by The second election of Donald Trump will likely mark a turning point in American history.
Four Years Up – Four Years Down
Those organizing to defend the interests of the working class and advance the cause of socialism will face unprecedented challenges under the second Trump administration.
An approximate (admittedly ‘vibes-based’) read on the forces likely to move into struggle against Trump is that they are largely burned out, demoralized, and defeatist. Not only has Trump won, again, but all the mass movements of the recent period seem to have little to show for their work, as much of the reforms won through struggle are about to be rolled back and the corporate and conservative attack on working and marginalized people escalated.
Not only has Trump won, again, but all the mass movements of the recent period seem to have little to show for their work.
The period from the launch of Bernie’s first campaign in May of 2015 to the BLM uprising of May 2020 saw some five years of explosive and consistent growth and strengthening of the progressive movement in the United States. From the electrifying and unprecedented 2016 Bernie campaign through the large demonstrations under Trump—5 million took part in the Women’s March, hundreds of thousands took direct action to block the Muslim ban, and labor threatened escalating labor action to end the government shut down—and to the second Bernie campaign, the movement seemed to grow from strength to strength. Even after Bernie’s defeat to Biden and the demobilization of the pandemic, the momentum was yet to peak with some 15-24 million taking part in the George Floyd Uprising, the largest mass protest in US history.1
But now it has been almost as long from the launch of Bernie’s first campaign to the uprising of 2020, and our movement seems to have demobilized, lost energy and direction, and now is facing its greatest threat yet. Even as Biden’s administration was moved somewhat to the left, the class struggle in the political field largely subsided. The movement didn’t disappear overnight, with much energy moving to the labor movement, but the struggle was less and less a direct and militant confrontation with the capitalist system as a whole.
The anti-war movement since October 7 saw some 1 million moving into struggle by December of 2024.2 Maybe another million or two joined actions after this; for several months there was a sustained level of activity and strategic organizing among a large militant minority, and the movement saw a new peak in the spring of 2024 with the encampment movement. But the anti-war movement is smaller by a factor of ten than the uprising of 2020. So not only have we not surpassed the twin peaks of the Bernie 2020 campaign and the George Floyd Uprising, but since then we have not even come close in terms of mass participation.
An ounce of active class struggle is worth more than a pound of reforms.
Most of the reforms of the Biden administration will be rolled back under Trump. However, it is true that some long term power was built, especially through a revival of militancy and new organizing in the labor movement. The actual gains in terms of numbers or replaced leadership are relatively small, but the revival of a fighting spirit is incredibly important nonetheless. But in spite of the soon-to-be revoked reforms, the broader masses which took action over the last decade seem far less primed to launch sustained resistance than was the case when Trump first took office.
This shows that an ounce of active class struggle is worth more than a pound of reforms in terms of preparedness to face the forces of counter-revolution. But the class-struggle is not something willed into being, it is a contradiction which arises through the structural divisions within capitalist class society. So just because we may feel deflated or defeated now, does not mean that mass movements will not unfold, even in the very near term.
While it isn’t possible to predict events in advance, an analysis of Trump’s agenda does give us some indication of how things might develop. The most obvious provocations which could kick off mass resistance to the Trump administration are the carrying out of mass layoffs to the civil service, attempts to implement mass deportations, or any serious escalation of war, either in support of Israel, with China, or elsewhere.
A Radical Regime For A Radical Crisis
Trump’s second term contains all the dangerous tendencies of his first term, which, having hardened over his last four years in opposition, now return as a more thorough break with the existing capitalist-democratic order.
Trump’s radical platform did not develop out of his own imagination. Rather, it represents a comprehensive set of solutions to the problems posed to the American capitalist class by a number of current and inter-related crises.
American-led Western capitalism is indeed under pressure from a number of serious crises. Western economies have never fully recovered from the trauma of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and the resulting Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. The global economic recovery was only possible based on unprecedented quantitative easing, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of sovereign debt, and the real engine of the global recovery was the Chinese economy, with China accounting for 35 percent of global GDP growth from 2008 to 2023.3 Public debt spiked again massively during the pandemic, while the Chinese economy has been weakening at an increasing pace.
Trump’s radical platform did not develop out of his own imagination. Rather, it represents a comprehensive set of solutions to the problems posed to the American capitalist class by a number of current and inter-related crises.
