Rufus Polson
Aug 26, 2017 · 3 min read

Abortion is interesting to me in that it’s not actually based in moral disagreement, although people tend to think it is. The abortion debate is fundamentally based in a factual disagreement, over an undecidable fact on which there can be no evidence: Are there souls, and do fetuses have them? If they do, abortion of even an early term fetus is murder. If they don’t (I personally think it’s ridiculous superstition) abortion of something without a functioning brain is not a very big deal.

But abortion, immigration and a number of other issues that are hot buttons for the right share an important feature: The reasons the actual people involved find these issues important are not the real reasons the issues are big. Immigration is the clearer case. Supporters of Trump may actually be interested in reducing immigration so as to reduce labour supply and increase wages. At least some of them — it always seems odd to me that the same people generally just happen to be against policies which would help blacks, who after all aren’t immigrants, for quite different no-doubt defensible reasons, and against policies that would help women, for again different no-doubt defensible reasons, and against policies that would help the indigenous, even though compared to them everyone is immigrants, and so on. So maybe a lot of them are just racists, even the ones that don’t admit it to us or themselves. But let’s take the surface reasons at face value. The thing is, the people pushing that issue are being duped. The people who turned it into an issue are Trump-like people — not Trump-like in crassness but Trump-like in money; there’s plenty of money behind the alt-right, just as there was plenty behind the Tea Party. Those people have two goals: Get people to vote for the economic right who would not otherwise have a reason to do so, and keep immigrant wages low. Those backers have no intention of reducing immigration, they just want to use pressure from the anti-immigrant constituency to make sure immigrants are considered vile and beyond the pale, to deny them rights and make them scared so they keep their heads down. Why would plutocrats back something that would do what that Trump supporter guy had in mind? It would reduce their profits. No, voters for the Trump-esque will find that there are just as many immigrants as ever, it’s just that more of them will be in jail or beaten up, and the pressure on wages will be even greater. We actually had a Prime Minister in Canada recently who deliberately pushed the anti-immigrant button, and that’s exactly what happened — just as many immigrants, just victimized harder, including a massive increase in “temporary workers” brought in to work cheap with no rights at all. Trump voters are being systematically duped on this issue. The “law and order” agenda works much the same way — it reduces wages both by putting prisoners to work as basically unpaid sweatshop labour and more generally by making particularly but not only black people into an underclass which gets paid less, whose existence then drags down wages more generally. So again, it stabs in the back the very people who are for it. Liberals aren’t able to point this kind of thing out because they have a blind spot for class issues themselves.

Similarly, abortion is a significant issue not because religious leaders give a damn about fetuses — those same religious leaders never give a hoot about kids once they’re born — but because the issue helps them gain greater control over their co-religionists, particularly the women. Again, there are issues of principle surrounding guns, but the funding comes from gun manufacturers who don’t care about any of that, they just want to sell lots of guns. Over and over, on issues pushed by the populist right, if you look at the structural underpinnings or at who gains, you will find that these saps are being fooled and taken advantage of by some wealthy, powerful elite group, such that if their “side” wins they will not get what they want and will actually be worse off.

So if you engage with the motivations and objectives of a Trump supporter, don’t forget that chances are the solutions they back are actually calculated to ultimately frustrate those objectives. Of course, Democratic elites are also using their backers and betraying them, so don’t feel too superior while you’re at it.

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