Comments on: “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” https://habitablezone.com/2011/12/29/whats-the-matter-with-kansas-how-conservatives-won-the-heart-of-america/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:12:50 -0700 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: ER https://habitablezone.com/2011/12/29/whats-the-matter-with-kansas-how-conservatives-won-the-heart-of-america/#comment-10193 ER Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:11:33 +0000 http://habitablezone.com/?p=6343#comment-10193 America was the first country in the world with a truly large and politically influential middle class. This has happened mostly during our lifetime, since the end of the Great Depression, and it is a monumental accomplishment. It is a tribute to progressive and liberal policies instituted just prior to the Second World War, although some of these trace back even earlier, to the social and labor movements of the turn of the century. But this success carries within it the seeds of its own undermining. Much of the middle class remembers what it was like to be poor, either from direct experience or from the testimony of their own family members. Many also have a memory of being displaced from a middle class existence and forced back into the ranks of the poor, a desperate position they were able to recover from only after the War. This is an even more terrifying nightmare. They are fearful of falling back; they fear the poor and view them as a threat. They also feel they now have a chance of attaining upper class status, lifestyle and wealth. Even more, they feel they are entitled to it because of their own intrinsic virtues ("see how far we've come through HARD WORK"). They ape upper class mores and values, they identify with them. They see themselves as possessing the social, psychological and moral virtues that will eventually guarantee them upper class status. When times are hard, as they are now, this whole world view is threatened, The possibility for most, and the certainty for some, of sliding back to the lower class suddenly becomes very real while the hope of joining the upper class becomes increasingly more remote. The middle classes are narcissistic. They cannot blame their own shortcomings, or failure of the economic system they have so enthusiastically and unquestioningly signed on to, for their economic decline, that would not be natural for any human being to do. But neither can they blame the motives or actions of the elites above them, for that is the very class they aspire to join. And their troubles could certainly not be due to blind chance, social and historical forces totally out of our control or even perception. Their anger and fear must be directed elsewhere, they need a focus for their discontent. The middle classes are also paranoid. In order to explain their dilemma, they must create a conspiracy, an enemy, a scapegoat that can be blamed for their troubles. In their view, it is a frustrated and sinister cabal of envious, rogue, failed elitists (not the commercial class that actually runs the economy, certainly, <em>those are folks just like us</em>!), but the educated, artistic and literate elite that has enlisted the great mass of brutish poor below to redistribute the wealth they, the middle class, have worked so hard to create. We have seen prior manifestations of this pattern before, it occured in several industrialized countries in the first half of the twentieth century, with catastrophic results. It appears to be a familiar and recurring theme running through urbanized, industrialized societies. America was the first country in the world with a truly large and politically influential middle class. This has happened mostly during our lifetime, since the end of the Great Depression, and it is a monumental accomplishment. It is a tribute to progressive and liberal policies instituted just prior to the Second World War, although some of these trace back even earlier, to the social and labor movements of the turn of the century.

But this success carries within it the seeds of its own undermining. Much of the middle class remembers what it was like to be poor, either from direct experience or from the testimony of their own family members. Many also have a memory of being displaced from a middle class existence and forced back into the ranks of the poor, a desperate position they were able to recover from only after the War. This is an even more terrifying nightmare.

They are fearful of falling back; they fear the poor and view them as a threat. They also feel they now have a chance of attaining upper class status, lifestyle and wealth. Even more, they feel they are entitled to it because of their own intrinsic virtues (“see how far we’ve come through HARD WORK”). They ape upper class mores and values, they identify with them. They see themselves as possessing the social, psychological and moral virtues that will eventually guarantee them upper class status.

When times are hard, as they are now, this whole world view is threatened, The possibility for most, and the certainty for some, of sliding back to the lower class suddenly becomes very real while the hope of joining the upper class becomes increasingly more remote.

The middle classes are narcissistic. They cannot blame their own shortcomings, or failure of the economic system they have so enthusiastically and unquestioningly signed on to, for their economic decline, that would not be natural for any human being to do. But neither can they blame the motives or actions of the elites above them, for that is the very class they aspire to join. And their troubles could certainly not be due to blind chance, social and historical forces totally out of our control or even perception. Their anger and fear must be directed elsewhere, they need a focus for their discontent.

The middle classes are also paranoid. In order to explain their dilemma, they must create a conspiracy, an enemy, a scapegoat that can be blamed for their troubles. In their view, it is a frustrated and sinister cabal of envious, rogue, failed elitists (not the commercial class that actually runs the economy, certainly, those are folks just like us!), but the educated, artistic and literate elite that has enlisted the great mass of brutish poor below to redistribute the wealth they, the middle class, have worked so hard to create.

We have seen prior manifestations of this pattern before, it occured in several industrialized countries in the first half of the twentieth century, with catastrophic results. It appears to be a familiar and recurring theme running through urbanized, industrialized societies.

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