In January 2025, Donald Trump is entering the White House as president for the second time. The conditions that led to his first ascendance to the presidency were addressed in Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster’s book, Trump in the White House (Monthly Review Press, 2017), written in the first few months after Trump’s election victory in November 2016. The main thesis of the book was conveyed in the opening chapter, “Neofascism in the White House.” There, Trump was described as a reactionary billionaire who was convinced that he could act with absolute impunity, and who had become the focus of a neofascist movement. In a period of growing economic and imperial instability, marked by the unusually slow recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, a powerful segment of the ruling class decided to take the dangerous step of mobilizing the lower-middle class—referred to by sociologist C. Wright Mills as the “rearguard” of the capitalist system—playing on its largely revanchist, racist, reactionary, and misogynist ideology, with Trump as the main beneficiary of this overall strategy.
The lower-middle class (consisting of small business owners, lower white-collar employees, low-level management, some relatively privileged blue-collar workers, and suburban and rural populations—in each case, overwhelmingly white) had been hard-hit under neoliberalism and was ready to lash out at government, as well as at the upper-middle class above and the working class below. The lower-middle class constitutes the core voter constituency of the Republican Party, united with those of fundamentalist Christian faith, and with particular regions in the South and West. Despite the fact that the working class makes up the majority of the population and the largest proportion of eligible voters nationwide, they seldom have much to gain in a capitalist election. Hence, their voter participation rates are almost invariably low, falling still further under neoliberalism. They thus constitute the bulk of what political scientist Walter Dean Burnham designated as the “Party of Nonvoters,” leaving the lower-middle class as the key strategic segment of the U.S. voting public.
Trump played up to right-wing and anti-government sentiments, particularly those of the lower-middle class, gaining a mass following, in the manner of historic fascist movements. In this way, he captured the mass of Republican Party voters, its regional political bases, and its entire political apparatus. Trump’s rise to power was made possible by a deepening economic stagnation in the U.S. economy that has now lasted a half-century, going back to the economic crisis of 1973–1975. This gave rise to neoliberal financialization, generating a whole new phase of monopoly-finance capital, in which the exploitation of the population has been accompanied by new forms of financial expropriation, resulting in a more rapid concentration and centralization of wealth and power and accompanied by still worsening conditions of economic slowdown. Inequality has reached unprecedented levels, with a handful of billionaires now enjoying more wealth than more than half of the U.S. population. All of this occurred alongside a decline of U.S. economic hegemony, symbolized today by China’s economic rise.
The constant ratcheting of the political system to the right and the growth of neoliberalism weakened both establishment political parties, but primarily the Democratic Party. While the Democrats are effectively prohibited by its big donors in the ruling class from turning even slightly to the left, except under the most extreme conditions, the Republican Party is not prevented by its billionaire supporters from moving all the way to fascism on the extreme right, always the fallback position of the capitalist ruling class when it perceives the internal and external bases of its power as threatened (as in the 2008 crisis). Neoliberal polarization of the society thus gave rise to neofascism, and to a neoliberal-neofascist alliance (in the sense of warring brothers). This is being played out not just in the United States but in countries throughout the capitalist core, including, to one degree or another, the entire G7. Key characteristics of this can be seen in the reemergence of a leadership principle, as in classical fascism, with Trump now seemingly becoming—not despite but because of his openly racist and misogynist behavior—the MAGA (Make America Great Again) leader for his tens of millions of followers. His ability to act with absolute impunity has been demonstrated again and again in all of his actions, giving him the appearance of a strong, defiant, and invincible leader. At the same time, the activation of the principle of Gleichschaltung (“bringing into line”), manifested in the widespread capitulation of liberal institutions and principles previously embedded in society, is an indication of what is to come.
During the first Trump administration, measures were taken, marked by the scapegoating of immigrants and attacks on the poor and dispossessed more generally, that the lower-middle class and even parts of the working class perceived as promoting their material interests, despite the openly racist and repressive character of these actions. The erection of prohibitive tariffs on Chinese products also took a racist, jingoist form. Tax reductions were presented as benefiting the lower-middle class and the working class, while actually constituting an enormous giveaway overall to monopoly-finance capital and those in the top 1 percent of income and wealth. In foreign and military policy, the Trump administration stressed its New Cold War on China, adopting a warlike stance aimed at hegemony in the Indo-Pacific and regime change in China itself. The Trumpist energy strategy was directed at eliminating all environmental regulations and opening up federal lands to fossil fuel exploration and extraction while declaring climate change a hoax. This enabled a vast expansion of oil and natural gas production and exports coupled with fracking, immensely increasing the wealth and power of the fossil fuel companies along with Wall Street investment houses. The undisguised racist and misogynist policies ingrained in all Trump administration actions were to lead to the appointment of anti-choice Supreme Court justices (resulting in the overturning of Roe v. Wade) and the use of direct force by federal authorities against activists during the George Floyd protests.
