GBlog

Das Gerede von den Abgehängten, die zur Gefahr für Fortschritt und Freiheit werden, ist menschenverachtend. Dieses Gerede zeugt von einem Triumph des Neoliberalismus

... scapegoating poor whites keeps the conversation away from fascism’s real base: the petite bourgeoisie. This is a piece of jargon used mostly by Marxists to denote small-property owners, whose nearest equivalents these days may be the “upper middle class” or “small-business owners.” FiveThirtyEight reported last May that “the median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000,” or roughly 130 percent of the national median. Trump’s real base, the actual backbone of fascism, isn’t poor and working-class voters, but middle-class and affluent whites. Often self-employed, possessed of a retirement account and a home as a nest egg, this is the stratum taken in by Horatio Alger stories. They can envision playing the market well enough to become the next Trump. They haven’t won “big-league,” but they’ve won enough to be invested in the hierarchy they aspire to climb. If only America were made great again, they could become the haute 
bourgeoisie—the storied “1 percent.”


Trump’s most institutionally entrenched middle-class base includes police and Border Patrol unions, whom he promptly unleashed after his inauguration by allowing them free rein in enforcing his vague but terrifying immigration orders, and by appointing an attorney general who would call off investigations into troubled police departments. As wanton as their human-rights atrocities in the years leading up to the Trump era have been, law-enforcement agents are already making their earlier conduct look like a model of restraint. They are Trump’s most passionate supporters and make concrete his contempt for anyone not white, male, and rich.


Always and everywhere, this sort of petit bourgeois constitutes the core of fascism. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, his look at the German economy and ideology in the five years preceding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Wilhelm Reich argued that this was largely because of the petite bourgeoisie’s dependence on the patriarchal family unit, which he called the “central reactionary germ cell” of “the authoritarian state.” As the “heads” of their families, small-business-owning men often exploited their wives and children and enforced a patriarchal morality on them in the interest of protecting their somewhat vulnerable enterprises. This oriented the petite bourgeoisie structurally toward reactionary politics.
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