Headwinds have emerged in Trump’s rush to derail and transform the state and place the American Empire on a radically new—but no less oppressive—footing. This time, however, Trump came with a more primed agenda, while the social forces to counter his trajectory remain a remote wish. This facilitates Trump’s stubborn soldiering on.

We do not know how far Trump will go. No concern is to be dismissed, whether it is the threat of fascist consolidation, the concern that damages to social programs will be near-irreversible, the further devastation of the labor movement, or the acute damage to the environment of four years of doing nothing (or worse).

For much of the dispirited left, Trump’s trajectory means a beeline to hell. And yet there is a sizeable gap between what Trump wants to do and what he’ll be able to carry out. State cultures and capacities can be attacked but not so easily recast. Global economic structures are stubborn. International reactions are uncertain. Class contradictions abound.

Though Trump’s cuts in programs’ taken-for-granted services have not yet been widely experienced, reactions to Trump’s rampage against the state are starting to surface. And if Trump’s bizarre on-again, off-again tariffs turn out to be more than a temporary negotiating ploy and their imposition pushes prices up and disruption up and the economy down, Trump’s credibility will sink like a stone. The prospects for the socialist left taking advantage of all this are dim. The pushback to Trump’s overreach is, paradoxically, therefore more likely to come from his own populist and corporate supporters.

Trump can meet the expectations of those looking for a hard line on immigration and can grant his corporate backers the tax cuts and deregulation they greedily seek. But it is the economy that will be decisive for his populist base, and on this measure, Trump is very unlikely to succeed. As for the business elite, they have always assumed Trump was not so mad as to start a tariff war that risked undermining the American empire itself. As that danger materializes, business will rebel. The question will then shift from what Trump intends to do to what he will he do as his plans go astray.

Method in Trump’s madness?

Steve Bannon, Trump’s first term whisperer, once described himself as a Leninist because “Lenin … wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Trump was apparently listening and learning. There is method in at least some of the early madness of Trump’s chaotic second term.

The shock and awe unleashed by Trump wasn’t just to concentrate state power in his hands or a vengeful rampage by someone who was rebuffed in 2020. Of greater consequence is the intent to disturb the normal functioning of the “deep state” to neutralize any of its oppositional inclinations and force it on its back foot. This is not about destroying the state; state interventions serving authoritarian ends will no doubt increase. Rather it is the permanent crippling of those aspects of the state that might limit capital and address collective needs.

Trump’s erratic tariff actions, alongside his reversal of the former bipartisan policy on Ukraine, has already had indirect results. In alleged defense against the American turn, Europe and Canada have both donned the nationalist mantle of sovereignty and given Trump one of the main changes he has called for: an increase in their military expenditures so as to correct America’s disproportionate share of NATO’s military costs. Since American firms will also get a good share of the increased military expenditures abroad, the bloated U.S. military-industrial complex will get a further boost.

As well, it may be that the uncertainty created over access to the U.S. market likewise has method in its madness: corporations may now bias future global investments and supply chains to locate in the U.S. “just-in-case.” This is of general concern but hits home especially in Canada since it is so close, so already integrated, and with costs relatively comparable.

Underlying all this lies the primary question at the core of Trump’s agenda. Paraphrased, it asks: “Why, if America is the world’s dominant power, does it accept such a disproportionate share of globalization’s burdens and receive such an unfair share of the benefits?” The framing of America’s status in these over-wrought terms adds a further method-in-madness: misdirection.

Many Americans may not like Trump’s answers to the question he poses, but in the process, they aren’t challenging the implicit assumptions behind this question. Is America really in decline? Is the problem that American capital is weak and needs strengthening, or is American capital already too strong and in need of being checked? Are the main difficulties facing working people rooted in the goods they import, or are they home-grown?

In spite of tariffs dominating the news, it is the domestic actions of the American state and domestic capital that most impact the quality of working-class lives. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt declared that “We cannot be content … if some fraction of our people is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” An awfully long nine decades later, the “we” in this sentiment is still divided between elites that are indeed okay with such an America and those that are decidedly not. Yet those on the losing side remain too fragmented and demoralized to respond; past defeats have taken their toll.

