This article is the editorial for issue #11 of Communist Revolution. Subscribe here!
The new Trump era begins with a bang. The new American president immediately issued a series of executive orders, and managed to push through a ceasefire in Gaza even before taking office.
Trump’s inaugural address was shot through with grandiloquent optimism, speaking of a new American “golden age”, America’s “manifest destiny” and even the conquest of Mars.
This is in stark contrast to the stale air and sluggishness of Biden’s Democratic administration. The liberal wing of the American ruling class is exhausted, discredited and in utter political bankruptcy.
This reflects a global phenomenon of the defeat of liberalism – something we’re familiar with here, with the complete discrediting of Trudeau and the Liberals, as well as the provincial Liberal parties.
The hypocritical, smiling, self-righteous, politically-correct wing of the ruling class, the one that prides itself on the diversity and inclusivity of its henchmen, the one that flies a rainbow flag over its shantytowns – this wing has just suffered a historic, watershed defeat.
And what they feared most is now happening with Donald Trump – not the fascist dictatorship they were raving about, without actually believing it. Worse for them, Trump is destroying the façade of democracy that the liberal establishment had painstakingly built up over decades.
The undivided rule of the billionaires could not be maintained for long if it had to resort solely to brute force to keep the workers shackled and exploited. Capital maintains its domination all the more effectively because it keeps the masses spellbound by the illusion of democracy.
But Trump, with his populist indictment of liberalism and its organized system of hypocrisy, is jeopardizing this illusion. He is exposing the dictatorship of Capital under which we really live.
This was evident at the presidential inauguration ceremony, where techno-billionaires Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg were on full display to show who the new administration really represents – an administration that Musk spent $250 million getting elected.
In his last statements before leaving office, Biden denounced the “oligarchy” that was forming. In reality, what he denounced was that this oligarchy was stepping out of the shadows. Elections in the U.S., as in other bourgeois democracies, are always determined by the checkbook rather than the ballot box. The billionaires that support the democrats are simply more careful not to brag about it.
Similarly, liberal newspapers wrote about Trump’s open threats to annex Panama, Greenland and Canada as “imperialist”. True enough, but not fundamentally different from when the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Their main complaint is that, unlike George W. Bush, Trump hasn’t had the decency to justify himself with the “defense of democracy”.
Trump is also shrugging off the hypocritical mask of “progressivism” that liberals had carefully placed over the ugly racist and sexist face of capitalism. All it took was for Trump to take office, announcing a reactionary charge against “wokeism”, for one corporation after another to begin abandoning their multiple empty and symbolic “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives or their totally ineffective environmental programs.
The “identity politics” centered on language, representation and tokenism that have dominated the left over the last ten years are now revealing themselves for what they are: empty gimmicks that are totally counterproductive in the fight against oppression, and that have only served as a convenient caricature for the right, feeding a reactionary backlash without improving the condition of oppressed people one iota.
Let Trump’s rise to power serve as a lesson to the movements against racism, sexism and other forms of oppression: these totally discredited liberal methods must be abandoned. Many people rightly fear the attacks Trump has announced on trans people and immigrants. Only a mass struggle based on revolutionary methods and a revolutionary program will stop this reactionary offensive.
However, it’s worth pointing out that there’s a reason why liberalism is a failure. It was the historic crisis of capitalism that brought liberalism to its knees, and the MAGA right is inheriting the same crisis. They won’t have a solution either.
Trump is a snake oil salesman. Soon, the millions of people to whom he promised a miracle cure will come knocking on his door when they realize he’s incapable of curing capitalism’s countless ills.
His tariffs are more likely to push up inflation, or even trigger an economic crisis.
Mass deportations will have serious economic consequences, not to mention the mass opposition they are likely to provoke.
And his mockery of the hated institutions of bourgeois democracy, which is currently boosting his popularity, will turn into its opposite. The millions of people who laugh with him will eventually realize that the joke is on them when they see the billionaires getting even richer while they continue to get poorer. Trump is sawing off the branch he’s sitting on.
The liberal status quo took a long time to die. MAGA conservatism won’t be so lucky to have such a slow, quiet death. The masses will quickly realize the scale of the scam and turn sharply to the left. Communists must be ready to welcome and organize them.
