A society with a more or less permanent underclass of some size can never become a communitarian society. The resources of the society devoted to maintaining the underclass become a more or less fixed sum, and anyone outside of that underclass who requires the assistance of the society is drawing away from that on a zero-sum basis, imperiling the political compromise. Such a claim is resisted both by the defenders of the underclass and those straining to acquire as much wealth as possible for themselves. It is an unscheduled poverty.
So perhaps one danger of less-prosperous years is that a prosperous society will resist an expansion of the social role, as it will be seen as ceding more resources to the existing permanent underclass, which has only won its proportion by a hard political fight, and the resulting identity and cohesiveness; the latter will then operate to exclude these other claims.