A spectre is haunting Europe. This horrible phenomenon has appeared suddenly, as if by some kind of black magic, conjured up from the darkest pit of hell by a malevolent devil, to plague and torment the good people of the Earth, to disturb their rest and people their worst nightmares.
The worst thing about this phenomenon is precisely that nobody seems able to explain it. It presents itself as a seemingly unstoppable force of nature, sweeping all before it. In an amazingly short space of time, it has succeeded in seizing control of the wealthiest and most powerful country on Earth.
All the combined forces of the great and the good, all the defenders of the ‘rules-based international order’, all the defenders of Apple Pie and Motherhood – all have united to defeat this monster of iniquity.
Our wonderful free press, which everyone knows to be the foremost champion of liberty and freedom of expression, rallied as a single man to fight the good fight in defence of democracy, freedom and law and order.
But all have failed.
The name of this spectre is Donald J Trump.
Panic
The utter intellectual bankruptcy of the ruling class is shown by the complete inability of the strategists of capital to make any sense of the present situation, far less provide a satisfactory prediction of future events.
This intellectual decline has reached its lowest level in the persons of the political leaders in Europe. They have led this once mighty continent straight into a morass of economic, cultural and military decline, reducing it to a state of complete impotence.
Having sacrificed everything for the benefit of US imperialism for decades, and having accustomed themselves to the humiliating role of servile minions of Washington, they now find themselves abandoned by their erstwhile allies and left to fend for themselves.
Their stupidity has now been completely exposed by the defeat in Ukraine and the collapse of their absurd dreams about defeating Russia and destroying it as a power. Instead, they now find themselves with a powerful and resurgent Russia, equipped with a huge army, armed with the most modern weapons, and hardened by years of battle experience.
At this critical juncture, they find themselves abandoned suddenly by the power that was supposed to come to their defence. Now they are running around like headless chickens, falling over themselves in their haste to express their undying and unshakeable support for Volodymyr Zelensky.
They rant and rage against the man in the White House, who they see as solely responsible for the disaster that has suddenly befallen them.
But all this hysterical chorus is merely an expression of panic, which, in turn, is merely an expression of fear – sheer, blind, undiluted fear. Behind the fake façade of defiance, these leaders are paralysed with terror, like a rabbit blinded by the headlamps of an approaching car.
What is the real reason?
If we are able to ignore, for a moment, the cacophony of complaints, protests and abuse, and try to find what it all means, through the dense fog of media hysteria, the dim outline of the truth begins to appear.
For anyone with even half a brain, it is self-evident that such a massive crisis cannot be the work of a single individual, even one endowed with superhuman powers. This is an ‘explanation’ that explains nothing. Rather than political science, it resembles the murky realm of demonology.
In apocalyptic terms, The Guardian wrote:
“Under Trump, the global agenda will alter, whether we like it or not. The battle against climate breakdown will take a gut punch, international relations will become more transactional, Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression may be stabbed in the back, and Taiwan will be staring down the barrel of a Chinese gun. Liberal democracies everywhere, Britain included, will also come under fresh siege from their own Trump imitators, powered by truth-spurning social media.
“American voters have done a terrible and unforgivable thing this week. We should not flinch from saying they have turned away from the shared ethos and rules that have shaped the world, generally for the better, since 1945. Americans have concluded that Trump is not “weird”, as it was briefly fashionable to claim, but mainstream. Voters went out on Tuesday and voted weird in huge numbers. Americans must live with the consequences of that.” (The Guardian, 6 November 2024)
So there we are! The Guardian, that most repulsive, barefaced expression of liberal hypocrisy, blames everything squarely on the American people who have committed the unforgivable sin of voting in a free and fair democratic election for a candidate who is not to its liking.
But how can one explain this appalling aberration? It is, we are informed by The Guardian with a completely straight face, the result of the supposed ‘weirdness’ of the American people. The definition of ‘weirdness’ is evidently anything that does not coincide with the prejudices of the editorial board of The Guardian.
What they really mean is that the American electorate – that is to say, millions of ordinary working-class men and women – are not really fit to exercise the right to vote, since they are organically ‘weird’.
To speak plainly, all Americans are naturally inclined to racism, hatred of minorities, and an incomprehensible aversion to the principles of bourgeois liberalism. This makes them naturally averse to democracy and inclined to fascism, as represented, of course, by Donald Trump.
But where does this weirdness come from? And were the same American electors also ‘weird’ when they voted for Joe Biden or Obama? Evidently, at that time, they were then pre-eminently sane. What has changed?
What is weird here is not the conduct of American voters, whose decisions were really quite rational and can be easily understood, but only the mental contortions of the miserable petty-bourgeois tribe of liberal scribblers, whose commitment to democracy evidently comes to a full stop as soon as the electorate votes ‘the wrong way’.
Their conception of democracy – that one can support elections, only if they result in the election of candidates that are to our liking – does seem to me to be somewhat ‘weird’. Yet it received striking confirmation in the cancellation of the recent election in Romania.
The Romanian authorities annulled the first round of the presidential election in December purely because they did not like the fact that a candidate of whom they disapproved, Călin Georgescu, had won. Not satisfied with this, they blocked him from competing in a May re-run of the country’s presidential election.
