Growing up, we called them "Crackers".

In college, they were the "townies".

Later, after we (and they) grew up, they were hard-hats, or straights, or pigs.

They're the top of the underclass, the lowest tier of the elites, the underdogs who are systematically oppressed, but who feel as long as there is someone they can feel better than they can still feel a sense of superiority to somebody. Marx called them the lumpen proletariat, or is it the petit bourgeoisie? Does it matter?

After WWII, they enjoyed a brief season of freedom, prosperity and progress. But now the times are changing, and they can feel it. Polite society can no longer afford them, they are expendable. They can tell they're sliding back, losing what they've gained after so much hard work and playing by the rules. They know what's coming, their grandparents told them stories of the back time and they can feel those times are coming back with a vengeance. They realize that their kids will never be as well off as they became, briefly, for one complacent generation. And they're pissed, they need to punish someone for the coming catastrophe.

They fought for the Confederacy, they manned the gun decks of Nelson's frigates, they died on the steppes by the thousands for Napoleon in the Russian Winter, and later in Stalingrad for Hitler, they persecuted the Jews, exterminated the Red Man, enslaved the blacks and colonialized the world, but they were always just employees. They conducted genocides in Armenia, Sarajevo, Rwanda, Myanmar and Iraq. They are the exploited, and the exploitable. And they are easily divided and used against their fellow victims by those with their own, more lofty agendas. They have never learned who their real enemies are, but they have always been persuaded to blame somebody. And they always hate someone.

Fascism is the dictatorship of the middle class. Its not just here, its happening all over the world.