Hierarchy and Dehumanization: The Mobius Noose of America’s Conflation of Race, Class and Gender

The line of descent from Joe McCarthy through Ronald Reagan and Timothy McVeigh to Donald Trump and his insurrectionist mob is the storyline of how the ideological heirs of the defeated Confederate oligarchy enriched themselves at the expense of American democracy and all of us who depend on the ideals of equal justice and equal opportunity under law.

Hierarchy, in other words, trumps equality — for them. Even the idea of equality is a sinister enemy of the natural order and must be squashed at every turn — by them.

That’s a core idea in historian Heather Cox Richardson’s deeply insightful analysis of “Movement Conservatism” entitled “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligargy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.” Despite its military defeat, the Confederate South extended its vision of the freedom of some based on the actual or virtual servitude of others into the 21^st century, Richardson writes.

It hoodwinked nearly half the American population into subjugating their common sense to the preposterous malarky that they were the victims of big government, the swindle of taxation and the “inferiors” it serves in the name of equality, known to them as “socialism.” Using the traditional techniques of all autocrats, authoritarians, and dictators — big lies and the dehumanizing fabrications of fear and hatred — the oligarchy turned poor people and the disenfranchised into a deadly and oppressive enemy, while ever artfully covering their own tracks.

Oligarchy, like fascism, can be defined as the rule of the special over the expendable. It holds that some people, some class or race or gender of people, some economic strata of people, are naturally better than others, and therefore better to rule over those who are inferior to them but who, like all devils, are always seeking insidiously to overthrow the proper order.

The “inferiors” — slaves, women, minorities, immigrants, and low-wage workers — are kept victims of institutional inequality, dehumanized in contemporary conservative terms as “takers” as opposed to the superior “makers.” Richardson calls this the “American paradox,” a society in which the freedom and wealth of some is based on the inequality and economic struggle of everyone else.

“Superiority” is always bolstered by dehumanizing big lies. There can’t be one without the other. Donald Trump’s loathing of the poor, of working stiffs who he called “losers,” of “Mexicans,” of women and of all those he sought to rule because he “alone” was fit to lead, is the latest example of Confederate fascism in America.

It’s based on a long history of conflating race, gender and class — of white wealthy men occupying the “statusphere” of specialness at the top of the social and monied hierarchy doing everything they can to keep laboring people of all races and women doing the work that makes them rich, while damning them as freeloaders who threaten to undermine “democracy” by tampering with free enterprise, stealing their wealth though taxes, a tricky power gained by these inferior “losers” through the cunning machinations of election fraud.

Those who didn’t believe in the oligarchy — New Deal Democrats and later on feminists and civil rights and counterculture warriors — were the target of McCarthyite big lies, dehumanizing them as “communists” or whatever bugaboo they conjured up. They scapegoated “liberals” as “radicals” who believed in the upside-down rule of the inferior over those who were supremely deserving. And they used the rhetoric of slander as a way to deflect blame from themselves.

In a particularly telling paragraph, Richardson writes that by “2016, Republican leaders sounded eerily like antebellum slaveholders in their defense of a system in which wealthy elites ruled over the masses.” She quotes a tweet from conservative pundit Josh Barro, “Elites are usually elite for a good reason and tend to have better judgment than the average person.” In 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney “claimed that 47 percent of the American people felt they were ‘entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it,’ and told supporters that those people would only vote for Democrats who would give them stuff.” Richardson added that former Republican senator Rick Santorum “put it more starkly: ‘I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.’”

Richardson continues, “Republicans had poured vitriol on women and minorities since Reagan invented the welfare queen in the 1970s, but in March 2016 National Review’s Kevin Williamson turned on poor white people,” she wrote. It was not the dramatic tilting of the economic scales toward the rich after 1980 that had hurt people dependent on welfare, he wrote, rather, “they failed themselves.”

Richardson puts the 1950s McCarthyite witch hunts of so-called “communists” in the context of oligarchic propaganda, saying that his approach was to suggest that the New Deal Democratic Party itself was “the bedfellow of international communism.”

McCarthy is the progenitor of Trumpism. McCarthy taught the Republican party “how to advance their agenda by exploiting the media. He yelled, he made crazy accusations, badgered, and hectored in what was essentially performance art that advanced a simple, almost mythological narrative … in which an outsider takes on a corrupt government,” draining the swamp, as they were want to say. McCarthy gave the GOP “a game plan,” Richardson wrote. And Trump ran with it. But he also added another historical component to it.

I’d call it the Quantrill Raiders/Jesse James/vigilante/paramilitary/outlaw component. It was updated in the 1990s by Timothy McVeigh and the anti-government bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and brought into the present by Trump and his partisan mob on January 6, 2021 as they stormed the U.S. Capitol, occupying it briefly, roaming around looking for Congressmen and Congresswomen to shoot and kill. Trump brought extremist violence in from the cold and made it for a moment a terrifying part of mainstream politics.

Richardson minced no words: The Trump administration “reflected the ideology of oligarchy. Government was not designed to promote equality of opportunity by guaranteeing equality before the laws. Rather, such meddling interfered with the ability of a few to arrange society as they saw fit; they, and they alone, truly understood what was best for everyone.”

Hierarchy in America trumps not only equality and democracy, but also the rule of law, fair play, honorable work for honorable wages and the moral foundations of human rights.

Richardson sums it up: “From Reconstruction through World War II, Americans created a hierarchical society. The fight against fascism — the modern form of hierarchical society — once again challenged …(the)…American Paradox. The ensuing drive for universal equality, though, enabled oligarchs to mobilize their corollary to the American paradox, gaining power by convincing voters that equality for people of color and women destroyed liberty. Now, for the second time, we are called to defend the principle of democracy.”

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it