Why the Working Class is Turning to Fascism
The Working Class is Choosing Regress Over Progress, Around the World
The world has a very big problem, and it goes like this: its working classes are increasingly turning to fascism, as a way out of the trap of modernity. Let me explain what I mean — for those of you that haven’t quite connected the dots yet, though I suspect many of you have.
Take a hard look around. What do you see? Britain. America. India. The Phillippines. From corner to corner of the globe, working classes are in the midst of an historic Great Reversal. They used to be a reliable power base — political, cultural, social — for the left, or at least the center. But increasingly, they vote right. Harder and harder right.
Let’s take the example of Britain and America. In Britain, the Labour Party — it’s centre left political side — relied on a “red wall” of working class voters. That “red wall” has been totally, utterly demolished. Working class Brits these days are far, far more likely to vote conservative than they are for Labour.
But not even just conservative, in any ordinary sense. Ultra conservative. Gone are the days of Thatcher’s methodical, pragmatic cost-cutting — which, disagree with it if you like, wasn’t completely malicious, ideological, corrupt, and fanatical, to the bone — which the working class largely opposed.
Modern-day Britain, though, couldn’t be more different. It’s seen a vicious cycle of conservative leaders, each astonishingly worse than the last. The cycle began with David Cameron’s slicked-back greed, a paean to the 80s, austerity redux. But that was followed by Theresa May’s robotic Brexitism, moored in xenophobia, bigotry, rage, resentment, disinformation, lies, and outright stupidity. And that, in turn, has given way to the breathtaking corruption, sleaze, incompetence, and venality of Boris Johnson’s government. Consider the fact that his health secretary gave a multi-million pound Covid supplies contract to…the guy that ran his pub.
You’d think the working class would be upset — even enraged — by all that. Nothing could be further from the truth. Britain’s seen this vicious cycle of increasingly malicious, incompetent, nation-wrecking leaders precisely because the working class can now be counted on to vote conservative, more and harder.
Britain’s working class now looks like this — and if this takes your breath away, it should. The fisherman who voted for Brexit, has no catch, is going broke, can’t support his family — and still doesn’t grasp that Brexit was a Big Lie, and he was the mark…so he just votes even more conservative. The farmer who voted for Brexit, doesn’t have a Europe to export to anymore — exports are down by 90% in many sectors — is literally losing the farm…and retorts by voting even more conservative. The low-level professional who aspires to become middle class, yet who now has to pay for education, retirement, healthcare, and so on — and keeps on voting ever more conservative.
What on earth happened to Britain? Before I answer that question, let’s also consider the example of America.
Biden’s victory is hailed as a triumph of the working class, but it was no such thing. America’s working class did not vote for Biden as a bloc, sending a message of unity as a social group. Biden was pushed over the top by minorities from across the social stratum, Asians here, Black people there, Latinos here. The working class in America is badly, badly fractured — and by and large, it votes increasingly conservative.
Again, not just any kind of mainstream, middling conservative. But a kind of breathtaking, reactionary, ugly, grotesque fanatical conservative. You know the type by now. America’s working class votes for people like Marjorie Taylor Greene — who seems to literally stalk and harass her fellow members of Congress. Like Matt Gaetz, who’s a creep of the highest order. All that, of course, is because the white working class has become Donald Trump’s personal plaything, his cult, his own movement of extremism, violence, greed, and ruin.
If you think I’m kidding, consider the following. The poorer Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Republican. The same is more or less true in Britain now. And that trend is now spreading around the world.
That’s an incredibly troubling phenomenon. Again, you only have to think of America and Britain to understand why. How did they become failing — or full-fledged failed — states? Because of the results of the toxic vicious spiral above. Working class voters chose conservatives. But of course conservatives then put in place austerity. They privatised everything in sight and then deregulated what was left.
As a result, in America, the average person’s life simply fell apart. Instead of having public healthcare, education, retirement, and so on, because everything was to be privately provided under conservative mantra, prices rose astronomically. Until finally Americans were paying what they’re now famous for — the cost of a home for healthcare or educating a child, their life savings for medicine, and so forth.
Hence, the average American began to live and die in perpetual debt. When I say that to Americans, they give me their famous blank stare — so what? But what they don’t understand is that there’s no more troubling social indicator that exists, period. Why? Just think of the Weimar Republic. How did it turn into Nazi Germany? Because Germany couldn’t repay its debts, a massive depression set in, the average person’s life fell apart — and they turned to fascism.
Why? The Nazis blamed the woes of the average German on long-hated minorities. Jews, famously, but also Poles, gays. Anyone more powerless than the “real” German of true and pure blood. This was a famous, age-old demagogue’s trick. You see, the woes of the average German were real. Their lives had fallen apart. They were unable to pay the bills and make ends meet. What the Nazis gave them was a scapegoat.
And for giving people in such dire positions a scapegoat — people who were breaking down, mentally, socially, culturally, economically, spiritually — they were rewarded with a fanatical, cult like devotion. It wasn’t their fault — the good Germans of the working class. They could breathe a sigh of relief. And then they could erupt in snarling rage. It was the fault of those hated minorities — the woes of the good German, the working class man and woman — and all they had to do was cleanse society of those hated, powerless others.
