“The result is a colossal profit, which comes to me.”
The social stratification that Shaw observed in early twentieth-century England made it easy for the rich to stay rich, but nothing works to protect the powerful like ethnic and racial hatred. In the American south, poor whites consistently vote to defeat proposals that would be greatly advantageous to themselves because they are convinced they would help blacks. The result is overall economic backwardness and a grossly inequitable distribution of income. The wealthy southern aristocrats are the only real beneficiaries.
The American south is not alone. Any region in the world that is torn by ancient ethnic, racial, or religious animosity is rewarded with widespread poverty, intellectual backwardness, and vast gulfs between the fortunate and the impoverished: Northern Ireland, the Balkans, or the Middle East, for example. The wealthy few benefit while everyone else suffers.
It is not remarkable that hatred is destructive. It is not remarkable that energy spent in destruction is not available for construction. It is not really remarkable that the lust for certainty condemns its victims to ignorance and folly, for the belief that you already have all the answers means that you can learn nothing. It is not remarkable, in short, that conservativism is backward, destructive, and cruel. What is remarkable, indeed amazing, is how effortlessly this enormous pool of destructive energy is directed at preserving the power and privileges of the powerful and privileged. It seems they barely have to lift a finger while the armies of the exploited do their work for them, energetically keeping each other in line.
This is true whatever the social and political system is. In an aristocracy, the conservatives support the aristocrats; in a theocracy they support the priests. Their passions may be aroused by their bigotry, xenophobia, racism, and morbid puritanism, but those passions are somehow always channeled into preserving the power of the haves.
The strangeness of this phenomenon is particularly marked in the United States, which has an especially strange power structure. (Americans will be startled to hear this. They are so used to their system that they think it quite normal, but it is in fact peculiar to the point of madness).
The United States is nominally a democracy. Legislators, executive officers, and sometimes even judges are elected. Unfortunately, in order to get elected it is necessary to raise enormous amounts of money. The consequence of this fact is that politicians feel far more obliged to those who supply them with these obscene amounts of money then they do to the voters. When they campaign, they make promises to the voters, but when elected they do the bidding of the special interests who funded them. It makes no difference which party label they wear.