NEITHER FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION
The logic of Trump versus the logic of Lenin
A version of this article is also available at Tempest.
Two realities frame this talk. One is that I have recently written a book, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. The other is that the 2024 presidential election in the United States, however it goes, inevitably advances an intense political crisis whose outcome is by no means clear.1 It occurred to me that it might be useful, at this historic moment, to compare the logic of Donald J Trump and the logic of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. As I will outline, the qualities inherent in the approaches of Trump and Lenin have quite different logics — moving toward different outcomes.
My remarks have four basic components. First, an examination of Trump and Trumpism. Second, how some Marxists have analysed fascism. Third, a suggestion of how this analysis could be applied to US realities. Fourth, a brief examination of Lenin and Leninism, with a concluding comment on how Trumpism is stronger than Leninism.
A trusted comrade who read earlier drafts of this presentation, noting what he felt were gaps and deficiencies, told me: “This is not your best work.” I think that is inevitably the case. What I say here is fragmentary and incomplete, in more than one way. My hope is that what I offer will be useful, nonetheless, for helping to advance a clarifying discussion. Perhaps that discussion will contribute to our thinking of what is what, and what is to be done.
Trump and Trumpism
Trump’s politics has been labelled by some as Trumpism. Before examining Trumpism, let us pause to consider the mediocrity with whose name this “ism” is identified.
The ABCs of Trump’s qualities certainly include arrogance, as well as the Three Bs: bigot, bully, and braggart. The bragging takes many forms: a self-promoting “go-getter” who compulsively highlights his achievements, but also claims to have gone further and gotten more than is actually the case; an ignorant man who glorifies his ignorance with the aggressive assertion “I don’t read books!”, while claiming to know far more than he knows; someone who exaggerates the esteem in which people hold him and takes credit for accomplishments that are not his own. His billionaire status adds lustre, resources and authority to all that is involved in the narcissistic self-construction of the person who is Trump. He is quintessentially, and very proudly, a capitalist, and there are thirty-four felony convictions which cause many to label him a crook.
Jumping forward in the alphabet, some critics insist Trump is a fascist. Others question whether he is consistent and coherent enough to play the role of a Benito Mussolini or an Adolf Hitler. The term fascist has certainly become a freely used insult applied to ideas, practices and people we detest. Trump himself uses it (jumbling it with words such as “Marxists”, “Communists”, “terrorists” and “very bad people”) to denounce enemies lurking in the courtroom, in the mainstream media, in the government, and in the Democratic Party.
How disciplined and single-minded is Trump as a political leader? He could hardly be compared favourably to a Winston Churchill or a Ronald Reagan, let alone to a Mussolini or a Hitler. “By the spring of 2020,” according to New York Times chronicler Maggie Haberman, “it had become clear to many of his top advisors that Trump’s impulse to undermine existing systems and bend institutions to suit his purposes was accompanied by erratic behaviour and levels of anger requiring others to try to keep him on track nearly every hour of the day.”2
It is instructive to consider the experience of Steve Bannon, one of the most focused far-right ideologues who served as a central advisor in the early phase of the 2016 Trump administration. Michael Wolff reported:
Part of Bannon’s authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru — or inscrutable God.3
Bannon would become exasperated and disillusioned, realising that the details of the right-wing “populist” agenda he envisioned “were entirely captive to Trump’s inattention and wild mood swings. Trump, Bannon had long ago learned, ‘doesn’t give a fuck about the agenda — he doesn’t know what the agenda is’.”4
But what can be termed Trumpism transcends the dysfunctionality of this ageing individual. Several essential elements help define what we are labelling Trumpism.
