What do vague generalizations like these mean? What do you mean by "Americans"? American workers? American capitalists? Actually, Americans have long romanticized failure as well as success. Westerns, to cite just one example, have long celebrated the loser/drifter and denigrated the middle- class townie. Hard-boiled detective fiction, I understand, does the same. Besides, this loser/winner dichotomy is strictly bourgeois. If socialism is about anything, it is about busting up the bourgeois concept of "success" and redefining it in the interest of the people as a whole.
Dan Lazare Ingrid writes: << It's just that many (and if not most, then the most visible) sex
workers
do exist on the margins, and Americans have a culturally ingrained revulsion
towards perceived failure or loser-dom. Americans love a winner and
will shun perceived losers almost out of a fear that failure is itself
contagious. And because economic marginality causes cognitive dissonance
for Americans who like to believe that in this country anyone who works hard
can achieve success, they are quick to blame the poor for their own misery.
Thus "street walkers," like welfare mothers, are viewed with public scorn.
Which is why it's so damn impossible to develop any serious left in this
country. >>