This seems to always be the case - people turn on neighboring socioeconomic classes, not the ones at the extreme top of the pyramid. During the Jim Crow era, the worst discrimination against blacks came not from the elite (many of whom had been abolitionists during slavery and equality-minded liberals afterwards), but from poor white sharecroppers who were one degree removed from slavery themselves. Nowadays, the conservative movement within the U.S. is composed of the ultra-wealthy plus the lower-middle-class and working-class Religious Right. The targets of the LA race riots were not rich white people, but Korean shopkeepers in minority neighborhoods.
I suspect it's because it's generally impossible to "skip" social classes and jump directly from the bottom to the top. Even rags-to-riches stories usually involved a period of a few decades where the person enters and assimilates into the intervening classes. Jan Koum went from immigrant to middle-class tech worker to aspiring entrepreneur to multi-billionaire. Henry Ford went from farmer to machinist to engineer to captain of industry. Andrew Carnegie went from immigrant to bobbin boy to telegraph operator to bookkeeper & investor to steel magnate.
As a result, each class views the class directly above them as their impediment to upwards mobility, and they're not wrong in that belief. In times of scarcity, resentment usually flows upwards to their immediate neighbors. The more distant causes of the socioeconomic structures that hold people down are effectively invisible to the rioting classes; all they see is people who are not very different from themselves doing better than them.
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This seems to always be the case - people turn on neighboring socioeconomic classes, not the ones at the extreme top of the pyramid. During the Jim Crow era, the worst discrimination against blacks came not from the elite (many of whom had been abolitionists during slavery and equality-minded liberals afterwards), but from poor white sharecroppers who were one degree removed from slavery themselves. Nowadays, the conservative movement within the U.S. is composed of the ultra-wealthy plus the lower-middle-class and working-class Religious Right. The targets of the LA race riots were not rich white people, but Korean shopkeepers in minority neighborhoods.
I suspect it's because it's generally impossible to "skip" social classes and jump directly from the bottom to the top. Even rags-to-riches stories usually involved a period of a few decades where the person enters and assimilates into the intervening classes. Jan Koum went from immigrant to middle-class tech worker to aspiring entrepreneur to multi-billionaire. Henry Ford went from farmer to machinist to engineer to captain of industry. Andrew Carnegie went from immigrant to bobbin boy to telegraph operator to bookkeeper & investor to steel magnate.
As a result, each class views the class directly above them as their impediment to upwards mobility, and they're not wrong in that belief. In times of scarcity, resentment usually flows upwards to their immediate neighbors. The more distant causes of the socioeconomic structures that hold people down are effectively invisible to the rioting classes; all they see is people who are not very different from themselves doing better than them.