One element is armed and dangerous: the forces that came together to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which included the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, militant components of the Tea Party movement, latter-day partisans of the old Southern Confederacy, and various Nazi and white supremacist groups. US General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in his January 2021 notebook, listed the groups with the comment, “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.” According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa: “Some were the new Brown Shirts, a US version, Milley concluded, of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party that supported Hitler. It was a planned revolution. Steve Bannon’s vision coming to life. Bring it all down, blow it up, burn it, and emerge with power.”5 These once-marginalised elements had come into the political mainstream, and had grown substantially, with the active encouragement of Trump and others around him. But this cunning, avaricious, profoundly limited individual and his acolytes were hardly capable of controlling them. Indeed, as a whole, the huge and diverse “Make America Great Again” movement cannot be understood as being under his control.6
Blended into segments of this pro-Trump constituency is something called “Christian nationalism,” which rejects the ideals of radical democracy enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and asserts that the US was founded (as one televangelist put it) “by Christians who wanted to build a Christian nation on the foundation of God’s will”, as defined by right-wing fundamentalists who see the notion of equal-rights democracy as a heresy incompatible with Christianity. Maverick neo-conservative Robert Kagan anxiously commented that “what Christian nationalists call ‘liberal totalitarianism’,” the signers of the Declaration of Independence called “freedom of conscience”. With or without this particular religious gloss, Kagan points out, such a deep strain of fundamental anti-democratic intolerance has been present throughout US history among substantial segments of the American people — reflecting bigoted attitudes on race, ethnicity, gender, and religion.7
Another essential element of Trumpism can be found in a quite different cluster of conservative entities and individuals, drawn together in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Founded in the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation has served as a centre for conservative academics, intellectuals, and policymakers since the Reagan presidency. Its newest effort is a 900-page, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which is meant to serve as a policy-making guide for a second Trump administration. According to its self-description: “This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country from the brink of disaster.” It is worth noting that Trump is by no means the centrepiece of this document; rather, reference is made to “the next conservative President.” Trump is mentioned frequently and very respectfully, but the Heritage Foundation, its collaborators, and its program are framed as entities transcending this individual. The bottom line of this conservative manifesto is a defence of unrestrained capitalism. The primary goal of the US president, we are told, should be to unleash “the dynamic genius of free enterprise.” This dovetails with proposals to impose a centralised authoritarian regime to enforce a wide range of right-wing policies.8
With an eye to moderate voters, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025. But its proponents remain solidly in the Trumpist camp, including loyalists who served in his first presidential administration. Covert plans have been developed to implement the Project 2025 program as soon as a right-wing president assumes office. Researcher Gillian Kane notes that Project 2025 is not dependent on a Trump presidential victory, emphasising that “even if Trump loses in November, many core aspects of this Christian nationalist plan will be implemented; indeed, some recommendations are already underway.”9 Even when Trump is no longer on the scene, the program associated with Trumpism – the unleashing of unrestrained capitalism while systematically repressing human rights and democratic freedoms — will continue to confront us.
A key essential element in Trumpism is today’s Republican Party. Leading figures and staffers of that party — as was the case with the conservative mainstream as a whole — did not begin as Trump supporters. One knowledgeable Republican operative, Tim Miller, describes what happened this way:
When the Trump Troubles began there wasn’t a single one in our ranks who would ever have said they were in his corner. To a person we found him gauche, repellent, and beneath the dignity of the public service we bestowed with bumptious regard. We didn’t take him seriously. … And you wouldn’t have caught us dead in one of those gaudy red baseball caps.
But, at first gradually and then suddenly, nearly all of us decided to go along. The same people who roasted Donald Trump as an incompetent menace in private served his rancid baloney in public when convenient. They continued to do so even after the mob he summoned stained the party and our ideals and the halls of the Capitol with their shit.10
Miller offers an insider’s view of a toxic cynicism permeating the Republican Party leadership, which contributed to Trump’s triumph within its ranks. Seeing the political arena as “a big game” through which, by winning, they “awarded themselves the status of public service, the Republican ruling class dismissed the plight of those we were manipulating, growing increasingly comfortable using tactics that inflamed them, turning them against their fellow man.” Miller and other operatives “advanced arguments that none of us believed” and “made people feel aggrieved about issues we had no intent or ability to solve.” He confesses that a quiet and unacknowledged racism was often employed. “These tactics became not just unchecked but supercharged by a right-wing media ecosystem that we were in bed with and that had its own nefarious incentives, sucking in clicks and views through rage hustling without any intention of delivering something that might bring value to ordinary people’s lives.”