These actions enjoyed the full support of the EU leadership in Brussels. No doubt The Guardian also cheered the cancellation of an election with every possible enthusiasm. This is obviously the way to prevent the likes of Donald Trump winning elections!
Hurrah! Three cheers for democracy!
Fascism has arrived!
From the very beginning, the media launched a noisy campaign, denouncing Trump as a fascist. Here are some examples taken at random from the press
Le Monde: “Trump’s first weeks as president have been enough to give the nightmare of America’s turn to fascism a feeling of reality”.
The New Statesman: “Can the United States resist fascism?”
The New Yorker: “What does it mean that Donald Trump is a fascist?”
The Guardian: “Trump’s neofascism is here now. Here are ten things you can do to resist”.
All kinds of establishment figures have spoken in the same vein. Mark Milley, a retired United States Army general who served as the 20th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a dire warning to America:
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.”
Kamala Harris agreed that Trump was a fascist, although Joe Biden limited himself to describing Trump as only a ‘semi-fascist’.
Nevertheless, he has repeatedly warned that Trump represents a danger to democracy – an opinion shared by many, such as the Attorney General of Arizona, who concludes that: “We are on the brink of a dictatorship.”
Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House press secretary under Donald Trump, expressed himself with greater frankness, saying simply: “He’s a fucking fascist – he’s the fascist of fascists.”
Predictably, many prominent figures on the ‘left’ have joined their shrill voices to the chorus of denunciation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who is frequently presented as a ‘socialist’ Democrat) wails:
“We are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.”
And so the tedious litany grinds on and on endlessly, day after day. The intention is quite clear: constant repetition of the same idea will eventually convince people that it must be true. These billowing clouds of hot air produce a lot of heat, but very little light.
What is fascism?
Now it is perfectly clear that here the term fascism is not intended as a scientific definition, but merely as a vulgar insult – roughly the equivalent of ‘son of a bitch’, or words of that sort.
That kind of invective may serve a useful purpose, allowing frustrated individuals to blow off steam and vent their rage against some individual who is not to their liking. They instantly feel a sense of psychological relief and go home satisfied in the conviction that they have somehow advanced the cause of freedom, scoring a tremendous political victory over the enemy.
Sad to say, such victories in a practical sense are devoid of any value whatsoever. Such terminological radicalism is merely an expression of impotent rage. Unable to strike any real blows against the hated enemy, one derives a sense of satisfaction by the simple device of hurling abuse at him from a safe distance.
For those of us who are interested in fighting real battles against real enemies, rather than tilting at windmills like Don Quixote, other, more serious weapons are required. And the first requirement for a real communist is possession of a rigorous scientific method of analysis.
Marxism is a science. And like all sciences, it possesses a scientific terminology. Words such as ‘fascism’ and Bonapartism have, for us, precise meanings. They are not mere terms of abuse, or labels that can be conveniently stuck onto any individual who does not meet with our approval.
Let us begin with a precise definition of fascism. In the Marxist sense, fascism is a counter-revolutionary movement – a mass movement composed principally of the lumpen proletariat and the enraged petty bourgeoisie. It is used as a battering ram to crush and atomise the working class and establish a totalitarian state in which the bourgeoisie hands state power over to a fascist bureaucracy.
The chief characteristic of the fascist state is extreme centralisation and absolute state power, in which the banks and big monopolies are protected, but subjected to strong central control by a large and powerful fascist bureaucracy. In, What is National Socialism?, Trotsky explains:
“German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital.”
Such, in general terms, are the main features of fascism. How does this compare with the ideology and content of the Trump phenomenon? We have already had the experience of one Trump government, which – according to the dire warnings of the Democrats and the entire liberal establishment – would proceed to abolish democracy. It did no such thing.
No major steps were taken to limit the right to strike and demonstrate, still less to abolish free trade unions. Elections were held as usual, and finally, although amidst a general uproar, Trump was succeeded by Joe Biden in an election. Say what you like about the first Trump government, but it bore no relation whatsoever to any kind of fascism.
The main assault against democracy was in fact led by Biden and the Democrats, who went to extraordinary lengths to persecute Donald Trump, mobilising the entire judiciary to drag him before the courts on innumerable charges, intended to indict him at all costs, place him safely behind bars, and thus prevent him from standing again for the presidency.
The entire media was mobilised in a vicious and consistent campaign of vilification and character assassination, which eventually created a climate in which at least two attempts were made on his life. Only by a fluke did he escape actual assassination (although he typically attributed it to protection by the Almighty).
A reactionary utopia
The ideology of Trumpism – insofar as it exists – is very far from fascism. Far from desiring a strong state, Donald Trump’s ideal is that of free market capitalism, in which the state plays little or no role at all.
His programme represents an attempt to return to the policies of Roosevelt – not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the author of the New Deal, but Theodore Roosevelt, who was president before the First World War.
On 10 January, an article in Le Monde stated:
“There’s a sense of déjà vu in the air. Donald Trump shocked his allies on Tuesday, January 7, by not ruling out the use of force to retake the Panama Canal or purchase Greenland. With this bluff, the president-elect is reviving the old tradition of US imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.
“The ‘golden age,’ which began after the Civil War, is one Trump dreams of: it was marked by the amassing of colossal fortunes, widespread corruption and inward-looking tariffs that protected US industry and meant there was no income tax.
