It seems unlikely that if we genuinely tried to re-engineer the system to make it better that it would turn out worse. The fact is that our problems - the ones leading to revolution - are pretty straightforward and have been solved many times in other countries, including this one.
The most obvious one is public healthcare. This is probably the number one problem facing most Americans - everyone encounters problems with health care, and the terror of medical debt keeps all of us chained to our jobs. But this is a solved problem - health care is twice as large as a share of the economy in the US, with worse outcomes, as it in other OECD countries, which all - ALL - have functioning public healthcare systems.
And this isn't fucking rocket science - there are a number of perfectly fine functioning schemes available. All you have to do is be willing to face down the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. The only problem is there are not many politicians in America willing to do that.
That, by itself, would probably take care of a good deal of income inequality - pharma, e.g., is basically a tax of 1.5% of GDP, taking money from average people and putting it into the pockets of the very wealthy.
If we want to go further the next no-brainer is simple: break up the TBTF banks. We should have done it in 2008. Instead we got Obama shielding the banks while they foreclosed on millions of Americans, not to mention perpetrating several other notable frauds. This is basically "income inequality, the industry" - it is full of vampiric individuals who keep trying to find new criminal schemes for enriching themselves. Putting a stake in it is not that complicated - break up the big players and a financial transaction tax would do it. But again, finding politicians willing to slay those demons is tough.
Of course as a committed anti-capitalist, I don't want to stop there. But the fact is that capitalism can do just fine, as far as staving off revolution goes. The US did it for decades, and only part of that was because of the Palmer raids and COINTELPRO and other such things. The vast majority of it was because of decent pensions, job security, and productivity growth. It just requires a modest commitment to make sure that the vast amounts of wealth we are constantly generating are distributed somewhat more evenly.