US far right prepares for power under Trump
Having narrowly survived attempted assassination and now formally anointed as the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump’s takeover of the Grand Old Party in the United States is complete. The far right is cemented at the apex of one of the world’s most powerful and influential political organisations and is on the cusp of power in the globe’s largest imperialist state.
The Republican election platform, for the first time written as a purely Trumpian document, promises, among other things, to use federal laws “to keep foreign Christian-hating communists, Marxists, and socialists out of America”; carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history”, including “millions” of undocumented migrants; and defund schools that teach what it calls “left-wing propaganda”.
Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as vice-presidential running mate underlines the inability of the party’s old establishment to influence this season’s electoral ticket. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon describes Vance as “St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus—the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself ever could”, according to Politico contributor Ian Ward’s paraphrasing.
The booing and jeering of longstanding Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell at the party’s national convention, even as he pledged his state’s delegates to Trump, is another indication of the far right’s supremacy in the party (if not numerically in terms of registered voters, certainly as the most organised faction in the apparatus). So too the mixed reception for “never Trump” establishment candidate Nikki Haley, who was blown out of the water in the primaries but came to pledge support in a pathetic display of fealty.
There is a very real prospect of a hellishly far-right Republican administration taking office in January. But while the November election appears Trump’s to lose, the contest is unlikely to be a landslide—at least in terms of the popular vote. Nothing like the 1980 or 1984 elections, for example. In those polls, Ronald Reagan, who oversaw the last significant Republican political realignment, won by 10 and 18 percent, respectively. (Although that was partly a function of very high rates of abstention.)
According to survey aggregates, most Americans have an unfavourable view of Trump. An NBC News poll last year found that just one-quarter of adults approve of his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Against the Republican far right and its array of opportunistic hangers-on, the Democrats could run a fossilised stegosaurus turd and still expect a better turnout than Walter Mondale managed in ‘84.
Yet the Democrats are in disarray, and the maths of the Electoral College looks increasingly challenging. President Joe Biden’s ineptitude and arrogance have significantly undermined his presidential authority and his standing even within Democratic ranks. The latest AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey found that two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to drop out of the presidential race. But most telling is that his base—the party establishment—has turned. It’s hard to see him running for re-election.
One curiosity of all this is that the turmoil of official politics seems at odds with the mood of the US ruling class. When Trump launched his first campaign in 2015, there was strategic confusion, paralysis and malaise in establishment circles over how to contain China, which was widely predicted to overtake the US economically and challenge geopolitically. The prognosis almost everywhere was that the United States was a declining global power and that China’s rise was inexorable.
In recent years, however, US imperialism has been revived through a combination of industrial policy and international diplomacy. The reinvigoration has been achieved while also satisfying the rapacious greed of US capitalists: company profit margins are at highs not seen since the years immediately following World War Two, and a Wall Street bull run has delivered tremendous gains for fund managers and investors. As a result, much of last decade’s establishment disquiet and disarray have abated.
For the first time this century, America is economically outmuscling China, which teeters on the edge of debt deflation and faces an increasingly hostile trade environment. Beijing is discovering that state capitalism, like “regular” capitalism, eventually succumbs to crisis. Some economic indicators, such as youth unemployment, have turned so sour that the government has stopped publishing figures. Others, such as the solvency of an array of regional governments, are probably unknown to all but local officials. Talk of “China’s century” has evaporated, along with the country’s foreign capital inflows. All this could be temporary, but the current situation is starkly transformed from the panic gripping the US government during the Obama presidency.
Further, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States has re-entered European politics with all the swagger of Eminem re-entering the Billboard charts. (“Guess who’s back?“) Washington’s reconstruction of a new sort of international bloc politics for the 21st century in the Asia-Pacific is also affirming in the eyes of many—be they allied, neutral or adversary states—that the US is again becoming, in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “the indispensable nation”. This is a far cry from the situation during George W. Bush’s presidency, when the “coalition of the willing” had to be constructed via chequebook diplomacy.
The US does face many challenges, of course. The government’s operations are funded by incessantly increasing the national debt, and economic growth is driven by massive but ultimately diminishing fiscal support. Wall Street could suffer yet another collapse, bond traders could turn against the government, as they did against British PM Liz Truss in 2022, or commercial real estate losses could provoke another financial panic. Israel could stuff Washington’s plans for a more settled Middle East and further distract from its Asian focus.
But the point is that the Biden presidency has generally been a time of imperial advance. A significant reorientation, begun under the first Trump presidency, has continued. There is no longer a sense of crisis within the ruling establishment—no longer a feeling that there is no plan to maintain US global domination and to advance the interests of the US capitalist class.
Many Democrats have wondered why the country isn’t rewarding them in the polls for delivering such outcomes. They clearly believe it’s the messenger, Biden, and not the message or their overall approach to governing. Time will tell if they can turn it around with a new leader without proposing anything much to reverse the decades-long stagnation in working-class living standards. The real question is whether a party of the status quo can triumph when the status quo appears so intolerable for so many.
Either way, right now, the fundamental dynamic is the far right again being ascendant.
Trump’s first term was characterised chiefly by policy paralysis rather than fascism’s march through the institutions. The billionaire was surrounded by establishment appointments and significantly constrained by Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and his own isolation.
If he is re-elected, there will again be limits on what Trump can carry out. He could end up at war with a range of states and sections of the judiciary. But he will not be as constrained a second time. The Supreme Court is more favourable to him now. And thousands of officials and public servants will be replaced with MAGA loyalists ready to fight for, rather than moderate or obstruct, the president’s program.
But it’s not only what a Trump administration does. Outside of government, Trump’s base has become more organised. The confidence and encouragement it would receive from the far right taking over the executive branch could unleash a wave of grassroots activism by people who have spent years building their networks.
Unlike what many US progressives seem to think, most of this will not take the form of brownshirt wannabes trying to emulate the Third Reich. While there may well be odious border mobilisations and vigilante attacks on migrants, much of the fascist campaigning will be in school districts, libraries and public offices. It will be led Christian mothers, not jackbooted young white men carrying torches through the streets.
In fact, Trumpism now looks more dangerous precisely because it often defies the crude stereotypes of progressives whose only political framework seems to be that provided by racial, ethnic or gender identities. Yes, there is a core element of white supremacy in the US far right. But the Trump movement’s glue is a more powerful adhesive than racial resentment: God, family, nation, order. In the US, this program transcends white supremacy, even if it cannot seem to live without it. It is a program around which the far right is trying, with some success, to rally a multiracial, anti-leftist coalition rather than one constitutionally averse to racial diversity.
Undergirding the nationalist political and cultural messaging is an ambitious economic nationalist program for a more potent US empire: rebuilding the military-industrial base, expanding energy production and reorienting supply chains away from China in anticipation of war.
In his speech to the national conference, J.D. Vance favourably quoted Reagan on keeping government out of people’s lives. But the new Republicanism marks the return of strong-state nationalism: very little in the program can be achieved without huge intrusions into the economy and society. One suspects that this is very much part of the appeal, given the ravages that free markets have wrought across the country.
If the right retakes power, the question is how the streets react. As it stands, Trumpism appears normalised, if widely unpopular. For all the talk about political polarisation in the United States, there is little organised expression of it outside of the far right—indicating perhaps that “polarisation” might flatter a disintegrated left and a progressive movement with no claws. Maybe that will change. If it doesn’t, politics will be all downhill.
