There is a long and storied tradition of members of lower classes being employed in jobs enforcing the will of the powerful against members of other lower classes.
Hey, it puts food on the table, and my kids are hungry. And it keeps the debt collector at bay.
The implied expectation of class / race / ethnic / ... loyalty is fundamentally flawed, though. I'm friends with people of many groups who are unlike me, and conversely, there are many people in my demographic whom I dislike. Not all [insert race][insert socioeconomic class][insert religion][insert ethnicity][insert career] people are the same, and we don't want segregation.
This is a particularly nasty cross-class alliance, but at the core, we WANT cross-class alliances.
> Hey, it puts food on the table, and my kids are hungry. And it keeps the debt collector at bay.
So does shovelling Jews into gas ovens and pulling out people's fingernails. I guess it just depends on where your internal "Do Not Cross" moral line lies.
I think you've made my point for me. If moral lines are easy enough to move that people will "shovel Jews into gas ovens and pull out people's fingernails," it's not hard to find people more than glad to cross class lines to enforce laws, whether those laws are just or corrupt (and most laws are in the middle).
At the core, there are few or no internal "Do Not Cross" moral lines. Moral lines are first culturally-situated, and second, individually-situated.
Incentive structures set by the ruling class drive a huge part of culture. Media does too. There are a lot of tools to manipulate culture, and they're actively (and increasingly scientifically) used. At the end of a Roman Triumph -- a big celebration -- captured war prisoners would be strangled in front of an audience. In that culture, that was okay.
From there, you need to find just a few people, either divided, disgruntled, or of low moral character. If I want to keep poor Southern whites in-line in 1870, I can find blacks who hate them. If I want to keep poor Southern blacks in-line, I find poor Southern whites. There, we had a nice 50/50 split, but there will always be a few.
The expectation that "it's the turncoats fault" isn't a productive one. You need to fix systems, not individuals (with incentive structures around individuals are part of systems, of course).
No. Systems are not just people. I know many organizations which have really good people, but completely toxic cultures due to systems.
Systems are things like checks-and-balances, incentive structures, power structures, organizational design, and conflict resolution structures.
The US didn't work better than Soviet Russia because it had better people, much as Americans would like to believe themselves superior. It worked better because it had better institutions, starting with a very well-drafted Constitution.
Given a 2020 context, those structures are starting to function less well. You won't fix them by asking politicians to behave better; you need to address the structural issues.
People make systems. Look to the people at the top to understand the foundation of culture and people-systems. People made principles as foundations for better systems.
But so often it happens that the working class and the owning class ally to reduce the power of the working class. They rarely seem to ally against members of the owning class.
At the battle of Plataea during the Second Greco-Persian War, a number of Greek city-states fought on the Persian side. Why? Because the Persians were so big and powerful they were surely going to win.
Because the owning class have really good PR(you can also be like us if you just work hard enough) and can afford better physical segregation and legal protection against the working class.
The implied expectation of class / race / ethnic / ... loyalty is fundamentally flawed, though. I'm friends with people of many groups who are unlike me, and conversely, there are many people in my demographic whom I dislike. Not all [insert race][insert socioeconomic class][insert religion][insert ethnicity][insert career] people are the same, and we don't want segregation.
This is a particularly nasty cross-class alliance, but at the core, we WANT cross-class alliances.