In addressing the Trump phenomenon, it’s common to treat Trumpism as unique. This is an exaggeration. The rise of a far-right preceded Trump and its rise extends far beyond the U.S. Something with a longer historical pedigree than Trump and common structural underpinnings seems at play. In this regard, four interrelated developments have been especially pivotal: the trajectory of neoliberalism, the crisis of legitimacy, the polarization of options, and the rise of nationalism.

From liberalism to neoliberalism

Liberalism was capitalism’s expression of the Enlightenment. Its foundational principles were private property in the means of production/distribution and the ubiquity of markets, including markets for labor power and nature—the core bases of human survival. Ideologically, liberalism argued that individualism and self-interest would maximize the well-being of all. Politically, it brought the vote, liberal rights such as freedom of speech and of association, protection from arbitrary arrest, and limits on government intervention in civil society.

Liberal capitalism was, however, not a universalist project but a class one. The right to vote was conditional on having significant property, and worker’s early attempts to act collectively were treated as illegal conspiracies to limit the overriding rights of commerce. In the U.S., the property qualification remained until the last third of the nineteenth century but still excluded women until the first quarter of the twentieth century and Black people not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Union rights were not established until the Wagner Act in the mid-thirties.

Containing workers in a society where their rights were drastically restricted was one thing. Doing so after workers had won the franchise, consolidated unionization, and won vital collective rights through social programs was another. The response of the American state to the working-class upsurge of the Great Depression was to introduce union rights and social programs—concessions seen as essential to retaining/retrieving the legitimacy of capitalism.

In the post-WWII period, the high working-class expectations that followed the denials of the 1930s and the sacrifices of the war economy again put pressure on elites. The American project of a liberal global order reinforced such pressures since it came with pronounced restructuring at home and required diverting domestic funds to reviving capitalism abroad.

The post-war boom made it easier for elites to offer concessions to workers. Those gains were, however, limited, integrative, and—without structural changes in the balance of class forces—vulnerable to reversal. Nevertheless, as the post-war boom faded and capital looked to lower worker expectations and increase management’s workplace authority, the concessions from capital allowed for a degree of persistent resistance.

The American state was at first unsure how to respond to this without alienating the working class. After a decade of stumbling, a consensus emerged. Tighter worker and social subordination to the priorities of capital accumulation were essential. This would be accomplished through liberalizing finance, globalization, putting a lid on growing social programs, and decisively weakening the labor movement.

This project, an adaption of the liberalism of capitalism’s early years to the new circumstances of working-class political gains, brought a modified or new liberalism: neoliberalism. It was wrongly characterized by many as degrading the state and expanding markets, but this misunderstood its class-biased essence. Markets need states, and the state was rather transformed to limit some of its roles (social programs, union rights, democratic input) while strengthening others (corporate subsidies, interventions in strikes, the industrial-prison complex).

The crisis of legitimation

Though elites were at first nervous about the ramifications of reversing the recent gains of the working class, a decade of searching for other solutions convinced them that maintaining the capitalist order demanded a full-on assault on workers. As it turned out, though the labor movement displayed significant economic militancy and impressive protests, when it came to political leverage the labor movement was a paper tiger.

With the status quo no longer an option and no social base to move things to the left, the solution to the 1970s crisis in capitalism amounted to the necessity of more capitalism. Adolph Reed succinctly captured the result as essentially “capitalism without a working-class opposition.” Having to buy workers off was now replaced by something far cheaper: working class fatalism. “There is no alternative” became capitalism’s defining slogan.

For a while working class families found ways to survive the assault. Women in the workforce worked longer hours, women at home entered the workforce. Students took time from their studies to add family hours (usually low-paid, precarious jobs). Families went into debt. But these individualized adaptations atrophied shared resistance, reinforcing the weakening of the class’s collective strength.

The festering alienation and growing frustrations constituted a crisis of legitimacy. The anger wasn’t directed at capitalism and capitalists but at the elected governments, state agencies, and political parties that were allegedly there to defend working people against the more extreme villainies of capitalism. The crisis of legitimacy was manifested as a political crisis.

Many Marxists insisted that the underlying cause lay in economic decline. But U.S. profits have done remarkably well, and nonresidential investment, while not matching the growth of profits, has grown at a respectable average of over 3% in real terms between its peak before the 2008–09 crisis and 2024.

The tension was rather over the contrast—and link—between how well things were going for capitalists and how miserable life was for most of the population. The subsequent crisis of political legitimacy invited radical change, but only the right proved able to exploit this. This climaxed in the election of Trump.

