A Fascist Specter Is Haunting America

As Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s dismal appearance at the Republican National Convention confirmed, not everyone in the labor movement carries antibodies against the chauvinist virus. Some of Trump’s cheerleaders have drawn explicitly on this heritage of ​“pro-worker” racism, which, as historian Gabriel Winant has traced, has deep roots in Springfield itself. A recent Newsweek op-ed — the title of which, ​“Springfield Is Emblematic of America’s Immigration Death Spiral,” wouldn’t be out of place in the white supremacist outlet Stormfront—references AFL-CIO founder Samuel Gompers linking, in 1924, the collapse of fair wages for U.S. workers with the rising supply of low-cost migrant labor. Ignoring the real history of U.S. labor struggles — in which immigrant and racialized workers were most often at the vanguard — the article goes on to discuss corporations’ gleeful certainty that ​“the Haitians they’ve hired won’t ever complain about their pay nor attempt to unionize.”

Gompers — himself a Jewish immigrant from London’s East End — was a strong backer of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and coauthored the wildly racist 1902 pamphlet, ​“Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?” Trump’s much-derided debate lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are ​“eating the dogs” and cats of Springfield is a grotesque descendant of Gompers’ slander of Chinese workers: ​“As to their morality, they have no standard by which a Caucasian might judge them.” 

Now, almost 150 years later, workerist Sinophobia still pays dividends, as vice presidential nominee JD Vance made clear at the Republican convention. Promising to ​“commit to the working man” and claiming that Trump is ​“not in the pocket of big business” (Project 2025 would like a word), Vance anchored his speech in the claim that Joe Biden had allowed ​“our country” to be ​“flooded with cheap Chinese goods” and ​“cheap foreign labor.”

This reactionary framing of ​“worker” versus ​“migrant” is aimed less at the factory floor than at what politics reporter Eric Levitz has bitingly termed ​“the tyranny of the unwoke white swing voter.” The principal function of this discourse — in which, as historian David Roediger observes, ​“the accent will always fall on ​‘white,’ and the mumbling on ​‘working class’” — is ventriloquizing workers to preempt any demands for justice, redistribution and an improved social wage. More importantly, it provides a mass electoral base for the retrenchment of capital amid global economic slowdown and increasing volatility instigated by climate disaster and war.

The ability to provide a popular base for pro-business policies was at the heart of fascism’s rise to power during the interwar years. That attitude explains why, at least initially, fascism was welcomed by pioneering neoliberal thinkers like Ludwig von Mises. As different factions of capital vied for increasing portions of a diminishing pie, and authoritarian liberal governments failed to garner popular legitimacy, fascists promised a fix for a weakened state and beleaguered capital alike. Or, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it in 1935 — describing the North’s collusion in defeating Reconstruction and consolidating what poet Amiri Baraka called ​“racial fascism” in the South — it’s a ​“counterrevolution of property.”

The conundrum in the 1920s and 1930s was how to mobilize the masses in defense of domestic capital as the world market fragmented and war loomed. Then, as now, support was more reliant on a dejected middle class than struggling proletarians, despite rhetoric describing ​“native” workers or ​“producers.”

As economics and political commentator Jamie Merchant argues in his recent book, Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, there are uncanny echoes of the compounding global crises that set the stage for fascism, even as today’s ascendant authoritarians aren’t identical to the ultra-nationalist mass movements of a century ago. ​“As growth slows,” Merchant writes of our own moment, ​“it increasingly becomes a zero-sum affair, with the gains of the few only coming at the expense of the many, and in a capitalist economy this means sacrificing the livelihood of the vast majority to the need for continuing profitability.” The materialist kernel of today’s ​“Great Moving-Right Show” lies in a planetary crisis of profitability and the disintegration of the neoliberal Washington consensus.

While billionaires, multinational corporations and financial institutions are still betting on ​“progressive neoliberalism” to shore up the system, a capitalist bloc—ranging from venture capitalists like Peter Thiel to dry-cleaning chain owners — has lined up behind the Trump-Vance ticket. Meanwhile, a growing U.S. consensus, straddling capitalist interests and the national security establishment, has met the fallout from free trade with an increasingly belligerent stance toward China — and not just from rightist reactionaries. Continuing a watchword of the Trump presidency, the Biden administration first imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese electrical vehicles and is now banning car-related software and hardware originating in China, in an attempt to stave off what the U.S. auto industry calls an ​“extinction-level event.”

This trend toward economic nationalism has also manifested in continued support, including among liberals, for increasing levels of domestic fossil fuel extraction. When Vice President Kamala Harris recently reaffirmed her refusal to ban fracking, she boasted, ​“we have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil.” And, in the same answer in which she attacked Trump’s climate denialism and celebrated the support of the United Auto Workers, Harris declared the Biden administration had broken records for domestic gas production, explicitly linking this energy strategy to boosting U.S. manufacturing and opening up more auto plants.

A Republican Party whose raison d’être has long been the demolition of workers’ rights and social welfare might today pose as the nemesis of ​“Wall Street barons,” but it’s still the vehicle for an oligarchic project to eliminate all regulatory obstacles to the accumulation of private wealth. Trump’s unguarded praise for Elon Musk laying off Tesla workers is just the tip of the iceberg, while Project 2025’s plans to undermine the recent advances made by the National Labor Relations Board signal the larger right-wing plans that lie below.

As Democrats declare themselves the ​“real” made-in-the-USA party, they may easily lampoon Trump ​“the scab” and Vance the venture capitalist. But they seem both unwilling and incapable of truly fighting the economic chauvinism that fuels the MAGA brand. The Democrats, like their centrist European counterparts, have adopted the doomed tactic of talking tough on ​“illegal” migration as a way to undercut more vicious forms of xenophobia. But once migration is cast as a ​“problem,” it always redounds to the benefit of the far Right, which need not deliver ​“solutions” as long as it diverts social malaise away from structures and toward scapegoats.

Democrats may defend their record of large-scale deportations as a kinder, lesser evil, but they are deluded if they think this represents an antidote to Republicans’ electoral rallying cry of ​“mass deportation now.” All chauvinist invocations of the ​“American worker” that treat Haitian workers — or Mexican or Chinese or Salvadoran workers — as second-class ultimately play into a zero-sum politics that, however much it rants about Wall Street, will always give capitalists a pass, even letting them pose as friends of ​“the working man.”

In a world of shrinking growth, accelerating inequality, climate crisis and war, economic nationalism will always boost the far Right, in or out of office.