Every calamity in human history tends to have a corresponding scape goat. Often in financial busts it becomes xenophobic, race often plays a strong role, the US Civil war was as much about the dichotomy of the Northern and Souther economies as anything else, while slavery was front and centre it was the fundamental economic difference between a plantation system in the south and a rapidly industrialising economy in the north that helped to draw battle lines. In fact, your average southerner wasn’t a white slave owner, they were a poor white farmer who only made about enough to live on.
In the 1980’s Ireland blamed single mothers, I was still in Los Angles and there the popular blame was against Mexicans. The blame game is nothing new. In the early 1300’s during the Great European Famine they blamed bakers and millers, the Parisians went so far as to tie them up and publicly whip them, the real enemy in that instance was mother nature who delivered three summers of rainfall that caused crops to fail, but you can’t lash …