American Cruelty Uniquely Created and Maintained by Elites

This article is a response to umair haque’s piece Why America is the World’s Most Uniquely Cruel Society. We begin by accepting part of its premise, which is that American society is uniquely cruel among its peers.

Rather than generalize the motives and conditions of immigrants who came to the U.S. to labor or do small scale agriculture, this article will argue that it was in fact the aspiring gentry and the already-well-off who created the conditions for that cruelty. Culture and governance in the Americas was shaped and defined, not by its immigrant underclass, but by its immigrants who came because there was no way to ascend the social ladder any farther in their homelands.

The new oligarchy in British North America was unique among its peers in the western hemisphere. There was no criollo class to mediate between the genocidal elite and the workers in the field and the natives in the hills. No appeal for Jesuit paternalism on behalf of either slave or indigenous laborer. The commitment of the early settler oligarchy to Puritan propriety and anti miscegenation set its colonial period a part from the rest of the Americas.

What stopped American society from becoming like other societies similar to it in the world today was the particular ambition of its founding elite, which married the language of eighteenth century liberalism to the realities of an abject slave state.

Into this particular context came the excess urban populations of Europe. As the capital extracted from slave labor began to fuel the engines of early American industrialism, the sovereignty of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer was broken. Into the cities went his daughters and sons, beckoned by the textile mill and the captains of industry.

A political system designed entirely to defend the structures of slavery and white landownership was unable to reconcile the contradictory nature of a rapidly industrializing bourgeois element in the north with the aristocratic objectives of the slaveholders. Northern industrialists were increasingly tired of competing with southern slaveholding interests for political authority, an authority owed nearly entirely to power derived from the three-fifths compromise.

The antebellum immigrant was propagandized by the ruling class to soldier in a war waged by southern paranoia first and northern opportunism second. It was a war that killed three quarters of a million people and inaugurated a system of tenant farming for its former slaves. It was a system more in line with others in the western hemisphere where northerners were already extracting material for their industrial engines. The Civil War may have started over slavery, but it was fought to make a peasantry of black slaves.

The modern military birthed by the American Civil War became a tool with two functions in the postbellum context: to spread its defacto empire south of the Rio Grande and to crush nascent labor movements in the U.S.

In Europe, labor’s demands were the source of the ameliorative social factors described by umair haque as lessening the cruelty of other industrialized societies. It is not a surprise then that the U.S. has one of the most violent labor histories, especially compared to the relative weakness of the movements that comprised it.

But what truly cast the U.S. labor movement into irrelevance was the capacity of industrialists to divide the workers along racial lines. Just as the well-off strivers and emergent gentry of colonial Virginia enacted the first slave codes in reaction to a militant coalition of African slaves and formerly indentured white frontiersmen, so too did the Taylorized factory owner cleave at the ethnic and racial difference on the factory floor. Not only did nineteenth and twentieth century capital exploit the fissures between black and white people, but between people of different European backgrounds as well.

There was a period of about twenty years in the middle of the twentieth century when the project that began on the foundations of a bourgeois slave state nearly did, almost by accident, become a less cruel place.

It was in the 1960s that for the first time there was a meaningful standard of universal suffrage in the U.S. Yet, just as in the nineteenth century, this social improvement was not the result of a political solution. The only meaningful legislation in this regard happened in the shocked aftermath of the day a president’s brain was blown across his wife’s lap in front of the entire American public. The integration of schools was only possible through court order, fiscal coercion, and in some cases the physical occupation of cities by federal forces.

There was social mobility. Families could be supported on the labor of one full time worker. Those who entered the professional class were not forced into debt peonage. Housing and funding were provided to people who struggled to access either.

And why? Because, the descendants of the founding class could no longer bear the geopolitical humiliation of being an apartheid state. The American elite were for the first time in competition not just for materials but for the hearts and minds of newly self-determined bourgeois national states, breaking through the decaying order of European imperialism.

In the 1970s, the Soviet project stagnated and its capacity to project power diminished. There was no longer a need to project the images of social democracy to the non-aligned world. Neoliberalism was born.

As the capacity of the state to lend assistance to the underclass was cut back, the state cracked down on the types of criminality practiced by people who have been abandoned politically and economically.

Now, fifty years downstream from the dawn of neoliberalism, the professionalized ranks are only accessible to the middle and lower class in exchange for a debt burden comparable to the hundred year leases of European feudalism. Social programs are designed to be inefficient and inaccessible. The housing projects, long abandoned fiscally, are now physically destroyed. Their occupants scattered to the winds of a precarious gig economy.

The “cruelty” of American society is unquestionably unique. But it is also the result of an elite ideology that has set Americans against each other to the political and social benefit of the descendants from that founding class of landowners.

The cruelty of the American ruling class has swallowed up the earth and regurgitated a rotten husk. What remains from that mid-century glimpse of improvement is an incompetent military behemoth and a depraved cult of national politics on the foundations of a slave state that is still yet to solve a political problem without rivers of blood and gore.

There is nothing intrinsic to the immigrant class of laborers arriving on the shores of North America, historically or at present. To identify “punching down” as the critical element in America’s unique cruelty is to play the part of the Taylorized manager whipping up a nameless misanthropy that only serves the factory owners.