The response to this quandary by the Democratic and Republican establishments seems nearly designed to accelerate the kind of proto-fascist, white supremacist mobilizing that found its footing in the Trump era (though it was never more than dormant in any American period). Republicans pay lip service to the “nobility” and struggle of “Main Street” small businesspeople, but their true interest in tacitly or openly supporting the anti-lockdown protests is to hasten the return of wage-laborers to the warehouses, agricultural processing plants, and other large worksites whose capitalist owners depend on manual, in-person labor (and which owners contribute handsomely to their reelection coffers and employ them after they exit government service). Republicans are terrified, as well, that by extending unemployment benefits that constitute above-minimum wages in many localities, they might risk opening the eyes of exploited wage-laborers and unleashing a popular movement against the austerity regime that is their only possible offering to their bourgeois capitalist overlords.
Democrats, on the other hand (while similarly beholden to big capital), know that much of their liberal, college-educated base is employed in “knowledge” work that easily and quickly migrated to the home office. As long as they appeared to campaign for larger stimulus checks and unemployment extension, they could simultaneously assure the more proletarian, wage-laborer section of their base that they were fighting for them, however quixotically.
It should surprise no one that the combination of a right-wing demagogue in the Oval Office, widespread economic and health-related immiseration even before COVID-19, and the mass movement of Black Lives Matter taking the streets during the middle of a global pandemic, resulted in a reactionary, organized assault on a multivalent symbol of the American political establishment. Whether the Capitol building represents to these Trumpian enragés the pedophilic, Satan-worshipping Democrats who give “handouts” to a largely Black and Brown working class while their vape shops and tanning salons go belly up, or whether that Neoclassical dome means establishment Republicans who refuse to participate enthusiastically enough in the alt-right’s delusions of Kulturkampf and “white genocide,” Trump’s stolen election “big lie” was always and only a pretense.
Of course, Conservatives have always believed they could harness the anger and resentment of a downwardly mobile and racially paranoid middle class to suppress the Left. In the early 1930s elections that ultimately brought Hitler to power, the Protestant middle class was the defining demographic in his support; the unemployed and working-class overwhelmingly supported the SPD’s social-democratic ballot.
America’s relationship with its homegrown petit bourgeois is, however, more opaque on the surface (and irrevocably more complicated by the enslavement of people of African descent, and by race more broadly). Abraham Lincoln, in his First Annual Message of 1861, articulates a deceptively Marxian labor theory of value:
“Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
He was careful, however, to contrast European modes of production with a kind of hopeful American exceptionalism [emphasis mine]:
“Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class–neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the North a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families—wives, sons, and daughters—work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other.”