Reluctant as I may be to align myself with spodi, I also do not see a proletarian armed struggle on the horizon.
But this has nothing at all to do with an evolved electorate that has learned lessons from history. It is precisely the opposite. Yes, there have lessons learned from history - but not by the voting public. The group that has learned the lessons of history is the economic elite. They are determined not to permit a repeat of the politics of the Great Depression, and the Grand Bargain that created the safety net (aimed at softening the blows of periodic crashes structurally embedded in capitalism).
Their instrument in creating a new reality has been the growth of corporate power, allowing them virtual full control of all the major media of information dissemination. By disciplined application of incremental change, they have completely re-formed and re-framed the US political landscape. In doing so they have fully refuted and disproved the Marxist left's stance on incrementalism. A revolution in slow motion, achieved by money + power + discipline and a substantial cadre of the disaffected. Most tellingly, this cadre consists of the children of the cadre that formed the support for the New Deal - the agrarian poor whites.
At the beginning of the Great Depression, US society was teetering on the edge. The last flowering of agrarian populism was in full bloom, and hostility towards industrial capitalism was at its height. Consider this contemporary Gallup poll:
It was no wonder that many capitalists of the time were running scared. A Marxist revolution in Russia appeared it might succeed, and communism was a force in Europe.
Capitalists are no longer running scared. The totemic image of Wall Street employees tossing McDonald's employment applications down on the OWS demonstrators below says it all. The contempt for the poor in the US is now total - they are no longer the salt of the earth (in Great Depression terms) but the salt in the wounds of capitalism.
The public attitudes of the depression era have been reversed. You could take the results from the above poll, reverse all the numbers, and be pretty spot on. Even under
very great economic pressure, this will be an effective block on any revolutionary undertaking.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. -Antonio Gramsci