The polarization of options

The legitimation crisis is intimately linked to a polarization of options. Capitalism’s persistent drive to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere” has led it to penetrate every institution, infuse everyday culture, twist our perceptions, and constantly make and remake a working class it can abide. This has made it even more difficult to counter capitalism.

Reformers often look longingly to capitalism’s post-war golden years as a proven alternative. But even if we limited our sights on returning to those years, it would require rolling back a great deal of the economic changes since then: globalization, the restructuring of production, the growth of corporate and financial power. This would be an especially radical venture.

Moreover (and aside from that era not being all that wonderful), we need to confront the fact that the 1950s and 1960s ended in failure. They were not a sustainable option without adding other far more radical changes. For capital and the state, this implied the neoliberal turn. The broad left refused or was simply unable to come to grips with this and was shunted aside. The political expression of this polarization of options is the shriveling, virtually everywhere, of social democracy. Absent the will and capacity to transform the structures of power in workplaces and in the state, its reforms proved tenuous.

Thinking (and acting) big is today a condition even for winning small. This demands developing a common sense distinct from that of capital and a respect for workers as having potentials beyond periodic voting, knocking on doors, and funding campaigns through their unions. Electoral politics is of course relevant, but only if a powerful social base is already in place. Building such a base cannot occur within the time pressures and consensus-focus of election campaigns, which look to mobilize the working class largely as it is, not to play a leading role in building the class into what it might be.

Absent a larger project of education and organizing to create a working class with the understanding, independent vision, confidence, and organizational/strategic capacities essential to transforming society, social democracy dissolves into the “parliamentary cretinism” Marx spoke of. It runs from socialism rather than defending it and takes its working-class base for granted in order win credibility (legitimacy) from sections of business.

The Democrats under Biden seemed to recognize the political costs of an alienated electorate and dared to occasionally speak of the end of neoliberalism. But the reforms they introduced didn’t confront the scale of what a true reversal would entail. At time of writing, the Democratic Party stands at its lowest approval ever recorded. Canada’s social democratic NDP likewise stands as historic lows, and European social democratic parties have long suffered similar fates.

The polarization of options notably also applies to the right. The right can mobilize resentments and anger through nativist appeals, but it cannot deliver on its promises because to do so would necessitate challenging the prerogatives of capital. Occasional rhetoric to the contrary, the right is too ideologically and institutionally integrated into big capital to carry through on any possible break with it. This sets the stage for a portion of Trump’s own populist base turning on him.

Nationalism

Globalization did not erode the role of nation-states but made them more important than ever. Under the aegis of the American state, all capitalist states came to take on responsibility for establishing—and legitimating—the conditions for global accumulation within their own territory and mutually agreeing to the rules that bound these states together.

The sovereignty of states within the American-led order was a liberal sovereignty, not a popular one. It came with strings noted earlier (the sanctity of private property in the means of production and distribution, freer markets, and equal treatment of foreign and domestic capital). The active role of nation-states helped keep nationalist sentiment alive, and globalization’s uneven development brought resentments that made a re-emergence of nationalist reaction an ongoing possibility.

The socialist demand for substantive or popular sovereignty standing above private property rights implied a radical economic restructuring that raised the need for planning and a reconsideration of domestic priorities. This posed a challenge to both the American-led global order and to internal capitalist classes, especially those most integrated into the globalization.

The right might lament their state’s status within global capitalism. But since it wasn’t about to truly take on its own capital or challenge globalization itself, it basically accepted the rules of the American Empire and expressed its economic nationalism in terms of strengthening national competitiveness. Its populist nationalism diverted attention from globalization per se to its impact on increased immigration.

The situation in the U.S. is distinct because the American empire has the power to channel American nationalism into modifying the balance of costs and benefits in its favor. That is, it can be populist in its criticisms of the impact of globalization on jobs and communities and the influx of immigrants and act to modify globalization without leaving it. But the mobilizing tactics involved, and the mechanisms used to pressure other states to accept special rules and conditions for America, incorporate risks to the very nature of the American empire.

Pivotal contradictions

What separates Trump from other American Presidents is his aggressive determination to smash the state and use tariffs as a tool for advantage.

