What is Trumpism?

Americans are used to hearing that every election is “the most important in our lifetime.” This year, both candidates have taken it a step further, arguing that it’s the most important election in the history of the United States. “For or against Trump?!” This is the alleged existential question posed by both major parties. But what exactly is Trumpism in the first place? Confusion abounds on this question, and yet, it is impossible to understand where US society is headed without a correct diagnosis of this disease.

[Originally published at communistusa.org]

An era of instability

For over a century, the US ruling class enjoyed exceptional political stability. However, that began to unravel in 2016, when the general election brought decades of economic decline and class anger to the surface. Leaning on economic nationalism and demagogic chauvinism against immigrants, women, and other oppressed groups, Trump vowed to restore economic prosperity and put “America First.” Posturing as a bold “outsider” taking on the Washington establishment for the good of the American people, he has taken over and transformed the Republican Party.

Liberals see Trump’s rise as a random and lamentable accident, and a worrying “slide towards authoritarianism.” While some acknowledge that he has tapped into reserves of legitimate discontent, they mainly present him as a sinister individual, single-handedly capable of destroying the democratic fabric of the country. But political trends do not appear out of nowhere. For an idea to develop and take hold in society, it must offer a perceived solution to a given problem.

To understand Trump’s rise, we must start with a basic understanding of how ideas arise and function within society. Karl Marx elaborated on this in his 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, writing:

Ideas do not drop from the sky. They emerge in the course of social existence, which has a material, economic basis / Image: Tyler Merbler, Wikimedia Commons

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In other words, ideas do not drop from the sky. They emerge in the course of social existence, which has a material, economic basis. For his message to gain an echo, Trump must have spoken to something deep-rooted within American social and economic relations. As Marxists, we must identify those “changes in the economic foundation” that have led to such a stark transformation of the American political superstructure.

Trumpism: half a century in the making

American capitalism emerged from World War II as the world’s dominant imperialist power. Europe and Japan had been utterly destroyed. 36.5 million Europeans died due to the war, compared to 405,000 Americans. Germany, which had been the economic powerhouse of Europe, was thrown back to 1890 levels of industrial output. Meanwhile, American industry had gone into overdrive.

In the years after the war, the US produced 43% of the world’s manufactured goods, 57% of the world’s steel, and 80% of the world’s cars. This, combined with new technologies and productivity gains prompted by the needs of wartime production, set the stage for the most significant upswing in the history of capitalism, which was accompanied by substantial improvements in living standards. Industry was booming, avenues for profitable investment were far-reaching, and capitalism was in a period of general expansion. A massive strike wave in 1945–1946 helped secure improved wages and conditions, and also benefits like pensions and health insurance, for a generation of American workers.

During this period, the US share of world trade in manufactured goods increased from 10% in 1933 to 29% in 1953. Unemployment was low, wages were rising, and blue-collar workers could easily land manufacturing jobs that allowed them to buy houses and raise families. Between 1946 and 1973, real household income increased by 74%, and Americans experienced significant improvements in the quality and affordability of their housing, education, healthcare, leisure time, and more.

These years made a deep impression on the consciousness of the American working class. Several generations came to believe that those conditions were the “norm” for American capitalism. It is still common to hear older generations reminiscing about “good old days,” “when we made things in America,”evoking mental images of diners, high-school football games, Coca-Cola ads, and newly built suburbs. With his continuous promises to “Make America Great Again,” Trump deliberately taps into nostalgia for this period.

In reality, however, this was not the norm but an anomaly, the product of the peculiar convergence of political and economic factors after the war. Faced with a world recession and the re-emergence of more serious imperialist competitors from the mid-1970s onward, the US ruling class went on the offensive against the labor movement, and capitalism tended back towards its historical norm.

Automation and outsourcing, inevitable features of the profit-driven market economy, eroded previously stable existences for millions of workers. Manufacturing jobs, which accounted for 39% of American jobs in 1943, fell to just around 8% by the 2010s. A 2020 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that since 1979, manufacturing employment “fell during each of five recessions, and in each case, employment never fully recovered to pre-recession levels.”