“Above all, it was defined by imperialism to ensure US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. During this period, the US bought Alaska from the Russians (1867), invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines – “liberated” in 1898 from Spanish colonialism, and dug the Panama Canal, completed in 1914.”
In other words, Donald Trump wishes to put the clock back one hundred years to an imaginary America that existed before the First World War – an America where business thrived and profits boomed, where free enterprise thrived and the state left it alone, where America felt free to exercise its young and powerful muscles in order to exert its dominance over Mexico, Panama and the whole Western Hemisphere, driving the decrepit Spanish colonialism out of Cuba, in order to turn it into an American colony instead.
Whatever one might think of this, it is a model that has very little to do with fascism. And this enticing view of history lacks any real substance or relevance to the world of the 21st century.
The age of Teddy Roosevelt was a time when capitalism had not yet completely exhausted its potential as a progressive economic system. And the USA, a healthy, thrusting, newly industrialised nation that had already established superiority over the old powers of Europe in important ways, was just beginning to exert itself as a decisive power in the world.
An entire epoch has passed since then, and the USA is faced with an entirely different configuration of forces, both internally and externally. Trump’s efforts to put the clock back to the world as it was in those far-off days are doomed to fail, shipwrecked by the changed world situation and the balance of class forces within the USA. It is, in fact, a reactionary utopia.
We shall come back to these points later. But first, we must settle accounts with the hysterical and utterly erroneous attempts of both the left and the right to explain the mysterious phenomenon of Donald J Trump.
A wrong method
“The vast practical importance of a correct theoretical orientation is most strikingly manifested in a period of acute social conflict of rapid political shifts, of abrupt changes in the situation… It is in just such periods that all sorts of transitional, intermediate situations and combinations arise, as a matter of necessity, which upset the customary patterns and doubly require a sustained theoretical attention. In a word, if in the pacific and “organic” period (before the war) one could still live on the revenue from a few ready-made abstractions, in our time each new event forcefully brings home the most important law of the dialectic: The truth is always concrete.” (‘Bonapartism and Fascism’, Leon Trotsky, 1934)
All too often, I find that when people on the left are confronted with a new phenomenon – one that seems to defy all existing norms and definitions – they tend to look for labels. And then, having found a convenient label, they look around for facts to prove it.
They say: Oh, yes. I know what that is. It is this, or it is that – fascism, Bonapartism, or anything else that occurs to them. That is a wrong method. It is the opposite of dialectical materialism. And it leads precisely nowhere. It is an example of lazy thinking – the search for easy solutions to solve new and complicated questions.
Far from clarifying anything, it merely distracts attention from the real issues and leads us into an endless and quite pointless discussion of questions that have been artificially introduced and merely add to the confusion, instead of answering the questions that need to be answered.
In his Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin explained that the fundamental law of dialectics is absolute objectivity of consideration: “not examples, not digressions, but the thing itself”.
That is the essence of the dialectical method. The opposite of dialectics is the habit of sticking labels on something and imagining that by doing so, we have understood it.
My good friend John Peterson recently remarked to me that Donald Trump was “a phenomenon”. I think that is correct. There is no need to compare him with any other figure in history. We must accept that Donald Trump is like – Donald Trump. And we should take him just as he is and analyse what is, in fact, a new phenomenon on the basis of concrete facts, not mere generalities.
Bonapartism?
Trotsky’s article Bonapartism and Fascism provides a very precise and concise definition of Bonapartism from a Marxist point of view:
“A government which raises itself above the nation is not, however, suspended in air. The true axis of the present government passes through the police, the bureaucracy, the military clique. It is a military-police dictatorship with which we are confronted, barely concealed with the decorations of parliamentarism. But a government of the saber as the judge arbiter of the nation – that’s just what Bonapartism is.”
The essence of Bonapartism, which may appear in a number of different disguises, is ultimately always the same: a military dictatorship.
In Germany: The Only Road, Trotsky explains how Bonapartism arises:
“As soon as the struggle of two social strata – the haves and the have-nots, the exploiters and the exploited – reaches its highest tension, the conditions are established for the domination of bureaucracy, police, soldiery. The government becomes ‘independent’ of society.”
These lines are crystal-clear. But how does all that compare with the present situation in the United States? It does not compare at all. Let us be clear about this. The ruling class will only turn to reaction in the form of Bonapartism or fascism as a very last resort. Is that really the present position? Powerful tensions undoubtedly exist in American society and they are causing a serious destabilisation of the existing order.
But to imagine that the class struggle has reached the critical stage, where the rule of capital is threatened with immediate overthrow and the only solution for the ruling class is to hand power over to a Bonapartist regime is pure fantasy. We have not yet reached that stage, or anything like it.
Of course, it is possible to point to this or that element in the present situation that can be said to be an element of Bonapartism. That may be so. But similar comments could be made of almost any recent bourgeois democratic regime.
In ‘democratic’ Britain under Tony Blair, power passed in practice from the elected parliament to the Cabinet, and from the Cabinet to a tiny clique of unelected officials, cronies and spin doctors. There were undoubtedly elements of what might be called a regime of parliamentary Bonapartism.