Moreover, since the 2007-2008 recession Western governments have faced an on-again off-again challenge from both progressive and reactionary populist movements, kicked off largely by the Occupy Wall Street global movement of 2011, and continued in the US through the two Bernie campaigns and the Black Lives Matter uprisings, and around the world in a large number of instances including the Arab Spring, powerful anti-austerity movements in Spain, Greece, and Ireland, the Yellow Vest movement in France in 2018, and more.
In the US, the Democratic Party has only managed to hold off the progressive-populist movement through a combination of accommodation and co-option on the one hand, and underhanded, undemocratic maneuvering in party internal politics on the other, resisting meaningful reforms but still being forced along in some important ways. Although the Democrats co-optations have mostly directed movements of resistance to capitalism into safe channels, this has necessitated them legitimizing, at least in abstract, the grand ideas of the protest movements, union campaigns, and progressive policies which challenge capitalism. And so they legitimize their own grave-diggers just to buy a bit more time.
This can be seen clearly in the 2020 protests, which enjoyed significant popular support which, even if few material reforms were won, nonetheless challenged the legitimacy of the police state in an unprecedented way.
This strategy can only delay for so long the material advances and organization strengthening of these forces, and it also serves to delegitimize the Democrats as they alienate more reactionary elements by moving rhetorically left, only to subsequently alienate progressive elements in their failures to carry through meaningful change. This was marked especially by Biden’s approach to Israel’s war on Gaza. The Democrat’s criticisms of Netanyahu’s conduct alienated them, to some degree, from the hardline Zionists, while Biden’s failure to actually impose any material limitations on Israel meant he could not win over the majority of the anti-war movement despite having taken rhetorical stances which were far more critical of Israel than previous Democratic administrations.
Trump represents an attempt to roll back the advances made in this way by the progressive forces over the last decade, displacing the neoliberal co-opters in order to clamp down on the genuine progressive masses. For example, in response to the advances of the Black Lives Matter movement, Trump is now gearing up to “roll back” the reforms of 2020, which in fact means a further militarization and empowerment of the unreformed police, paired with an attack on civil rights and diversity initiatives.
Trump represents an attempt to roll back the advances made in this way by the progressive forces over the last decade, displacing the neoliberal co-opters in order to clamp down on the genuine progressive masses.
Finally, since the crisis of 2007-2008, the relative economic and military supremacy of Western capitalism has seen a relative decline in strength due to the slow but steady rise of Chinese industrial and military capabilities.
Attacked by Trump’s economic nationalism to the right, and Bernie’s left-populism to the left, the defeat of Clinton’s 2016 campaign meant the defeat of the planned advances of neoliberal policies. This was marked especially through the defeat of the Trans Pacific Partnership, the only credible answer neoliberalism had to challenge the rise of China.
The 2020-2024 Biden administration, facing the same pressures as Clinton, could only hope to carry out policies of temporary stabilization, but not advance. Caught between the interests of the domestic US capitalist class and the pressure from the progressive masses, Biden never had any hope of mounting a serious challenge to the economic threat from a rising global capitalist rival in China, and proved barely able to defend the neoliberal order from pressure from the left and the mass movements. Biden could only hope to keep the existing order on life support, maintaining the social structures which allow for the continuation of capital accumulation just a bit longer.
When Donald Trump stepped fully into the political field in 2016, he may not have had the long term goal of leading the militant wing of American capitalism against the growing threats of domestic unrest at home and Chinese capitalism abroad. But regardless of his intentions, over the last 8 years he has attracted these various forces to his banner, uniting an array of disparate discontents—from oil tycoons threatened by the green agenda to rust-belt workers agitated by harmful offshoring of jobs—into a united challenge to the Democratic-led neoliberal model.
As Engels’ writes in Ludwig Feuerbach And the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy,
When… it is a question of investigating the driving forces which consciously or unconsciously lie behind the motives of men in their historical actions … then it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of people in each people.
So as much as Donald Trump’s personal preferences play an outsized role, as the leader of the MAGA movement, we can best understand him by understanding the particular interests of the different forces within his coalition—Zionists, the Christian right, small business owners, anti-China hawks, domestic manufacturers, nativists, police boosters—and how he has successfully bound them into an alternative political project.
An Economic Nationalist Regime
Trump represents and is the leading champion for the revival of economic nationalism as a challenge to neoliberal globalization.