Manufacturing jobs, which accounted for 39% of American jobs in 1943, fell to just around 8% by the 2010s / Image: Jschnalzer, Wikimedia Commons

The reformists and left-liberals explain this as if it were a simple matter of bad policy. In reality, these trends were merely part of the economic logic of capitalism. Explaining the contradictory impact of automation under capitalism, Marx described in Wage-Labor and Capital how newly introduced machinery:

Throws workers upon the streets in great masses; and as it becomes more highly developed and more productive it discards them in additional though smaller numbers … Even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment—are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy.

This is precisely what happened to significant layers of the population during this period, as low-wage service-sector jobs, many offering only part-time hours, increasingly replaced better-paying manufacturing jobs. Those who kept their manufacturing jobs saw their real wages decline. The ruling class was aided in this by the passive, class-collaborationist policy of the labor leaders. Throughout this period, union membership fell from a peak of one-third of the workforce in the 1950s to just 11% by 2016.

In Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States, Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldrige explain:

From 1900 to 1973, real wages in the United States had grown at an annual rate of about 2%. Compounded over the years, that meant that average pay (and by implication average living standard) doubled every 35 years. In 1973, this trend came to an end and the average real wages of what the US Bureau of Labor Statistics calls production and nonsupervisory workers began to decline. By the middle of the 1990s, the average hourly real wage of a production worker was less than 85% of what it had been in 1973.

A 2018 Pew Research Center report confirms this: “For most US workers, real wages have barely budged in decades.” Inequality grew enormously during this period, and as a 2023 report from the Department of the Treasury explains, income became more volatile, the amount of time spent on vacation fell, and Americans became less prepared for retirement. “Intergenerational economic mobility has also declined—90% of children born in the 1940s earned more than their parents did at age 30, while only half of children born in the mid-1980s did the same.”

All of this had a huge, if initially hidden, impact on mass consciousness, even before the 2008 global capitalist crisis. The Great Recession of 2008 was then followed by the longest and weakest economic recovery in US history.

Necessity expresses itself through accident

There was bound to be a political reaction to all of this. The 2016 election cycle began with expectations of a “normal” race between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. But a tipping point had been reached. It soon became apparent that millions of American workers had lost patience with establishment politicians.

The progressive forces within the youth and working class rallied around Bernie Sanders, who offered a “socialist”-lite program of free college tuition, single-payer healthcare, and public-works jobs. Meanwhile, Trump appealed combatively to the underlying class anger of those who lean to the right. Many Trump supporters sympathized with Sanders’s campaign and could have been won over. However, unlike Sanders, who capitulated to the DNC, Trump was willing to fight to the end. While Sanders pledged fealty to his party’s arch-establishment candidate, Trump overcame all resistance and won his party’s nomination.

As election day drew nearer, Clinton trumpeted her candidacy as a continuation of the status quo, stating: “As president, I will carry forward the Democratic record of achievement. I’ll defend President Obama’s accomplishments and build upon them.” But she failed to consider that to millions of people, including lifelong Democrats, Obama’s legacy meant a continuation of an increasingly miserable existence. It meant closed factories, decaying Rust Belt towns, opioid addiction, and tedious shifts at low-wage service-sector jobs.

Trump, on the other hand, postured as an outsider intent on draining the Washington swamp. He delivered a very different message: “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people… The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs as they flee to Mexico, China, and other countries all around the world. It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

Beneath the bluster and scandal, Trump’s presidential term was characterized mainly by traditional Republican Party policies, such as his signature corporate tax cut / Image: Office of the President of the United States, Wikimedia Commons

When one compares these messages and their context, it is not difficult to understand why Trump won the 2016 election.