Replacing the heads of state agencies with Trump loyalists is not like cutting off the head of a chicken. The institution lives on and so does the necessity of a range of historically developed state functions that serve both social and capitalist needs. Indiscriminate slashing won’t end bureaucratization but create a new bureaucracy, one more narrowly clientelist and authoritarian with ongoing conflicts inside and across agencies and bringing chaos, dysfunction, gaffes, permanent damage, and also resistance in the form of strategic leaks from within the state.

As for tariffs—for Trump and his advisors, the holy grail to making America great again—three points need emphasis. First, while tariffs are a sales tax on foreign goods intended to redistribute global jobs, it also comes with impacts on the domestic distribution of class income. Consider the reaction of Amazon and Walmart, the two largest employers in the U.S.

When these companies bring goods in from China (their main supplier), the government adds the tariff to the cost of the goods. This raises the costs of the companies and is passed on, in whole or in part, to their customers. Unlike an income tax, this tax doesn’t depend on your income; the rich and poor pay the same for the good. But the story doesn’t end there. What matters at least as much is what the government does with the revenue it has collected. It will certainly not be used to improve social programs and needed infrastructure; Trump and Musk are too busy slashing those.

Rather, the funds collected from tariffs will be used by the Trump administration to offset the loss of revenue from the tax cuts Trump promised his rich friends. So instead of Trump ending inflation from “Day-One,” he is aggravating it. And instead of addressing popular concerns, he is using monies taken mostly from working people to make the filthy rich even richer (and filthier).

Second, though tariffs are sometimes worth it to defend jobs or, as in the global south, to create the time and space for economic development to take hold, if they are the only response as opposed to being part of a larger set of policies, the outcome may not match the intent. In the mid-80s, Ronald Reagan imposed quotas on Japanese cars to force them to produce in the U.S. rather than just ship vehicles form Japan. The enthusiastic support of American autoworkers—understandable given their options—didn’t however bring them the security expected.

The job did not go to where autoworkers were experiencing closures; they went to the south. The Japanese transplants, having the advantage of newly built plants with no legacy costs for retirees, no unions to represent the workers, and playing off one state against another to get large subsidies, increased their market share. This led to more job losses in the north. Soon the Japanese non-union plants, not the UAW, were setting the standards for the industry.

Returning to the Chinese example again—since this is where much of the anger over job loss has been directed—taxing Chinese goods won’t shift them to the U.S. Buyers will instead turn to getting them from other countries with costs a bit higher than China but still far cheaper, because of their stage of development, than in the U.S. This was witnessed with earlier tariffs on China, which did reduce their exports to the U.S. somewhat, but what followed was their replacement with an explosion of exports to the U.S. from the rest of Asia. Add in retaliation against U.S. exports and interruptions in the supply chains affecting all kinds of other U.S. jobs, and what emerges is higher inflation, more disruption in the economy, and little impact on American jobs.

This leads to a third point. Tariffs are a diversion from the larger problems facing American workers—problems intimately linked to the neoliberal assault on working people raised earlier and still in place. Trade matters, but the antagonistic and substantively undemocratic domestic impact of corporate and government decisions matters more. These range from the absence of universal health care and inadequate access to higher education and affordable housing to the refusal to make unionization a substantive democratic right.

Relevant here as well are the failures of the U.S. economic and political system to act coherently on the transition to electric vehicles, a relatively small dimension of the environmental crisis that will have a major impact on autoworkers and other workers. In the fifties, the U.S. was producing about three quarters of all gas-powered vehicles in the world; today China, for reasons that go far beyond trade issues, makes about the same proportion of the world’s electric vehicles. The reasons, and so the solutions, go far beyond tariffs.

An Imperial reset?

Over the past eight decades the post-war American Empire was the goose that laid the golden eggs for both American and much of global capital. Its emergence was a response to the nightmarish failures of international capitalism in the previous three decades: two world wars, the Great Depression, monstrous nationalist reaction. The concern was to generate a relatively stable, globally integrated capitalism not rooted in brute force but in the acceptance of formal sovereignty for all states and rule-based international economic relations.

The resentments and frustrations that piled up within the U.S. in recent decades created a political opening that led to Trump’s rise. Channeling frustrations outward rather than to the domestic class war against working people, Trump promised to rejig the balance of international costs and benefits in America’s favor, a tricky but possible project that gained majority popular support.

