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FORD AND MUSK. THEY MADE CARS. THEY BACKED FASCISTS.  
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Harold Meyerson
January 6, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Each age’s premier industrialist has had appalling politics _

Elon Musk attends the opening of the Tesla Gigafactory
Berlin-Brandenburg, March 22, 2022., Patrick
Pleul/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

 

Time was when a comparison of Henry Ford and Elon Musk would have
focused on their respective roles in revolutionizing automaking. Ford
manufactured the first cars priced at levels that enabled millions of
people to purchase them, with the first factories that could
mass-produce such products. Musk manufactured the first electric cars
that, while not yet affordable to a truly mass market, were
nonetheless built in sufficient quantity to give electric cars a
substantial foothold in an economy slowly and tortuously turning away
from fossil fuels.

Would that were still the only way in which the two were comparable.
Unfortunately, Musk has since joined Ford as the most prominent
American employer of his era implacably opposed to unions. He also is
recapitulating Ford’s backing of America First politicos while
simultaneously committing major resources to manufacturing in a nation
(for Ford, Germany; for Musk, China) posing the greatest threat to
liberal democracies. Worse yet, Ford’s vociferous antisemitism
helped to fuel the rise of German Nazism, while Musk has now gone all
in
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to promote the rise of Germany’s neo-Nazis, who constitute much of
the base of the AfD, which, to the alarm of millions of Germans, may
finish second in that nation’s upcoming elections.

In different ways, Ford and Musk both transformed much of American
life. Ford’s assembly-line mass production, which he began in 1913,
converted the nation to a car culture over the next several decades.
First, however, he had to create a stable workforce in his factory,
since conditions were so dismal and the pay so low that employee
turnover posed a challenge he had to overcome. In 1915, he was
persuaded to raise worker pay to what was then an unheard-of $5 a day.
Turnover dropped, production speed and volume increased, and the
increased pay—which other companies eventually felt compelled to
match—created a working class that could actually afford to buy the
cars and other products they produced (though buying homes remained
out of reach for many until the mass production industries were
unionized in the 1930s and ’40s). Economic historians came to
describe this mass production/mass consumption system as
“Fordism.”

There isn’t yet a system we could call Muskism; indeed, Muskism
suggests chaos more than system. Musk, however, has extended his chops
to companies (SpaceX, Starlink) in multiple industries, as Ford was
never eager to do (he had to be persuaded, as World War II came to
America, to build airplanes). Industrially, Musk, to use philosopher
Isaiah Berlin’s typologies
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(who knows many things) while Ford was a hedgehog (who knows one big
thing).

The problems with Ford and Musk concern not what they knew, but what
they believed. Ford may have been the first industrialist to raise pay
levels, but he was the last major industrialist in the years preceding
our entry into World War II to vehemently, and violently, oppose
unionization. While sit-down strikes waged by the United Auto Workers
compelled General Motors and Chrysler to recognize their workers’
union in 1937, Ford used his “Service Department”—3,000 violent
ex-cons and industrial spies—to suppress all attempts at
unionization. When organizers from the UAW local headed by future UAW
President Walter Reuther marched to Ford’s giant River Rouge factory
in 1937, they were beaten by Ford’s thugs
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that newspaper photographers recorded and sent across the nation. It
was only in 1941, by which time the UAW had so aligned itself with
Black Detroit workers by championing civil rights that Ford could no
longer count on them to cross picket lines, and by which time Ford’s
Service Department had become too notorious to the general public to
unleash, that the UAW succeeded in unionizing Ford.

Musk has tweeted his way into Germany’s parliamentary election,
arguing that “only the AfD can save Germany.”

Musk hasn’t been compelled to hire thugs to clobber union
organizers, but he’s hired law firms—the thugs’ latter-day
equivalent—to effectively do the same. That’s standard management
practice in today’s C-suites, of course, but Musk still stands out
by having proclaimed [[link removed]],
“I disagree with the idea of unions” in an interview with _The New
York Times_’ DealBook. Musk has since put that disagreement into
action by having SpaceX file suit against the National Labor Relations
Board, which had alleged two instances of the company using illegal
unfair labor practices. The suit contends that the NLRB itself is
unconstitutional because its administrative courts rule on such
cases—though all such rulings can be, and frequently are, then
challenged in federal courts. In 1937, the Supreme Court upheld the
constitutionality of the NLRB, which has ruled for and against
employers and unions for the subsequent 87 years without facing a
relitigation of its constitutionality. That, apparently, has not
deterred Musk, nor has he been deterred from opposing the unionization
of 50 Tesla mechanics in Sweden, where 90 percent of the workforce is
unionized and where unions are foundational to the nation’s social
contract.

