Business leaders have often sounded like religious zealots and it could either be to their benefit or their undoing.  The tendency towards the faith in market mechanisms have often found comfort in the rhetoric of religion.  In this country in a lot of ways it makes sense.  Karl Polanyi sort of points out this tendency in his book "The Great Transformation." There's another book by David Noble titled, "Beyond the Promised Land," where he points out that much of the rhetoric in support of capitalism, private ownership, and free markets in pre-capitalist England was religious.  It referred to the "New Israel," mans reclaiming some level of divinity or salvation through market mechanisms.  The examples continue.  The key word really is faith.  Those who are quite religious tend to have the capacity/conditioning for faith and if the rhetoric speaks to them they are easily manipulated into having "faith" in a variety of things.  In my opinion anyways.  

Also slightly less related are these tea party folks.  I've kind of gotten increasingly interested in them the more I read about them.  The New York Times has had a couple of different lengthy articles recently on the origins and tendencies.  They actually represent a pretty interesting development.  They are largely a group which has a couple of overlapping areas but remain independent.  From the "birthers" who evidently believe that Obama isn't a citizen, people who believe in states rights and militias, to people who want to disband medicare/medicaid, etc.  Well this tendency, if the left could organize half as well as they have, is pretty good.  They have massive rallies, and have raised quite a bit of awareness, money, and have gotten a large following.  Their basic complaints are completely in line with leftist, socialist beliefs too.  Aside from the anti-abortion, racist strand which is on its own.  This might be a subject for a different post but it seemed interesting because so many of these folks seem furious at the state of the country, justifiably, and their energies just need direction.  

The post is kind of disjointed and inconsistent so I'll stop.  If anyone responds I'm interested in hearing what anyone else thinks.  

Therefore, it may be the case that the business class collectively (there are some dissenters, like the auto industry) are willing to incur the higher operating costs and great risk of worker revolt in order to prevent market ideology from inadvertently being debunked.

This is exactly right. Hopefully, it will cause a schism of the kind you're suggesting, but many variations are possible. On the one hand, we could have a shift to outright anti-capitalist viewpoints. Second, we could have a shift to a more reformist version of capitalism, like in most other industrialized countries. Another possibility is we could get nothing. Finally, at the worst extreme, people's frustration could be channeled into reactionism.

The future is hard to predict!