(FORTUNE Magazine) – PICTURE A DOZEN crystal champagne glasses, arranged atop one another in a precarious pyramid. A cascade of bubbly, poured by an unseen hand, fills them to the rim. Accompanied by lounge music and the sound of glasses clinking, a voice intones: ''For ten years in America, the rich have been living it up. Receiving billions in tax breaks. All voted for by Tom Tauke. These Reagan- Tauke tax breaks have added billions of dollars to the federal debt since 1982. Tom Harkin voted against tax breaks for the rich and has been named one of the Senate's most frugal members.'' Then, as the champagne glasses tumble and smash, spilling wine everywhere, comes the pitch: A vote for Tom Harkin -- a Democrat, ''fighting for us'' -- is a vote for the Common Man and against the excesses of the Eighties, personified by Republican Congressman Tauke. If you live in Iowa, you've probably seen (and seen and seen) this TV commercial. You probably also voted for Harkin in the recent election. He won easily. As anyone knows who wasn't snoozing through November, Harkin's bash-the- wealthy campaign was no isolated instance of Plains populism. Rudy Boschwitz, the only Senate incumbent to get the boot, was defeated by Paul Wellstone, a college professor who toured Minnesota in a battered old school bus while millionaire Boschwitz zipped about in a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron. A line from Wellstone's stump speech that never failed to draw cheers and applause: ''Rudy Boschwitz lecturing me on fiscal responsibility is like Leona Helmsley lecturing Mother Teresa on charity.'' Even Vermonters, who once gave no quarter in their Republicanism, picked as their lone Congressman Bernard Sanders, a socialist who railed against ''the millionaires and multinational corporations.'' Coming as they did on the heels of a tax law that will require the well-to- do to shell out more than before, the 1990 elections offer an intriguing glimpse at Americans' new, harsher attitudes toward wealth and those who have it. Says David Lillehaug, a Minneapolis attorney who helped plan the winning Wellstone campaign: ''We kept seeing a tremendous reaction against the opulence and waste of the Eighties, in favor of positive social responsibility for the Nineties.'' The trend, though just beginning, is reminiscent of the dramatic shift from the get-rich-quick, devil-may-care 1920s to the grim anticapitalism of the 1930s. THIS TIME AROUND, of course, the U.S. is not in the grip of a Great Depression. Nonetheless, middle-class families nervous about their own economic prospects seem less hopeful of amassing riches, and less admiring of the affluent, than during the glittering Reagan era. ''The social climate now may be conducive to a revolt against the rich,'' says David Meer, a senior vice president of DYG Inc., a consumer-research and consulting firm. ''In the Eighties everybody still felt they had a chance to get rich themselves. Now, with the economy in the state it's in, the stock market in the doldrums, land values falling, white-collar layoffs, and so on, people are starting to recognize that the train has pulled out of the station -- and they weren't on it.'' Partly as a result, Meer believes the Nineties will see a marked change in the way society defines success, with achievements such as a happy family life and service to one's community replacing money as the measure of one's worth. Says he: ''We see it as the search for happiness in a post-affluent society.'' Ambivalence toward wealth shows up vividly in a poll of 1,002 Americans conducted for FORTUNE in November by Clark Martire & Bartolomeo Inc., an opinion research firm in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Although definitions of just how much money it takes to be rich vary wildly (see following story), the respondents on average put the figure at $1.3 million in total household assets. People living in the Northeast and those earning $50,000 a year or more gave higher numbers. Strikingly, despite the fact that many Americans' boats rose significantly in the Eighties, only 1% of the population feel they are rich, while 54% describe themselves as middle class. In some respects the American dream of working hard and getting ahead remains unchanged: 88% of the people surveyed, nearly nine out of ten, believe it is still possible to start out penniless and become wealthy. About 60% say that, given their druthers, they would like to be rich. Men are more likely than women to wish they were well-to-do, and people in the Northeast and West profess more enthusiasm for the prospect than do Midwesterners or Southerners, possibly in part because of regional disparities in the cost of living. So far, no big surprises, you say? True, but consider this: About 55% of the respondents who had an opinion on the subject -- and 92% of them did -- believe that ''millionaires have gotten where they are by exploiting others.'' Three out of four (74%) say that millionaires do not pay their fair share of taxes. Almost three-quarters claim to have chosen candidates in the