However, merely to contain certain elements of a phenomenon does not yet signify the actual emergence of that phenomenon as such. One could of course say there are elements of Bonapartism present in Trumpism. Yes, one might say that. But elements do not yet represent a fully developed phenomenon.
As Hegel remarks in the Phenomenology:
“When we want to see an oak with all its vigour of trunk, its spreading branches, and mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead.”
This incorrect method leads to endless errors. First, you attempt to apply an external definition to a phenomenon. Then you stick to it at all costs. And you try to justify it by all kinds of ‘clever’ examples from history that are dragged in by the hair.
Then, as night follows day, somebody else comes along and says, no: no, that’s not Bonapartism. And they produce equally ‘clever’ facts, in order to demonstrate that Bonapartism is something else altogether.
Both are equally right and wrong. Where do we get when we enter into this kind of circular argument? Like a dog chasing its own tail, we get precisely nowhere.
While it is true that the use of accurate historical analogies can sometimes provide clarification, it is equally true that the thoughtless and mechanical juxtaposition of essentially different phenomena is a sure recipe for confusion.
For example, I believe that it would be quite correct and apposite to describe the Putin regime in Russia as a bourgeois Bonapartist regime. That’s an example of a helpful analogy. But in the case of Trump, it’s more complicated than that.
The problem is that Bonapartism is a very elastic term. It covers a wide gamut of things, starting with the classical concept of Bonapartism, which is basically rule by the sword.
The present Trump government in Washington, despite its many peculiarities, still remains a bourgeois democracy.
It is precisely those peculiarities that we have to examine and explain. And since, in all honesty, we find ourselves unable to find anything remotely similar in history – ancient or modern – that can be compared to it, and since we have no ready-made definitions that can be made to fit, there is only one alternative left open to us: TO START TO THINK.
The crisis of capitalism
The great philosopher Spinoza said that the task of philosophy was neither to weep, nor to laugh, but to understand. In order to understand Donald J Trump, we must leave aside the pseudoscience of demonology and state the obvious.
To begin with, whatever else he might be, Trump is not some evil spirit, endowed with superhuman powers. He is an ordinary mortal – insofar as an American billionaire may be considered such. And like any other figure of relevance in history, the real causes of his rise to power must ultimately be connected with objective processes at work in society.
In other words, we must see it as inevitably connected with the objective situation of the world in the early decades of the 21st century.
The major turning point in modern history was the 2008 crisis, which completely destabilised the whole system. Capitalism found itself teetering on the brink of collapse. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, I vividly remember the moment in which bankers publicly expressed their fears that within a few months they’d be swinging from the lamp posts.
Those fears were actually well grounded. In fact, all the objective conditions were ripe, actually, for socialist revolution. That was only avoided by the adoption of panic measures in which the state intervened to save the banks by the injection of huge quantities of public money.
This contradicted all the theories promoted by the official bourgeois economists for the previous thirty years. They all agreed that the state must play no role – or a minimal role – in the economy. The free market, left to itself, would solve all problems.
In the moment of truth, however, this theory was shown to be false. The capitalist system was only saved by state intervention. But this created new contradictions in the form of colossal and ultimately unsustainable debts.
Since 2008, the capitalist system has been in the deepest crisis in history. It has constantly lurched from one disaster to another. At every step, governments resorted to the same irresponsible policy of deficit financing – that is to say, printing money to get themselves out of a hole.
The myopic strategists of capital, the miserable tribe of bourgeois economists and the even more bankrupt political establishment politicians all assumed that this situation – infinite supplies of money plucked out of thin air, an inexhaustible flow of cheap credit, low rates of inflation and low interest rates – was going to continue forever. They were mistaken.
All this was merely piling up contradiction upon contradiction – preparing the ground for the mother of all crises in the future.
I predicted at the time that all the attempts of the bourgeoisie to restore economic equilibrium would merely serve to destroy the social and political equilibria. This is precisely what has happened.
The objective conditions for socialist revolution were clearly present. Why did it not occur? Only because one important factor was missing from this equation. That factor was revolutionary leadership.
For a whole period, the pendulum swung sharply to the left in one country after another. That was reflected in the rise of a whole series of radical-sounding left movements: Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Bernie Sanders in the USA, and above all, Corbyn in Britain. But that only served to expose the limitations of left reformism.
Let us take the case of Tsipras. The whole of the Greek nation was behind him in defying the attempts of Brussels to impose austerity. But he capitulated. The result was a swing to the right.
There was a similar story in Spain. Podemos originally presented a very radical left image. But the leaders decided to be ‘responsible’ and entered a coalition with the Socialists, with predictable results.
In the USA, Bernie Sanders rose swiftly from nothing to create a mass movement that was clearly looking for a socialist alternative. He had every chance of creating a viable left alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. But in the end, he capitulated to the establishment of the Democratic Party, and the opportunity was aborted.
The clearest case of all was in Britain, where, like Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn came from nowhere and was propelled into the leadership of the Labour Party on the crest of a powerful movement to the left. Corbyn himself did not create this movement, but he acted as a point of reference for the accumulated mood of anger and discontent in society.
The result astounded and terrified the ruling class. They were publicly declaring that they had lost control of the Labour Party. And that was true. Or rather, it ought to have been true.
