Stop blaming working class people for fascism

One of the laziest liberal conceits is that the core of Trumpism is fundamentally people who one might snobbishly refer to as white trash. 

How often do you hear someone from the professional or pundit classes bemoan "poorer people voting against their interests"? The clear implication is they are too stupid to know they're being screwed. 

Blaming poorer people for those doing them harm is not simply lazy, it's incredibly damaging and helps the agents of fascism.

The core of Trumpism is not people working three jobs to barely make ends meet. 

 

The core of Trumpism is people so comfortable they can take several days off, buy a plane ticket, spend money to buy tactical gear and go to Washington, DC to play Rambo. 

Trumpism, like Trump himself, is not the workers; it's the bosses.

Exit polls reveal that those who made less than $100,000 voted for Biden by a margin of 13 points. Those who made under $50,000 voted for Biden by an 11 point margin. Those who made more than $100,000 voted for Trump by a margin of 12 points. 

Margins in US House races were almost identical.

These were much higher margins than the relatively small difference in voting between those with a college degree and those without.

Hannah Arrendt described the working class as "the only class in Germany which…had never been wholeheartedly Nazi.” 

This ties in to a recent article in The Nation about a 40 year old book Who Voted for Hitler?

The book exams data in German elections in the 1920s and 1930s to chart the Nazi Party's rise from a marginal faction to seizing control of the country.

The article states: Three-quarters of a century have passed now since Hitler came to power in Germany, leaving in place two enduring myths about how it happened. One claims that Hitler’s rise was born of the frustrations of the middle class in post-WWI Germany. The other holds that Hitler’s support came from the disenfranchised and uneducated working and out-of-work poor. But neither myth is accurate, and both are based on hearsay—half-truths people are comfortable with, rather than hard truths that emerge from the data.

Hitler, like Trump, never came close to enjoying majority support in any election. The book's author finds that the Nazis were a party that organized people, especially in rural communities; that it was largely a Protestant phenomenon; and that it coincided with an with an inability and disinterest on the part of the major parties of the left to organize.

The Democrats have largely abandoned rural America, ceding it to a Republican monopoly. This has played perfectly into Trump's martyr scam.

The failure of the complacent mainstream parties in Weimar Germany to respond to changing social conditions led to the rise of extremism and bolstered the demand for a strongman, someone the public might describe as "He may be crude, but he's a man of action." Sound familiar?

The press of the time may not have all supported the Nazis but they did not condemn them outright either, treating them more as rascals whose heart was in the right place.

The book adds: As for the violence, these newspapers provided an easy excuse: it was a justified response to the provocations or attacks that had come first from the other side.

Cue the old objectivity vs neutrality debate in journalism - sometimes called "both sides-ism" - an abject failure in the face of unvarnished evil.

The data consistently showed below-average support for Hitler in working-class districts, and higher support in upper-middle-class and wealthy ones. There were pockets of rabid support for the Nazis in rural areas.

Protecting the elites from the Communist boogeyman was central to the Nazi sales pitch, perhaps explaining why several members of the deposed Kaiser's family joined the party.

Eventually, the traditional conservative parties surrendered to the Nazi cult: one after another, the traditional conservative parties...  began in the late 1920s and early ’30s, as the worldwide economic depression took its toll, to form alliances with the Nazis.

The article concludes that the greatest danger with a movement like the one embodied by Hitler’s militant National Socialists does not stem from the movement itself, always a minority, but rather within the larger society and its halfhearted disavowal of the Nazis, together with a kind of secret brainwashing of the educated and well-off middle class that is vulnerable precisely because they think they aren’t.

Fascism is not for the unwashed masses. It's the last gasp rage of elites who feel their privilege threatened.

But fascism  needs just enough minoritarian support from non-elites to gain a critical mass. And that's precisely why blaming the poor for their own oppression is catastrophically counterproductive for us all. 

The Nazis' first putsch failed. Their second didn't.