Every four years, America’s forgotten people become kings of the world

“There are Chamber of Commerce Republicans,” Frederick tells me. “They’re not real Republicans. These people here are Patriot Republicans”.

We’re standing on a street corner in Michigan, about 40 kilometres outside Detroit, at a small “Freedom Rally”. Every Sunday (Easter and Christmas aside), for the past five years, Frederick and a group of around two dozen others have been here, planting flags and holding signs. It’s the usual fare: an assortment of Trump placards and American flags, one blaring that the “Democrats cheated”, signs saying “Honk if you love freedom”. The honking is incessant. This is Trump country.

Michigan is among one of the key states both Republicans and Democrats are hoping to win. Credit: Bloomberg

But you can describe this place in other ways, too. It’s autoworker country. It’s home to the once glorious, now withering manufacturing sector that spans all those states you would have heard about endlessly if you’ve been following US elections: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. States whose reality is achingly captured in the common description “Rust Belt”, all steel and decay.

It’s home to a particular strand of the American working class: the people Reagan took from the Democrats in 1980. The people Obama won twice. The people Trump won in 2016, and who Biden won back in 2020. In short, the people who decide US elections.

That’s the result of America’s electoral college system, in which the president is decided by which states they can win. If this election was simply a popular national vote, these workers would be swallowed whole, effectively invisible while things were decided in places like New York and Los Angeles. Now, for a brief period every four years, they’re kings of the world.

In between that, they wield little clout at all. The machinery of commerce and popular culture largely forgets them. They make cars the world isn’t terribly interested in buying given the range of Asian and European alternatives. No one makes television shows or sings songs in which they are the heroes the way Bruce Springsteen used to. What do you get when you cross cultural alienation with economic disempowerment? Revolt.

It’s an extraordinary situation: elections being decided largely by the victims of globalisation – the very globalisation the US itself championed and engineered having won the Cold War. That’s a mighty structural contradiction, and it throws off all kinds of sparks.

“I support free trade, but not free labour,” Mark tells me at the same street-corner rally, before explaining how the World Economic Forum is a front for enforcing global communism. It’s mind-bending stuff, but somehow in this setting, it makes perfect sense.

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: nna\NPearson

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?

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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