But in the moment of truth, Corbyn failed to take action against the right-wing leadership of the parliamentary Labour Party which, with the support of the bourgeois media, organised a vicious campaign against him.
In the last analysis, Corbyn capitulated to the right wing and paid the price for his cowardice – which is really an expression of the organic spinelessness of left reformism in general.
Trump and Corbyn
Here we see a striking contrast with Donald Trump, who also came under a very serious attack from the establishment, including from the leadership of the Republican Party itself. He did what Corbyn ought to have done. He mobilised his base and turned it against the old Republican leadership, which was forced to retreat.
This, of course, does not alter the fact that Trump remained a reactionary bourgeois politician. But it must be confessed that he showed a courage and determination that Corbyn manifestly lacked.
He also showed complete contempt for so-called political correctness and identity politics, which, unfortunately, the left reformists have swallowed whole. This played an absolutely pernicious role in Corbyn’s case.
When the right wing attacked him for alleged antisemitism (a charge that was entirely false), he immediately retreated. He became easy meat for the reactionary Zionist lobby and the whole of the British ruling class and quickly reduced to abject submission – a helpless victim of addiction to reactionary identity politics.
If Corbyn had done what Trump has done, he would have met the charge of antisemitism head-on, mobilised his rank and file, and unleashed them on the right-wing establishment of the Labour Party, carrying out a thoroughgoing purge of those rotten elements.
Had he done this, there was no question that he would have won. But he did not. This allowed the Labour right wing to pass onto the offensive, to expel the left – including Corbyn himself – and to purge the party from top to bottom. The result was the victory of Starmer and the experiment in Corbynism ended in disaster.
The same experience has been repeated time and again. And in every case, the leaders of the Left have played a most lamentable role. They have disappointed their base and handed power to the right wing on a plate.
It is this fact – and this fact alone – that explains the present swing of the pendulum to the right. That was entirely inevitable, given the cowardly capitulation of the left.
Let others lament the facts and moan about the rise of Trump and other right-wing demagogues. We answer with contempt: don’t complain about this. It is entirely your own responsibility. You frankly got what you deserved. Now we all have to pay for the consequences.
What does Trump really represent?
Let us begin with the obvious. We can all agree that Donald Trump is a reactionary bourgeois politician. This is hardly worth stating. Nor should we have to repeat that communists do not support him in any way.
But in stating the obvious, we do not advance a single step in analysing the phenomenon of Trump and Trumpism. For instance, is it correct to say that there’s no difference between Donald Trump and Joseph Biden?
That they are both bourgeois politicians who stand essentially for the same class interests is self-evident. In that sense, one could say that they’re all the same. Yet it ought to be clear even to the blindest of the blind that there are, in fact, very serious differences between the two – in fact, a yawning abyss.
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The fact that, in the last analysis, both men are bourgeois politicians and ultimately represent the same class interests, does not at all preclude the possibility of sharp differences emerging between different layers of the same class. In fact, that kind of conflict has always existed.
The central problem for the bourgeoisie is that the model that had apparently guaranteed the success of capitalism for many decades is irrevocably broken.
The phenomenon of globalisation, which allowed them to overcome the limits of the national market for a long time has now reached its limits. Instead, we have the rise of economic nationalism. Each capitalist class advances its own national interests against those of other nations. The age of free trade gives way to the age of tariffs and trade wars.
Hopeless nostalgics bemoan the passing of the old order. But Donald J Trump embraces it with all the enthusiasm of a religious convert. As a result, he has turned the world order upside down, to the rage and frustration of weaker nations.
Donald Trump therefore calls down the curses of his erstwhile ‘allies’ in Europe, who blame him for all their misfortunes. But he did not invent this situation. He is merely its most extreme and consistent exponent and advocate.
The bankruptcy of liberalism
For many years, the ruling class and its political representatives in the West have been systematically peddling a pseudo-progressive image in order to conceal the reality of class domination. They have skilfully made use of so-called identity politics as a weapon of counter-revolution.
And the ‘Lefts’, lacking any firm ideological basis of their own, have swallowed this rubbish, hook, line and sinker. This has only served to discredit them in the eyes of working-class people, who look with disbelief at their antics, quibbling over words and forever repeating the platitudes of so-called political correctness, instead of fighting for the real interests of workers, women and other oppressed layers in society.
Therefore, when Donald Trump comes along and denounces identity politics and political correctness, it is hardly surprising that he strikes a responsive chord among millions of ordinary men and women whose brains have not been hopelessly addled by the postmodernist sickness.
Do the Liberals defend democracy?
The liberals have a very peculiar view of democracy. As we have seen, they support elections – but only if the candidate they favour wins. If the result is not to their liking, they immediately start shouting about an unfair result, hinting at vote rigging and all kinds of shady practices – usually, without producing a shred of evidence.
We saw this following Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Trump became the first president in American history without prior public office or military background.
In effect, Trump was an outsider – someone who was not connected with the existing establishment in Washington, which has held a monopoly of political power for decades.
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They saw him as a threat to their monopoly and acted accordingly to subvert democracy and overturn the result of the election. The Democrats launched the notorious ‘Russiagate’ scandal against Trump, with the clear intention of driving him out of office.
