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

By Argiris Malapanis and Geoff Mirelowitz

Is Trumpism identical to Buchananism?

Buchanan promoted a set of ideas, of principles — rightist and reactionary — that he refused to tone down. Trump is somewhat different. His most important objective has always been achieving personal political power. This is reflected in his writings, more scant than Buchanan’s, which largely spotlight his outsized ego and alleged business acumen — such as The Art of the Deal and Why We Want You to Be Rich.

Trump may well have no genuine principles. Or to put it another way, his overriding principle — as he told the 2016 Republican national convention — is, “I alone can fix it,” referring to the challenges facing the United States. Trump’s election campaigns, his presidency, and his big lie campaign about a “stolen” election, were all fundamentally about his personal quest for power. His demagogy primarily serves that goal.

Millions are taken in by that demagogy — including ultra-rightists who hope he’ll go further — or consider it part of Trump’s “persona,” and minimize it. Millions of others, however, find it insulting, rude, disrespectful, and offensive. That has never bothered Trump. He makes little or no claim to the traditional politicians’ pretentious rhetoric of “uniting all Americans.” His goal is to mobilize his own base and win enough other votes to carry the Electoral College, as he did in 2016.

OPINION

Like Buchanan, Trump appears to revel in insulting his opponents, often bestowing a derogatory nickname on them. His rhetoric and demeanor have contributed to coarsening political discourse, encouraging polarization, restricting opportunities for civil political debate, and demonizing perceived enemies. A recent example was Trump’s performance on July 31 at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. There he questioned whether Kamala Harris is “really” Black and insulted Rachel Scott, the ABC News correspondent who was interviewing him.

In choosing a vice-presidential running mate, Trump opted for Ohio Senator JD Vance. Although he once denounced Trump, Vance has since become a leading spokesperson for radical rightist demagogy.

Vance, another millionaire, recently helped promote Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). This book praises Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who led Spain for decades; Joseph McCarthy who led the post-WWII anti-communist witch-hunt in the United States; and General Augusto Pinochet, the butcher who presided over the murder and jailing of thousands when he led the overthrow of Chile’s elected government in 1973, with covert U.S. support, and installed himself as dictator.

Vance is not the only Trump lieutenant who has endorsed this rightist screed. Others include media figure Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Steve Bannon, who wrote the foreword.

“In the past,” Vance wrote in his blurb for the book’s jacket, “communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.”

Vance has praised Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s reactionary blueprint for a second Trump administration. In that spirit, Vance has promised to push for firing thousands of civil servants and replacing them with “our own people,” if elected.

Vance has also explained that had he been vice president in 2020, he would have done what then Vice President Mike Pence refused to do: use his power to help keep Trump in office. This is not a small matter. Had Pence done Trump’s bidding in January 2021, it could have led to a constitutional crisis with an unpredictable outcome.

Trump and his allies have already laid the groundwork for instigating such a crisis if they lose in November. They have made clear, as they did in 2020, their position is that only two outcomes are possible: either Trump wins or the election is stolen from him. Another rightist mobilization to overturn a second election may prove even more dangerous than four years ago.

At the same time, while reaffirming his radical rightist perspective, Trump has pulled back from some of the most extreme positions associated with his campaign — unlike Buchanan. For example, Trump is not campaigning now for the full criminalization of abortion. He compelled the GOP to amend its platform to drop the explicit goal of a federal abortion ban. Trump sees such a stance as an obstacle to getting the votes he needs to return to power. Similarly, he has distanced himself from the implications of Project 2025.

This of course offers no guarantees about what Trump will do on these issues if he returns to the White House. He will be surrounded by a coterie of rightists determined to push for reactionary goals they couldn’t accomplish in Trump’s last term.  Trump’s response to such pressures can pose genuine dangers.

Quest for personal political power

Again, Trump’s primary goal is personal political power. That is why World-Outlook has characterized Trump as a “Bonapartist.”

World-Outlook explained the term in its inaugural article, following the events of January 6, 2021.

We called attention to the writings of Marxist scholar George Novack. Decades ago, Novack wrote that Bonapartism “carries to an extreme the concentration of power in the head of the state already discernible in the contemporary imperialist democracies. All important policy decisions are centralized in a single individual equipped with extraordinary emergency powers. He speaks and acts not as the servant of parliament… but in his own right as ‘the man of destiny’ who has been called upon to rescue the nation in its hour of mortal peril.”

The Democrats have responded to Trump’s demagogy by seeking to demonize him, attacking him as a threat to democracy. Trump earned that designation by his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Many see him that way for good reason. But the charge is not convincing to Trump’s base or to many who have not yet made up their minds about how to vote. Millions still see the attempts to jail Trump as an undemocratic effort to use the courts instead of the ballot to decide who will be elected president.

Attacking Trump has always been a far easier task for Democrats than offering any genuine plans for improving the social and economic conditions that concern tens of millions, regardless of who they may vote for.

Failure of bourgeois liberalism

As the January 2021 World-Outlook analysis explained, “The history of the last century shows that… steep economic downturns [such as the 2008-10 financial crisis and the worldwide economic depression triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-22] start breeding radical attitudes ahead of triggering significant class battles. Before large numbers of workers become receptive to class-struggle proposals and open to political action independent of the capitalist class and its parties — the Democrats and Republicans — radical attitudes get a hearing in the middle class and among layers of workers.

“The working class in the United States does not yet think and act like a class. Much of the political initiative today comes from right-wing currents. Ultra-rightist groups take advantage of their foothold within the two-party system and other ruling-class institutions. They tap into the loss of confidence in the government and suspicions of the most prominent, established politicians. Conditions are ripe for rightist demagogy and conspiracy theories to gain a wide reach.”

