A 17-year-old woman is called a thief and a crackhead and is tormented and humiliated on national television. Amid all these taunts the host of the programme, Jeremy Kyle, interrupts and pruriently informs viewers that she has a "reputation" and is said to have slept with 33 men. ITV says this did not violate broadcasting standards because, after all, the young woman appeared to accept "the allegation" that she has an active sex life.

Of course, the veracity or otherwise of the allegation is beside the point, as is whether the young women accepted it. The fact that it is considered an "allegation", that it invokes a stigma, is the point. This is sexist, but it is also linked to social sadism. Sadism is hardly particular to "bear-baiting" shows like Kyle's. It is an integral component of a great deal of neoliberal popular culture. In reality TV, such as Big Brother, it comes in the form of a host or a disembodied voice playing the impartial enforcer of the rules, but which is actually imposing irrational superego injunctions and distributing punishments and rewards in a totally unaccountable way. That represents one aspect of neoliberal ideology: life is a lottery, stuff just happens, there is no morality in either winning or losing, but we nonetheless accept the outcome and enjoy the suffering of the loser.

What Kyle's show offers, however, is a hit of something far more potent: moralised social sadism. At first the punitive superego seems hidden behind a staged confrontation representing a moral dilemma: a "druggie" is confronted by a "responsible elder sibling", for example. The show merely facilitates the discussion, engaging the audience's moral passions on one side or other. Except that Kyle himself willingly impersonates the punitive superego.

This has been done more playfully on, for example, the Weakest Link. But Kyle genuinely torments the wretched, evincing moral contumely for their recklessness, self-indulgence, "promiscuity" – in short, their failure to implement the middle-class cultural norms of aspiration and enterprise. His tearing at his subjects' exposed wounds – often class injuries – is the emotional crescendo of the programme.

Any potential guilt over enjoying this spectacle of cruelty is mitigated by the cognitive strategies ITV's apologia refers to: the dupe willingly entered the arena and accepted the outcome. However, the more important subtext is that she really deserved it, and here the show is very efficiently conveying existing social resentment.

In the boom time we heard a lot about the "feckless poor", the "underclass", and chavs – those in the bottom 20% of society with no mortgage, no jobs, and no future. They were scapegoated as the vector of all social ills. Even some of the working class hated them because they were perceived as representing the decline of hard work, cohesive families, cleanliness and stoical resistance. As such they were blamed for the material losses endured by the working class.

Likewise, a section of the middle class hated them because they despoiled the dream of perpetual, information-driven progress under the auspices of neoliberal globalisation. The expanding army of drug addicts, long-term unemployed and homeless people certainly incited moral outrage and demands for social reform. However, the obverse of this was paternalistic authoritarianism informed by resentment for the poor, as expressed in the demand for tough love and discipline. This registered politically in the form of workfare, asbos, and other attempts to morally regulate and punish the poor.

In the era of relative global stagnation and austerity, these old social resentments have been symbolised differently. Now the same feckless poor are held significantly responsible for state overspending, reckless borrowing and the general lack of fiscal discipline that is supposed to have brought about the meltdown. And now we have to clean up their mess.

These resentments, and the desire for cruel retribution that they entail, are not invented by TV producers; they are just canny enough to exploit them.