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Trump and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Spectre Of Communism · 2024-11-26

Core Argument

The central thesis of this episode is that Donald Trump's re-election does not represent a rightward shift in American politics but rather an expression of deep-seated class anger that has been building for decades. The argument claims that liberal democracy in the United States is in a terminal crisis of legitimacy, and that Trump has been able to capture an anti-establishment mood precisely because no left-wing alternative has emerged to give it organised expression. The Democrats are presented as the party of the ruling class, having squandered any claim to represent working people through decades of neoliberal policy, warmongering, and — most recently — presiding over a devastating cost-of-living crisis while celebrating an economic recovery that nobody feels. The episode argues that class consciousness is forcing its way back onto the political stage, but in a distorted form, because reformists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have repeatedly opened the door to an alternative and then slammed it shut, leaving the field clear for a demagogue like Trump.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on a classical Marxist understanding of the capitalist state and its relationship to class rule. The concept of liberal democracy is treated not as a set of neutral institutions but as the political form of bourgeois rule, and the crisis of those institutions is understood as a symptom of the deeper crisis of capitalism itself. The episode implicitly draws on Gramscian notions of hegemony and legitimacy — the idea that the ruling class normally rules not just through force but through consent, and that the collapse of trust in institutions represents a crisis of that consent. There is also a clear debt to Lenin's critique of reformism and the theory of the vanguard party: the argument that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement, and that the failure of the Sanders wing to break with the Democratic Party was not a tactical error but a class betrayal rooted in a lack of ideological consistency. The analysis sits firmly within the revolutionary Marxist tradition, rejecting both the reformist left and the liberal centre as incapable of addressing the crisis because both ultimately defend the capitalist system.

Conjunctural Relevance

The episode is anchored in the immediate aftermath of Trump's 2024 victory and draws on a wealth of specific data to make its case. Polling from the World Values Survey (2022) shows confidence in US major institutions at 27%, the lowest since 1979. Pew Research data shows trust in government has fallen from 73% in 1958 to 24% in 2022. A New York Times poll found 69% of Americans want major changes to the economic and political system or to see it torn down entirely. The episode notes that 63% of voters said they do not feel represented by either major party, and that independents now constitute a plurality at 37%. On the economic front, mortgage rates are at 20-year highs, house prices at record levels, and 40% of households rely on additional income to make ends meet. The episode also highlights the Democrats' role in facilitating genocide in Gaza, escalating the war in Ukraine, and using state force against student protesters — all of which, it argues, discredited any claim to being the "lesser evil." Trump's cabinet picks — Pete Hegseth at Defence, Matt Gaetz, Elon Musk at the head of a new Department of Government Efficiency — are presented as evidence that the coming four years will be more chaotic than the first term, with Trump on a collision course with his own federal apparatus.

Where the Argument Continues

This episode is best understood as part of a broader body of analysis produced by the Revolutionary Communist International on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of right-wing populism. The argument about the failure of reformism is developed at greater length in earlier Against the Stream episodes covering the Sanders campaigns and the 2020 Democratic primaries. The analysis of the 2020 George Floyd uprising and its revolutionary potential is explored in other episodes, as is the question of the labour movement's betrayal during the 2021-2022 strike wave. The episode deliberately leaves open the question of how communists should organise in the Trump period — this is gestured at in the closing remarks about the need for a network of trained revolutionary cadres, but the practical strategy is developed elsewhere in the RCI's written materials and in the Spectre of Communism series more broadly. The theoretical grounding in Lenin's What Is To Be Done? and the critique of "left" reformism is a thread that runs throughout the corpus.

Connections

  • Lenin, What Is To Be Done? — The theoretical basis for the argument about revolutionary theory and the vanguard party.
  • Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks — On hegemony, crisis of authority, and the distinction between organic and conjunctural crises.
  • Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone — For the global context of declining trust in liberal institutions.
  • Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? — On the crisis of legitimacy and the exhaustion of neoliberal governance.
  • Earlier Against the Stream episodes on the 2016 and 2020 US elections, the Sanders phenomenon, and the Black Lives Matter uprising.
  • The RCI's written analysis of the 2024 election, including Antonio Bal's speech at the Revolution Festival.

Key Quotes

  1. "The bua Liberals are basically the Baseline ideologues of American capitalism and their world view has been discredited and it's not its legitimacy is not coming back — it's actually been mortally wounded."

  2. "Trumpism is like a Frankenstein monster Distortion of class rage — it's what happens when it finds no leftwing expression."

  3. "The Democrats are correctly, understandably associated with a lot of this Devastation and they are the party of the ruling class... people feel that this is now a representation of something new — at least those who have Illusions in trumpism."

  4. "Class is roaring back into US politics — it's coming to the surface and it's an element that's been on the sideline or has been ignored for decades."

  5. "Without revolutionary Theory there can be no revolutionary movement — in the end the only chance you have of withstanding those kinds of pressures and always remaining firm and consistent in the face of this Onslaught from the enemy class is to have a worldview that's consistent."