Unfortunately, yes. The prominence of small business and petty bourgeois "entrepeneurs" in far right coalitions is not (merely) a question of number of participants. It is that "small business owner" operates as an aspirational image for others in the coalition who are not https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1348257273785819143

Remember that "The Apprentice" styled Trump as a hero and role model for entrepeneurs and small businessmen. It was this persona that made Trump an especially charismatic leader for this far-right coalition

Identification with kleinbürgerliche virtues and aspirations is part of the social glue that brings the coalition together, whether or not the individual members are affluent or not. Some people may not own their own businesses, but wish they did.

I have, with @vitolaterza09 been pushing back against the "white working class revolt" narrative since 2016, for many reasons—it erases the racism, it plays into the right wing propaganda—but we see that it obscures the class component of what brings this coalition together

There could be many reasons for insisting that Trumpism is a "working class revolt." Among them is—centering the petty bourgeois character of this movement incriminates the media for creating Trump's entrepreneurial folk hero persona.

Another reason why petty bourgeois aspirations are key: the right persistently hailed immigrant shopkeepers as "victims" of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. Non-anglophone propaganda inundated immigrant communities with this message before the election.

Should we be so surprised at those marginal shifts in 'immigrant majority' urban areas towards the GOP we saw last fall? Petty-bourg aspirations towards property and wealth, and anti-black, anti-radical fears about so-called Black radicals taking your wealth go hand in hand.

The disinformation campaigns targeted at immigrants, which I was exposed to through Hispanophone relatives, during the election leaned into this heavily. At the same time, I want to caution against treating small business owners as a lost cause.

This Minneapolis restaurant owner's refusal to subsume his loss under this right-wing narrative, and show solidarity with Black Lives Matter is all the more commendable in this context, and a reminder that people do not mechanistically vote their class. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/dining/minnesota-restaurant-fire-protests.html