Liberals and Reformists Can't Defeat Trumpism
The 2024 United States presidential election has come and gone, returning Donald Trump to the White House. Liberals and Democrats are beside themselves at the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, aka Holocaust Harris. But just as when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, they are utterly incapable of self-reflection or understanding the reasons for Trump’s victory. Instead they lash out with racist and eliminationist rhetoric against marginalized groups they perceive to be responsible for Harris’s loss—Black and Latino men, Arab Americans, etc.—displaying the very intolerance and bigotry they view as exclusive to Trump and his supporters.
If you’re looking for an analysis of Trumpism and the reasons why Trump won the election, I would you direct you to the articles “What Is Trumpism?” by Bryce Gordon of the Revolutionary Communists of America and “Trump victory: A kick in the teeth for the establishment” by Alan Woods. Suffice it to say that Trump won because of overwhelming disgust with the establishment, as the vast majority of people in society see their living standards continue to decline. Democrats offered nothing to respond to these concerns, instead focusing on abstract and hypocritical appeals like the need to “defend democracy”.
The billionaire Trump is a right-wing demagogue who defends capitalism and offers no real solutions to society’s problems. But he has cleverly managed to channel working class anger against the status quo towards his own ends. As Alan Woods writes: “By supporting Trump, millions of people are saying: ‘anything and anybody is better than this. We can do no worse. Let us roll the dice!’ Now they have decided to roll the dice one more time.”
In the absence of a mass working class party in the United States, the 2024 election once more came down to a duel between the two capitalist parties and voters resorting to “lesser-evilism”. Millions held their noses and voted for Harris out of fear that Trump would be even worse. The fears of workers and marginalized groups in the wake of Trump’s election are real and justified. Yet the Democrats’ debacle shows yet again that “lesser-evilism” is a dead end, one that only prepares the way for eventual victory of the “greater” evil.
That Democrats constitute the “lesser” evil is taken for granted by their voters, but it is by no means obvious this is the case. The late Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report referred to Democrats as “the more effective evil”, because Democrats in power—like the Liberals in Canada—can enact right-wing policies with far less mass pushback from below. One only has to look at the right-wing Harris campaign, which largely adopted Trump’s platform and focused on attracting “never-Trump” Republicans, boasting of endorsements by the likes of Dick Cheney. Where Democrats once criticized Trump’s border wall, now they campaign on finishing it.
A quote falsely attributed to Edmund Burke, often regarded as the founder of modern conservatism, holds that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Liberal and reformist politicians excel at doing nothing. But as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” The Trump campaign spent millions of dollars on anti-trans ads. When a reporter asked Harris her views on gender-affirming health care, she blandly responded, “I think we should follow the law.” Democrats win support by exploiting the fears of marginalized groups, but refuse to fight against the erosion of rights for these groups.
Consider abortion rights, which Democrats have cynically used as a fundraising tool for 50 years while refusing to codify Roe v. Wade into law, since that would eliminate a valuable tool for frightening working-class women into voting for them. In his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama claimed to support the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have enshrined abortion rights into law. Once he had been safely elected and inaugurated as president, however, he said passing a law to guarantee abortion rights was “not the highest legislative priority,” despite Democrats controlling the presidency, House of Representatives, and the Senate.
Similarly, Joe Biden in his 2020 presidential campaign promised to restore Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land”, having cynically “evolved” from his 1974 position that he didn’t think a woman should have “the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” Once again, Democrats did nothing to enshrine abortion rights between 2020 and 2022 when they held the presidency, House, and Senate. Working class women in the United States should never forget that it was under a Democrat president that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, with Democrats given advance warning of the decision but refusing to lift a finger to protect abortion rights by law.
And what of the reformists—the so-called “democratic socialists” such as Bernie Sanders and the “Squad”? They have utterly discredited themselves under the Biden administration: abandoning any mention of left-wing policies such as Medicare for All, swearing undying fealty to the capitalist Democrats, and providing left cover for the Biden-Harris administration’s policies of austerity, war, and genocide. After Harris’s humiliating loss, Sanders started talking about how the Democrats had abandoned the working class. We can expect Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, et al to move “left” in words again now that the Democrats are in opposition once more.
Sanders threw away a historic opportunity in 2016 when he could have broken from the Democrats and led the formation of a mass socialist party in the United States. Instead, Sanders loyally supported Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Harris in 2024—the very representatives of the “billionaire class” he railed against in 2016. Unlike reformists such as Sanders, who capitulated to the Democrats, Trump refused to bend to establishment attacks on him. Rob Sewell writes:
If there is one thing we can learn from Trump, it is this. Despite being an out-and-out reactionary, he stands firm and refuses to compromise or buckle in face of his opponents. He refuses to capitulate, no matter what is thrown at him. This stubbornness earns him the respect of millions.
The left would benefit enormously by adopting such resolve. They need to fight fire with fire. Simply put, the left needs to grow a backbone.
This requires a revolutionary outlook and programme, an ingredient the reformist leaders sadly lack. They fail to understand that the masses, who are looking for a lead, want nothing less than a real revolution – not in words, but in deeds.
Leon Trotsky once described the process of revolution as a series of “successive approximations” by the masses, who will try and discard all parties and programs, on both the left and right, as they search for a way out of the crisis of society. Right-wing populists such as Trump in the U.S.A., Boris Johnson in the U.K., Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Doug Ford in Ontario, etc. win only due to the lack of a radical, anti-establishment left-wing alternative.
In Canada, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is likely to become the next prime minister—thanks in large part to the ignominious role played by the federal NDP, which under Jagmeet Singh propped up the Liberal government for years under the “confidence-and-supply” deal. By chaining itself to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, the NDP has identified itself with the hated establishment. In doing so, it has provided an invaluable gift to Poilievre and the right, who are ludicrously able to pose as the “anti-establishment” option.
When Trump was elected in 2016, there was a massive influx of radicalized youth and workers into the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). How did that work out? Despite claims with Biden’s victory in 2020 that progressives would “push him to the left”, the DSA and all Democrat supporters ended up moving to the right and providing left cover for right-wing Democrat policies—including a literal genocide in Gaza and a police-state crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrators, overwhelmingly in cities led by Democrat mayors. Far from pushing the Democrats left, those who supported Democrats as the “lesser evil” moved to the right.
All this recent history underscores the necessity of working-class political independence. Liberals and reformists are incapable of fighting Trumpism because they support the same system, capitalism, that Trump defends. Communists are the only political tendency that consciously seeks the overthrow of the capitalist system. If you don’t have a perspective of breaking from capitalism, then like the liberals and reformists, you will end up defending capitalism, which Lenin accurately described as “horror without end”.
The current generation of youth has never known anything but constant crisis. Those who protested in support of Black lives against police brutality, those who oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, have learned the true nature of the state at the end of police batons cracking their skulls. These radicalized youth will represent a greater and greater section of the working class as time goes on.
A 2023 poll by right-wing think tank the Fraser Institute, hardly a bastion of subversive thinking, found that 1 million young Canadians said communism was the ideal economic system. The job of communists is to find these people and to bring them into a party capable of overthrowing the rotten capitalist system. There is no alternative.
More than 100 years ago, the great Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg raised the slogan that humanity faced a choice between socialism or barbarism. Capitalism in crisis vomits up monsters like Donald Trump. The only way to fight this barbarism is to join the communists.