In the 1800s, Rich Southern Whites Were Convincing Poor Non-Slave Owning Whites to Defend Slavery...

[TomCADem]

...even though doing so was economically harmful to poor whites. Today, history repeats itself as working class whites supported a billionaire Oligarch whose policies would devastating to the white working class with tax cuts to the rich, and cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, etc.

I think one point that is rarely mentioned is how Trump's reliance on racial animus and fanning prejudices not only oppresses the objects of such racism, but also oppresses working class whites. This use of racism as a means of oppressing working class whites is not new.

At the time of the Civil War most Southern whites did not own slaves. Indeed, in the North, part of the opposition to the expansion of slavery was that it was a threat to white jobs. While abolitionists believed slavery was a moral wrong, antislaveryites did not want slave labor spreading through the country, taking jobs away from the white laboring classes.

Yet, in the South, white non-slave-owning whites fought to preserve slavery even though it would appear that they were being undercut by availability of slave labor. Why? One author explains how racism was used to oppress not only black slaves, but poor whites:

https://thehistoricpresent.com/2012/10/30/slavery-tough-on-white-americans/

Rich white slaveholders had long prevented poor southern whites from rising up against their oligarchy by focusing on race instead of class. Don’t focus on how unequal you are to us in every respect, they told poor whites; focus on how superior we all are to blacks. Even the poorest, least educated white man is better than a black man. Focusing the poor white majority on racial solidarity rather than class inequality preserved the unequal social and political system in the south and shored up slavery.

In 1860, perhaps recognizing that Southern Elites needed to convince poor whites to fight to defend an institution that harmed them, wrote a pamphlet entitled: "The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder" (1860).

https://deadconfederates.com/2011/05/04/non-slaveholders-stake-in-defending-the-peculiar-institution/

4. The non-slaveholder of the South preserves the status of the white man, and is not regarded as an inferior or a dependant. He is not told that the Declaration of Independence, when it says that all men are born free and equal, refers to the negro equally with himself. It is not proposed to him that the free negro’s vote shall weigh equally with bis own at the ballot-box, and that the little children of both colors shall be mixed in the classes and benches of the school-house, and embrace each other filially in its outside sports. It never occurs to him, that a white man could be degraded enough to boast in a public assembly, as was recently done in New York, of having actually slept with a negro. And his patriotic ire would crush with a blow the free negro who would dare, in his presence, as is done in the free States, to characterize the father of the country as a “scoundrel.” No white man at the South serves another as a body servant, to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform the menial services of his household. His blood revolts against this, and his necessities never drive him to it. He is a companion and an equal. When in the employ of the slaveholder, or in intercourse with him, he enters his hall, and has a seat at his table. If a distinction exists, it is only that which education and refinement may give, and this is so courteously exhibited as scarcely to strike attention. The poor white laborer at the North is at the bottom of the social ladder, whilst his brother here has ascended several steps and can look down upon those who are beneath him, at an infinite remove.

5. The non-slaveholder knows that as soon as his savings will admit, he can become a slaveholder, and thus relieve his wife from the necessities of the kitchen and the laundry, and his children from the labors of the field. This, with ordinary frugality, can, in general, be accomplished in a few years, and is a process continually going on. Perhaps twice the number of poor men at the South own a slave to what owned a slave ten years ago. The universal disposition is to purchase. It is the first use lor savings, and the negro purchased is the last possession to be parted with. If a woman, her children become heir-looms and make the nucleus of an estate. It is within my knowledge, that a plantation of fifty or sixty persons has been established, from the descendants of a single female, in the course of the lifetime of the original purchaser.

6. The large slaveholders and proprietors of the South begin life in great part as non-slaveholders. It is the nature of property to change hands. Luxury, liberality, extravagance, depreciated land, low prices, debt, distribution among children, and continually breaking up estates. All over the new States of the Southwest enormous estates are in the hands of men who began life as overseers, or city clerks, traders and merchants. Often the overseer marries the widow. Cheap lands, abundant harvests, high prices give the poor man soon a negro. His ten bales of cotton bring him another, a second crop increases his purchases, and so he goes on opening land and adding labor until in a few years his draft for $20,000 upon his merchant becomes a marketable commodity.