That would amount to the equivalent of a democratic coup d’etat. A violation of democracy? Of course, but if it is necessary sometimes to violate the rules of democracy in order to defend democracy, then so be it!
Subsequently, they went to the most extraordinary lengths to prevent Donald Trump from ever becoming president again. They launched a veritable tsunami of legal cases, aimed at putting him behind bars.
There were four court cases directed against Trump personally, starting with the notorious Stormy Daniels affair, followed by the accusation of election interference in Georgia and finally the question of the presence of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
In addition, there were over 100 lawsuits against Trump’s administration.
The mass media were mobilised to take full advantage of the assault. But it failed completely. Each of these cases merely served to boost his support in the polls. The final result was seen in the presidential election on 5 November 2024.
With the second highest voter turnout since 1900 (after 2020), Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes, the second highest vote total in US history (after Biden’s win in 2020). Trump won all seven swing states.
This was not just an election victory; it was a decisive triumph. It was also a complete rejection of the liberal Democrat establishment.
It was also a shattering rebuff for the prostitute media that overwhelmingly supported Harris. Among daily newspapers, 54 endorsed Harris and only 6 backed Trump. Of all weekly newspapers, 121 supported Harris and only 11 were for Trump.
How is this to be explained?
Trump and the working class
It is striking to note the difference in the class composition of the votes cast. Whereas Harris won a majority of voters earning $100,000 or more, Trump won the majority of voters earning under $50,000. So there is absolutely no doubt that millions of American workers turned out to vote for Donald Trump.
There is absolutely nothing particularly surprising or ‘weird’ in this. Trump’s appeal to the working class has a material basis. Since the early 1980s, the real wages of working-class Americans have either remained the same or decreased, particularly as jobs were outsourced to other countries, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Similarly, the Economic Policy Institute reports that wages for lower- and middle-income households have seen little to no growth since the late 1970s, while the cost of living has continued to rise.
In many American cities, there are conditions of misery and squalor that resemble those of the poorest cities of Latin America, Africa or Asia. And this poverty exists side-by-side with the most obscene concentration of wealth in a few hands that has been seen in a hundred years.
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Yet all of this is apparently invisible to the middle-class ‘progressives’. The political establishment and the tribe of well-paid journalists and commentators have been so fixated on the pernicious poison of identity politics that they have consistently ignored real problems faced by working-class people, whether black or white, male or female, straight or gay.
A typical example was the insistence of the politically correct imbeciles to advocate terms like ‘Latinx’ to promote gender inclusivity. Yet only 4 percent of Hispanics use this term, and 75 percent say it should never be used, according to Pew Research.
The way was therefore opened for right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump to give voice to the accumulated anger of millions of people who felt justifiably ignored by the liberal establishment in Washington.
As a result of this, in 2024 Trump expanded his base by connecting with black and Latino working-class communities.
That is the direct consequence of the betrayal of ‘Lefts’ like Sanders, who, by failing to offer any clear alternative to the liberals, left the door wide open for right-wing demagogues like Trump.
It is an actual fact that, up until recently, even the term ‘working class’ hardly appeared in the electoral propaganda of the main parties. Even the most daring left-wingers normally referred to the ‘middle class’ instead. The American working class, for all practical purposes, had ceased to exist!
There may have been this or that exception to the rule, but it is no exaggeration to say that it was Donald Trump – a billionaire, right-wing demagogue – who alone claimed to champion the interests of working-class people in his speeches. One might say that he alone was responsible for placing the workers at the centre of American politics once again.
There is no need to tell us that this is mere demagogy, empty rhetoric with no substance. Nor do we need to be informed that Trump says these things for his own purposes, which are inevitably connected to the interests of the class to which he belongs.
That is perfectly clear to us. But that is entirely beside the point. The plain fact is that that was far from clear to the millions of working-class people who voted for Trump in the presidential elections. We neglect this fact at our peril.
What interests does Trump defend?
It should not be at all difficult to explain our attitude to Trump to any thinking person. It is really very simple. We say:
This billionaire defends the interests of his own class. Anything that he says will ultimately be in his own interest and in the interests of the rich – the bankers and capitalists. It follows as night follows day that those interests can never be the interests of the working class.
However, in order to gain the support of the workers, he will sometimes say things that appear to them to make sense. When he speaks of jobs, employment, falling wages, rising prices, he naturally gets a response.
And it may well be that one or two things he says might be correct. In fact, Trump once admitted that he had taken several ideas from Sanders’ speeches and used them to appeal to the workers.
To be sure, Trump is a reactionary bourgeois politician, but that does not mean that he is exactly the same as any other reactionary bourgeois politician. On the contrary. He’s got his own interpretation of things, his own outlook, policy and strategy, which differ in many fundamental ways with, for instance, the positions of Joe Biden and his clique.
In some respects, his views may seem to coincide, at least to some degree, with our own. For instance, in his attitude to the war in Ukraine, his disbanding of USAID, or his rejection of so-called ‘woke’. That some coincidences can indeed exist between what bourgeois politicians say and what we ourselves think was already explained by Trotsky.
In May 1938, he wrote an article called Learn to Think – A Friendly Suggestion to Certain Ultra-Leftists.
In it, we read the following:
“In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond best to the interests of the proletariat. This rule applies just as much to the war period as to the period of peace.”
