Keeping the working class poor and needy

I have believed for a long time that a driving force behind the conservative agenda has been to keep a poverty-stricken lower class to provide for the betterment of the wealthy at a low cost. How else to explain the demand that abortion be illegal, that schools be dismantled, that social security and health services be denied to the poor, that food stamps be eliminated, that housing prices be so expensive that the poor have no place to live, and on and on and on.