recent elections in part because they promised to spread the tax burden more fairly -- that is, to leave the middle class alone and keep kneading the upper crust. Only one in three Americans admits to admiring the rich. And in the years since the question was posed in a 1979 poll, the number of people who think society would be better off without any millionaires at all has risen by 11 percentage points, from one in four Americans to about one in three. This bunch is still a minority, to be sure, but it's half again as big as it was a decade ago. WAIT A MINUTE, you may be thinking. If most Americans would like to be rich, yet some of them also believe society would be better off without rich people, how to account for the contradiction? Perhaps by pointing to the widespread assumption that if one were to become rich oneself, one would be a kinder, gentler sort of rich person than the current crop appear to be. Americans, with a feisty belief in their own singularity, almost always -- 85% of the time -- say that money is the main symbol of success in the U.S. But only 20% call it the chief hallmark of success in their own lives. Most people insist that what they value most is enjoyable work (86%), happy children (84%), a good marriage (69%), and contributing to society (66%). Nicer-than-thou tendencies aside, much middle-class resentment of those who are now rich comes, as any barely sentient politician can tell you, from that pesky tax-fairness issue. Among the 74% of those polled who believe the wealthy aren't pulling their weight, a few go so far as to say that the inequity of taxation is a major obstacle to upward mobility for the masses. One of them is Yvette McKooks, 56, who lives in Bremerton, Washington. She has two sons, 27 and 29, each of whom tried to start his own business. Both foundered, and their mother thinks it was partly because they were mercilessly overtaxed. ''Many of the rich seem to get out of paying their fair share of taxes because they know all the loopholes,'' says McKooks. ''But for people like us, high taxes are a major barrier to success.'' Because Social Security taxes and state taxes too increased substantially during the 1980s for most middle-income families, the top income tax rate ''just isn't really 28% anymore,'' says McKooks. At the same time, in the name of deficit reduction, some traditional loopholes for the middle class, notably deductions for interest on consumer debt, disappeared. EVEN IF CONGRESS could devise a magical tax formula that would please everybody, uncertainty about the future of the economy would still cast a pall over people's ability, or willingness, to identify with those better-heeled than themselves. The Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan has kept tabs on Americans' financial confidence going all the way back to 1946. This July, 37% of the population expected to be better off in a year's time, while only 10% said they thought their situations would worsen. Just three months later, the figures showed a startling change. In October those expecting to be better off a year hence dropped to 29%, while the contingent looking to be worse off more than doubled, to 24%. Why? Says Richard Curtin, who runs the survey: ''People feel that taxes and inflation are eating into their spending power.'' Many also wonder whether they will have jobs a year from now. Late in 1989 the Brooks International management consulting firm queried 11,128 employees in six industries nationwide and found that a whopping 76% were not even fairly sure their jobs were safe. Tellingly, the uncertainty was evenly divided between management and labor. Richard Kristensen, a Brooks executive vice president, sees class warfare brewing not along traditional blue-collar vs. white-collar lines, but between middle managers and senior bosses. Noting that top management often carries off multimillion-dollar prizes even when the company is faltering, Kristensen says, ''Money is a lightning rod. It's a potent symbol.'' When jobs are lost because of real or perceived mistakes on the part of the top dogs, the huge disparity in salaries and perks among the survivors adds insult to injury. Boss baiting may be supplanting Japan bashing. ''The problem now is that so many people believe the villain is right upstairs, not across the Pacific Ocean,'' Kristensen says. ''It's a revolt against the Trumps of the world -- the people who seem to have made it on hype rather than substance and performance.'' If Americans no longer revere or seek to emulate the flashy moguls of yesteryear, what are they aiming for instead? Laurel Cutler, worldwide director of marketing planning at the Chicago advertising agency Foote Cone & Belding, has been keeping a weather eye on the nation's values for the past two decades. Says she: ''I've never seen such a sea change before, and certainly never such an abrupt one.'' When she asks people whom they admire, the name that pops up most often is Barbara Bush. ''Nancy Reagan had real pearls and fake values. Barbara Bush has fake pearls and real values,'' Cutler says.