Even when Trump says things that are correct, he invariably does so from the standpoint of his own class interests and for reactionary purposes with which we have absolutely nothing in common.
The bottom line is that in every case, we always lay stress on the class position. For that reason, it is entirely impermissible to identify ourselves with the policies of Trump. That would be a serious mistake.
But it would be a far more serious mistake – in fact it would be a crime – to stand even for one moment with the so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ bourgeois elements whose attacks on Trump are guided entirely from the standpoint of the reactionary bourgeois establishment against which Trump is waging war at the present time.
The lesser evil?
Once you make concessions to accusations such as fascism, Bonapartism and the alleged threat to democracy, you begin to enter the slippery slope that can lead you – even unconsciously – into the position of lesser evilism. And that is undoubtedly the biggest danger.
Is it correct to say that the Biden regime represented something progressive in relation to Trump? That is how they sold it. And the so-called Left have accepted it as good coin.
They try to argue that Trump is an enemy of democracy. But if one examines the monstrous conduct of the Biden clique one sees how it showed a complete contempt for democracy right up to the very end.
Consider Biden’s so-called ‘ironclad’ support for Israel’s assault on Gaza – earning him the moniker ‘Genocide Joe.’ Or his ‘democratic’ administration’s blatant suppression of the right to assembly, as hundreds of students were brutally beaten and 3,200 arrested nationwide for peacefully protesting in solidarity with Palestine.
Biden vowed to be “the most pro-union president in American history”, yet he crushed railway workers’ right to strike. He pledged to end Trump-era deportations but ultimately expelled more undocumented immigrants than his predecessor. The list goes on.
Right up until the end, Biden clung to office long after he had been effectively exposed as unfit for office even by his own party, which removed him as the presidential candidate for the Democrats.
Even after the overwhelming majority of the electorate voted against the Democrats, he continued to exercise his powers as president, carrying out blatant acts of sabotage to undermine the democratically-elected candidate, Trump, and even to drag the United States to the brink of war with Russia.
It would be hard to imagine a more blatant disregard for democracy and the opinions of the overwhelming majority of the American people. Yet this gangster and his clique continued to masquerade as the defenders of democracy against the alleged threat of dictatorship!
Many other things that Biden and his gang did were infinitely more counter-revolutionary and disastrous and monstrous than anything that Trump ever dreamed of doing. That’s the fact of the matter. Yet we find people on the left who are prepared to argue that it is preferable to support the Democrats against Trump, ‘in order to defend democracy.’
It is not our business to tie ourselves to a sinking ship, but, on the contrary, to do everything in our power to help to sink it. It is not our policy to sow illusions in the liberals and their so-called democracy, but to expose it as a cynical falsehood and a deception.
In Whither France, Trotsky explains that the so-called policy of the ‘lesser evil’ is nothing but a crime and a betrayal of the working class:
“The working-class party must occupy itself not with a hopeless effort to save the party of the bankrupts. It must, on the contrary, with all its strength, accelerate the process of liberation of the masses from Radical influence.” [Editor: the Radical party was a liberal party in power in France in the 1930s]
That is excellent advice for us today. In combatting Trumpite reaction, we can under no circumstances associate ourselves with the bankrupt ‘liberal’ Democrats in any way.
Find a road to the workers!
Periods of transition, such as the period through which we are now living, invariably will give rise to confusion. We will be frequently confronted with all kinds of new and complicated phenomena that have no obvious precedents in history.
In order not to be thrown off-balance, it is necessary at all times to keep a hand firmly on the fundamentals, and not be blown off course by this or that accidental development. The main feature of the present situation is that, on the one hand, the objective situation is crying out for a revolutionary solution.
The potential is there. But there is at present no force sufficiently strong to bring this potential to fruition. Therefore, for the time being, it remains just that – a bare potential.
The masses are striving to find a way out of the crisis. They put one party leader after another to the test, but soon discover the deficiencies of all the existing organisations. This explains the general political instability that is manifested in violent swings on the electoral plane from left to right, and back again.
In the absence of any kind of guidance from the left, the road is open for all kinds of peculiar aberrations and demagogues of the Trump variety.
They can rise rapidly, giving an expression to the anger and discontent of the masses. But contact with reality eventually leads to disappointment, preparing a further swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction.
To see such developments in purely negative terms would be to completely misunderstand the situation. The masses are desperate and need urgent solutions to their problems. People like Donald Trump appear to offer them what they’re looking for.
We have to understand this, and not merely dismiss such movements as ‘far right’ (a meaningless phrase in any event) aberrations. Of course, in such movements there will be reactionary elements. But their mass character indicates that they have a contradictory base in society.
In order to find a road to the workers of any country, it is necessary to take them as they are – not as we would like them to be. In order to enter into a dialogue with the workers, we must begin with the existing level of consciousness. Any other approach is merely a recipe for sterility and impotence.
If we wish to engage in a meaningful conversation with a worker who has illusions in Trump, we cannot begin with shrill denunciations or accusations of fascism and the like. By patiently listening to the arguments of these workers, we can base ourselves on many things that we agree with, and then, using skilful arguments, gradually introduce doubts as to whether the interests of the working class can really be defended by a wealthy billionaire businessman.
