Mark can’t disavow capitalism because that would be to disavow the soul of America, and these are patriots, after all. But he therefore cannot accept that free trade means precisely that labour goes to where it costs the least.
Kamala Harris at a rally in the Michigan college town of Ann Arbor. Democrats are relying on young voters to turn out.Credit: nnaNPearson
So, he frames this instead as companies being allowed to behave immorally by underpaying workers in foreign countries. You can think of tariffs, then, as a fine for exploitation. If that sounds a bit like a left-wing critique, that’s because for the most part, it is. The difference is that for people like Mark the failure isn’t one of capitalism, but ethics and culture. Companies don’t pay workers peanuts because that’s the market rate in poorer countries, they do it because they’ve lost their moral compass. “Christian capitalism” he says, has given way to “atheist capitalism” in America, shorn of all its moral constraints.
In this way, a dying economic system becomes connected to a dying culture, in which everyone from Democrats, the Chamber of Commerce and even these autoworkers’ own union have been complicit, one and the same. And when you see it that way, you see an America that has fully, top to bottom, betrayed its own people. An America that at every level of its culture and party politics was only too happy to cut these people loose. It begins to feel like a conspiracy.
So when Frederick and Mark start seamlessly weaving the (repeatedly disproved) 2020 “stolen election” theory into their discourse, I begin to see how it fits into something much bigger. To look them in the eye is to see that’s it not an affectation or a mere talking point: they mean it from the bottom of their souls. It’s as clear a fact to them as gravity, the denial of which is every bit as crazy.
For fomenting this, Trump is hugely culpable. But I can’t demonise these people for believing it. The point is that it’s easy for them to believe because it chimes so clearly with their experience of America, where forces beyond their control, in which they have no say, and which don’t care for them, can profoundly reshape their lives. From that vantage point, the fix is in, and has been for decades. Why wouldn’t you believe an election would be fixed to maintain that?
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That’s how deep this crisis goes. If the stolen election canard was some isolated claim, it could well end with Trump. The problem is that it expresses something that was already there, and had been building for decades: a profound loss of faith in institutions; in the very things that underwrite American democracy. And no democracy can survive if that sentiment reaches a critical mass. In that context, so much seems at stake in a place like Michigan.
This disillusioned bloc isn’t about to disappear; the question is whether or not it grows. And this year, the conditions are ripe. Incumbents don’t tend to survive cost-of-living crises, and manufacturing workers fearing for their jobs are exactly who you might expect to revolt. If they don’t, if the number sticking with their union’s view of things holds, then perhaps a ceiling has been reached.
But if they shift once more, there’s no guarantee it will be the last time. And it’s then just a matter of how explosively all these contradictions play out.
Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.
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