(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

By Argiris Malapanis and Geoff Mirelowitz

The 2024 presidential election is less than three months away. The U.S. working class faces the same challenge posed throughout its history. In this class-divided society, the wealthy minority that makes up the capitalist class has two political parties. The working class has none. We are presented with the claim — by Democrats and Republicans alike — that their candidate speaks for working people and will improve our conditions. That’s an illusion. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have defended and will safeguard the interests of the capitalist class.

After much indecision, the Democratic Party resolved the crisis posed by President Joe Biden’s insistence that he remained the strongest choice to oppose Trump’s effort to return to the White House. Biden’s stunningly poor performance in the June 27 nationally televised debate with Trump brought the crisis to a head. It was resolved by his belated decision — under an avalanche of pressure from the Democratic establishment and its financial backers — to step aside in favor of Harris, his vice president.

Although Harris had long been derided by many Democrats, pundits, and commentators as too weak a candidate for serious consideration, those concerns were quickly abandoned. Democrats rapidly united and a wave of momentum has developed based on the hope that they might now defeat Trump in November.

OPINION

Trump emerged from the June debate riding his own wave of momentum. His opponent was widely seen as simply too feeble to rally the support needed to defeat him. A failed assassination attempt created even more enthusiasm for the Trump campaign. The decision to replace Biden with Harris has, at least temporarily, reversed that situation. The outcome of the election is now widely seen as too close to call.

In the wake of his 2020 electoral defeat, Trump used the technique of the “big lie” to mount a campaign that claimed the election had been “stolen” from him. This culminated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Once police and the National Guard finally dispersed the rightist mob, Trump and his supporters were put on the defensive. He was impeached in the House of Representatives and narrowly avoided conviction in the Senate.

While many members of Congress continued to support Trump’s false “voter fraud” claims, he was defeated in the courts and widely condemned by many who speak for the interests of the capitalist class. His political future appeared uncertain. Few could have predicted then that today it would be Biden forced to step aside, while Trump would again enjoy broad support.

Trump’s recent trajectory

Trump was not on the defensive for long. He soon consolidated his control of the Republican Party.

For more than 150 years the GOP has been one of the two capitalist parties — alongside the Democrats — that monopolize political power on behalf of the wealthy minority that rules the United States.

The decision to retain Trump and his rightist demagogy as the face of that party is not accidental. If the wealthy who control the GOP wanted a different candidate and a political strategy other than “Make America Great Again” they would act on that choice, as the wealthy who control the Democratic Party ultimately acted to replace Biden.

There is no meaningful sign of dissension among those who control the GOP. To the contrary, widespread reporting indicates that many who condemned Trump after January 6 now support him again. There are few if any signs that substantial numbers of GOP politicians or ruling-class figures who identify as Republicans are leaving the party for the Democrats. Nor is there any sign that those dissatisfied with Trump have any plans to establish a new capitalist party. At least for now, the two-party system that serves the wealthy remains intact.

This is the electoral choice capitalism now offers working people for the foreseeable future: Trumpism or the Democratic Party liberalism associated with Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and now Kamala Harris. There is little reason to expect the two-party system will offer anything different after 2024 than it is offering today.

While it may have seemed unlikely in January 2021, the signs of Trump’s rapid comeback have been unmistakable for some time. Prosecutors whose political allegiances lie with the Democratic Party indicted Trump, accusing him of various crimes in four different cases. Whatever one’s opinion of the legal merit of those charges — and there is no doubt that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election — it quickly became clear that after each new indictment Trump emerged stronger.

This is not only because Trump’s base, among millions of people in the middle classes and some sections of the working class, evidences an undying loyalty to him. Millions of others were suspicious of the indictments and saw them as a political act by Democrats to remove a candidate they could not defeat at the polls. The indictments could not prevent Trump’s candidacy. And no conviction — one has been obtained, others are now less likely — can bar him from the White House.

The Wall Street Journal — which condemned Trump for the stolen election campaign and January 6 — opposed the indictments, referring to them as “lawfare.”

In a July 9 editorial, the Journal celebrated the recent Supreme Court verdict that handed Trump the ruling he hoped for. “The Supreme Court’s decision last week that the Presidency enjoys constitutional immunity for official acts has more or less sealed the failure of the lawfare election strategy,” the Journal stated. “Mr. Trump can be charged for unofficial conduct, but what parts of the Jan. 6 indictment, if any, are in that category? Lower courts will chew this over, but it’s hard to see a trial before Election Day, or maybe ever if Mr. Trump wins.”

Behind Trump’s success

Trumpism — “America First”^[1] rightist radicalism and demagogy — thrives on the social and political conditions capitalism has created. Frequent cycles of rising joblessness and underemployment; persistent inflation, especially in expenses that most affect working people, like groceries and rent;  falling real wages; lack of affordable housing and health care; a widespread opioid epidemic; and increasing homelessness are now considered normal across the United States.

