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US vs THEM
That is how it was put by Romney and his group in the last election, as Richard Wolff reminds us in his presentations. Such as this one. An economic Us vs Them but not entirely. This country is and has been unique in that it is one of the few countries that is not made up of a majority of people from the same racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds. So there has been at least an undercurrent of racial/ethnic/religious animosity from the get go.
Add to that the economic and social differences, it’s actually pretty amazing we have not been at each others throats all along. There was great debate as to whether voting should be limited to only those who owned land or were bankers and merchants and yeoman farmers and on and on.
For a while Us was was limited to white anglo saxon men. And then divided up to men either those with money and prestige or those without IE workers and farmers etc. Depending on which group one belonged to. But it did not include and minorities or homosexuals. It included women but only as second class members with – for a while – no voting rights.
Racial bigotry wasn’t limited to blacks. There was Native Americans, Italians, Irish, Jews, Japanese, Chinese and even Germans. Some of it outrageous and some of subtle. Stereotypes and caricatures galore.
Social too. The Hillbilly and Farmers and Southerners and rednecks and city slickers etc. In movies and comic books and on TV and radio…….
And all was fine as long as They kept their place and kept quiet. The war or animosity between the business owners and the workers is nearly as long and in a way rather ironic and most of those who became business owners originally here, came from the working classes over there. Both groups convinced that They are the ones who do the work and They are the ones who make the country great and They are the ones who deserve respect. And that the Others should be grateful and are lazy and uncouth etc.
After WWII and the availability of higher education came another group of educated professionals that did not exist in such great numbers who also spit but this time along more ideological lines of US vs Them. Neither one fully or actually identifying with either of the previous groups. Since they were not part of the rich elites or the working classes. A new bourgeoisie as it were or elites wannabee. Wishing they were rich and quite often trying to live like such.
But then another group emerged. One I first had contact with in the late 1970s. Baby-boomers who rejected the college educated crowd and intellectuals. Who felt that they had been somehow betrayed by them. Angry, disenchanted people who wanted to relate to the proletarians or working stiffs but were quite often well educated. Distrustful of the educated liberals who they thought had betrayed their ideals but not really from the working classes either. An Us vs Them that is not nearly as well defined.
So maybe when Richard Wolff and others ask how come We and not rising up against Them in outrage, it’s because We are not all that sure who We are. Not nearly as clear now as it was in the past.
18 Comments
All of these divisions have one thing in common: they divide the members of the non-ruling classes from each other and therefore benefit the ruling class of the time. Every single one.
It’s quite deliberate and, unfortunately, quite effective.
Yep…it surely is.
Back in the 1930s or so it was very clear who was a member of the ruling and who was not. An I’ll wage there were damn few – if any – who were deluded enough to think they were members or could ever be members of the ruing class.
Now there are a good number of people who think they are or could be members of the ruling class.
I would say the entertainment value of these people finding out it just ain’t so could be rather high.
I think someone brought up and interesting point. That some people will self identify with one group because one or more policies and.or belief of the other is unacceptable to them.
Even though their personal beliefs do not really go with the group the self identify with. Cognitive dissidence wise.
This is what happened in the south to some extent I think.
This is why so many poor folks keep spending what little money they have on playing the lottery. They sacrifice the real benefit of a cup of soup today, for the very slim chance of being rich tomorrow. They know the system probably won’t let them become wealthy any other way.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bdm.588/abstract
Oh absolutely. Hoping not just for the “BIG ONE™“ but even just a couple a hundred bucks. For the rent or doctor bill or utility etc.
> how come We are not rising up against Them in outrage,
> it’s because We are not all that sure who We are
Maybe it’s because “we” actually want to be rich, and if presented with the opportunity would gladly take it. I.e., we are morally corrupt at the core, having been socialized in the U.S.
Say more about this. The divisions in the South are geographical and class divisions as well as the huge division by race. And for a long time, it was ownership of real estate that determined whether white males could vote. Wealth determined who was influential in a rural neighborhood. Prior to the 1980s, there was a strong working-class identity among textile workers that often had a progressive agenda on some things. Religious domination of politics is a post-Civil War phenomenon that waxes and wanes depending on how hard times are. There is still in smaller, less mobile communities a culture of social control that puts some views off limit. It is enforced with pointed humor or coarse talk to guage the reaction of the listener.
The cities in the South are filled with transplants from other parts of the South and from elsewhere. There is a strong compulsion on those who move in to “go native” and echo the views of native Southerners. There is also the compulsion of non-Southerners to indulge whatever biases they bring from elsewhere. Some of the most outspoken neo-Confederates in urban areas are from New York, Ohio, or Michigan.
Yes, I do believe that a lot of We do not know who We are.
To you Tarheel and UCT1. Both good points. And more than a few became what They Believed as rich so abandoned their old beliefs.
PS: My cousin was a dean at UNC for a number years. Nice campus.
Two things I’ve noticed are (1) folks who have settled and (2) folks so gone cynically they might as well have settled. By settled, I mean folks who go through the motions of the “American Dream”–work hard, play by the rules, don’t worry about anything wider than their family and their immediate domestic environment (not assuming even a yard to mow). Some do it thinking that that is all there is to living. Others do it without fighting for larger issues because the kleptocracy rules. The effects on society are pretty much the same. The South tends to have more of the type 1 kind of people.
PS: Campuses tend to be the way that lots of folks want to live. There are people retired to Chapel Hill because their years on campus were the high points of their lives. Lots of college towns are like that. What does that say about our standard formulation of the American Dream?
Why we are not rising up. See my comments @9.
Here’s a poem that goes with this diary:
Very good.
You have to be asleep to believe it ?
Reflexively missed it. There are folks whose American Dream looks a lot like the collective activities, social life, and intellectual challenges of their college days in humanized environments with trees, open spaces, and ample libraries in a non-automobilized environment.
There was a time during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which self-organizing workers created schools to improve their literacy and also to have some intellectual challenges. A lot of the current common ideology about education being a ticket to a job came out of the twisting of what those workingmen’s schools were about. Labor at that time was not anti-intellectual.
You said standard as in generic. What you are describing is hardly what I would call generic but borders on the ideal.
Interestingly enough a lot of European metro centers are now like as you describe.
I think that a lot of the anti-intellectual feelings that labor acquired came our of the anti-war movement. Where it was perceived as being arrogant and self-righteous.
My reading of the antagonism of labor to the anti-war movement was that a lot of labor were WWII vets and could not (1) comprehend the criticism of the Vietnam War and (2) had been through the anti-socialist purges within the labor movement in the 1950s and were angry at folks seeming to support a communist enemy.
Also true.
My mother was a WWII vet but against the Vietnam war the entire time. Considered herself to be a “Roosevelt Democrat” but became very anti-capitalist during her last years.