Ford is chasing :melon-musk: 's business model and doing an end-run around their hordes of loyal car dealership minions. Blood in the fucking water.
This is actually a huge deal. The proletarianization of the petite bourgeois and their children is accelerating rapidly, and they will only become more fascist in response.
they will only become more fascist in response.
They were fascist already. If anything, the economic precarity they’ll experience will move a portion that otherwise would have remained fascist/liberal to the left since that’s the only side talking about immediate material improvements.
Even if they accept that women and minorities are the cause of their economic woes, the American right doesn’t even pretend to offer immediate aid. It’s no different than nebulous shit liberals promise that requires layers of insulating privilege to be motivated by.
We’d be way further along the fascism pipeline if capital had the competence/discipline to give out a crumb of property to expand the class of people who’d defend it.
If you tar them with the ‘fascist’ moniker at this stage, we may as well just claim America is already an explicitly fascist state. Which is a claim I am willing to entertain btw, I just don’t think it is super useful for understanding these economic crisis and their effects. ‘Fascism’ isn’t ‘when capitalism targets and immiserates minorities’ as that is just part of traditional capitalist structures.
American facism will likely be represented by the complete and inevitable breakdown of liberal law and order in which these people organize to attack both government and private corporations in order to preserve their private ownership. It will be funded by some corporations and opposed by others, but it will not resemble German or Italian fascism., as we have already done all the privatization that occured under those regimes through neoliberalism .
For now, most of these petite bourgeois people will be able to transfer their capital into other enterprises, such as restaurants and slums, but there is only so long before the profit margin collapses on those as well and they are driven out by larger capital entities. However, the sense of entitlement, betrayal and loss by their children will prime to move them straight into the arms of the fascist right (they will call themselves libertarians) unless they have a friend who is a leftist that can steer them in another direction. Fortunately, that might happen more and more as more and more people turn to the left, but with the complete breakdown of public education and segregation by wealth, I think this is increasingly unlikely.
