Identifying the real agenda

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It was announced earlier today that Elon Musk has endorsed Trump for the presidency of the USA and committed around $45 million a month to supporting his campaign. It underlines, obviously, the way in which American political campaigning is dominated by money. It’s not so much that votes are directly ‘bought’ in a way which could be defined as corrupt; more a case of the candidate with the biggest war chest being able to promote his or her message more comprehensively and effectively. In theory, one of the differences between politics in the UK and the US is that the UK has stricter rules on who can donate and how much candidates and parties can spend. In practice the rules are fairly easy to circumvent, and one of the later acts of the Tories in government was to dramatically increase the limits in an attempt to give the party generally funded by the richest in society a better chance of winning. And although it’s difficult to prove a clear and unambiguous quid pro quo, ennobling people looks to have been something of a money-spinner for the Tories.

But I digress. When people talk of the nascent fascism of Trump, they are often referring to his views on issues such as migration. It’s not clear to what extent Musk agrees with much of what Trump has to say on those issues. But then, neither is it certain how much Trump believes in that stuff either, or whether he really sees it as just his way of appealing to voters whose economic interests have little in common with his own. I find it hard to believe, for instance, that someone employing as many people as Musk does, with his strange attitudes towards employment rights, isn’t at least partially dependent on the immigrants who Trump says he wants to deport. His support for Trump is probably more about their shared belief about what the nature of economic relationships in society should be. Much of what Trump says tends to avoid that, but if we judge by his actions when he was president previously, he certainly believes that American oligarchs and authoritarians – such as Musk, for instance, to say nothing of himself and his family – should be the ones for whose benefit the economy should be run. It’s probably what makes Trump so fond of Putin as well – another authoritarian who runs his country for the benefit of the richest few, including himself, and has little patience with the idea that people should be allowed to choose their leaders.

It’s not just about Trump, Musk and Putin either (and one could add Farage, Orbán, Meloni, Le Pen, and Fico as well as a number of prominent UK Tories to the list). The common thread that runs though what has become known as ‘populism’ might superficially look as though it’s about nationalism, opposition to ‘wokery’ (to use their prejudicial terminology) and migration, but scratch the surface and it’s really more about the key economic relationships in society. In all those countries where ‘the right’ is in the ascendency, the political discourse is often about the cultural fluff because they think that’s where the votes are, but the real danger lies in the underlying tendency towards authoritarianism, oligarchy, and increased concentration of wealth, undermining the rights of ‘lesser’ individuals in the process. Persuading people to vote against their own economic interests turns out not to be a difficult task. But we should have known that after Brexit.