Miller concludes:
Should it have come as a surprise that a charlatan who had spent decades duping the masses into joining his pyramid schemes and buying his shitty products would excel in such an environment? Someone who had a media platform of his own and a reptilian instinct for manipulation? Someone who didn’t hesitate to say the quiet part aloud?11
Another ex-Republican operative, Stuart Stevens, insists it is a mistake to see Trump as having “hijacked” the Republican Party. Instead, Trump “is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty years or so, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party.”12
Liz Cheney, a lifelong conservative Republican and former Congressperson from Wyoming who resisted more doggedly than most Trump’s efforts to bully the Republican Party into supporting him, ended up lamenting: “We have now learned that most Republicans currently in Congress will do what Donald Trump asks, no matter what it is. … I am very sad to say that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our Republic.” According to Cheney: “So strong is the love of power, that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump.”13
Of course, the Republican Party has a long and complex history. Just as in the case of the other essential elements of Trumpism, it did not begin with Trump and will not end with him. “Whatever happens to Trump,” journalist Joe Conason writes, “the fate of American conservatism and the Republican Party … already seems fixed,” destined “to grind on shamelessly, with or without him,” propagating a well-rehearsed ideology (as Conason puts it) of “falsehood and fraud.”14 The highly influential and stilted news and opinion operations of Fox News, the Breitbart News Network, and countless talk-radio outlets were well-established before Trump’s presidency.15 Regardless of what happens to Trump, the larger phenomenon of Trumpism will be with us for some time to come. “Trump is not the disease, he’s the symptom,” is how Chris Hedges described it. “Trump really built on a malaise that was already widely prevalent within the United States.”16
We must also be clear that this is a global phenomenon, as noted by many different observers, involving powerful movements and, sometimes, governments in a diverse range of countries: Argentina, Brazil, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Russia, Turkey, the US, and more. A combination of terms is used to describe what is happening — right-wing populism, authoritarian xenophobic ultra-nationalism, etc — all seeking to capture its complex content. Sometimes the word “fascism” is applied, but the term quasi-fascism seems more apt. The prefix quasi- means “resembling” and “having some, but not all of the features of.” The term quasi-fascism, in the present moment, can be understood as “fascism in the making.”
What is fascism?
Fascism represents more than simply a murderous right-wing dictatorship, the sort imposed by monarchs, generals, and wealthy elites for centuries.17 One of the first Marxists to analyse fascism was German Communist (and Rosa Luxemburg’s longtime comrade) Clara Zetkin. One primary aspect of the fascist development, she noted, involved “the disintegration and decay of capitalist economy, and the symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois state.” Another involved the failed promises of reformist politics to defend and advance the well-being of the lower and middle classes, causing massive disillusionment and desperation amid disintegrating realities, especially when the reformists (in this case, those predominating in the German Social Democratic Party) showed themselves to be “in benevolent accord” with liberal capitalists. The third primary aspect, according to Zetkin, involved downwardly mobile middle classes that provided a disappointed mass base, “joined [she says] by large circles of the proletariat, of workers who have given up their faith not only in socialism, but also in their own class.” The result, Zetkin notes, is that “fascism has become a sort of refuge for the politically shelterless.”18
It was the promise of the left to solve the economic crisis through socialist transformation — and then its utter failure to do so — that brought into being the fascist alternative, uniting frightened capitalists and desperate, disappointed masses. This suggests that we on the Left will have a shot at making a revolution before the threat of fascism becomes serious. This is how many of us understood Leon Trotsky’s bald assertion that “fascism will come only if we fail.”19 In this scenario, the possibility of Trumpism morphing into fascism would be precluded. But this involves a serious misunderstanding of our history, which corresponds in a unique way to the developments described by Zetkin and Trotsky.
Aspects of US reality
The conservatives of the Heritage Foundation, among others, blur together the mildly liberal Democratic Party with rhetorical denunciations of “the left” and accusations of “socialism”. There is a craziness to this — but on a certain level, it makes sense. It is worth taking a few minutes to consider the history of the US left and see why it makes sense.
