The Despair of the American Working Class is Real
And It’s Sowing the Seeds of American Fascism
To really grapple with the way that fascism has taken America over — or at least one side of its politics, we have to be able to hold a number of conflicting, and perhaps distasteful, ideas in our heads. They go like this.
The despair of the working class is real. The working class is the author of its own despair. Elites gave the American working class a raw deal, which they — bafflingly — eagerly accepted. And so the seeds of fascism were sown, in this Faustian bargain between elites and working class.
Let me explain all that, or at least try to.
It’s easy, these days, to mock Trumpists. Perhaps they should be mocked. They should also be understood, though — if, at least, you want to contend with why fascism has taken hold. And from that perspective, there’s one fact that matters intensely, which is all too easily forgotten or minimised.
The despair of the working class is very, very real. It isn’t just the butt of a joke. It is lethally real. I say this because there have been many, many attempts to pretend it doesn’t exist. They usually come from pundits. But pundits are ensconced in shining offices on K Street or Manhattan. They have no actual contact with the working classes they so clearly despise and obviously consider inferior.
How do we know the pain of the working class is real? Well, all you really have to do is take a drive through the Rust Belt. You’ll see conditions that are better suited to the “third world,” or maybe not even there. A child born in Bangladesh now has a higher life expectancy than one born in poor Southern counties. Mind-boggling enough for you? So let me say it again.
The despair is real. If you don’t believe your own eyes — probably the greatest trick American pundits ever pulled off — then just go ahead and look at social indicators. I just gave you one — but there are plenty, plenty more. Working class America is home to what two of America’s best social scientists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, call an epidemic of “deaths of despair.” Suicides — slow or fast — have become endemic. Related to that, of course, is the opioid epidemic. Incomes are stagnant. Town squares are either abandoned, empty, or full of wasted zombies. Happiness has fallen off a cliff. Trust has imploded. The despair of the working class is in every single social statistic there is.
So why do American pundits pretend it doesn’t exist? That’s a good question. I think the answer has to do with a kind of arrogance. American pundits genuinely seem to despise the working class, and that brings me to the second point.
The working class is the author of its own despair. Why does the American working class now live in squalor, ruin, poverty, and isolation? Because that is what it chose. America’s working class is the originator of a trend that’s now spreading, unfortunately, worldwide. Working classes flipping right, voting ultraconservative, as they do now in Britain, India, and beyond. Wherever we see this trend, we see social ruin, usually by way of fascist collapse. Why is that?
The working class in America chose austerity. A working class should — anyone should, really— choose things like expansive healthcare, affordable education, good retirement, childcare, all as social institutions. They should back safety nets and social insurance schemes and social systems to the hilt. Because, obviously, they are the ones without the resources to enjoy such things individually. It is only collectively that a working class can enjoy the basics of modern life, really. Bill Gates might be able to build his own hospital, and employ his own doctor — but Bill the steelworker can’t.
In America, though, the working class made a perverse, self-destructive choice. Unlike nearly every other working class on the globe at that point, it voted against expanding the social contract to include generous social systems, public institutions, and collective forms of insurance or action. Not just once, as a protest. But systemically, predictably, consistently. Furiously, angrily, even hatefully. For about half a century, beginning with the Reagan Revolution, until now, when the trend continues.
The end result was that the working class itself was left without the things it needed most, public institutions, social systems, forms of collective insurance. And that ignited a rapid, catastrophic plunge into poverty, ruin, and shame — despair.
That’s why pundits look down on America’s working class. At least if you ask me. “Those idiots deserve what they chose!” The patrician noses of America’s elites sniff haughtily. “We’d never choose that — we’re smarter than they are!!” And yet they miss a crucial wrinkle in this story — one that makes the story not a comedy, but a tragedy.
Why did America’s working class take the perverse position that would lead to its own self-destruction — against any kind of social investment or public institution or collective insurance or action? Because that is what it was swindled into believing.
You might think “swindled” is a strong word, but let me make the case. Around the time of the Reagan Revolution, America’s intellectuals — I use the word lightly — began to make a certain case. That everything in the economy and society should be private, and nothing should be public. No need for a public retirement, healthcare, childcare system — any kind of system at all. No need for any kind of collective action or insurance. No, everything should be private. From hospitals to schools to universities to childcare to parks to toll roads.
Why? The idea was that all this would have three positive effects. One, it would be cheaper — and so the working class would save money, a lot of it, that they needed. Two, it would be morally right — it would lead to higher levels of virtue, because anybody that couldn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps must be lazy, foolish, indolent, or weak. And three, it would be politically optimal — that is, if everything in society was reduced to a market transaction, then the long arm of government wouldn’t need to “interfere” with “freedom.”
