My own theory (without any real evidence) is that the oligarchs use race to divide the white working class from the non-white working class. A specific example is the video on systemic racism going around. It correctly points out redlining (a truly horrific practice), but also talks about black students having to attend underfunded schools. I attended predominantly black, underfunded, public schools my entire childhood. By this logic, I was at the same schools and was a "victim" of systemic racism. Which immediately implies that it was actually systemic classism at play against the working poor, rather than being purely race-based.
If a party chose to ignore the corporate overlords and focus on issues that working class people of all ethnicities cared about, they would get a lot of votes, and very few super PAC donations.
Many philosophers and others have written about how the powerful divide the lower classes in this way. I don't have any explicit citations offhand, but your observations have merit amongst those who study these issues.
Using race to divide labor is a time-proven capitalist tactic. Go back to Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, where the system was made explicit after the mixed-race uprising again the oligarchs of the time.
"The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (many enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class. The ruling class responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705."
Fascinating. I grew up in rural Virginia. A little Known fact is that the vast majority of white settlers there were indentured and/or bonded, often convicts. The first Africans in 1619 were indentured as well. Horrifically, in the 1650s when the first African slaves were brought over, the elites pushed further changes in social norms that resulted in a significant worsening of treatment of the African indentured servants who had long since become free landowners and farmers. A formerly indentured, free black man had a prosperous farm a few miles from where I grew up. The courthouse there dates to the 1600s, and the records are there that show jealous white neighbors gradually stealing his land with impunity, starting at the time that slaves started becoming common. It is chilling looking at those documents standing in that building.
My own theory (without any real evidence) is that the oligarchs use race to divide the white working class from the non-white working class. A specific example is the video on systemic racism going around. It correctly points out redlining (a truly horrific practice), but also talks about black students having to attend underfunded schools. I attended predominantly black, underfunded, public schools my entire childhood. By this logic, I was at the same schools and was a "victim" of systemic racism. Which immediately implies that it was actually systemic classism at play against the working poor, rather than being purely race-based.
If a party chose to ignore the corporate overlords and focus on issues that working class people of all ethnicities cared about, they would get a lot of votes, and very few super PAC donations.