In the same interview [[link removed]] in
which Musk voiced his opposition to the very idea of unions, he also
marveled at the level of EV consumption in China, making clear that
the Chinese market was key to Tesla’s future, and therefore that
Tesla’s continued manufacturing presence in China was key as well.
Musk has worked hard to cultivate good relationships with China’s
leaders, even as Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and a fair number
of non-Republicans believe China poses a threat to the American
economy and (chiefly among those non-Republicans) liberal democracy
generally.

In this, too, Musk is following Ford’s lead. During the 1920s, when
the Soviets’ New Economic Policy encouraged capitalist investment in
the still-new USSR, Ford opened a major plant in Russia. In the 1930s,
Hitler’s coming to power in Germany didn’t convince Ford that he
should shut his factories there. Indeed, the company continued to
produce and expand there even after World War II had begun (two years
before the U.S. entered the fray at Pearl Harbor). Ford’s son Edsel
even attended a dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria in 1940 to
celebrate the fall of France to Hitler’s armies.

Which brings us to Ford’s most notorious activities: his promotion
of antisemitism, which during his lifetime was exceeded only by the
Nazis. In 1920, Ford purchased _The Dearborn Independent_, a weekly
Detroit-area newspaper, which he made sure got distributed all across
the United States. He used it to continually attack the Jews for every
cosmic wrong, even reprinting and distributing _The Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion_, a forgery written by Russian Czar Nicholas
II’s secret police to encourage pogroms against the nation’s Jews.
The _Protocols_ purported to be a document written by rabbis that
advocated, among other things, the killing of Christian children. In
the early 1920s, Ford also “authored” (that is, hired ghost
writers to commit his thoughts to paper) and “edited” (with ghost
editors) the four-volume anthology _The International Jew_.

By the early 1920s, Ford’s antisemitism had attained global reach.
_The International Jew
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into multiple languages
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including German. One Nazi Party founder and leader, Baldur von
Schirach, later said, “I read it and became antisemitic.” When
Hitler wrote _Mein Kampf _in 1924-1925, he singled out Ford for
praise, calling him a “great man,” and hanging a large portrait of
Ford in his Munich office. Ford’s continuing production in Germany
during the first two years of World War II strongly suggests he had no
qualms about the Nazis controlling all of Europe.

Fast-forward now to Elon Musk, who today has no qualms about neo-Nazis
ruling Germany. Quite unsolicited, Musk has tweeted (X-ed?) his way
into Germany’s parliamentary election, which will be held next
month, beginning by arguing that “only the AfD can save Germany.”
The Alternative for Germany
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far-right, vehemently anti-immigrant and racist party that has grown
in strength, particularly in the economically depressed states that
were formerly part of East Germany, since it was founded a dozen years
ago. Musk has argued that it’s not a neo-Nazi party, but a number of
self-professed neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers have been in the
party’s leadership, while the German government views it as a
potentially violent threat to German security.

Unlike some of Europe’s other neofascist parties, such as France’s
National Rally, the AfD isn’t committed to maintaining the kind of
national social democratic welfare state for its white native
population, which is part of the white working-class appeal of other
nations’ xenophobic parties. The party’s founders were
disproportionately right-wing economists opposed to the European Union
extending any debt forgiveness or aid to Greece and other Southern
European nations during the post-2008 depression. Those founders are
long gone, but their anti-statist and anti-union economics—including
calling for the abolition of the minimum wage and of such labor
practices as including worker representatives on corporate boards and
having worker-manager councils in workplaces—remain in place. All
that surely appeals to Musk, who has continually opposed the efforts
of IG Metall (Germany’s main industrial union) to organize the giant
Tesla plant in Brandenburg.

Since his initial tweet, Musk has doubled down on his involvement in
the upcoming election, authoring an op-ed in Germany’s leading
Sunday newspaper and offering to stream over X an interview with the
AfD’s leader later this month. Germany’s current government, its
leading political parties (except AfD, of course), and its unions and
other civil society groups have all noted that no foreign
industrialist has ever intervened in a German election before, though
Musk has responded that it’s precisely his investment in
German-based manufacturing that gives him the standing to do that.
Neither Musk nor his critics have cited Ford’s investments in Nazi
Germany or his affinities with the Nazis as a precedent for such
actions, but they’re there, in plain view.

For that matter, in opening X to a range of far-right loudmouths and
conspiracy-peddlers, a number of them parroting antisemitic myths and
tropes, Musk has been on the receiving end of a condemnatory statement
from the Anti-Defamation League. He had retweeted and endorsed one X
posting that asserted that Jews promoted “anti-white” racism, and
in response to the ADL’s condemnations, he blamed the group in
particular for encouraging such hatred. The resemblances to Ford grow
ever more pronounced, and ever more grotesque.

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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

* Elon Musk; Henry Ford; Anti-Semites; Fascists; Neo-Fascists;
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