 The Make America Great Again movement has been the single most important development in modern American politics. For its traditional leftist critics, its significance is rooted in its ability to be a unique and modernized version of fascism with American characteristics. Prominent liberal/leftist authors such as Gerald Horne, aligned, with the defunct Communist Party USA, have argued that “the specter of which still looms large today, evinced, most palpably, in the Trump-MAGA movement” is that of “U.S. fascism… the system of U.S. apartheid, aka Jim Crow, or the legacy of anti-Black terror perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan.” This depicts the epistemic arrogance of the cosmopolitan elite academic writing on the MAGA phenomenon from outside, basing themselves not on going deep into MAGA country, but on abstract clippings from the mainstream liberal press, whose disgust at Trump’s lack of propriety and hegemonic formalism offends their liberal eyes. Their position, which can be classified as Trump derangement syndrome, is the valid conclusion of those who accept the hysterical premises of mainstream hegemonic liberalism. It only sees one dimension of Trump, that of the elites which do lean toward Nazism, not the other dimension, the heart of the MAGA base, which is the discontented working class – traditionally the heart of any sort of communist organizing. As someone who experienced the initial rise of MAGA in the cosmopolitan ambiance of my former Miami home, I understand where this “leftist” position emerges from. Its foundational understanding of this modern social phenomenon is not the actual MAGA movement, but the caricature of it that is spun by the mainstream liberal media. This media paints the average MAGA supporter as a zealot bigot who supports Trump because of their hate for minorities. The MAGA movement is treated as a “Trump Cult,” and the extreme exceptions of fanatical individuals are painted as the mainstream. For anyone that is outside of the regions where the working class MAGA base is located, the mainstream media narrative will certainly leave you worrisome about this group. For me, it took living deep in MAGA country, first in Iowa and then in a pro-MAGA part of Southern Illinois, to actually grasp what this political development represents. Far from being simply reducible to a “fascist threat” rooted in the legacies of American white supremacism and bigotry, MAGA represents and organic and spontaneous manifestation of a forgotten working class anger, taking for the first time since the civil rights movement the form of political partisanship. As Haz Al-Din has argued: In the United States, the MAGA Movement has come to be defined by being the exclusive American form of partisanship. As is well known, the distinction between the Republicans and Democrats, in nearly every election cycle, has never amounted to any real political distinction on the basis of Clauswitzean absolute enmity. Partisanship, that is impassioned political partiality, has made its definite return in the United States solely in the MAGA movement, which has again reintroduced real political enmity and distinction to the belly of the globalist beast itself. Having its origins in a rather accidental confluence of circumstances, in Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016, the movement has become the host of every possible real counter-hegemonic ideological tendency within the United States. This movement is not pure. It does not exhibit the advanced form of class consciousness that the working class and socialist movements of the 20th century held. Nonetheless, it should never be that purity of form that we search for. As I have argued in my work on The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, to expect purity as a pre-condition for work is to resign yourself to paralysis, to make the task of organizing the class struggle impossible. MAGA therefore is not pure and cannot be. Instead, it is the first manifestation, since at least the black freedom movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, of dissident working class and popular power. The discontent of the MAGA working class base is rooted in the simple fact that the security, stability, and economic wellbeing of the American working class in the era of their parents and grandparents, the era that afforded at least a semblance of reality to the American dream, exists no longer. The American working class, which at one point became what Engels would have called a “bourgeois proletariat,” has lost the economic privileges that came with that uplifting. It has been, as Noah Khrachvik calls it, “reproletarianized.” This was an uplifting that was rooted in three central factors: 1) there was a strong communist and labor movement that won significant concessions from the ruling capitalist class in the lead up and after math of the Second World War; 2) there existed in the Soviet Union a prosperous and viable alternative world order whom the world, for at least a brief period of time, thanked for the defeat of the scourge of Nazism; and 3) the United States had emerged, in the aftermath of the Second World War, as the global imperial hegemon, replacing a role previously occupied by Britain. This afforded it the ability to use the super-exploitation of the Global South, and the super profits that were produced, to give greater economic stability to the national working class and hence pacify its revolutionary potential. As the United States entered the decades of the 1970s, the process of reversing these gains for the working class was underway. This marks the era