Now, the thing to note is that all this was theoretical. It wasn’t real. It was just… guessing… by a bunch of dudes in suits with fancy titles. And those dudes in suit were making bad guesses, even at the time.
Why? Because even then — this was 1980 or so — Canada and Europe were already beginning to pull ahead of America. Standards of living were rising every year, and life was good. But those nations had significant social systems, collective forms of insurance and action, strong unions, expansive social contracts. There was already beginning to be plenty of proof that America’s elites were leading the country in exactly the wrong direction. They should have known it — just by glancing at the world. So why didn’t they? Well, it was easier not to acknowledge it. To pander. Underlying the ideas of individualism and selfishness and ugliness and materialism that were sold to the working class was a strong undercurrent of bigotry and racism, America’s original sin.
Let me now tie up all those threads.
America’s working class was the subject of a massive social experiment. One every bit as total as the Soviet Union’s. In the Soviet Union, everything was to be collectivised. In America, everything was to be privatized. The difference, though, is that Soviets knew they were part of a social experiment. America’s working class still hasn’t quite figured it out.
This grand experiment conducted on America’s working class was sold to it. They were told, time and again, that being selfish, greedy, competitive, angry, cruel, aggressive, and hostile — all that was virtuous, right, economically efficient, socially optimal. And after a time, they came to believe it. America’s working class bought into the social experiment that was being conducted upon it, to the point that nobody much in America even really knows they’ve been lab rats for one of history’s most massive socio-economic experiments.
The problem is that the experiment failed. These ideas and values — which were obviously code for bigotry and prejudice, basically allowing the white working class to breathe a sigh of relief, and think “Phew, I don’t have to pay for those peoples’ school, education, healthcare, retirement — they used to be my granddaddy’s slaves!!” — had come to dominate amongst the working class: aggression, selfishness, rage, indifference, stupidity. That is who they had been trained to be. But the experiment wasn’t working. The country wasn’t growing more prosperous. It was sinking, falling apart, and the working class was the first to drown.
Now let’s come back to today. Fascism is rising for these reasons, which seem contradictory at first glance. The despair of the working class is real. The working class is the author of its own despair. Elites sold the working class a Faustian bargain which they accepted — which was to sink them both.
But if you think about those a little more carefully, they begin to make perfect sense. The working class in America was convinced that the social experiment that was being conducted on it — aggression and cruelty and selfishness as arch-values, in a society where the endless competition and quest for acquisitiveness never ended, and so everyone was an adversary, never a friend or ally — was for the best. So convinced, in fact, that today, the working class in America doesn’t even have a vestigial memory, really, that there ever was a social experiment — or a past before it, where the working class itself demanded unions, social contracts, guarantees, public institutions.
The social experiment conducted by elites on America’s working class produced a kind of seismic shift in its consciousness. A kind of Stockholm syndrome developed. The working class believed so intensely in the values and ideas that it had been sold — individualism, aggression, competition, that if a person wasn’t enough this way, that they were at fault — that as they began to sink into decline and ruin, they blamed themselves. Hence, the epidemic of “deaths of despair.” Then, coming to their senses a little they blamed elites — for selling them a false bill of goods: these were the seeds of Trumpism. And Trump turned right around and blamed minorities for the woes of the white working class — Mexicans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, anyone different.
All this was going on — and is going on — because the experiment elites conducted on the working class failed in a material way, but it succeeded in one crucial, subtler way: it altered the mentality, values, mindset, attitudes of the working class permanently, and left them victims of a Darwinian-Nietzschean mindset where the strong should survive and the weak deserve to perish. America’s working class is now ruthlessly Darwinian-Nietzschean. It believes in the idea that the strong prove their strength by dominating the weak — and so they look for those even weaker to hate, scapegoat, subjugate, cleanse away. But they are only repeating the mantra, the ideology, that elites taught them in the first place.
That is why fascism is happening in America, and why it will continue to happen. Set in motion a grand social experiment in turning a whole society ultra-competitive, individualistic, materialistic, selfish, greedy, hostile, aggressive — in believing the world is divided into weak and strong…set that in motion in a society already deep in the mire of centuries of hatred…and when the experiment fails, watch out. You will have a bunch of test subjects who have been failed, but still believe in the experiment.
That’s where America is today. It’s working class, which has flipped hard to Trumpism, genuinely, desperately, foolishly believes in the experiment that was conducted on it by elites — that if it’s just a little meaner, harder, tougher, crueller, more selfish, indifferent, greedy, then finally, finally, it will have its moment. After all, that’s what elites have been preaching to it all its life. The working class believes in the failed experiment of totalitarian, predatory capitalism, of every person for themselves, of every social group trying to claw its way above every other, in pulling the weak down, to prove your own strenght — but the experiment is over. It failed. And all that’s left in the ashes is fascism.
Umair
May 2021