To be sure, such rhetoric was nothing more than cynical posturing and manipulation. In fact, in 2015, Trump privately told Yale business school Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld that he purposefully copied the anti-corporate messaging that Bernie Sanders’s campaign had shown was effective. But in the absence of  any other anti-establishment force, Trump rode the wave of discontent into the White House, aided by the anti-democratic Electoral College which had been implemented by the founding fathers precisely to guard against such “popular passions.”

From the ruling class’s point of view, Trump constituted a “rogue element” who had managed to take hold of the Republican Party and the presidency. The majority of the ruling class cringed at the sight of someone so narrow-minded, egocentric, and unpredictable at the helm of their system. “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” Marx explained, and Trump was not trusted by most serious capitalists for this role.

Beneath the bluster and scandal, his presidential term was characterized mainly by traditional Republican Party policies, such as his signature corporate tax cut. In keeping with the global trend toward protectionism, he implemented a series of tariffs, most of which were left in place by the Biden administration. He rode out a lucky streak of relative economic stability during those years and continued massive deficit spending like Obama and Bush before him. In 2019, there were already signs of a recession on the horizon, but he successfully scapegoated the Covid-19 pandemic when the economy collapsed. However, the constant chaos led to an “anyone but Trump” mood, barely bumping Biden into the White House. After claiming the election was stolen, however, and given rampant inflation on Biden’s watch, Trump’s grip on the GOP has only grown stronger.

A cross-class electoral coalition

It is common for the bourgeois media to frame US politics in terms of two blocks, with the liberal media portraying all “Trump supporters” in broad strokes as a kind of reactionary mob. To be sure, Trump does possess a core of die-hard reactionary backers, including some small fascist groupings. He also has the support of a layer of reactionary small business owners. But the reality is that a significant layer of Trump’s base consists of working-class people whose livelihoods have been brought into question by decaying capitalism.

For many, he is merely a “lesser evil” in comparison to the Democrats. They support him despite his overt chauvinism, not because of it. In fact, a 2024 Pew Research poll found that while 91% of Republican voters are “very or somewhat confident” that Trump can make good decisions about economic policy, only 26% “like the way he conducts himself personally.”

The Wall Street Journal interviewed a Ford worker, a member of the United Auto Workers who was apolitical until the 2016 Trump campaign. Asked about his support for Trump, he stated: “I knew the Democrats had left working-class people in the ‘90s. Trump’s no genius. He just realized what was going on in the country and had the courage to stand up to these people. Mass immigration, the Green New Deal—it’s all crap. Doesn’t help any working-class people.”

Asked about his support for Trump, one autoworker said: “I knew the Democrats had left working-class people in the ‘90s. Trump’s no genius. He just realized what was going on in the country and had the courage to stand up to these people” / Image: Spencer Cooper, Flickr

This is the confused and distorted outlook that the class collaboration of the labor leaders and reformist left leads to. By appealing to blue-collar America, Trump draws support from many who identify as working class. This is why the 2024 GOP platform promises to “protect American workers and farmers from unfair trade,” “bring back the American dream and make it affordable again,” and “build the greatest economy in history.” Never mind that this is impossible under capitalism in crisis.

A mass communist party could win over many of Trump’s working-class supporters by emphasizing a class program that would raise everyone’s living standards. The solution isn’t to scapegoat immigrants or attack measures to address climate change—but to nationalize the Fortune 500 under workers’ control as part of a democratically planned economy. However, due to the crisis of proletarian leadership, these layers are currently being ceded to the right wing.

Will Trump implement a dictatorship?

Throughout Trump’s rise, especially after he was first elected and after the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol, liberals have raised a hue and cry about fascism and dictatorship in the US. This is a superficial analogy, a scare tactic intended to drum up support for the Democrats.

One can speculate as to what Trump would “like” to do, but that is not the decisive question. The critical point is that given the current balance of class forces, Trump is not in a position to implement a dictatorship, whether a fascist state or an unstable military dictatorship. It is not a question of Trump’s individual desires, but of the relations between the classes. Any bourgeois state in today’s America must account for the vast potential power of the 120-plus-million workers who run US society and who are starting to wake up after decades of slumber.