American capital, on the other hand, was focused on the goodies they’d get from a second Trump presidency. It largely ignored Trump’s pre-election ranting about trade, seeing it as performative. Judicious and temporary tariffs might have been acceptable, but Trump’s wild charge out of the gate risked unravelling the Empire. His gun-shot imposition of tariffs made retaliation inevitable, and his doubling down to show he is serious will raise tariffs to wider and higher levels. Trump’s weaponization of tariffs to force other, non-trade concessions adds to the animosity and chaos.

And since trade is inseparable from the paths of exchange rates, capital controls may also follow. In the past, global uncertainty tended to accelerate global financial flows into the safety of the U.S., raising the value of the dollar but leaving U.S.-produced goods less competitive. Today, such flows may surprise and go in reverse, leading to panic and higher U.S. interest rates. Either way a further step in the reordering of the global order may follow: capital controls and a negotiated global reduction of the dollar’s exchange rate.

The U.S. has of course never hesitated, even within the “rules-based order,” to bully the global south or a particular partner when it considered it necessary. What makes the present era distinct is the extent to which Trump’s recent aggressiveness has been directed against America’s allies. The consequent discrediting of American leadership will make any negotiated end to the tariff war and the resetting of the global order even more difficult.

This potential unravelling of the American empire through tit-for-tat will be cheered on by some. But reminding ourselves of the reality of the interwar years should give pause. Absent a powerfully organized left, there is little reason to look forward to economies thrown into disarray, scapegoating and nativism mobilized, democratic practices thrown aside.

Conclusion: Wither the Withered Left?

Whatever Trump’s inclinations, without an ability to deliver on his economic promises and an escape route from the tariff chaos, Trump’s problems will deepen. A good part of his populist base is already getting restless, and most of his capitalist supporters are getting nervous. The response of socialists must begin with what we must not do.

However much we might prefer Trump losing to the Democrats, we must abuse ourselves of illusions about the present or future Dems being the vehicle for a better world. Welcoming them back will mean the return to a status quo so recently criticized, thereby consolidating a lowering of expectations when we especially need to raise them. The same goes for coming to grips with what electoral activity can do and what it can’t. Elections are only relevant if there is a social base that can take them forward. It is only the existence of such a base that makes elections relevant.

This does not mean turning our energy to cheerleading every localized and sporadic victory as a sign of having “turned the corner” and calling for vague “movement building.” Resistance and solidarity are fundamental to all social advances and to be acclaimed. But extrapolating from partial victories—there are no total victories within capitalism—to fantasizing radical turns or imminent revolution are barriers to discovering the complex answers to what has so long eluded us. As well, inflating the status of groups that erupt from time to time and point to organizing potentials but have no institutional capacity for sustaining themselves to being “movements” undermines the challenge of what building effective movements would mean.

Analytically we must grasp that inter-imperial rivalry and a vague internationalism will not do the heavy lifting for us. The basic threat to global capitalism does not lie so much in the conflict between states as in the conflicts within states and how this then plays out internationally.

Trumpism, emerging not out of the conflict between American capital and European, Canadian, or Chinese capital but the outcome of neoliberalism in the U.S., is telling here. An internationalist sensibility is of course fundamental to socialism’s universalism. But as Marx and Engels noted, the struggle may be international in substance but in practice starts at home. If we are not organized at home, we will not be able to do much for others abroad.

Finally, we must end the characterization of identifying the prime task of the left as building a working-class social force as “class reductionism.” If the working class is not won over to organizing itself for social transformation, we can forget talk of replacing capitalism with something radically better. Addressing inequities within the population, whether based on gender, race, ethnicity, income status, and so on, is crucial. But it is most germane if it is directed to overcoming inequities among workers to the end of genuinely building the class. Without that goal, we are left with parceling the class and diverting the fragments from taking on the larger enemy: capitalism.

We must above all confront the fact that we are, in all countries, basically starting over. In the U.S., this means initiating the long march to rebuild a left outside of the constraints of the Democratic Party that can speak to the felt concerns of a disoriented and demoralized working class. Institutionally, it means organizing ourselves to simultaneously make socialists and build a social force with the collective capacities to defend itself, understand that the limits it confronts are not cause for retreat but reasons to broaden the struggle, and be confident enough to dream its own dreams and act on them. Everything we do must primarily be judged in terms of whether it builds towards that goal.