Over the past century, the organised left has had a powerful impact, influencing politics, laws, consciousness, and culture within the US. The labour movement, the waves of feminism, the anti-racist and civil rights movements, the struggles against the Vietnam war, the various student movements, and more, were all instrumental in bringing about far-reaching changes on the US scene over many decades. This would not have been nearly as effective (and might not have come into existence) without the essential organising efforts of left-wing activists.
This was accompanied by another development, however. Although a significant element of left-wing activists insisted on the need for political independence from pro-capitalist political parties, this was largely overpowered by a deep adaptationist trend. In the “Red Decade” of the 1930s, convergence between socialist-minded forces and a somewhat expansive social liberalism was especially accelerated, as the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) “stole” many reform components of the socialist program. This was done, as FDR insisted, to save capitalism during the angry Depression years — but also to ensure the continuing popularity and election of FDR and those around him. More than this, the bulk of the organised left was absorbed into the New Deal coalition.20
Over half a century, six decisive pivots have made absorption of the organised left into the Democratic Party almost complete: (1) The trade union movement of the 1930s, particularly the dynamically left-leaning new Congress of Industrial Organizations (the CIO), formed a firm alliance with FDR’s New Deal Democrats; (2) a 1935 decision by the Communist International under Joseph Stalin to form a “People’s Front” alliance with liberal capitalists such as FDR, brought the dynamic US Communists into the Democratic Party coalition; (3) at the start of the Cold War, the bulk of the organised labour movement (along with most moderate socialists) embraced the Democratic Party’s anti-Communist and liberal capitalist agenda, leading to a broad “social compact” of business, labour, and government from the late ’40s and through the ’50s; (4) the civil rights coalition of the early ’60s became intimately entwined with the party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; (5) through the ’70s and ’80s, much of the 1960s “New Left” committed to the reform wing of the Democratic Party; and (6) as the twenty-first century began to unfold, new waves of young activists joined with older layers, amid radical-sounding promises and soaring hopes, to put Barack Obama in the White House.21
From the early twentieth century, the organised left had been a dynamic force of considerable significance in the US. Among workers and the oppressed, it had mobilised effective struggles that won genuine victories. It inspired hopes for further effective struggles that would advance human rights, improve the lives of the working-class majority, and bring to birth a better world. Among the wealthy and powerful, it inspired fear and rage.22
By the end of the twentieth century, through the process we have traced, the organised Left had largely evaporated. Some of its rhetoric, many of its values, and much of its reform agenda (often in diluted form) could be found in the Democratic Party. Yet a sincere and practical commitment to replace the economic dictatorship of capitalism with the economic democracy of socialism was no longer on the table. Nonetheless, among the wealthy and powerful there were those who still felt fear and rage, and also a deep determination to recover lost ground, particularly in the context of the disintegration and decay of the capitalist economy.
That is why anti-Trump Republicans such as Liz Cheney, along with Democrats such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — entwined as they are in the disintegration and decay of the capitalist economy and with no real solutions to offer — are incapable of providing a durable alternative to Trumpism.