Does any of that sound familiar? It should.
It is exactly — and I mean exactly — what’s happening in Britain and America today. Trump came along, and gave the white working class a scapegoat for its woes — Mexicans, Latinos, Jews, Muslims. The white working class responded in an explosion of fanatical adoration, which allowed Trump to build a cult. He’s used that cult of personality and the working class’s undying devotion to him to purge the Republican Party of anyone that stands in the way of still repeating the Big Lie that the election was stolen — which is now being compounded by the next Big Lie, that there was never an attempted coup.
This is the story of Weimar Germany all over again, in eerie, haunting detail. The woes of America’s working class are very, very real. It’s more or less impossible to live a decent life as a working class American now — you’re not just on the edge financially, you’re sunk, and even for sinking, you’re exploited to the bone. They can’t pay off their debts, ever, period — the social indicator that usually marks the transition to a fascist society.
And yet whose fault is this? It’s the working class’s own fault, for voting conservative to begin with. But nobody likes to be wrong — especially not when you have a demagogue casting a spell of black magic before you, and giving you a scapegoat to demonise for your woes.
Now look at Britain. Exactly the same dynamic holds true. What was Brexit really about? It was about finding a scapegoat. By then, 2015 or so, British working class life was in ruins. Britain had experienced something much like America had — its industrial base had been eviscerated, all those stable jobs were gone, towns were basically left to rot, and the people in them more or less abandoned.
Working class life became an exercise in despair and rage and ruin — just as in America, suicide rates skyrocketed.
But who was to blame for this mess? The working class itself was. It had made the crucial different in electing David Cameron, whose conservatism had put in place austerity, which, by the mid 2010s, had finished the job of destroying the working class’s optimism, faith, solidarity, trust in itself, confidence, possibilities.
Enter the next stage of the cycle of collapse. That is why the working class responded with an explosion of fanatical glee when it was given a scapegoat: Europeans. It’s hard to imagine a more ridiculous scapegoat than gentle and friendly Europeans. Working class Brits, though, were taught to genuinely begin to hate Europeans, as malign and corrupt enemies, dirty and impure aliens, job-stealing immigrants. Britain’s working class erupted in xenophobia, bigotry, rage, ugliness.
Just as in America, the magic trick of producing a scapegoat to blame for the problems it had itself created caused conservatism to soar in popularity amongst the working class. And the end result for Britain has been catastrophic — under Johnson’s government, Britain is becoming a failed state like America, a place without a functioning social contract, where the NHS is being sold off and the BBC privatised. This is going to hit the working class hardest — and yet they are as attached to Boris as America’s white working class is to Trump, with exactly the same level — if not more of senseless, mindless, thoughtless rapture.
That is why Britain and America feel like they are societies which cannot be mended now. The working class has made its choice, and its choice is for xenophobia, rage, ugliness, stupidity, hate. Give them someone to hate, and it seems, they will reward you by turning a blind eye to everything else. Their own lives falling apart. Their own exploitation and ruin. Their own dehumanisation and commodification as mere disposable cogs in a machine of profit.
As long as you give today’s working classes someone to hate, you can get away with anything, and I mean anything. Trump let hundreds of thousands of Americans needlessly die of Covid. Does anyone care? In Boris’s Britain, Brexit has destroyed the economy in a way that’s never been seen in a modern country. Nobody cares, much. Certainly not many in the working class.
Take that trick, and repeat it. And you’ve got Putin. Modi. Duterte. The rising fascists of Europe, the Le Pens and so on.
A modern society cannot function when a working class’s only political and social and cultural priority is to have someone to hate. To blame for their woes. Scapegoats, after all, are easy enough to conjure up. There are many strata below the working class, too, even poorer and more powerless — from minorities to the marginalised to refugees and so on — just pick one. But a working class whose only care in the world anymore is slaking its thirst for hate cannot be the linchpin of a functioning society. Because it will not demand a working social contract, economies in which gains are fairly shared, cultures in which lives have inherent worth and dignity, and it’s not just money that matters.
Only a working class can make a society be modern. That is one of the greatest paradoxes of all. What do we think of as the apex of modernity? Europe, Canada. Places with expansive social contracts which care for all. Working classes made that happen.
So when working classes stop making modernity happen, then the result, too, is predictable. Regress sets in. Modernity rewinds. It goes backwards in time. What does it mean to go backwards in time? Well, you begin with the 20th century’s fascism, and end up flashing back centuries at light speed, until you’re right back at feudalism and serfdom — cheering on your exploitation and dehumanisation by those “nobler” — richer, more violent, greedier, more indifferent — than you, because they give you a small position in a social order which, at least, is above someone else. They tell you are good, that your life has meaning, value, purpose — and all of that amounts to hating someone else, usually violently, for the gain of elites, mostly, who are busy taking everything you have while you’re not looking.
If you doubt me, take a hard look at America and Britain today, and tell me they’re not on that journey now.
The question is whether the rest of us join them.
Umair
May 2021
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