Of course, at this stage, our arguments will not necessarily succeed. The working class in general does not learn from debates but only through their own experience. And the experience of a Trump government will prove to be a very painful learning curve.
Therefore, when we speak to workers who support Trump, we should have a friendly approach and agree with the things which we can agree with, then skilfully point out the limitations of Trumpism and make a case for socialism. The contradictions will eventually come to the surface. However, despite this, the illusions in Trump will persist for a time.
Nothing will be achieved by adopting a belligerent and hostile attitude to the many honest workers who, for absolutely understandable reasons, have rallied to the banner of Trump. Such an approach is both sterile and counter-productive, and will lead nowhere.
History knows many examples of how workers who first enter the arena of politics with extremely backward, even reactionary views, can rapidly move in the opposite direction under the impact of events.
At the beginning of the 1905 revolution in Russia, the Marxists were a very small and isolated minority. The majority of Russian workers were politically backward, with illusions in the monarchy and the church.
The overwhelming majority of the workers in St Petersburg initially followed the leadership of Father Gapon, who was actively collaborating with the police. When the Marxists approached them with leaflets denouncing the Tsar, the workers tore them up and sometimes even beat up the revolutionaries.
Yet all that changed into its opposite after the events of Bloody Sunday on 9 January. The same workers who tore up the leaflets now approached the revolutionaries demanding arms to overthrow the Tsar.
In the United States, we can cite a similar example, a highly symptomatic although a far less dramatic one. When a young worker called Farrell Dobbs first entered politics in the early 1930s, he began life as a convinced Republican.
But through the experience of stormy class struggle he moved straight from right-wing republicanism to revolutionary Trotskyism and played a leading role in the Teamster Rebellion in Minneapolis.
In the stormy period of class struggle that will open up in the United States, we will see many such examples in the future. And some of the workers who now enthusiastically support Trump or similar demagogues, can be won to the banner of socialist revolution on the basis of future events.
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On the surface, the Trump movement appears to be very solid and practically indestructible. But this is an optical illusion. In reality it is a very heterogeneous movement, riven with profound contradictions. Sooner or later, these will become manifest.
The liberal enemies of Trump are hoping that the failure of his economic policies will lead to widespread disappointment and loss of support. Such a failure is entirely predictable. Already the imposition of tariffs is being met with inevitable reprisals. This must eventually be reflected in job losses and factory closures in the affected industries.
However, the predictions of an imminent demise of the Trump movement are premature. Trump has aroused enormous expectations and hopes among millions of people who were without all hope before. Such illusions are deep-rooted and powerful enough to withstand a whole series of shocks and temporary disappointments.
It will take time for the hypnotic spell of Trump’s demagogy to dissipate. But sooner or later, the disillusionment will set in, and the longer it takes for the workers to understand that their class interests are not represented, the more violent the reaction will be.
Donald Trump is now quite old and even if he succeeds in dodging an assassin’s bullet, nature must sooner or later impose its iron laws. In any event, he is unlikely to stand again for president – even if the rules could be changed to allow it.
It is impossible to imagine Trumpism without the person of Donald J Trump. It is precisely the power of his personality, his undoubted skill as a mass leader and master demagogue, that is the glue that holds his heterogeneous movement together. Without it, the inner contradictions that exist within it will inevitably come to the surface, bringing about internal crises and fractures in the leadership.
J.D. Vance seems the most likely successor of Donald Trump, but he lacks the immense authority and charisma of his leader. He is, however, an intelligent man who may well evolve in all kinds of directions on the basis of events. It is impossible to predict the result.
There is a well-known law of mechanics that states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Donald Trump is a master of hyperbole. His demagogic utterances know no bounds. Everything he promises is marvellous, tremendous, wonderful, enormous, and so on. And the degree of disappointment, when it finally comes, would be correspondingly enormous.
At a certain point, his movement will begin to fracture along class lines. As the workers begin to desert him, the crazed petty bourgeois elements will probably coalesce in what will be the embryo of a new and genuinely fascist or Bonapartist organisation.
Out of the chaotic situation, the movement in the direction of a third party will become irresistible. By its very nature, it will be a confused affair – not necessarily with a left-wing or even particularly progressive programme in the first instance. But events will have a logic of their own.
Many workers, having burnt their fingers with Trump’s experiment, will be looking for an alternative banner that will more accurately reflect their anger and deep-seated hatred of the rich and the establishment, which is merely an immature reflection of their instinctive hostility to the capitalist system itself. This will push them sharply to the left.
It is not at all far-fetched to foresee that some of the boldest, most dedicated and self-sacrificing militants of the future communist movement in America will consist precisely of workers who have passed through the school of Trumpism and drawn the correct conclusions from it. There have been many precedents for such developments in the past, as we have seen.
Finally, I want to make one thing clear. What I have presented to you here is not a worked out perspective, far less is it a detailed prediction of what will take place in the future. To do that, one would require not the Marxist method, but a crystal ball – which sadly is yet to be invented.
On the basis of all the observable facts at my disposal, I have put forward a very tentative prognosis which, however, can be no more than an educated guess. The current situation presents itself as an extremely complicated equation, which has many possible solutions. Only time will fill in the gaps and provide us with the answer. History will present us with many surprises. Not all of them bad.