where neoliberalism develops. Neoliberalism is often simply reduced to the policies of privatization, liberalization, austerity, and deregulation that the US imposed on countries of the Global South through structural adjustment programs and the institutions of global finance capital (IMF and World Bank). But these policies, representing a new stage of U.S. imperialism (or super-imperialism), was not simply exported abroad, it was also imposed at home. What came to characterize the existence of the American working class was a condition which tended more and more towards drowning them in debt and making it harder than ever to make ends meet. The neoliberal agenda was not simply something the U.S. imposed, as imperial hegemon, on the rest of the world – it was something it imposed on its own people too. This was not a simple accident or a wrongful choice of policy, it was structurally necessary to deal and cope with the general crisis of capitalism that emerges in the 1970s. Faced with the effects of the long-term tendency of the rate of profit falling, in the 1970s the American capitalist class was faced with two options, two routes afforded to it to revitalize its rates of profit: 1) continue the growing tendency of financial parasitism and usury through the reinvestment of capital in the FIRE sector, deriving more and more profits from interest rates, land rents, stock buy backs, and financial speculation; or 2) if one sought to continue making profits from productive capital, such capital had to be exported abroad to the Global South where the cost of doing business was much lower, i.e., where buying labor power, land, resources, and technology could be much more affordable. Here the rate of profit is rejuvenated through significantly diminishing the cost of production. The citadels of American capital took both routes, each of which was conjoined with a loss of opportunity and economic stability for the American working class. These changes have produced modern America, one of the most economically unequal societies in all of human history. It is a society where 80 percent of the people are struggling to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck, and drowning in unpayable debts, while the wealthiest few have accumulated their wealth at unprecedented rates. Today we live in an America where the three richest Americans own more wealth than the poorest half of the population. To put it in starker terms, in America the three wealthiest individuals have more wealth than the 170 million poorest Americans combined. The trajectory we are on suggests that this will only get worse. Today, for the first time in American history, the youngest generations are guaranteed a worse living standard than that of their parents. It is a society in an undeniable sharp decline. The material stability that working class Americans once had allowed for ideological stability, that is, for a smoother acquiescence to the ruling ideas. If the ruling class demanded zealot anti-communism, the working class provided it. It was a dark time for our class, where the trinkets of comfort we were afforded made many forget about the fundamental antagonism in society – that between the workers and the big owners of capital. Today, as material conditions have deteriorated, ideological stability has also faltered. Americans are, as we say, “rocking the boat.” The ruling ideas, as well as their corresponding material institutions, are more and more coming under scrutiny. What I have previously called a “crisis of legitimacy” is profoundly with us today. Americans, from all sides of the political spectrum (but especially in the MAGA movement), are not consenting to the agendas of the Deep State (intelligence agencies), big pharma (the pharmaceutical industrial complex), big agro (the masters of the sickening, chemical-filled food we are fed), the legacy media (those who spin the narratives to get the populace to think what the elites need them to think), the educational institutions (those who seek to promote division and factionalism of the poor and working class under the banner of promoting “diversity,”), and the political class (those who represent not the American people, but the banking cartels, investment firms, and big corporations that make up the oligarchs of this country). No country, irrespective of how fascistic it might be, can survive without a basic degree of consent from the populace. Without hegemony the ruling order quickly collapses. Coercion on its own is insufficient, a baseline degree of consent is always necessary. Today we are in an America where that baseline of consent is hardly reached. If a crisis of legitimacy this deep had occurred in any society of the early 20th century, a revolution would’ve surely ensued. Such an uprising has been prevented (for now), by the simple fact that although the U.S. ruling elite might appear as idiots, the sheer instinct of class survival has made them smart enough to develop new ways of sustaining stability and hegemony through the collapse of stability and hegemony itself. As I have previously argued, today hegemony is defended precisely through the feigning of being counterhegemonic: The rulers must, at all times, manipulate the public into seeing them as subaltern, as powerless and waging a crusade against the elites themselves. From conservatives, to liberals, to the various Trotskyite “leftists” and “democratic socialists,” all American politics is coming more and more to take the form of dissidence. It is an aristocracy of capital that survives through the conceit of continuously struggling against itself for