There is a strong class system in the United States, and a strong prejudice encouraging male Americans of Northern European descent, especially those of British descent, to be the powerful ones on top.
That’s why—when we’ve “cast” candidates for the role of U.S. President (by voting for them)—they’ve been male, and had at least one parent who was of Northern European descent.
Both the Right, and the Left, seem to be fighting against the class system.
Who knew that when Graydon Carter (and Spy Magazine) called Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the 80’s they’d help to bring a crass real estate developer into the White House?
Who knew that when candidate Kamala Harris (in her run for the presidency) called for more people to obtain college degrees, less citizens would come out to vote?
Last year, I read Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th Century Britain, by British author Kevin Siena.
This book reveals the English perspective on Britain’s colonization of North America.
The 2019 book explains how the British upper crust dealt with the British, Irish and Scottish vagrants who wandered the cities and countryside.
During the 1700s, the government essentially used vagrants to populate the 13 colonies, and thereby reduce the prison population.
(It wasn’t until the 1840s that British intellectuals began to deal seriously with the British class system. Let’s just say real social change is taking a while.)
I just finished White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg.
This 2016 book describes how the class structure in the U.S. has kept its’ Anglo-Saxon plebs under control, from colonial times through this century.
I learned from these two books that it wasn’t just prejudice against black and brown people, that fed the class system in Europe.
For centuries, the European elite believed that there were two types of people—the people of “good blood,” and the people of “bad blood”—and sometimes people with “bad blood” could look similar to you.
Giving alms boxes to the poor at Christmas was one thing.
Associating with them, was quite another.
Obviously, this attitude toward people who didn’t own property carried over to the New World.
Class-conscious Republicans have elevated Trump, possibly because they identify with him?
In the last days of the 2024 campaign, this all became clearer when it seemed each side was talking about the opposing side as “garbage.”
MAGA has chosen Trump to fight against “educated elitists” who they assume look down on them.
The Left dislikes Trump because he’s acting against their cherished fantasy that America is a classless melting pot.
It’s a big mess of people—sometimes ones who are essentially in agreement—fighting each other over scraps.
Some Right-wing pundits have acknowledged that Donald J. Trump isn’t a particularly good representative for the Anglo-Saxon “cause.”
Trump is one of our very few Presidents to be the child of immigrants.
(Andrew Jackson’s parents immigrated from Ireland in 1765.)
Trump’s mother was a servant girl, who immigrated as a teenager from Scotland.
His father was a first generation American.
Both of Fred Trump’s parents were born and raised in Germany.
When Trump chose to marry, his first, and his third, wives were both Slavic adult immigrants.
Only his middle wife (Marla Maples) was born in this country (the state of Georgia), and that was his shortest marriage.
(Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would have been aghast! Is Donald Trump afraid of American DNA?)
Unlike other “developed” nations, the citizens of the U.S. live in a country without a safety net.
It’s estimated that around 26 million Americans have experienced homelessness.
Since the 1970s, we’ve lived in a country in which it takes two salaries to buy a house and/or raise a family.
In The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class—and How to Rescue Our Future, by Thom Hartmann, Hartmann describes how the 40th President, Ronald Reagan, began to destroy the middle class, from 1981-1989.
Back in the early 1980’s, the middle class controlled almost 22% of the nation’s wealth. Today, it controls under 5% of the wealth.
Since the late 1770’s, the United States has lied to the rest of the world, and portrayed itself as a classless society.
However, America has never been that.
The Englishmen who planned the colonization of North America saw this land as one giant workhouse where they could send their orphans, debtors, vagabonds, and convicts.
In Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash, she mentions how the third US President Thomas Jefferson (in one of his public education proposals) planned that a few lucky scholars be “raked from the rubbish,” and be educated above grade school level.
(Jefferson used the word “rubbish” to describe poor men who didn’t own property.)
When Jefferson spoke of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” he wasn’t speaking about everyone.
He was only referring to white property-owning males, preferably, Englishmen.
It’s a certainty that many of our Founding Fathers thought of poorer communities as “waste people.”
It wasn’t until 1830 that all states dropped owning property, as being necessary in order to vote.
The Civil War was about class, in addition to being about slaves.
Confederate leaders argued that the planter class was born to rule, and that Northerners were degenerates for not believing in their Southern “utopia.”
Southern plantation owners, newspaper editors, and politicians argued against the education of “offscourings,” “mudsills,” crackers, hillbillies, and swamp people.
The 36th President, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), explained the Southern Dixiecrat mentality to his White House staff:
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
Americans seem angry at the class system, but the Right, and the Left, are in conflict over solutions.
Right-wingers believe they are fighting the educated elite; they want white, property-owning Northern Europeans to be honored as those with the “best blood.”
Left-wingers are sick of the empty promises of DEI departments, and the Democratic Party; they want real change, not just adherence to slogans and political correctness.
*The term “mudsill” was coined by US Senator James Henry Hammond (according to Nancy Isenberg, on page 157 of White Trash) to describe the innate inferiority of Northerners, to the plantation elite of the South. According to Hammond (1807-1864), “mudsills” were the “urban roughs, prairie dirt farmers, greasy mechanics, and unwashed immigrants” who infested Northern cities.
