The Powerful Seduce the Weak Into Working Against Their Own Interests
If you have looked at the pages where we examine contrasting values and world-views of liberals and conservatives, you are ready to understand how the plutocrats so easily manipulate non-wealthy right-wingers.
Manichaeism and Authority Worship. While there are superficially many ways in which conservatives and liberals differ, there are really two main themes: the objectification of value and the lust for certainty.
The desire for certainty leads them to seek an absolute Authority, to whom they can turn for all answers. The plutocrats are delighted to provide them with what they desire.
Those who objectify values project all that is evil onto others, allowing them to vent all of their own hateful and cruel impulses onto those they deem to be wicked enemies. They also idolize those richer and more powerful. The plutocrats do not need to keep them in line; they do it themselves.
Bernard Shaw made this clear in his deeply ironic play, Major Barbara (1905). The protagonist, Andrew Undershaft, is an enormously wealthy munitions manufacturer. Everyone naturally assumes that he must be a slave-driver, cruelly bullying his employees to squeeze every last penny of profit from them. But when they visit his company town they get the opposite impression: it seems he indulges his workers to the point of spoiling them. They cannot understand how he can maintain discipline. He explains:
I dont. They do. You see, the one thing Jones wont stand is any rebellion from the man under him, or any assertion of social equality between the wife of the man with 4 shillings a week less than himself and Mrs Jones! Of course they all rebel against me, theoretically. Practically, every man of them keeps the man just below him in his place. I never meddle with them. I never bully them. . . . I say that certain things are to be done; but I dont order anybody to do them. I dont say, mind you, that there is no ordering about and snubbing and even bullying. The men snub the boys and order them about; the carmen snub the sweepers; the artisans snub the unskilled laborers; the foremen drive and bully both the laborers and artisans; the assistant engineers find fault with the foremen; the chief engineers drop on the assistants; the departmental managers worry the chiefs; and the clerks have tall hats and hymnbooks and keep up the social tone by refusing to associate on equal terms with anybody. The result is a colossal profit, which comes to me.
This is a marvelous system for the plutocrats. They can be as gracious, kind, and (to a degree) generous as they please. Their heads rest lightly on their pillows and they sleep soundly, dreaming dreams of blest innocence. They do not see themselves for what they really are: parasites riding on the backs of the unfortunate. They look in the mirror and see only kind benefactors who provide lucrative employment to unworthy wretches.