The decades-long failure of bourgeois liberalism to ameliorate worsening economic and social conditions, as represented by the record of Democratic Party administrations, has fueled the rise of Trumpism. It is based on the experience of millions of working- and middle-class people during the eight-year-long tenures of Bill Clinton in the 1990s and Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017, as well as Biden’s current stint in the White House.

World-Outlook’s inaugural article highlighted those conditions: “Joblessness, under-employment (millions juggling two or more, poorly paid, part time jobs, forced to do so by manufacturing jobs being lost to automation and outsourcing abroad), low wages (the federal minimum wage has been $7.25/hr for more than a decade), inadequate housing (declining homeownership across the board since 2006, but with Black homeownership rates dropping to levels predating the 1968 Fair Housing Act), a failed educational system, more deportations than at any time in U.S. history (with Democrats often showing the way), and utterly inadequate medical care (only underlined by the very modest reforms of Obama’s ‘Affordable Care Act’) have continued to afflict working people no matter who was in the White House.”

This reality has not substantially improved over the last three and a half years of the Biden/Harris administration. It is a consequence of the workings of the capitalist system, defended by both capitalist parties.

What is the way out?

Only a program and strategy that unifies working people behind proposals that serve our interests, not those of the wealthy, can change the situation. Lacking that we will continue to face the same choices we had in 2016, 2020, and today; the same choices we’ve faced for decades on election day.

The most recent encouraging sign for the working class has been the uptick in labor struggles that have won some important victories after decades of setbacks and defeats. These include efforts led by young workers to unionize employers such as Amazon and Starbucks, as well as the successful contract fight waged by the Teamsters at UPS in 2023.

The most important recent working-class accomplishment was registered in the national strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) against the Big Three auto manufacturers last fall. Following that victory, the UAW expanded its organizing efforts in non-union plants, especially in the South. 

UAW president Shawn Fain, the first president of that union elected by the rank and file, has also begun raising ideas for more united labor action. He expressed some of them in a recent article, May Day 2028 Could Transform the Labor Movement — and the World.

In that essay, Fain proposed a general strike in 2028 — a bold suggestion. It is not at all clear the union movement can gain enough strength by then to undertake such a step. However, as important as the prospect of united, militant strike action is, the broader ideas Fain outlined are just as significant. They deserve widespread discussion among working people, unionized as well as unorganized.

“To reshape the economy into one that works for the benefit of everyone — not just the wealthy — we need to reclaim our country’s history of militant trade unions that united workers across race, gender and nationality,” wrote Fain.

He then pointed to the militant struggle for the eight-hour day, which resulted in establishing May Day as a working-class holiday around the world, though not in the United States. “That’s not a coincidence,” Fain noted. “The billionaire class and their political lackeys have done everything they can to white out the true history of the working class in our country.”

“They want us to believe,” Fain continued, “that corporate bosses gave workers decent wages, benefits and safer working conditions out of the goodness of their hearts. That justice and equality for people of color, for immigrants, for women and for queer communities were gifts benevolently handed down from above.

“But we know the truth,” Fain explained. “Every law passed, every union formed, and contract won — every improvement made at the workplace — has been won through the tireless sacrifice of the working class. But if we are to truly reclaim the power and importance of May Day, then it can’t be through empty symbolism. It must be through action.”

Reject ‘America First’

The logic of Fain’s perspective argues against the America First outlook.

“Because corporate greed doesn’t recognize borders, neither should our solidarity,” he said. “In the UAW, we’ve seen firsthand how companies pit workers against one another. Workers in Michigan are pitted against workers in Alabama, workers in the United States are pitted against workers in Mexico, workers in North America are pitted against workers in South America.

“It’s a simple game. Companies shift production — or threaten to shift production — to locations where the labor is cheaper, the environmental regulations more lax, and the tax cuts and subsidies are greater.

“A united working class is the only effective wall against the billionaire class’ race to the bottom. For the U.S. labor movement, that means grappling with some hard truths. Like the undeniable fact that it is impossible to protect American jobs while ignoring the plight of everyone else.”

These words can inspire millions of working people — regardless of who they plan to vote for in November. It’s no wonder that Trump called on autoworkers to “fire” Fain.

In an August 12 interview with one of his billionaire supporters, Elon Musk, Trump went further and spoke forcefully for firing workers who go on strike.

“I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk. “You walk in, you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’” 

Musk is the CEO and largest stockholder of the Tesla auto and truck manufacturer, a company the UAW aims to organize.

Shawn Fain is absolutely right that “empty symbolism” will accomplish nothing. Bold action is indeed required.

That is precisely why the UAW’s decision, echoed by most other unions, to endorse Biden and then Kamala Harris — the candidate of one of the two parties beholden to the very corporate bosses Fain correctly denounces — points in the opposite direction.

United, working-class action in the electoral arena — independent from the parties of the capitalist class — is as necessary as it is on a picket line. The ideas Fain has expressed could unify working people behind working-class candidates and a working-class political party that could break the stranglehold on U.S. politics of the one-party system with a two-party face. That is the only way to effectively answer Democrats and Republicans whose policies have created the economic and social conditions so many working people find unacceptable.

It is also the only way to effectively answer Trumpism. A Harris victory in November would keep Trump out of the White House. But it will not end the growing danger of Trumpism, or some other form of rightist reaction — as Biden’s 2020 election and subsequent administration did not.

We are under no illusion that the UAW, or any other union, is going to take this road between now and November. But is it the only road forward for the future if working people do not want to face fundamentally the same choices every election day.

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

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