What has changed in the political landscape since the initial assessment in Trump in the White House in 2017? The COVID-19 epidemic and the deep recession that followed temporarily altered the general conditions that had brought Trump to power. Trump’s irrational, reactionary, and dispassionate responses to the pandemic and the subsequent mass protests over police lynchings, coupled with the huge increase in unemployment associated with the deep recession, led to his defeat in 2020. Due to the extreme conditions of the crisis, the Democrats, sparked by Bernie Sanders, were able to gain more working-class support, shrinking the Party of Nonvoters, with the result that the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, offering only a mildly reformist program, narrowly won the election. Meanwhile, Trump insisted that the election had been stolen, sparking an abortive attack on the Capitol by his followers.
During the Biden administration, an economic recovery set in, but with only very limited benefits to the population as a whole as inflation, resulting initially from supply-chain disruptions and then corporate-induced price rises, led to record food prices. Housing costs also soared, leaving more and more people unable to purchase a home, pay their mortgage, or cover their rent. Although macroeconomic statistics showed big improvements, marked by vast increases in wealth at the top, along with reduced unemployment (although a much larger portion of overall employment was in the form of precarious contingent labor), the conditions of the population as a whole plummeted (see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “Grand Theft Capital,” Monthly Review 75, no. 1 [May 2023]).
Meanwhile, the Biden administration, beginning in 2022, poured more than a hundred billion dollars into NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, followed in 2023–2024 by tens of billions of dollars in support of Israel’s genocidal anti-Palestinian war in Gaza. A general military buildup against China and a projection of U.S. power globally was carried out, extending the New Cold War begun by Trump. More surprising, the Biden administration adopted much the same repressive approach to immigrants as Trump. Despite the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (its main climate initiative), the Biden administration’s energy policy did not differ radically from that of Trump, continuing the massive giveaways to the fossil fuel companies. All of this further undermined Democratic Party support in both the working class and lower-middle class. The Democrats also lost much of their backing in the Black, Latinx, and Palestinian communities, previously bastions of support.
In the Democratic race for the presidency, the Kamala Harris campaign strategy concentrated on winning over those lower-middle class Republicans who had moved away from Trump, while effectively ignoring the working class. Exit polls indicate that Democrats lost big on the economy, while at the same time the Party of Nonvoters expanded in relation to 2020 with a shrinking turnout from the working class. In the key state of Michigan, Harris’s continued support of Israeli settler colonialism figured in the Democratic loss.
Trump gained less than three million additional votes in the 2024 election in comparison to 2020, while the Democrats lost votes considerably in excess of that in relation to 2020, with millions of previous Democratic voters choosing the Party of Nonvoters. Trump now controls both houses of Congress and has the U.S. Supreme Court in his pocket, giving him near dictatorial powers. Since he campaigned on the basis of declaring that he was ready to use the military against the “enemies within,” which he defines as consisting of “illegal” (undocumented) immigrants, Marxists, and others, a general repression can be expected. This is likely to take the form of lawfare—or the bending of legal and political rules designed to permanently alter the playing field. It is a method perfected by U.S. imperialism and now rebounding on the United States, indeed, used against Trump himself. Nor are matters likely to be better in the realm of foreign and military strategy, where a further acceleration of the overall New Cold War on China, pushing the globe toward a Third World War, is to be expected, with signs that Trump is already filling his new administration with iron hawks (Domenico Montanaro, “Trump Falls Just Below 50% in Popular Vote, But Gets More than in Past Elections,” National Public Radio, December 3, 2024, npr.org).
Historically, the resistance movement against fascism took the form of a Popular Front struggle that included liberals but was led by the left, predominantly Marxists. Something like this might be contemplated in response to today’s neofascism. However, the actual room for such a Popular Front within the imperial core of the system is much narrower than in the past. For the left to join an “antifascist” alliance with a neoliberal tradition in the Global North that supports Zionist genocide in Palestine, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine, and Washington’s New Cold War on China—while consistently putting capitalism before the climate—would be fatal. In the age of late imperialism, potential thermonuclear war, and planetary exterminism, there can be no future for humanity that does not require as its basis the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large on a global scale. “The drama of our time,” Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy wrote in Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1966), “is the world revolution; it can never come to an end until it has encompassed the whole world.” Despite setbacks, this more than ever defines the nature of the struggle in the twenty-first century.
Correction
In John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” in the November 2024 issue of MR, page 12, paragraph 2, line 1: “French Marxist” should be “Greek Marxist.”
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