Noting that 30 million US workers have lost their jobs since 1996, Hedges points out this generated “a deep despair and even rage among people who have been betrayed largely by the Democratic Party … that pushed through NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]” and “that de-industrialized the country,” thereby making large chunks of what had been the Democratic Party’s working-class base open to the demagogic appeals of Trumpism.23
Indications are that the white working-class vote has been split. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden got 41% of the white vote while Trump got 58% — in each case, a majority of these were from working-class voters. (Related to this, 56% of union households went for Biden, and 40% went for Trump.) Political scientists Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes document that white working-class support for Trump has often been overstated. Only 30% of his supporters in 2016 were from this proletarian category, although they add that 60% of white working-class voters went for Trump in that year. Some studies indicate a decline in such support.24
Yet Harris consistently expresses her support for capitalism, considering herself “a pro-growth capitalist who wants a ‘forward-looking economy that helps everyone’.”25 The problem with this is that capitalist profits are often not consistent with “helping everyone.” Whenever push comes to shove, she can be expected to compromise working-class interests (as has the Democratic Party as a whole) to help maintain capitalist profitability, wreaking havoc on the working-class base, as it has in recent decades. Over the past two years we have seen Democratic politicians lining up with wealthy and powerful elites to deny exploited rail workers the right to strike, allow fossil fuel industries to assault the environment, and enable Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children in Gaza.26
In a London Review of Books report on the recent Democratic Party national convention, Christian Lorentzen noted “the alliance forged under Joe Biden between the party’s centrist establishment and its formerly insurgent left wing,” concluding “that the Democratic tent is big enough for firebrands who denounce billionaires as well the right sort of billionaires,” who support, fund, and help lead the Democratic Party. Even a moderate socialist such as Bernie Sanders — good as he is in some ways — is badly compromised to the extent that he consistently and systematically calls upon his supporters to remain within the framework of the staunchly pro-capitalist Democratic Party. Sanders ends his most recent book with the exhortation: “It’s time, finally, for the Democrats to recognize that good policy is good politics. It’s good for the party. It’s good for the country. It’s good for the world. Let’s do it!”27
Lenin and Leninism
In contrast to such compromising liberals and moderate socialists, and also to grotesque “super-capitalists” such as Trump, is the uncompromisingly anti-capitalist Lenin. The logic of Trump is to manipulate mass pressure, mass consciousness, and mass struggles to his advantage, for the enhancement of his position and power, but also to unleash the “dynamic genius” (and profits) of capitalism. The logic of Lenin (to use the old radical-labour slogan) is to “agitate, educate, and organise”. Draw together more and more of the working class, with a deepening sense of class consciousness, to struggle for immediate improvements in the condition of labouring people and the oppressed, and replace the power of the capitalists with the collective power of the working class. The result being a transformation of the economy to an economic democracy in which technologies and resources required to meet human needs are socially owned and used specifically to meet those needs.
Comparing the personality of Trump with that of Lenin is also instructive. One of Lenin’s most informed and critical biographers, anti-Communist journalist Isaac Don Levine, described him as:
… without arrogance, without any personal ambition, a ruler who shunned honors, Lenin was perhaps the first great leader in history who had no mania for glory, for authority, for pomp. His quest for power was not an egotistic passion but a duty imposed upon him by his [revolutionary socialist] faith, and he used it not to further his own selfish ends, but to promote his ideals.28
Levine emphasised the extreme modesty of Lenin’s living standards and his treatment of others. He quoted one of Lenin’s prominent Menshevik opponents, Raphael Abramovitch: “His home life and personal relations would merit the enthusiasm of any Baptist minister. It is difficult to conceive a simpler, kinder and more unpretentious person than Lenin at home. Making ends meet with difficulty, he was always shabbily dressed, and is not much different in that respect even now,” after the Bolshevik revolution. Abramovitch added “poverty worried him little, for his only interest in life lies in party affairs and politics.” Levine’s conclusion built up to an unrelenting political criticism, but also emphasised much that was positive: “Unselfish and irreproachable in his character, of a retiring disposition, almost ascetic in his habits, extremely modest and gentle in his direct contact with people, although peremptory and derisive in his treatment of political enemies, Lenin could be daring and provocative in his policies, inflexible in the execution of his principles, unscrupulous in his method of government and crafty and pitiless in his handling of men and affairs.”29
What Levine identifies in negative terms was seen by Lenin’s comrade, Anatoly Lunacharsky, as reflecting the single-mindedness which was “the dominating trait of his character, the feature which constituted half his make-up, [which] was his will: an extremely firm, extremely forceful will capable of concentrating itself on the most immediate task but which yet never strayed beyond the radius traced out by his powerful intellect and which assigned every individual problem its place as a link in a huge, world-wide political chain.”30
This suggests an intellectual coherence absent from Trump’s make up. One is highly cultured, and the other is not. While Trump boasted “I don’t read books,” Lenin immersed himself in the works of William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Anton Chekov, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Chernyshevksy and Maxim Gorky, among many others. More than this, he wrote many books, although these were entirely devoted to politically-focused prose.