power. Like in Kafka’s The Trial, where the court bureaucracy is reproduced precisely by presenting itself as powerless subjects subjugated by the system, the dialectic of American political authority today also takes the form of this feigning of impotence to sustain their systemic omnipotence. Power sustains itself through the pretense of powerlessness. The institutions and individuals that most explicitly defend the status quo are not the once primarily responsible for the stability of the status quo – it is those who present themselves as dissenters (of a left and right variety) who are coming to play more and more an indispensable role for the status quo. Today all of the American political spectrum has to present itself as politically defeated and fighting an uphill battle for power. It is this material and ideological predicament – this endless cycle of crisis that is sustained through the structural incorporation of “dissent” into the status quo itself – that produced two significant movements of popular dissent in 2015: MAGA and the Bernie Movement. While some might have now forgotten, in 2015 the class basis for both of these movements were largely the same. Many of the individuals that would have voted for Bernie in the presidential race decided to vote for Trump after the Democratic Party cheated Bernie in the primaries. Both Bernie and Trump had developed movements that could’ve radically transformed American politics, both critiquing the ruling institutions of power, the two-party duopoly, the war machine, and the economic standing of working class America. So, what made the MAGA movement survive and the Bernie one fade away into various disparate groups? The answer is quite simple: Bernie ended up folding completely into the same Democratic Party establishment that cheated him in 2016 and 2020. Bernie’s pretensions at a “political revolution” were not even symbolically upheld after his defeats. He placed himself in the long tradition of social democracy, where the talk is nice and radical, but the actions always align you with the dominant imperial centers of power. As a young Marxist, this apparent “betrayal” taught be the lesson of how social democrats have always betrayed the working class to side with the powerful – in time showing me that I was duped by the old social democratic trick, not “betrayed.” Today we have a Bernie that only has mean words for the Republican Party and Trump, and ignores almost completely the bipartisan responsibility of the crisis working class families are in. Today we have a Bernie that argues, after almost two years of Zionist genocide of Palestinians, that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” While Trump never fulfilled the aspirations of the MAGA base in his first term, he at least kept up the pretension of “draining the swamp” and combatting the Deep State. Even though his cabinet was filled with Warhawks like Elliot Abrams, Mike Pompeo, and others, he still signaled to his base a sense of dissidence. For many years this was enough to keep the movement alive, to keep it from dissipating like Bernie’s. His unfulfilled promises, in the eyes of his base, were rooted in the Deep State’s ability to insert a Warhawk cabinet around him. Trump was, for them, not to blame – it was the swamp monsters around him who were responsible. Trump, of course, went along with this narrative, it was what was needed so that he could have his cake and eat it too, that is, so that he can disappoint his base politically but also sustain their support. It was the sustained vitality of the Trump base (in contrast to the dissipation of Bernie’s) that would lead to the recognition of its revolutionary potential by the new resurgent American Communist movement. In January of 2021, shortly after the famous January six storming of the capital, I mentioned in a podcast that the Trump movement was divided into two spheres: 1) those in the elite who ended up siding with Trump, a sector that also included all of the reactionary “diasporas” from China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. that were pro-Trump because of the formally anti-communist discourse, and 2) the discontented working class base, that could’ve gone to either Bernie (or a more traditional, pro-working class “left”) or to Trump in search of a candidate that represented a break from the dominant political horizon – an outsider who would break with the liberal formalism of the Obamas, Clintons, and Bushes and would actually represent a populist (i.e., pro-American people) agenda. I urged the need for communists to understand the revolutionary potential of this MAGA base, and to reject the liberal-“left” condemnation of them as “fascist.” Communists had to go to MAGA and show them that what they liked about Trump could only be realized through American socialism. Around the same time, the philosopher and political theorist Haz Al-Din – now the Executive Chairman of the American Communist Party – would develop, in one of the most brilliant essays of modern American political theory, the notion of MAGA Communism, recognizing the objectivity of the working class MAGA base as the foundation for any communist movement in contemporary America. This, far from being a synthesis of Trump and Communism (as liberals libelously claim), is simply a restatement of the traditional communist ethos of going deep into the working class masses, serving as the agents that facilitate the advance of their imperfect spontaneous working class consciousness into socialist class consciousness proper. MAGA Communism, therefore, was always just communism attuned to the contemporary