When sensible persons decry the widening income and wealth gap, the rising poverty rate, and the isolation of the privileged class in our country, I invariably think that if they had known how Mississippi worked years ago, they could have easily anticipated our national malady.

The object of elites everywhere is to exploit everyone else as much as possible without stirring up rebellion. Mississippi elites have performed this balancing act for well over a hundred years using techniques of social control that are so familiar as to be almost invisible to its inhabitants, much like water is invisible to fish.

The tried and proven method of the American South has been racism, a con game that sets blacks and whites against each other and causes them to blame each other for their wretched condition. Racism is difficult to deal with rationally, since it contains a strong component of psychological projection coupled with a profound ignorance of how the economic system works, Southern fundamentalist religion facilitates the process of projection by its Manichaean division of humanity into the children of darkness and the children of light and by its hostility towards the intellect. Dispensationalism and creationism have replaced history and science with alternative explanations of reality that are almost impossible to dislodge by evidence and rational argument.

The plantation system has now been spread throughout the United States. Its basic principle, "divide and conquer," has proven to be a flexible, efficient tool of social control far outside the Mason-Dixon line. Rush Limbaugh made a fortune persuading male blue-collar workers that their economic decline was the fault of "liberals." Right-wing politicians have recently demonized Illegal immigrants from Latin America as a danger to the American way of life.

Like a cheap perfume, a subtle racism permeates southern society from top to bottom.

Conservatism, with its emphasis on hierarchies, class, and control of society by the "better sort of people," has frequently encouraged that peculiarly American combination of racism and fundamentalism that keeps the lower classes distracted and docile.

For this reason, it is surprising to see the rabidly right-wing editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal feature a column by Jim Webb, former secretary of the Navy under Reagan and newly-elected Democratic senator from Virginia, warning the nation that if the huge chasm in income and wealth between the elites and the rest of us continues to widen, we risk what he charitably causes "political unrest." Webb has peered into the abyss and doesn't like what he sees.

If it remains unchecked, this bifurcation of opportunities and advantages along class lines has the potential to bring a period of political unrest. Up to now, most American workers have simply been worried about their job prospects. Once they understand that there are (and were) clear alternatives to the policies that have dislocated careers and altered futures, they will demand more accountability from the leaders who have failed to protect their interests. The "Wal-Marting" of cheap consumer products brought in from places like China, and the easy money from low-interest home mortgage refinancing, have softened the blows in recent years. But the balance point is tipping in both cases, away from the consumer and away from our national interest.

In this author's opinion, the ultimate outcome of this process, if it is allowed to continue, is a nation of gated communities surrounded by vast slums policed by soldiers, paramilitaries, and probably organized crime. If you don't believe this, drive around southern Madison County, where one one gated community after another lines the main roads.

Both Democrats and Republicans bear the blame for this, having succumbed to the siren call of free trade, deregulation and reliance on a harsh, punitive criminal justice system that sweeps up the entirely predictable army of the dispossessed produced by those policies and imprisons them at a rate that rivals some of the most vicious and repressive regimes in the world.

So read Webb's column and ponder.

Jim Webb: Class Struggle : American workers have a chance to be heard (Via Daily Kos)