While there was an openness to his evolving Marxist perspectives, there was also a remarkable consistency. In his polemic of the early 1890s, What the “Friends of the People” Are, Lenin emphasised themes that would be central to his thought, his writings, and his actions over the next three decades. It’s worth considering several key passages:
The worker cannot fail to see that he is oppressed by capital, that his struggle has to be waged against the bourgeois class. And this struggle, aimed at satisfying his immediate economic needs, at improving his material conditions, inevitably demands that the workers organise, and inevitably becomes a war not against individuals, but against a class, the class which oppresses and crushes the working people not only in the factories, but everywhere. …
When its advanced representatives have mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas become widespread, and when stable organizations are formed among the workers to transform the workers’ present sporadic economic war into conscious class struggle — then the Russian worker rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian working class (side by side with the proletariat of all countries) along the straight road of open political struggle to the victorious communist revolution.31
The ways in which Lenin developed and applied these perspectives deserve to be elaborated and critically examined. In doing that, we find a commitment to what Georg Lukács called “the actuality of revolution,” or as Max Eastman put it, a rejection of those “who talked revolution but did not intend to produce it.” At the same time, we find a commitment to utilising Marxist theory dialectically; not as dogma, but as a guide to action, understanding that general theoretical perspectives must be modified through application to “the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.” We find Lenin’s insistence that the revolutionary party must function as “a tribune of the people,” combining working-class struggles with systematic struggles against all forms of oppression, regardless of which class was affected. There is also an approach to the interplay of reform struggles with the longer-range revolutionary struggle, permeated by several qualities: (a) a refusal to bow to the oppressive and exploitative powers-that-be; (b) a refusal to submit to the transitory “realism” of mainstream politics; and (c) a measuring of all activity by how it helps build working-class consciousness, the mass workers’ movement, and the revolutionary organisation necessary to overturn capitalism.32
Those who share Lenin’s commitments have a responsibility to adapt his perspectives to what has unfolded over the past hundred years. In doing so, we must face a key aspect of Trumpism’s superiority as a global political force. The international working-class movement that was essential to the logic of Leninism is no longer the powerful force of a hundred years ago. There has been a dramatic decline and fragmentation of the working-class movement in the capitalist centres where it once flourished.33 Those of us who are in basic agreement with Lenin’s orientation have a responsibility to do what we can to reverse that process, and to help build the working-class movement and the revolutionary socialist strength and vigour capable of overcoming the problems of our time.
For now, Trumpism is far more powerful than the meagre and disparate forces currently drawn to the Leninist alternative. Yet the logic of Trumpism pulls toward the deepening disintegration, violence, and catastrophes of global capitalism. The logic of the alternative pulls toward economic democracy, expanding liberty, and justice for all. The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg noted long ago, is between socialism and barbarism.34
This is the annotated text of a presentation scheduled for the Marx Memorial Library on November 6, 2024.
- 1
Portions of this presentation are derived and developed from Paul Le Blanc, “Trumpism, Fascism, and Political Realities in the United States,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 11 June 2024 https://links.org.au/trumpism-fascism-and-political-realities-united-states, and Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2023)
- 2
Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (New York: Penguin Books, 2022), p. 429. Also see Editorial Board, “The Dangers of Donald Trump From Those Who Know Him,” New York Times, September 26, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/26/opinion/donald-trump-personality-history.html.
- 3
Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2018), pp. 115-116.
- 4
Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2019), p. 29.
- 5
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021), pp. 273-274; Matt Prince, “What is President Trump’s Relationship with Far-Right and White Supremacist Groups?,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-09-30/la-na-pol-2020-trump-white-supremacy; Aram Roston, “The Proud Boys Are Back: How the Far-Right is Rebuilding to Rally Behind Trump,” Reuters, June 3, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-proudboys/.
- 6
Ezra Klein, “The MAGA Movement Has Become a Problem for Trump,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/opinion/project-2025-trump-election.html.
