It's been noted before that Jim Crow laws were much more about keeping poor whites and blacks from identifying along economic lines, than racism. Among others, Bob Dylan has commented on it, growing up in the music industry. Divide and conquer.

The real question isn't simply about class conflicts, but the mechanisms that have been constructed around them.

Consider that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures and the Romans adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion around the time the Empire was solidifying and remnants of the Republic were finally fading. That top down father figure is a handy device, when it comes to validating rule from above. When the West went back to more broad based political systems, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.

Ideals are not absolutes and assuming them to be only creates a very conflicted society.

Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, rather than an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.

I could go on about the ways society is broken up into controllable pieces, but it would get rather long.

Take rugged individualism, for instance. The effect is that we are socially isolated and dependent on those political and economic structures, as the networks connecting us to each other.

https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/parsing-the-zombie-apocalypse-2e4413cefef3