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The class composition of American proto-fascism

From John Ganz’s newsletter:

You can go down the list and check; SLSCO, CSI Aviation, and Barnard Construction all have a similar pattern: a regional, closely-held company that is “politically integrated,” so to speak.

If you’re familiar with the work of Melinda Cooper, this wouldn’t surprise you. In 2022, she wrote “the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned” and that “[t]he family-based capitalism that stormed the White House along with Trump stretches from the smallest of family businesses to the most rambling of dynasties, and crucially depends on the alliance between the two.” Trump, of course, comes from this social class, whose business practices are “informal,” or, more blunty put, often downright criminal.

When you add in the presence of Thiel-backed firms like Anduril, you begin to get a picture of the Trump coalition’s material basis. It’s an alliance of this family-based regional scam capital and a reactionary fraction of the tech sector that focuses on defense and security. Then you add in ICE’s function as an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob and all the illiterate influencers and, voila, you have the class composition of actually-existing American fascism, which characteristically enough, is also a racket. It’s the mob from top to bottom.

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/magas-peoples-capitalism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=112019&post_id=186731108&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=hcf3&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

There was a paper in, I think, Monthly Review years ago which I’m struggling to find which looked at mid-range capital in American politics: those firms which are family owned, regionally dominant but largely invisible from a national perspective. It made the argument these are becoming increasingly central to the American right and what Ganz says here immediately made me think back to it.

I’d add in the more feral end of American finance (including Crypto capital, which I don’t think is the same thing politically as the tech-right, though there are overlaps) and elements of the white middle class afraid of falling for whom that fear has long since become racialised.

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