It seems to me that most Americans believe we don't need wealth distribution because they don't understand the huge divergence in wealth distribution. An economist and a psychologist did a study together on income distribution and how we percieve the division of wealth. Most Americans believed we lived with the income distribution of Sweden and considered the current US distribution of wealth to be the worst case scenario (they weren't told which was which before answering.) I think that the more people realized that we live in a plutocratic-peasant society where you're either super rich or poor the less they'll resist taxing the rich because as we can see, when the rich have their money they could care less about whether the rest of us have enough to survive.
http://www.slate.com/id/2268872/
