The Snarling Underclass

White Trash Hurricane

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
11/28/05
http://zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/underclass.htm

There’s an element to American society that I’ve always thought of as “the snarling underclass.” They are the ones who aren’t exactly caught in the grinding poverty of the unemployed and the destitute. Instead, theirs is a different kind of poverty, a poverty that includes owning their own homes and a car or two, and having at least some employment, even if it means missing a few meals now and then, and being chronically late on various payments. Maybe the cable or the power gets shut off for a week or two every year during the slow time.

They’re wealthy enough to feel discontent. They aren’t starving, they aren’t living in the streets, but they’re barely getting by. Rather than making their own entertainment, they can listen to country and heavy metal on their MP3 players, and they can watch NASCAR on the cable.

They’re just high enough up that they can sneer at black people, but low enough to be uncomfortably aware that black people can take their jobs. They have just enough to feel they have a stake in capitalist America, but still have trouble paying the bills. And gawd knows what they’ll do if one of the kids get sick or dad has a heart attack.

In a land of plenty, where they supposedly have the advantages, they don’t have enough. And this translates into a simmering resentment. It permeates their lives, even if it exists as a background hum. It emerges as a resentment against intellectuals and the schools that failed them (or in which they failed themselves); against members of less privileged groups that are doing better than they are (“Of course they gave the job to an unqualified woman! They gotta follow those liberal rules!”). Even as they fail to share the benefits of privilege, they feel a searing resentment against the people they see as taking that privilege away, in the form of affirmative action, in laws that specify that other groups – blacks, gays, Hispanics – have exactly the same rights that they have (translated to “special rights”). In a place of prosperity, they are not prospering, and they are continually looking for someone to blame.

They are by no means unique to America. All developed countries have this underclass. It’s just that, nurtured by a wealthy and ruthless well-heeled right wing movement, they are much more visible, and if their lives aren’t exactly improved (that would be counterproductive, since it would defuse the resentment), they are at least coddled and given a megaphone by the far right.

Hitler understood this social phenomenon, and how to utilize it. He enrolled the snarling underclass in the Brownshirts, told them it was OK to act out against Jews, intellectuals, trade unionists, socialists and liberals. Stalin, too, understood this, and gave them empowerment in the ranks of the party, as proctors, “special police” and common snitches. They aren’t alienated from society, and they aren’t barred from climbing within it, but they haven’t done so.

The resentful underclass, not excluded from society like the outcast groups (Jews and socialists in Hitler’s Germany, gays, intellectuals, liberals and blacks in America) want desperately to be empowered and acknowledged, and the false hope that this can be given to them can be made with relatively little effort. For one thing, it’s a promise that doesn’t have to be kept.

Between the gnawing need to belong, and the fact that they resent education and often just aren’t very bright, this makes the snarling underclass easy to manipulate. All a demagogue needs to do is explain to them that they are simply the misunderstood and unappreciated heroes of America, the salt of the earth, and that they will help them push back and ultimately defeat their tormenters – intellectuals, liberals, weak-kneed democratic (note small “d”) politicians – and keep their inferiors in their place, so they can get the type of jobs to which they are entitled. Some day.

Add religion into the mix, and you’ve really got something. People who study propaganda and social manipulation for a living will shake their heads over the fact that millions of Christians were cozened into supporting a party that was flatly hostile to the poor, embraced such non-Christian values as the death penalty and “preemptive war,” and got away with it for as long as they did.

They gave the snarling underclass fancy and well-protected locales on the Internet to congregate and empower one another, shoring up the gossip and “news” that they carefully fed them, and for a while, were cultivating sites such as Free Republic to become brownshirts – organized thugs who could coerce and intimidate for them. Fortunately for America, things for the underclass weren’t quite bad enough for them to want to go out smashing store windows belonging to people the managers didn’t like, and Free Republic, after a series of increasingly embarrassing attempts at mass rallies and upon getting strong opposition to efforts to threaten and coerce people, backed off. Brownshirts, like most forms of staph, are relatively harmless if the host organism is healthy, and deadly when it isn’t. Still, outfits like Free Republic allow all the cranks and haters to legitimize one another. I saw one post there crowing that liberals didn’t dare argue with “conservatives” (which is what they call themselves) in their home element. The poster may or may not have been aware that any account expressing liberal sentiments, no matter how politely or thoughtfully, would be immediately shut down and the messages deleted.

But it does result in some of the vilest political discourse you can imagine. Most people are already familiar with the GOP’s willingness to smear military men who disagree with them (“Swift Boats,” the attempt to smear Murtha as being a coward, and so on), knowing that their coddled, still seething and snarling underclass will act as an echo chamber and try to legitimize their viciousness.

They will run counter to their own best interests in defense of those who are coddling them. In a debate on Usenet about the low tax rate corporations and the ultra-wealthy enjoy while millions go without basic necessities such as good education, adequate health care, or affordable transportation, one guy snarled,

“What do you propose doing about this, Ugg Suckley? As the article says, the influx of cheap labor from places like China and India are what's hurting American jobs. “I'll explain a simple economic reality to you libs, since you're obviously too stupid to figure it out for yourselves. Those fatcats that you so bitterly despise, such as the CEOs and others who run the PRIVATE companies that drive America's economy, are being paid by shareholders to maximize profits. Typically companies' biggest expense is labor. Why should they pay spoiled whiners in America $20 to $40 an hour or more when they can get workers from other countries who will appreciatively do the same work for a few bucks a day? If those eeevil fatcats don't minimize costs everywhere they can, they'll be replaced by other eeevil fatcats who will. “So I repeat the question to Monkeypiss and other America hating libs. What do you suggest be done about it (other than your usual whining)?”

Another one wrote:

“Fucking Union assholes priced themselves out of a job. Maybe YOU should have paid $30K for your last car instead of that piece of shit $12K car you drive. You want Union assholes to have jobs, then maybe YOU should buy their over priced cars. There's no reason a car should cost $30K, except when some union asshole gets $31/hour + benefits. Put your money where your mouth is asshole.”

Now, it’s impossible to tell whether the writers are some guys struggling to keep up with car payments and behind on credit card bills who remain convinced that the same people who are pushing them ever more into debt are much better able to serve their interests, or if they are just agent provocateurs for those same interests, but note the truculence, and the false claim that there is not a solution to the problem, because the rich always deserve special treatment, and if they don’t get it, they’ll take it. Also notice the self-hating description of the typical American worker (I don’t know many people who make $20 or $40 an hour, off hand) and the insistence that the workers deserve to have their pay rates trashed by foreign competition.

The snarling underclass eat this up with a stick. There is nothing like watching a poor man stoutly insist that a rich man should be allowed to take whatever he needs to feel comfortable, and threatening his fellow workers with cheap foreign labor, is there?

The good news is that it’s disintegrating as time goes by – not because the snarling underclass realize they are being used, but simply because lots of time has gone by, and they have nothing to show for it. It would be nice to pretend they would rise up and barbeque the people who used them so shamefully, but that won’t happen. Just as well, really – most of them have guns.

Instead, they’ll either pretend that their support of the GOP propaganda machine was merely a brief flirtation that they saw through quickly, or, more often, will deny they were ever a part of it. Either way, they’ll feel better about themselves, and the GOP will have to figure out other ways of clinging to power.

But in the meantime, the snarling underclass will continue to seethe...and nobody has an answer to that one.