Liberals Won’t Save Us (or Themselves)

Trump is on the warpath against the left with renewed fury coming off Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In rapid succession, the White House strongman issued an executive order that classifies antifa (an ideology) as a “domestic terrorist organization” and National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which expands the list of targets of this massive state repression to any and all perceived opponents of his government. These include organizations said to endorse “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”—basically, anything to the left of a Fox News pundit.

The latest measures are a serious escalation of Trump’s unrelenting efforts to stomp out dissent. They make advocacy and financing of leftist political activity a crime, not to mention participation in it. The administration is marshaling vast resources of the state machinery, from the FBI’s national and local Joint Terrorism Task Forces to the IRS, to pursue this crackdown. Already, Trump has invoked supposed antifa protests outside federal immigrant detention facilities in Portland as grounds to send in the National Guard. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and several Muslim and community activists in New Jersey have been sued by the Feds for protesting the “auction” of West Bank Palestinian lands to Jewish Americans for settlement. Rutgers University professor Mark Bray, who taught courses about fascism and wrote a book about antifa, fled the country after receiving death threats when Kirk’s Turning Point USA petitioned for his firing. Dozens of others have also been victimized, and this is just the beginning.

In order to best defend ourselves against what is to come, it is necessary to be clear about what we are up against. Trump is not just some mad would-be king lashing out against his foes out of personal spite. He is on a mission ordained by the ruling class: To burn down to the ground every last trapping of the old liberal status quo in order to direct all of society’s resources toward preparation for eventual war with its rivals, especially China. Trump’s tariffs, squeezing of the neocolonies, building up military bases in different parts of the world, expansion of war industries and even the Gaza plan are all in accord with this objective.

Trump is going to push his agenda through one way or another. U.S. imperialism’s global position is slipping, and this country’s rulers can no longer tolerate anyone who gets in the way of decisive action to turn things around. The vast expansion of repressive force and thoroughgoing regimentation of the working class and all of society have their blessing. Trump assembled all his military generals and admirals in Quantico, Virginia, to ensure they got this message.

The current crackdown is ultimately directed against the working class, to ensure that it does not try to throw a monkey wrench into the grand plan. But Trump also wants to make an example of liberals who have caused him headaches. He raves about bringing down major financiers of liberal causes, like billionaire George Soros, and has gotten indictments of New York Attorney General Letitia James and ex-FBI director James Comey. Nobody is to stand in his way. But the liberals are in a quandary. Their values and institutions, which previously were the primary means of promoting U.S. pillage of the world, are now entirely out of favor, but at the end of the day they align with Trump on the key question: the need to maintain U.S. imperialism’s dominance. Mainly, they don’t like that he spits in their face while doing it.

It is no accident that the liberals are largely helpless in the face of Trump’s vendetta. However much it pains them, he is U.S. imperialism’s man of the hour. Trumpism is a modern-day version of bonapartism, which, as Leon Trotsky explained, is a regime in which the economically dominant class “finds itself compelled to tolerate—in order to preserve its possessions—the uncontrolled command of a military and police apparatus over it, of a crowned ‘savior’” (“Again on the Question of Bonapartism,” March 1935).

Since the moment he took office again, Trump has played precisely that role, citing one or another long-forgotten law to justify himself and shrugging off the vaunted system of “checks and balances” that the liberals put so much stock in. The courts cannot and will not stop Trump in any meaningful way, because he has the momentum of the fundamental interests of the ruling class behind him—interests that the courts themselves serve. When a court rules he cannot dispatch the Oregon National Guard to Portland, he mobilizes the California National Guard. When the states challenge that mobilization in court, he calls up the Texas National Guard. The courts are at most a minor speed bump to his designs.

The liberals have also been hoping and praying for the Democrats to get out of the coma that they’ve been in since the elections last November. The Democrats have been utterly impotent as an opposition to Trump and lack anything resembling a coherent plan to bring him down. There has been a lot of huffing and puffing from the likes of the California and Illinois governors—but it’s been all bark, no bite. Every time the Democrats try to draw a line in the sand, such as in defense of Obamacare funding to force the federal government shutdown, it backfires. While the Democrats pretend to stand up for the everyman, Trump is attempting to slash the funding of programs in Democratic-run states and fire thousands of federal workers.

The Democrats themselves are adopting Trump’s undemocratic methods in the name of defending democracy against its chief executive. Taking their cue from the “fascist in the White House,” the Democrats in California (and nationally) are pushing Prop 50 to redistrict the state to favor their party in response to the Republicans having done the same in Texas. This shows that the Democrats care far more about winning seats for themselves than providing anything to reduce the misery of workers and the oppressed. This is nothing new. The only thing the Democrats accomplished under Biden was to screw over working people and get Trump re-elected. Out of favor among both workers and the oligarchs alike, the Democrats must resort to their own blatant election rigging to have any hope of taking back Congress. To count on them to save us all from Trump is like trusting a blind man to lead you through high-speed traffic.

Trump’s crackdown must be challenged. But the liberals are not going to save us (or themselves for that matter) from Trump’s relentless onslaught. It is a product of the most reactionary force on the planet, U.S. imperialism, going on the offensive when liberals are entirely invested in shoring up that force. The only way to get Trump to back down is to build a working-class movement of those with nothing to lose and everything to gain by impeding U.S. imperialism’s march. This can only be done in opposition to both liberal and reactionary wings of the capitalist class.

But the left has other ideas—namely, to revive some kind of liberal anti-Trump resistance. Clinging to the liberalism that made the lives of workers hell will only further discredit the left in their eyes and leave the left more exposed to Trump. Echoing Democratic Party leaders, some left groups consider Trump 2.0 to mark the triumph or near-triumph of fascism in the U.S. Other left groups declare that the anti-Trump movement is stronger and more widespread than ever. And in some cases, they say both things.

These two takes on what is happening in this country are equally wrong. On the one hand, Trump’s regime is plenty reactionary, but all its violence is coming at the hands of the armed forces of the state without the assistance of roving bands of extraparliamentary fascist thugs. On the other, Trump faces no serious resistance at the moment. These two seemingly incompatible exaggerations serve a common political purpose: to justify the link between the left and the liberals and absolve themselves from having to win over workers who have gone to the right.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation, Socialist Equality Party and many others on the left look to the 50501 protests (No Kings Day) on October 18 as the way to fight back against Trump. But these are Democratic Party-run protests, whose whole purpose is to try to line up people behind the hated liberal politicians. In an October 7 article, Left Voice has a whole list of demands that they want to build a contingent around in these protests, but notably missing is anything that draws a line against the Democratic Party. This renders hollow its calls to break with the Democrats. There is nothing wrong with intervening into these protests. But without drawing a line against the Democrats and their liberal politics, you are simply giving a left cover to an unholy alliance with a section of the ruling class.

A resistance against Trump that can actually beat him back is desperately needed. To bring that about, it is necessary to connect the defense of the working class to that of the left and minorities based on actual arguments for why it is in their material interests. The other obvious thing to build our defenses against Trump is for left groups to set aside petty organizational grievances and sectarian attitudes in order to mobilize the broadest possible united-front action. Anything else will leave us wide open for even more vicious attacks. Ditch the Democrats! Ditch the sectarianism!