Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah.)
Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.
Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide “leadership” (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than… $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy. But now, so will the workers.
Workers save up money and use it to go on strike.
However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then gets the government to discriminate heavily against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.
Terrified mobs – stoked into a frenzy by the business owner’s well-funded propaganda – tear down brown-eyed people’s homes and food supplies, forcing them destitute before the strike is done.
The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit… or starving to death.
The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These blue-eyed workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness. Unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolish and so cruel.
But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, “uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!”
Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers, fooled into attacking their own team, and try to rebuild their union, or B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them… but reluctantly return to work, because the strike has been broken. Or, C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.
The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kind of opportunities they have access to.
The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,
“Divide and conquer.”
I find this disingenuous, infantilizing. Racial discrimination and warring has been happening since the beginning of (recorded) time. It stems, among many, many other things (this thing is incredibly complex), from the fear of the other’s “unknowns”, a somewhat justified fear of others, given humanity’s penchant for conquering the neighbors. Another factor is the use of each own’s feeling of superiority over the other’s, to cover for one’s underlying fear of inferiority in some way. Take the example (one of many, not singling out here) of the Jews assertion that they are god’s chosen people, thus everyone else being inferior.
While divide and conquer has been used since the dawn of time, and adapted by the capitalists, the sad and simple fact is that people fear that which doesn’t conform to their comfortable life scheme, that people want certainty, and having a “different” is unsettling for many, and demonization is an easy way to prop one’s belief structure. People who exchange critical thinking for a “safe” belief structure, find it threatening to have others challenge that, so they fight back, to try to have that attack defeated. This can be exploited by others, to rally against that perceived common enemy. Wave a flag, and all who have a common belief of that flag representing their values will rally.
People don’t want to think, and/or challenge their beliefs. It’s a comfort thing.
I like your answer too. While I strongly believe the trans talking point is being amplified almost exclusively to fuel culture wars between the working class, your point on out-group mentality is a DNA encoded reality, from what I remember reading.
I think the two compromise the bulk of the answer along with the culture war fuel dumped by foreign entities interested in destabilizing the US.
The only remedy is education. Something that is sadly on the decline.
Incredible answer! I saved this with my running list of great quotes and passages.
