onadesertedisland said:
I am so sick of lower income classes supporting right wing politics. I don't understand why the poor are not pouring support into this movement. I hope that this movement gels into a cohesive voice speaking louder than the tea party lunatics, while moving the country away from complete oligarchy.
A friend of mine had a co-worker last year who was an immigrant from India. This fellow was struggling and poor, despite his legal (documented) status, and had been here five years and not gotten any appreciable foothold in upward mobility. He was suffering directly from the policies of a corporatist/oligarch society.
In spite of his, he had become a rabid watcher of "FOXNEWS!" and a rabid neocon Republican supporter. He was a mini-neocon himself, and my friend got into a lot of arguments with this guy.
As near my friend could tell, this guy sucked up to the neocons and wall street because they validated his beliefs about what made people worthwhile, who deserved to rule society and why, etc. The very people who would keep him under a glass ceiling due to his race, if nothing else, given half the chance, were his personal heroes because of what they represented.
Now, I've seen that same attitude among naturally born Americans who are white, poor, and suffering directly from the problems with America's economic and societal structure - it's even more powerful for them because those flapping joweled dour white men in charge are "their people".
A tremendous number of people have been raised and conditioned all their life to believe in what George Carlin would rather sarcastically refer to as the "American Dream". They don't have sufficient knowledge of how things really work, and/or the critical thinking skills, to consider how many of the rich white men got rich. In their mind, their instinctive grasp of the situation is that every one of those bankers and hedge fund managers is a genius who rolled his sleeves up, took a hammer to a pile of lumber, and personally built this business empire by himself and is justly rewarded by the founding fathers and God. Even if they think some of them are rich assholes, they can't extract their frame of reference from vaguely seeing all of them as a Henry Ford. The narrative conditioning of the American Way has been highly successful.
Many of the poor in America see the rich as rich bastards, but accept blindly that it's their lot. The "higher classes" are there because that's just the way it's supposed to be. This is actually a pretty typical narrative among underclasses that can develop. In a sense, it's a survival skill; psychic armor against knowing that you're probably going to be doomed to toil under harsh conditions unless you get extremely lucky.
I've had conversations with white folk in the lower classes like that. They see the rich as alien beings, like royalty, existing in another dimension. They may not even like them, but they react with a practically religious offense to certain kinds of criticism of the rich.
The oligarchs have taken full advantage of this social conditioning and the "American Dream". The question is how quickly various demographics can wake up and experience an epiphany about what's really going on.