These two flavors of capitalist order—free-trade globalization and economic nationalism—are two tools by which a national capitalist class can pursue its interests, and national capitalist classes have historically switched between these two forms. Neoliberalism was just the latest iteration of a free-trade focused global order, but certainly not the first of its kind; nor is protectionism unique to Trumpism.
Both globalism and economic nationalism are promoted by camps which seek to pursue their unique interests by making a case that their model for organizing capitalism (which some call a ‘social structure of accumulation,’ and others call a ‘hegemonic concept of control’) is in the best interest of the US capitalist class as a whole. The two dominant camps are largely underlain by finance capital, which accumulates capital through lending, and productive capital, which accumulates capital more directly through production of commodities. Finance capital has a more global outlook, since it can move capital easily to different markets to seek the highest profit. Productive capital is more geographically and materially dependent, and therefore more dependent on specific government relationships, nation-state based privileges, and spheres of influence rather than a more uniform and impersonal set of international rules.4 But now China plays and wins by this very-same set of rules, challenging US capital.
In 2016 Trump campaigned on an economic nationalist platform. This was probably most clearly exemplified by Trump’s rhetoric criticizing NAFTA and opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the US ruling class’s strategy to confront China through trade liberalization of 12 Pacific nations to intentionally exclude China, which Obama signed in February of 2016.5 Trump withdrew the US from the TPP in 2017, three days into his first term, and launched a series of “trade wars” with China and the EU, implementing tariffs. This marked a break from the most hard-core tendencies of neoliberalism and the free-traders’ strategy for confronting China.
However, Marxists should more so understand Trump’s economic nationalism as a “bending of the stick” in the direction of protectionism rather than a full-on break with neoliberalism. This is most clearly demonstrated in Trump’s 2018 re-negotiation of NAFTA in the US Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), led by US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer; USMCA actually upheld and extended the general principles of the original neoliberal NAFTA framework, except that it moved slightly back towards protectionism by increasing national production requirements in key areas including the auto industry. The archetypical neoliberal model of NAFTA actually already included these national production requirements, only at a lower percentage, highlighting how there has really never been a “pure” implementation of neoliberal principles.
Trump and his camp were not the only ones who felt the need to confront China by pivoting from orthodox neoliberalism. With the attempt to confront China through neoliberal means dead from the unrevivable TPP, Biden actually kept many of Trump’s economic policies in place.
But Trump and his camp were not the only ones who felt the need to confront China by pivoting from orthodox neoliberalism. With the attempt to confront China through neoliberal means dead from the unrevivable TPP, Biden actually kept many of Trump’s economic policies in place, not only keeping but actually increasing tariffs on China.6
Furthermore, Biden did not attempt to pursue a resuscitation of the earlier neoliberal model, but instead put forward his own version of economic nationalism, again with the purpose of confronting the challenge from China, in the CHIPS act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This relative bi-partisan agreement on a need to revive protectionism to confront China shows that the need to confront the threat of Chinese capitalism is not a pet issue of one faction of the US capitalist class, but the class as a whole.
However, this does not mean that all sections of the US capitalist class desire to move towards an economic shift to the same degree and intensity. Rather, Trump clearly represents the sections of the US capitalist class which desire a far more radical confrontation with China.
The basis of this difference is the difference in how different sections of the US capitalist class accumulate their capital, and to what degree China represents a threat to that accumulation.
Although the US economy is the second largest exporter of goods and services after China and obviously a lynchpin of global production, US exports are actually a relatively small part of the US economy, accounting for only around 10 to 12 percent of the economy. In 2023, US exports amounted to some $2 trillion, while German exports were some $1.6 trillion,7 even though total US GDP in 2023 was $27 trillion while German GDP was only $4.4 trillion.8 These simple statistics show that there are vast differences in the extent to which national economies are dependent on trade and therefore reliant on free-trade policies. And more specifically, they highlight how the vast majority of the US economy is actually dependent on the domestic market, a fact which is only further exacerbated if we consider the domestic market to include Mexico and Canada.
There are many US capitalists who make their profits either investing overseas, or selling goods and services abroad. However, for most US capitalists this global trade and investment is a secondary consideration and the main source of profit-making is at home.
