired Omarosa Manigault four times on various versions of The Apprentice (including the White House season), he nonetheless ushered the failed clerical worker into fame and fortune. As a gatekeeper, he represented the mysterious forces people seek to harness when they imagine a new life into being or “name it to claim it.” Perhaps a vote for him was a form of propitiation.

Belief affects behavior. After the 2008 crash, several thoughtful articles analyzed the role of prosperity gospel in encouraging home-buyers to take on more debt than they could possibly handle. Now evidence is mounting that car buyers are doing the same thing, with subprime auto loans behaving very much like subprime mortgages did in 2007. People who believe that their ability to become rich requires them to view themselves as rich right now, who see houses and cars and designer clothes as evidence of their faith or the power of their imaginations, as blessings from God or manifestations of an abundant universe, will make bad financial decisions.

Bad political decisions, too. They will resist the idea that they belong to a class that needs a $15 minimum wage or the right to organize or Medicare for All. They might recognize that those things would be helpful as they cool their heels on the wrong side of the River Jordan, but they will not make common cause with those on the hard end of income inequality. That would be “victim thinking,” to use Joel Osteen’s term, and would kill any chance of reaching the Promised Land.

Researching this essay, I felt unexpected sympathy for mainstream preachers trying to steer Christians away from prosperity gospel, some of whom see themselves as latter-day Martin Luthers railing against the sale of indulgences. Their critiques are trenchant and well-grounded in scripture, but they’re fighting a losing battle. Nothing dims prosperity gospel’s appeal, even when its architects go to prison for fraud, corruption, and rape, as they do fairly regularly. If religion is the opiate of the people, then prosperity gospel is the crack, and even the threat of hell doesn’t dim its allure.

Part of the reason lies in its social rituals. A few months ago, I attended a megachurch service in Florida with my 96-year-old father and his caregiver. I’d been interested in prosperity gospel for a while and saw the high-gloss low-penitence extravaganza I expected. We heard a passionate preacher whose voice broke regularly as he recalled the boundless generosity of God. We sang joyful pop-hymns accompanied by a twelve-piece band and professional backup singers. Through the church’s state-of-the-art PA system, we all sounded fantastic, light-years better than the ragged, organ-driven warbling I remembered from my youth. Before, during, and after the service, people greeted us with smiles, handshakes, and warm hugs. Dressed in jeans and an ironic golf shirt, I looked like what I was, a leftist non-believer from the opposite corner of the country, yet the warmth seemed genuine. I witnessed little speaking in tongues, but there was plenty of dancing and hands-in-the-air swaying and shouts of “Hallelujah!” As others have observed, the experience was closer to a music festival than a traditional church service.

But it was more than just celebration. In fact, the whole experience seemed designed to conflate present joy with the assurance of future blessings. Somehow the euphoria of the service made the promised abundance palpable, as though the joy to come was somehow seeping through into the present. The implication: if I feel this happy in this moment, I must be having a foretaste of blessings to come because nothing in my present circumstances justifies such happiness! Moreover, if I feel this happy in this moment, then surely that is the faith that will ensure those blessings! That’s not just hope; it’s hope on steroids, and I understood in that moment how Lotteryism works at the level of feeling.

The collective exuberance of worship also obscures the atomization prosperity gospel encourages. Kareem Abdul Jabar called prosperity gospel “a war on the poor” because of the way it dangles false hope to squeeze donations from people who can barely afford food. Equally toxic is its insistence that poor believers deny their own material reality — a reality they share with other poor believers — and maintain a cognitive and behavioral fantasy about the self.

Prosperity gospel and the law of attraction serve Lotteryism by dangling an advantage in a rigged game. Though both maintain that some will win with hard work and personal initiative, bootstrapism has yielded ground to miraculism in recent years. A happy discovery, a chance meeting with a benefactor, an eccentricity that captures the public imagination, a run of luck that lets a weak contestant snag the win, and, above all, a big inheritance: such are examples of a higher order that rewards “right thinking” with extraordinary interventions in the material world. And even the most trenchant critique of Lotteryism will meet with resistance from those convinced that denying reality is the only way to change it.