Example: The white supremacy theories that informed the Confederacy.

Hierarchy people don’t believe equality is possible because they don’t think people are equal.

They think the purpose of government is to allocate power and maintain the hierarchy.

When a government helps people, they think the government is taking from the “makers” and giving to the undeserving.

When people lower than them on the hierarchy demand equality, they think those people want to “replace” them.

2/

19th century America was a strict hierarchy (specifically, a patriarchy) with White men at the top and Black women at the bottom. Black women literally didn’t own their own bodies.

White women were kept out of the professions which kept them dependent on men, which gave men control over them.

19th-century laws reinforced the hierarchy.

Rape laws preserved the hierarchy and were designed to protect (white) men from false accusations, they weren't designed to protect women from attack.

3/

. . . If a woman got raped, it was seen as her fault. (She was supposed to be guarding the “goods.”) Even after the Civil War, the rape of a Black woman wasn't seen as a crime.

Even men low on the hierarchy benefitted. Think of it: They had no trouble getting a woman. Women literally couldn't say no because they had no options.

Then along came the Civil Rights and women's rights movements and the patriarchy was dismantled.

We are riding the backlash. . .

4/

If you take a long view of history and consider how long we lived in a patriarchy, you can see how rapid the recent changes have been.

The rapid changes enrage and unsettle the hierarchy people. They think liberals are destroying what was good about America. They want to go back to the “good old days” when America was “great.”)

That's why they want to outlaw abortion, make medicine expensive, and dismantle the regulatory agencies created by the New Deal.

5/