- 7
Robert Kagan, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart – Again (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 2024), pp. 171, 176. Also see Robert P. Jones, “The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think,” Time, August 31, 2023, and Robert P. Jones, “Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America,” Time, September 10, 2024. Also see Sruthi Darbhamulla, “An Unsteady Alliance: Donald Trump and the Religious Right,” The Hindu, September 10, 2024, https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/an-unsteady-alliance-trump-and-the-religious-right/article68382345.ece. Quite different versions of Christianity exist. See, for example, Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 49-77, 222-27, and Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church (New York: Harper One, 2007). The revolutionary-democratic qualities of the founding document of the US are indicated in Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
- 8
Spencer Chretien, “Project 2025,” The Heritage Foundation, Jan. 31, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/project-2025; Project 2025 - The Presidential Transition Project: Policy Agenda, including the text of Paul Dans and Steven Groves, ed., Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, https://www.project2025.org/policy/. For critical evaluations, see: E. Fletcher McClellan, “A Primer on the Chilling Far-Right Project 2025 Plan for 2nd Trump Presidency,” Lancasteronline, June 3, 2024, https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/a-primer-on-the-chilling-far-right-project-2025-plan-for-2nd-trump-presidency-column/article_ef88858e-1e9b-11ef-9e81-bf8485299455.html; Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, “Project 2025: The Far-Right Playbook for American Extremism,” https://globalextremism.org/project-2025-the-far-right-playbook-for-american-authoritarianism/. The quotation describing who composed the Project 2025 document is in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 2-3.
- 9
Centre for Climate Reporting, “Undercover in Project 2025,” climate-reporting.org; Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, “Hidden-camera video shows Project 2025 co-author discussing his secret work preparing for a second Trump term,” CNN, August 15, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/15/politics/russ-vought-projeco0authct-2025-trump-secret-recording-invs/index.html; Amy Goodman and Lawrence Carter, “Project 2025 Co-author Lays Out ‘Radical Agenda’ for Next Trump Term in Undercover Video,” Democracy Now!, August 16, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQjdwsZhE_Q; Gillian Kane, “Project 2025 is Already Here,” In These Times, June 2024, p. 8.
- 10
Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (New York: Harper, 2022), p. xii.
- 11
Miller, p. xx.
- 12
Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), pp. xiii, 4.
- 13
Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2023), pp. 2, 366. It should be noted that the Constitution — defining stabilising structures and rules for the US government — is hardly a democratic document. See Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), and Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022).
- 14
Joe Conason, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2024), pp. 271-272. Also see Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
- 15
Pew Research Center, “Five Facts About Fox News,” https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/08/five-facts-about-fox-news; Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman,“Study: Breitbart-led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php; “The Divided Dial” series (November 15 - December 21, 2022), On the Media, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial.
- 16
Chris Hedges, “Harris vs Trump: The End of American Dominance?” Interview with Mohamed Hashem, Real Talk: Middle East Eye, 5 August 2024
- 17
For considerably more detail than is possible here, see: David Beetham, ed., Marxists in the Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism From the Inter-war Period (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019); F.L. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism, Second Edition (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1982); Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2005).
- 18
Clara Zetkin, “Fascism” (August 1923), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/08/fascism.htm. Also see Clara Zetkin, Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win, ed. by Mike Taber and John Riddell (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).
- 19
Leon Trotsky, “American Problems” (August 7, 1940), Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939-1940 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 337. Italian socialist Ignazio Silone expressed this idea with a cynical twist: “Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place” – see The School for Dictators (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), p. 112.
- 20
Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience, pp. 153-98; David Milton, The Politics of US Labor, From the Great Depression to the New Deal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982).
- 21
This is explored in Paul Le Blanc, Left Americana: The Radical Heart of US History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), as well as Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013). Also see: Manning Marable, “Jackson and the Rise of the Rainbow Coalition,” New Left Review, January-February, 1985; Sheila D. Collins, The Rainbow Challenge: The Jackson Campaign and the Future of US Politics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986); Steve Cobble, “Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition Created Today’s Democratic Politics,” The Nation, October 2, 2018; Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).