Others note the same trend. Faith Popcorn, chairman of BrainReserve, a consumer research outfit in New York City, calls the phenomenon ''cashing out'': less concern for material things, more emphasis on what money can't buy. She sees it as symptomatic of ''America's fatigue with excess.'' Barbara Feigin, who assays the zeitgeist for Grey Advertising, has also noticed the shift. ''People are much more insecure, and much more thoughtful, than we've seen them in years,'' Feigin says. ''After a spree of self-indulgence in the Eighties, everyone has turned serious. It's because, with families to raise in this atmosphere of job insecurity, a possible recession, war in the Mideast -- well, life looks more serious.'' Time to face the music. Personal bankruptcies last year numbered 616,753, up 12% from 1988 and more than double the figure for 1984. Suddenly leery of overextending themselves, consumers are borrowing less this year. In the second quarter consumer credit was piling up at the rate of $200 billion a year, vs. $285 billion in 1989. Conspicuous consumption is declining. It's hard to sort out whether the new ascendancy of altruism is an outgrowth of post-affluent populism or more a sign that baby-boomers have finally grown up. ''Because this generation is so numerous, they influence the whole culture. When they were adolescent, we all acted like adolescents,'' says Laurel Cutler. ''Now that they've matured, they're learning that maybe they aren't the center of the universe. So we're seeing a tremendous interest in giving something back to society rather than just taking.'' Over 98 million people -- 23% more than in 1987 -- volunteered time and skills to charitable organizations last year, according to a recently published Gallup poll. The upshot of all this for the American dream? It's worth noting that many still look forward to wealth. FORTUNE's survey shows the percentage of those who expect to be rich is highest (52%) among adults in their 20s; nonwhites are slightly more likely to believe they will one day be wealthy than whites are. Pamular Green represents both groups; she's 23 and black. She makes less than $20,000 a year as a secretary in Columbus, Ohio, but expects to be worth more than a million someday. Green has a five-year plan for starting her own catering business and then buying a restaurant. ''I'll start small and build up,'' she says. Recession or no, she believes, ''if you want to succeed badly enough, you will. It all depends on you.'' What's more, the percentage of people who think their children will have a better shot at prosperity than they did themselves is still high, at 74% -- although some, like Rickey Welsh, 33, a machinist in Brentwood, California, believe their offspring will have a tougher struggle to attain the same standard of living. Says Welsh of his 12-year-old son: ''The way things are, he's really going to have to work hard for it.'' THE REVOLT against excess may turn out to be a transitory case of sour grapes, subject to reversal with the next big upswing in the economy. But if Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is right, and the pendulum of history really does move in 30-year swings, the U.S. could be in for an eerie replay of the late Sixties and early Seventies -- a quickening of social conscience, followed by a recession, maybe even accompanied by a distant, escalating war nobody likes much. However it all plays out, for the present even multimillionaires are getting the new populist message: Stash the flash. Manhattan glitterati Henry Kravis and Carolyne Roehm have reportedly taken to hosting hoedowns at their Connecticut hideaway, with many of the once glitzy guests decked out in blue jeans and simple dirndl skirts. If the leveraged-buyout kings and fashion queens of the Eighties are learning how to square dance these days, can a new populism be far behind?