7. But should such fortune not be in reserve for the non-slaveholder, he will understand by honesty and industry it may be realized to his children. More than one generation of poverty in a family is scarcely to be expected at the South, and is against the general experience. – It is more unusual here for poverty or wealth to be preserved through several generations in the same family.

8. The sons of the non-slaveholder are and have always been among the leading and ruling spirits of the South; in industry as well as in politics. Every man’s experience in his own neighborhood will evince this. He has but to task his memory. In this class are the McDuffies, Langdon Cheeves, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clays [sic.], and Rusks, of the past; the Hammonds, Yanceys, Ors, Memmingers, Benjamins, Stephens, Soules, Browns, of Mississippi, Simms, Porters, Magraths, Aikens, Maunsel Whites, and an innumerable host of the present, and what is to be noted, these men have not been made demagogues for that reason, as in other quarters, but are among the most conservative among us. Nowhere else in the world have intelligence and virtue disconnected from ancestral estate, the same opportunities for advancement and nowhere else is their triumph more speedy and signal.

9. Without the institution of slavery the great staple products of the South would cease to be grown, and the immense annual results which are distributed among every class of the community and which give life to every branch of industry, would cease. The world furnishes no instances of these products being grown upon a large scale by free labor. The English now acknowledged [sic.] their failure in the East Indies. Brazil, whose slave population nearly equals our own, is the only South American State which has prospered. Cuba, by her slave labor, showers wealth upon old Spain, whilst the British West India Colonies have now ceased to be a source of revenue, and from opulence have been, by emancipation, reduced to beggary. St. Domingo shared the same fate, and the poor whites have been massacred equally with the rich.

[Warpy]

1. It's a little simpler than that for the average white southerner of modest means

He was doing OK but going nowhere since all the best land had been grabbed by rich guys from England who claimed acreage in the name of wives, children, and all indentured servants. Yes, the rich guy got the acreage. The indentured servant got nothing.

Non slaveholding white guys, often descendants of those same indentured servants, got the less productive land that was left over, if they got much of anything, at all. They had little hope of getting rich farming cotton or tobacco. What did appeal to them was an appeal to the strong sense of "hunh, nobody gonna push me around" that is so prevalent in the culture there.

Lofty thoughts of a reproduced English country society in a never-never land governed by the Articles of Confederation might have appealed to the wealthy and educated (although not, apparently, in history) but ordinary men fought so that a bunch of Yankees wouldn't be telling them what to do and how to do it. That created the sense of solidarity with the rich plantation slave owners.

[enough]

2. Still, it's always interesting to see how the arguments were spun out with such

tortuous logic. There certainly did seem to be a compulsion to explain.

[Warpy]

3. Wars are sold to populations with no stake in them in two ways

The Civil War I already addressed. The other way is a variation of "If we don't stop them now, they'll invade and kill us!" Once the propaganda really gets going, there is little way to stop fools from supporting complete madness.

[TomCADem]

4. Looking at the Contemporary Propaganda You Can See How Racism...

...is being used by rich whites to convince poor whites to fight to defend slavery as an institution, which rich Southern whites used to undercut wages paid to poor whites.

Today, poor whites are convinced to fight for cuts to Medicare, Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, tax cuts to the rich, and oil pipelines that generate relatively few jobs.

In other words, the one thing Trump is selling is making America White again, and that promise of a scapegoat and the implicit racial superiority of that promise is priceless.

[Warpy]

5. When they start to sell another war we can't win

you'll find out what I'm talking about.

[TomCADem]

6. But War Is Very Effective as a Distraction...

...and Trump is all about creating distractions to avoid the hard questions.

[Nevernose]

7. Slavery had little to do with it for POOR whites

And I'm just talking about actual Confederate military service here; racism was, IMO, literally invented as a means of preventing the poor from uniting.

However, the first wave of Confederate soldiers were largely the sons of Southern aristocracy, and therefore very much indebted to the institution of slavery.

The waves of Confederate soldiers after that were largely drafted. It was the South that invented the military draft in the States (both United and Confederate). Most of the rest were victims of propaganda. The pro-slave papers continuously produced stories about "patriotism" and spreading (mostly) bullshit stories of the raping and pillaging the Yankees were doing just one county over.

Conservative media brainwashing Southern men is a tradition in this country. "There is nothing new under the sun" and all of that.