See also: social dominance theory. [...] (More on SDT)

Not nearly all such people are outright sadistic and power-hungry, but those who are can spin complex ideological rationalizations that push the "overton window" and allow the "good" bourgeois to be complicit with a cruel and unjust system. See e.g. the "Reagan revolution" in America and the myth of the "welfare queen" that's a 3-for-1 package of racism, classism and sexism. I've read a bit about how it has been fuelling a "fuck you, got mine" attitude in poor people one step above the underclass; the system hasn't actually been kind to a white/male/lower-middle-class stratum, but it has given them someone to feel superior to. It's very similar to how the ideologues of the Confederacy explicitly advocated giving poor white men supreme rule over their household as a means of racial solidarity across the class divide. [...] False equivalence. Of course, any movement can degrade into an authoritarian-populist, four-legs-good-two-legs-bad version, given a vicious political atmosphere and polarized underlying worldviews, but... it happens to dominant/conservative ideologies, too! The dominant group just doesn't notice the resulting violence and victimization because from its privileged position it can afford an illusion of social peace. If we agree that it's a danger of political processes in general rather than of specific movements, could we stop sneaking in implicit arguments that a particular ideology is safe from viciousness and indiscriminatory aggression?