- 22
See for example Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
- 23
Hedges, “Harris vs Trump: The End of American Dominance?”
- 24
Roper Center, “How Groups Voted in 2020,” https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2020; Kathryn Royster, “New Political Science Research Debunks Myths About White Working-Class Support for Trump,” Vanderbilt University, July 29, 2020, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/news/2020/07/29/political-science-research-debunks-myths-about-white-working-class-support-for-trump/; Martha McHardy, “Donald Trump’s Support Among White Working Class Has ‘Shrunk Significantly,’” Newsweek, August 14, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-white-working-class-voters-poll-1938946.
How to define the term “working class” is highly contested. Some assert that having a college education places a person outside of the working class (which consigns many small business owners to the working class, while teachers and many nurses are consigned to the so-called “middle class”). This contrasts with the Marxist definition of working class: those who sell their ability to work for a paycheck, regardless of educational level. Michael Zweig, in his Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2023, p. 96) presents 61.9% of the US labour force as working class, and 38.1% as “middle class”. But as Harry Braverman and others have indicated, some in this latter category are in occupations that have been proletarianised — see R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy, “Beyond the Degradation of Labor: Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review, Vol. 66, No. 5: October 2014.
It should be added that when one factors in African American, Hispanic, and Asian American workers, a clear majority of the US working class is not behind Trump.
- 25
On Harris’s pro-capitalist orientation, see: “Who is Kamala Harris' father Donald Harris who Trump accused of being a Marxist in the debate,” The Economic Times, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/who-is-kamala-harris-father-donald-harris-who-trump-accused-of-being-a-marxist-in-the-debate/articleshow/113263386.cms; Amanda Gordon, “Doug Emhoff Pitches Harris’ Economic Vision as ‘Pro-Capitalism’ and ‘Helps Everyone,’” Time, August 27, 2024, https://time.com/7015029/doug-emhoff-kamala-harris-pro-capitalism-economic-agenda/; Nicholas Nehamas and Reid J. Epstein, “Harris Casts Herself as a Pro-Business Pragmatist in a Broad Economic Pitch,” New York Times, September 25, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/us/politics/harris-economic-speech-pro-business.html.
- 26
David Shepardson and Nandita Bose, “Biden Signs Bill to Block US Railroad Strike,” Reuters, December 2, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/; Brian Dabbs, “Harris Embraces US Fossil Fuels in Showdown with Trump,” E & E News by Politico, September 11, 2024, https://www.eenews.net/articles/harris-embraces-us-fossil-fuels-in-showdown-with-trump/; Ilan Pappé, “The Genocide in Palestine,” The Palestine Chronicle, September 17, 2024, https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-genocide-in-palestine-how-to-prevent-the-next-stage-from-happening-ilan-pappe/.
- 27
Christian Lorentzen, “Not a Tough Crowd,” London Review of Books, 12 September, 2024, p. 31; Bernie Sanders, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism (New York: Crown, 2023), p. 293.
- 28
Isaac Don Levine, The Man Lenin (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1924), p. 34.
- 29
Levine, The Man Lenin, pp. 36, 193.
- 30
Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” Revolutionary Silhouettes, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lunachar/works/silhouet/lenin.htm.
- 31
V. I. Lenin, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats,” Collected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), pp. 299, 300. That this orientation informs all of Lenin’s political thought can be seen in V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings, ed. by Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008), and also in Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015).
- 32
Georg Lukács, Lenin, A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso, 2009), p. 11; Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), pp. 150, 151; V. I. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” “What Is To Be Done,” and “Against Subordination to Liberals,” in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, pp. 259, 140, 143, 162-6.
- 33
A massive narrative, focusing on Europe and indicating what once existed and what has been lost, can be found in Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002). In a different key but covering some of the same ground is Mike Davis’s brilliant volume Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (London: Verso, 2018).
- 34
See Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott, eds., Socialism or Barbarism: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Pluto Press, 2010), and Paul Le Blanc, “Rosa Luxemburg and the Final Conflict,” Spectre, April 24, 2020, https://spectrejournal.com/rosa-luxemburg-and-the-final-conflict/.
