[WS:] Indeed. I've been trying to grasp what that something else is, and to date, the most plausible conjecture comes from the world of literary fiction. Specifically, the novel by Milan Kundera, _The joke_ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joke_(novel)) which offers interesting insights into the collective psyche of Czech intellectuals during the communist period. It stipulates that intellectuals embraced communism en masse in 1947 because it offered them an illusion of getting what they did not have before - power.
I think that the same principle may be at work since the 1980s - the market/"new economy" system created an illusion of college graduates getting direct access to power - either through their "innovations" (the myth of IT work) or through corporate ladder (e.g. meteoric careers of business management graduates.)
In the end, both illusions turned out to be joke on the naive 'egg-heads" (as Kundera's novel title suggests) - but they never really understood what hit them. Kundera's protagonist is obsessed with a revenge against his "persecutor" (an opportunist who accused him of 'revisionism' which led to his expulsion from university), and in the pursuit of that revenge he turns into a scoundrel hitting a "substitute" target, the ex-wife of the "persecutor" who had been dumped for a newer model. The US college graduates hit by the market that promised them power and freedom, turn into teabaggers attacking a substitute target - the government.
Wojtek