For this latter section, it makes sense to prioritize protecting dominance in the domestic market even if this means reducing opportunities for international profit-making. As Chinese capitalist production continues to increase on a quantitative and qualitative level, competing as a near-peer with US capitalist production and increasingly gaining US market share even in more advanced industrial fields, the domestic-reliant capitalists are forced to take protectionist measures.
For many US capitalists, the potential gains of expanding markets in Ukraine or securing the EU more comprehensively are simply not worth the cost of strengthening China.
Moreover, the different fractions of capital are not evenly impacted by this disparity of priorities. US based finance capital is less directly tied to the domestic market than is US productive capital.
The logic of the prioritization of the domestic economy over opportunities for foreign profit-making weighs not only on issues of industrial policy and trade, but also on foreign policy. The gains to US exports to be defended by supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia must be weighed based not only on the actual cost of aid, but also by the cost of driving Russia closer to China, thereby strengthening China. For many US capitalists, the potential gains of expanding markets in Ukraine or securing the EU more comprehensively are simply not worth the cost of strengthening China.
The shift to economic nationalism is inherently a re-prioritization of US productive capital at the cost of finance capital. Trump’s appeal to rust-belt workers hurt by free trade has been a rhetorical throughline of his last decade of political activity. The fact that confronting China requires reinvesting in American manufacturing allows Trump to present himself as a champion for manufacturing workers, and the actual investments in manufacturing provide Trump a set of juicy handouts by which to buy off important sections of the labor movement.
But just because Trump means to move more aggressively to shore up the prospects of the US capitalist class, does not mean that he will necessarily be able to overcome the serious crises it faces. Most importantly, the shift towards economic nationalism will not automatically overcome, and may exacerbate, the US government’s growing debt crisis. If a tipping point is reached, as was by the UK in the 2022 mini-budget crisis, US government borrowing costs could increase dramatically virtually overnight, which would lead to an increase in the cost of all government services.
The Threat of Authoritarianism
The prospect of a real move towards authoritarianism is uncertain but a serious potentiality in Trump’s second term.
Trump learned important lessons from his first administration about how the administrative state could block his policy rollout. Now, not only has the Supreme Court seemingly given him a free hand in ruling all “official acts” are granted immunity from prosecution, but Trump is this time stacking key posts in the administrative state with “yes men” loyalists whose careers are entirely reliant on staying in Trump’s good graces. This stacking is not limited to cabinet posts; rather, Project 2025 outlines a plan to increase “schedule f” political appointees in the civil service 10 fold – from 4,000 to 40,000 – giving Trump far greater and deeper direct control over the levers of the state.
Removing obstacles to his rollout increases Trump’s ability to wage authoritarian crackdowns on dissenters and mass movements which challenge his agenda and administration. The question of whether Trump will pursue suppression of dissent is only a question of degree. The recent settlement with ABC News for defamation is one end of the spectrum, where Trump uses ‘light’ lawfare to bring pressure on his critics. Legislation which would give the Treasury broad powers to remove the non-profit status of pro-Palestinian groups would be an even further step in this direction. Finally, the far end of the spectrum is the more direct implementation of state repression to detain, persecute, and prosecute activists and dissidents. This is not science fiction but recent history; the Bush administration argued it could legally detain US citizens deemed “enemy combatants” and hold them indefinitely without charges, and also tortured detainees at “black sites” around the world with impunity. The FBI also surveilled meetings of anti-war activists, targeting the ISO in 2005, and as Edward Snowden revealed, the US basically monitors everyone all the time through programs including XKeyscore and PRISM.
The US government already has broad powers to crack down on street protests and other forms of militant direct action, but far more could be done by Trump and his Department of Justice through escalating “lawfare.” One possibility is that RICO charges, the law used to go after organized crime, could be brought against activist organizations like DSA which organize mass civil disobedience; such an approach would empower the government to bring charges against basically every DSA member.
One possibility is that RICO charges, the law used to go after organized crime, could be brought against activist organizations like DSA which organize mass civil disobedience.
Politically, the suppression will almost certainly follow the traditional strategy of counter-revolution. In this strategy, the vanguard of the revolutionary forces are met directly with stiff repression, while the surrounding forces are cowed into silence in order to isolate the more militant layers from solidarity. Once the most militant layers are dispatched, the broader movement can be dealt with easily.