These conditions are unacceptable to millions of working-class and middle-class people. They see “business as usual” politicians of both parties as responsible for them. Trump continues to claim, falsely, that he is different.

Because these conditions have not faded, Trumpism hasn’t faded. The idea that these problems require radical solutions — of a kind neither liberal Democrats nor “old school” Republicans offer — is not mistaken. But “radical” is not enough, and the term can be used to serve the wealthy when its class content is unclear. What is needed are radical solutions in the interests of the working class. The Democratic Party cannot and will not put forward such solutions.

The starting point of a genuine fight against Trumpism, as well as Democratic Party liberalism, is the rejection of “America First.” Otherwise working people remain locked into the idea that our fundamental interests are national, not class, interests; that we have more in common with the wealthy minority that profits from our labor — because they, too, are “Americans” — than we do with fellow working people around the world.

The Democratic Party shares the nationalist America First outlook even if its candidates generally do not use the overtly reactionary demagogy Trump employs. Democrats urge working people to support the use of U.S. military might around the world. They tell us to get behind their party’s foreign policy, as they have done with Biden’s whole-hearted military backing of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. They see immigrants flooding into this country to seek a better life as a problem that needs to be stopped.

That is why deportations of immigrant workers increased under Obama. That is why the Biden/Harris administration has increasingly adapted to Trump’s demands to sharply limit the right of immigrants to request asylum in the United States.

Origins of Trumpism

An extreme right-wing has always been part of the two-party system. A long list of ultra-rightist politicians preceded Trump. They include Senator Joseph McCarthy, the anticommunist witch hunter in the 1950s; Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrat George Wallace, both presidential candidates in the 1960s; and in the 1990s, Patrick Buchanan who, after serving presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, ran against George H.W. Bush in the 1992 GOP primaries.

Buchanan was seen by many as an incipient fascist. He was the first to revive the call for “America First” — first raised decades ago  — as the slogan of extreme U.S. nationalism. Buchanan eventually faded from the scene, but his impact lived on in the candidacy of Sara Palin as the GOP vice-presidential nominee in 2008, the Tea Party movement that mobilized during the Obama years, and ultimately Trump.^[2]

Buchanan advocated a no-holds-barred fight that would pit the GOP against a Democratic Party he claimed “supported abortion, radical feminism, and the homosexual rights movement.”

Speaking in prime time in 1992 to the GOP convention Buchanan declared, “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

He demonized immigrants and sought to define who are “real” Americans and who are not. He relied on scapegoating immigrants and others for the economic and social problems caused by the capitalist system itself.

By fusing cultural and economic issues, Buchanan summoned public outrage and resentment over everything from school busing to affirmative action and “un-Christian” art to rail against economic elitism. The “real Americans,” especially those in rural areas, were thus pitted against the urban elites: “The high-taxing, government spending, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood loving, left wing freak show,” as author Thomas Frank would later describe^[3] Buchanan’s appeal.

The political continuity to Trump is clear. It is clearest in Trump’s unrelenting demonization of immigrants. His rightist, anti-immigrant rhetoric has been central to his campaign from the moment he announced his first candidacy in 2015. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…” he declared then. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

That demagogy led naturally to his well-known proposal to build a wall between Mexico and the United States to keep immigrants out. Later it led to his efforts to restrict travel into the U.S. from countries with large Muslim populations.

As Buchanan himself opined during the first summer of Trump’s presidency, “The ideas made it, but I didn’t.”

Buchanan, a veteran Republican Party stalwart, knew he had little or no chance to unseat Bush as the GOP nominee in 1992. Winning an election was not his primary goal. He was trying to promote his reactionary ideas and contribute to building a movement that would fight for them, not only in an election, but in the streets.

Buchanan was an extreme right-wing ideologue. Most of his books — including Right from the Beginning and A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny — focused on promoting his ultra-rightist program for reshaping the USA. He continued to do so in a syndicated opinion column.

Trump, armed with a personal fortune that Buchanan did not enjoy, set out to win the GOP nomination in 2016 and then the presidency. He faced mockery at the outset but quickly dispatched every better-known GOP hopeful in the 2016 primaries. He then pulled off an upset that shocked many when he won the Electoral College, defeating Hillary Clinton.

Behind his victory was the reality of millions of middle-class and working-class voters who felt their economic and social conditions were deteriorating and that the Democrats did not even acknowledge the problems, let alone have any answers for them.

Trump had no answers either, other than scapegoating, demagogy, and blaming the Democrats. But dissatisfaction with those conditions — disappointment with the “Hope” and “Change” Obama said he would produce but did not — led millions to vote for Trump.

(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

NOTES

[1] “America First” is a term first coined by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson in his 1916 campaign that pledged to keep America neutral in World War I. It was used widely as a political banner by Charles Lindbergh and other rightists in the 1930s.

[2] For more on the political continuity of Trumpism with Patrick Buchanan, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party, see The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, a 2023 book by Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea (pp. 112-129).

[3] Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York, Metropolitan, 2004, pp. 5-6).

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