History question for DU

Can anyone name any other time and place in which so-called "regular people" were willing to protect with violence a societal status quo that clearly did not benefit them?

The most loyal American Tories tended to be those who had economic ties to the mother country as shipping agents, plantation owners with huge investments in the British economy, and government employees like Benjamin Franklin's son who, for his loyalty to the crown, ended up serving briefly as governor of New Jersey.

If anything, the American whigs (Washington, Jefferson, et al), especially those from non-manufacturing states, enjoyed quite a few benefits from not having to pay import taxes for finished good imported from England. It's not an accident that America endured a 12 year depression immediately upon declaring its independence. Americans enjoyed more than trade benefits of being part of the British Empire, particularly after the British drove the French off of North America, conquered Florida from Spain, and tamed the Indians. The only Americans who faced hostile fire were those who went into Indians' defined territory and tried to take yet more land.

a surprising number of poor, rural people in NY, NJ and PA became Loyalists during the Revolution. It was probably just an emphasis on regional history.

I'm sure you are correct overall and the majority were wealthy - it makes the most sense.

Appalachia

There are guys in the Honduran military right now protecting the coupsters whose only goal is to rip off the people as well as possible?

Those two come to mind. The right wing attracts these people. It's bizarre.

of this phenomenon.

I guess the military is too.

it for them. I am completely baffled as to why the current buffoons are doing what they are doing. Somehow some slick talker has convinced them that they will losse all if they don't protect the status quo.
I often think of America today as being afflicted with battered wife syndrome. So fearful of the great unknown that they stay with the batterer

n/t

Certainly the Russian, Polish, & Ukrainian peasants getting slaughtered by the Germans in WW1 to save the decadent Russian gentry were suckers of the sort you describe.

At Fort Sumter, S.C.

in Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton.

"Fascism may be defined as ... a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (p 218)


... mobilizing passions:

-a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional -solutions;

-the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

-dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

For more of the list see http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/fascism-2.html