This story is not at all surprising. Harley-Davidson, an American cultural icon, made 350 of its employees in Kansas City, Missouri, redundant after receiving a huge, supposedly job-stimulating tax break from the GOP and announcing a massive stock buyback, which will upload profits and cash transferred from the public purse directly to its shareholders. (It’s not likely that those who lost their jobs own shares in the company.)
Harley-Davidson is also planning a bit of “wage arbitrage” (all that comparative advantage amounts to) by opening a plant in Thailand. In this way, it will plug into the defining circuit of the global economy: Goods manufactured in a low-income country are exported to one with much higher wages, but whose leading job sector consists of unproductive (Adam Smith’s sterile) workers (they distribute or sell or service the imported cheap products), and whose capital markets are dominated by a tiny upper class that draws more and more of its income from financial assets with values inflated by speculation, the public purse (quantitative easing), and buybacks.
You will not be surprised to learn that a white male employee laid off at the Harley-Davidson factory still supports the white man he voted for in the 2016 presidential election—Donald Trump—despite being a direct victim of this white man’s pro-business and anti-labor policies. Let’s think about this for a moment. You wont find a Trump voter in the whole of America who is in a better position to see the light (this is class warfare) and change their mind (I’m going to vote for someone who stands up for the working class) than this now-unemployed Harley-Davidson man. But no, he still wants Trump to stay in power and to make his life worse. How do we explain this mind-fuck? I believe we must begin with a new essay by the celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty: “Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict” (PDF here).
Let’s go right to the take-home of Piketty’s essay. By examining voting records in France, the US, and the UK, he determined that all three countries are converging on a post-crash political order that is essentially a two-party system dominated by those with a high education (the left) and those with a high income (the right). This is something new because in all three countries, high-education white voters used to vote like high-income white voters (for right-wing candidates), and low-education and low-income whites voters supported the left. The Democratic Party in the US, for example, is increasingly supported by high-education white voters; the same is true, but to a lesser extent for historic reasons, for the Labor Party in the UK.
Piketty also notes that minorities (usually people of color) of all classes and incomes in the UK, the US, and France are aligned with the high-education voters. But what about the standard white working-class voters in these countries? Who are they aligned with? The answer becomes visible if the voting bodies in these countries are broken into four parts: egalitarian globalists and pro-rich globalists on one side, and pro-rich nativists and pro-poor nativists on the other. A close examination is not required to see that the last two will become the road to a fascism that’s paved by an insurmountable capitalist crisis.
For Piketty, the high-education and high-income political order appear to be dissolving into a globalist party that’s opposed to a nativist one. This explains why the left and, say, the e-commerce corporation Amazon, are one on the issue of Trump’s racist Muslim ban. Though leftist globalism is not defined by the free flow of capital, and pro-rich globalism is (everyone must participate in the market), they see eye-to-eye when it comes to basic civil rights (the right to be human with the former; the right to buy and sell with the latter). What this means is that the top Western political systems in the world have in their futures a system that has on one side anti-fascists and the other fascists. A working-class white man or woman who continues to support a leader whose entire goal is to weaken and break the working classes as a whole must have accepted a working-class nativism as his or her final political solution. But why?
The answer is not hard to see. With fascism, a poor person surrenders their human morality (make me equal to you) for the opportunity to participate in the robbery (primitive accumulation, dispossession) that regenerates unchecked capitalist accumulation. It has no inspiration that’s higher than obtaining this authorization to rob the other. Fascism is the adoption of the weltanschauung of those with power—me, the bed, the home, the job, the market as moments in the struggle for survival, the red teeth and claws—by the powerless. This is the promise that Trump and his kind keep making to those who have lost everything: You can still be just like me. I will give you the permission to do exactly as I do.
