October 17, 2024
State racism in the name of workers’ interests.”
That’s not the only response to the perennial question “What
is fascism?” — but it is a
compelling one. Now that mass deportation — starting with
the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio — has joined
sealed borders and “drill,
baby, drill” as keystones of the Republican Party
platform, it’s undeniable that the GOP’s
much-ballyhooed effort to rebrand as the “party of workers”
is inseparable from its assault on the rights and safety of immigrants. While
the Trump campaign has run on protective tariffs, and some MAGA Republicans
have praised the antitrust work of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan,
the GOP’s core pitch remains simpler and more powerful: assuaging the fears of
the “American
worker” by ramping up terror against their “non-
American” peers.
People hold signs that read "Mass Deportation Now!" on the third
day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July
17, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
As Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s dismal
appearance at the Republican National Convention confirmed, not everyone in the
labor movement carries antibodies against the chauvinist virus. Some of Trump’s
cheerleaders have drawn explicitly on this heritage of “pro-worker”
racism, which, as historian Gabriel Winant has traced, has deep roots in
Springfield itself. A recent Newsweek op-ed — the title of
which, “Springfield
Is Emblematic of America’s Immigration Death Spiral,”
wouldn’t be out of place in the white
supremacist outlet Stormfront—references AFL-CIO founder Samuel Gompers
linking, in 1924, the collapse of fair wages for U.S. workers with the rising
supply of low-cost migrant labor. Ignoring the real history of U.S. labor
struggles — in which
immigrant and racialized workers were most often at the vanguard — the article goes
on to discuss corporations’ gleeful
certainty that “the
Haitians they’ve hired won’t
ever complain about their pay nor attempt to unionize.”
Gompers — himself a Jewish
immigrant from London’s East End — was a strong
backer of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and coauthored the wildly racist 1902
pamphlet, “Some
Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic
Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?” Trump’s
much-derided debate lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating
the dogs” and cats of Springfield is a grotesque
descendant of Gompers’ slander of Chinese workers: “As
to their morality, they have no standard by which a Caucasian might judge
them.”
Now, almost 150 years later, workerist Sinophobia
still pays dividends, as vice presidential nominee JD Vance made clear at the
Republican convention. Promising to “commit to the
working man” and claiming that Trump is “not
in the pocket of big business” (Project 2025
would like a word), Vance anchored his speech in the claim that Joe Biden had
allowed “our
country” to be “flooded with
cheap Chinese goods” and “cheap foreign
labor.”
This reactionary framing of “worker”
versus “migrant”
is aimed less at the factory floor than at what politics reporter Eric Levitz
has bitingly termed “the
tyranny of the unwoke white swing voter.” The principal
function of this discourse — in which, as historian David Roediger
observes, “the
accent will always fall on ‘white,’ and the
mumbling on ‘working
class’” — is
ventriloquizing workers to preempt any demands for justice, redistribution and
an improved social wage. More importantly, it provides a mass electoral base
for the retrenchment of capital amid global economic slowdown and increasing
volatility instigated by climate disaster and war.
The ability to provide a popular base for
pro-business policies was at the heart of fascism’s rise to power during the
interwar years. That attitude explains why, at least initially, fascism was
welcomed by pioneering neoliberal thinkers like Ludwig von Mises. As different
factions of capital vied for increasing portions of a diminishing pie, and
authoritarian liberal governments failed to garner popular legitimacy, fascists
promised a fix for a weakened state and beleaguered capital alike. Or, as W.E.B.
Du Bois put it in 1935 — describing the
North’s collusion in defeating Reconstruction
and consolidating what poet Amiri Baraka called “racial fascism”
in the South — it’s
a “counterrevolution
of property.”
The conundrum in the 1920s and 1930s was how to
mobilize the masses in defense of domestic capital as the world market
fragmented and war loomed. Then, as now, support was more reliant on a dejected
middle class than struggling proletarians, despite rhetoric describing “native”
workers or “producers.”
As economics and political commentator Jamie
Merchant argues in his recent book, Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global
Decline, there are uncanny echoes of the compounding global crises that set the
stage for fascism, even as today’s ascendant authoritarians aren’t identical to
the ultra-nationalist mass movements of a century ago. “As
growth slows,” Merchant writes of our own moment, “it
increasingly becomes a zero-sum affair, with the gains of the few only coming
at the expense of the many, and in a capitalist economy this means sacrificing
the livelihood of the vast majority to the need for continuing profitability.”
The materialist kernel of today’s “Great
Moving-Right Show” lies in a planetary crisis of
profitability and the disintegration of the neoliberal Washington consensus.
While billionaires, multinational corporations and
financial institutions are still betting on “progressive
neoliberalism” to shore up the system, a capitalist
bloc—ranging from venture capitalists like
Peter Thiel to dry-cleaning chain owners — has lined up
behind the Trump-Vance ticket. Meanwhile, a growing U.S. consensus, straddling
capitalist interests and the national security establishment, has met the
fallout from free trade with an increasingly belligerent stance toward China — and not just
from rightist reactionaries. Continuing a watchword of the Trump presidency,
the Biden administration first imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese electrical
vehicles and is now banning car-related software and hardware originating in
China, in an attempt to stave off what the U.S. auto industry calls an “extinction-level
event.”
This trend toward economic nationalism has also
manifested in continued support, including among liberals, for increasing
levels of domestic fossil fuel extraction. When Vice President Kamala Harris
recently reaffirmed her refusal to ban fracking, she boasted, “we
have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of
an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil.”
And, in the same answer in which she attacked Trump’s
climate denialism and celebrated the support of the United Auto Workers, Harris
declared the Biden administration had broken records for domestic gas
production, explicitly linking this energy strategy to boosting U.S.
manufacturing and opening up more auto plants.
A Republican Party whose raison d’être has long been
the demolition of workers’ rights and social welfare might today pose as the
nemesis of “Wall
Street barons,” but it’s still the
vehicle for an oligarchic project to eliminate all regulatory obstacles to the
accumulation of private wealth. Trump’s unguarded
praise for Elon Musk laying off Tesla workers is just the tip of the iceberg,
while Project 2025’s plans to undermine the recent advances
made by the National Labor Relations Board signal the larger right-wing plans
that lie below.
As Democrats declare themselves the “real”
made-in-the-USA party, they may easily lampoon Trump “the
scab” and Vance the venture capitalist. But
they seem both unwilling and incapable of truly fighting the economic
chauvinism that fuels the MAGA brand. The Democrats, like their centrist
European counterparts, have adopted the doomed tactic of talking tough on “illegal”
migration as a way to undercut more vicious forms of xenophobia. But once
migration is cast as a “problem,”
it always redounds to the benefit of the far Right, which need not deliver “solutions”
as long as it diverts social malaise away from structures and toward
scapegoats.
Democrats may defend their record of large-scale
deportations as a kinder, lesser evil, but they are deluded if they think this
represents an antidote to Republicans’ electoral rallying cry of “mass
deportation now.” All chauvinist invocations of the “American
worker” that treat Haitian workers — or Mexican or
Chinese or Salvadoran workers — as second-class ultimately play into a
zero-sum politics that, however much it rants about Wall Street, will always
give capitalists a pass, even letting them pose as friends of “the
working man.”
In a world of shrinking growth, accelerating
inequality, climate crisis and war, economic nationalism will always boost the
far Right, in or out of office.
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