There was a white supremacist coup attempt last week.

Race relations have always been tied to class. Originally the answer to a lack of workers in the North American colonies was indentured servants. It was quickly discovered however that the old world model of landed "aristocrat" could not be transplanted to a frontier society. In the old world where every bit of land was owned the farm laborer had no where to go if he found his condition unpleasant. In a frontier society he could just abandon his "obligations" and go west. Slavery solved this problem by creating an easily identifiable underclass. In the North where industry and trade dominated the economy slave labor was of less value than in the plantation economy of the South. Slaves do not make great industrial workers or traders. The North was also not well suited in terms of climate for large scale plantations growing export cash crops. Slavery took deep roots in the South be cause it was profitable. The prejudices we usually associate with racism originally took their form from the class prejudices of the dominate plantation owning class in the South. There were layered on top of the natural prejudices that "civilized" people have for the stone age cultures they encounter. Those attitudes are remarkable similar to the attitudes of the urban "sophisticates" for what they see as the typical Trump supporter.

Class in the U.S. today is defined by education and wealth. Prior to the mid twentieth century intelligence was of modest economic value for people who had little opportunity for upward mobility based entirely on their intellectual ability. Today IQ defines not only where you work and your income to a large extent but the likelihood that you have a stable marriage and live in a comfortable neighborhood. The U.S. is now segregated by IQ in a way unimaginable 80 years ago.

It isn't just bad economic policy that has driven the increasing economic divide between labor and white collar workers but classism as well. For decades globalism and the financial services industries have favored a move away from domestic productivity. The unfortunate consequences for the shrinking middle class were easily justified because of the prejudices of urban white collar workers and their employers. Mindless ideas such as a service economy, information economy, post industrial economy, took on almost cult like attributes in large segments of the population. It not only justified leaving labor behind but covered over the very real low productivity of white collar workers and the failures of those ideas. First with Reagan and Clinton corporatism, widespread investment in worthless tech that caused the dot com collapse, the arrogance of the financial sector that lead to the subprime collapse, and in the near future the possible collapse of tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook and Google that have no meaningful assets. Post industrial only works if you can import someone else's slave labor.

Rather than being "dim" minorities that voted for Trump see through the prejudices that keep the Urban "elites" in power. They see that the post industrial economy is largely a shell game. That the financial services industry is really just banksterism. That the tech industries value is not secured by anything real. What they have is common sense, something lacking in the new petite nobility. They know a lie based on prejudices better than any other segment of society. They also see the emperor has no clothes. That they have more in common with white labor than the urban elites.

Nice