We have already seen how the US ruling class has sought to employ this method to defend Israel, bringing direct police repression against street activists, which is paired with a larger campaign to brand anyone who stands with Palestine in any way, or who doesn’t join in the repression of activists, as antisemitic.
It is possible that Trump does not immediately pursue an authoritarian crackdown, but that such a crackdown is employed if street protests reach a threatening height. Another potential is that the authorities could allow the MAGA activist layers to intimidate the mass movements, looking the other way or even coordinating with them.
Another possibility is that suppression of dissidents could take place in line with a serious escalation of a conflict with China. Considering that fear-mongering around China has long been the bi-partisan approach, a conflict with China may initially have a much larger base of support among the population as opposed to escalations in the Middle East or with Russia. If there was widespread popular support, this would leave any anti-war activists highly isolated.
Overall, in the short term Trump has broad discretion and few obstacles as to how far to pursue authoritarianism, while in the more medium and long term the regime will follow what is in the best interest of the ruling clique of the American capitalist class assembled around Trump and the class as a whole. This will develop on three main axes—the extent to which authoritarianism is needed by the Trump clique to enforce its rule on the capitalist class as a whole (suppressing the Democrats and the rule of law), the extent authoritarianism is needed to discipline the nation in preparation for war or escalating proxy wars with China, and the extent authoritarianism is needed to suppress threats to key pillars of capitalism such as imperialism, white supremacy, and undemocratic political structures, or the capitalist system as a whole.
Overall, in the short term Trump has broad discretion and few obstacles as to how far to pursue authoritarianism, while in the more medium and long term the regime will follow what is in the best interest of the ruling clique of the American capitalist class assembled around Trump and the class as a whole.
The last of these potentialities suggests that the greater our success in challenging Trump— that is, the more dangerous we become to his regime—the greater the danger of authoritarian suppression.
DSA is not yet prepared to wage large scale mass movements against Trump, and moreover is totally unprepared to take on any real steps in response to an authoritarian crackdown. If there is an attempt to suppress the left, including through lawfare and mass arrests, it will be crippling. If Trump sets out to suppress DSA, the pro-Palestinian anti-war movement, or other forces on the left in a real way, he will meet opponents hardly prepared to resist in any substantial way, or to carry forward and escalate mass resistance while operating in “underground” or “semi-underground” conditions.
Electric Shock; Electric Boogaloo
Almost certainly, we are not prepared to face Trump. Our organizations are too small, our methods are not professionalized, our political perspectives are underdeveloped, our strategy is too often self-isolating, and most importantly, our coherent vision of a positive alternative for society does not yet exist. The coming struggle will reveal the extent of our unpreparedness like a painful electric shock.
But like any shock, if it does not kill us, our weakness in the face of Trump will jolt us awake. Trump’s second term seeks to stamp out everything we have built over the last decade. Our task is not only to try to preserve the many important reforms which have been won. We must go beyond this, developing a movement against the right and for working people which is crystalized in serious efforts to launch a new political party, understood both as the best force to resist Trump and to deliver a positive agenda for working people.
This requires not only beating back Trump’s attacks, but more importantly, shedding off our own limitations and limited outlooks. DSA must steel itself to dive confidently into mass movements and major confrontations with the government, bringing a strong Marxist program and a powerful, party-like organization.
We will be fighting battles of a severity and intensity in excess of any work we have done before. If we can succeed, our movement will be so energizing that it will electrify the working class into struggle against not only Trump but the capitalist system as a whole.
Citations
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html ↩︎
- https://www.msn.com/he-il/news/other/more-than-1-million-americans-participated-in-protests-since-hamas-israel-war-began-on-oct-7/ar-AA1l3gOY
↩︎ - https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/12/China-bumpy-path-Eswar-Prasad
↩︎ - See: The Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van Der Pilj, Chapter 1, Section 1: https://libcom.org/library/class-formation-atlantic-scale ↩︎
- https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/02/03/statement-president-signing-trans-pacific-partnership ↩︎
- https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/13/politics/china-tariffs-biden-trump/index.html ↩︎
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/264623/leading-export-countries-worldwide/
↩︎ - https://www.statista.com/statistics/268173/countries-with-the-largest-gross-domestic-product-gdp/
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Henry De Groot
Henry De Groot, he/him, is involved with the Boston DSA Labor Working Group, an editor of Working Mass, and author of the book Student Radicals and the Rise of Russian Marxism.