As Engels explained in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, when we are analyzing history, “It is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole people, and again whole classes of the people in each people.”

Fascism is a unique form of military dictatorship that leans on a mass base of enraged petty-bourgeois elements to physically crush organized labor. It came to power in Italy, Germany, and Spain only due to the complete exhaustion and demoralization of the working class after years of revolutionary struggle, which ended in defeat.

This is clearly not the situation in the US, where the enormously strong working class has not been defeated by any measure. A Bonapartist military dictatorship is also not in the cards for Trump in the short or medium term. For that to happen, the class struggle would need to be at an impasse, and Trump would need to have the support of a sizable wing of the armed forces—which he does not have.

After losing to Biden in 2020, Trump wanted to stay in power and experimented with different options to make that happen. However, the US ruling class, desperate to reaffirm its grip, could not support this endeavor. Just before the riot, the Washington Post published an opinion piece signed by ten former defense secretaries, speaking out against Trump’s denial of the election results. The pro-Trump riot at the Capitol was a rag-tag group, quite small in the grand scheme of things, with no real plan, no support from the ruling class, and no possibility of actually taking power.

Trump is certainly not a “normal” politician, and is inclined toward authoritarian bluster. But his base of support is decidedly not a fascist movement, and his rise does not signify a fundamental shift to the right among the US population. Rather, it is a symptom of instability and the lack of a coherent working-class option. The working class would have to be exhausted after several defeated attempts at revolutionary change for Trump to be on the verge of imposing a military dictatorship. But the situation is the exact opposite: we are on the verge of a historic upsurge of class struggle in the years ahead.

American capitalism cannot be “made great again”

At a town hall in 2016, Barack Obama was asked what blue-collar workers might look forward to as their jobs continue to disappear. With no more electoral prospects to worry about, Obama stated the truth about automation and offshoring more bluntly than usual, explaining that some jobs “are just not going to come back.” Alluding to Trump’s promises to “bring all these jobs back,” he asked, “How exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? … What magic wand do you have?”

The task before us is to urgently build a class-independent communist party that can eventually split the working class majority away from both major parties / Image: RCA

This is the unpleasant truth for the capitalists and their politicians. They do not have a magic wand with which to restore economic growth and stability. No capitalist politician can control the direction of the capitalist economy. Capitalism is, by definition, anarchy in production, and bourgeois elections merely determine who will captain the sinking ship of US capitalism.

Trump’s rise is a product of long-term trends: the decades-long, organic decline of American capitalism, and an unprecedented political degeneration of the left and the labor leadership. Any perspective for defeating him must also take the long view of history. The Democrats might be able to temporarily stop Trump at the ballot box, but they are equally unable to fix the system’s inherent contradictions. As long as there are candidates making demagogic appeals to upend the status quo and fight political corruption, the establishment politicians will struggle to stop their continued dominance in the political landscape. However, “populism” of any stripe is not enough; only a socialist revolution can provide stable jobs and rising living standards for all, eroding the economic basis for all forms of reactionary demagogy.

To successfully fight for that program, communists must stand firmly against the capitalists’ parties. The Democrats and the Republicans are enemies of the working class in equal measure, who can do nothing to curb the organic decline of US capitalism. Experience has shown that voting for the “lesser evil” does not work and, in fact, prepares the ground for the “greater evil” to come roaring back. We must keep our political banner clean and prepare for the future, with the understanding that the same factors that led to Trump’s rise are also preparing a surge in open class conflict. Since Trump himself cannot make good on his promises, he too will eventually be exposed in the eyes of his supporters.

The task before us is to urgently build a class-independent communist party that can eventually split the working class majority away from both major parties. The only way forward is to reframe the political polarization in the US along class lines, thereby aiming the legitimate anger of the working class against our collective real enemy: the capitalist system itself.