American conjuncture and to what the MAGA movement represented in American politics. Today, as I have argued before, we are at a crossroads – not just for MAGA, but for the U.S. as a whole. The maneuver that sustained the MAGA base on the side of Trump in the first term will not work in the second. In the decade that has passed, the MAGA base has only been further disenchanted with ruling institutions. Most significantly, they have broken their long-term allegiance to the Zionist entity, who they now see as responsible for the U.S. involvement in the wars in West Asia (the so-called Middle East). While part of the rhetoric on Israel might be upside-down (in the sense that they see Israel influence the U.S. and not the U.S. use Israel as a colonial outpost in the region), it is still an objective rejection of the foreign policy that the U.S. (in their eyes under the influence of Israel) has carried out in West Asia. This term Trump will not have an opportunity to have his cake and eat it too. He will have to decide – does he follow the Deep State agenda and lose his base, or (and this is a Hail Mary) does he switch course and actually rule in a way that satisfies MAGA’s expectations? As of last week, I was ready to bet everything I had that the former would be true, that Trump would continue to create a rift with his base rooted in supporting policies which MAGA disagreed with. After the first month of his new term, Haz Al-Din and I speculated that this rift was already in motion, that the MAGA base was starting to break from Trump and becoming up for grabs by new political forces. The two main contenders, of course, would be the so-called Groypers (the modernized American Nazis), led by Nick Fuentes and a few other figure heads (now with the support of Kanye West, whose been for decades a cultural-fashion icon for the American youth) and the American Communists Party, the only Left-wing force in America willing to win over the MAGA base. The battle was going to be more sharply broken up into three forces: the traditional establishment devoid of any popular support, the parts of MAGA that would go with the Groypers, and the parts of MAGA that would go with the Communists. In terms of the people, this would, in essence, be a battle between the Groypers and the Communists, between modernized American Nazism and American Communism. Each political force would have something that the other lacked: the Nazis, for whom the ruling class will always turn in periods of crisis, would have at their disposal the financial and media resources of the filo-fascists (the fascist-friendly sectors of finance capital), as Jacques Pawels calls them, the Communists, working on a vision of uniting our class and America, would have the upper hand of a unifying principle (as opposed to the Nazi’s racist, tribalist one) and disciplined organization. This would have placed the American horizon in a somewhat homologous position with Germany before Hitler’s rise, where the key players that represented a new direction where the Nazis and the Communists. However, the last week of Trump political maneuvers has brought more confusion than clarity. In a wild turn of events, some dissident commentators are suggesting that this week Trump decided to repair the developing rift with MAGA and actually listen to the MAGA base. As George Galloway and Jackson Hinkle have noted in their recent conversation, this week Trump has seemingly broken with Netanyahu and Israel, rejecting their machinations for war with Iran, allowed the Houthis to continue targeting Israeli ships (calling the Houthis brave and honorable), cut off contact with Netanyahu publicly over disrespect, fired National Security Advisor Waltz over his close association with Netanyahu, cancelled Secretary of Defense trip to Israel, met with groups from the resistance behind Israel’s back, and, to put the cherry on top, signed an executive order to try to end the price-gauging of the criminal medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex, potentially cutting up to 80% in drug prices. I don’t think any of us had this week of political maneuvers on our bingo cards. Even the formal recognition of a Palestinian state has been floated around. However, that is Trump, a fundamentally unpredictable X factor that could break with the course and direction of politics at any moment. That is why, even when he has served the interests of the elite, he has been such a thorn on their backs – the ruling elite like the stability of someone who is predictable, and Trump couldn’t be more unpredictable. After all, this is the individual that went from saying he would make the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) disappear, and moments after, be the first U.S. president to step foot in the country. From threatening to obliterate the DPRK to laughing with Kim Jong Un about hoping to look “nice and slim” in the picture, such unpredictability and quick turn of events are always a possibility with Trump. This could also very well be a political machination, a feigning of a change of course to sustain a deeper continuity of political direction. After all, it is impossible not to see Israel’s genocide in full display. The ruling elite would want nothing more than to pin this catastrophe on a single individual – Bibi Netanyahu – than to admit that this is the logical manifestation of the Zionist agenda. Such a course of events is also very likely. Either way, if Trump ends up actually serving the agenda of his base, that will still deepen the split between the status quo (Democrats, the anti-MAGA “left,” and the anti-Trump Republicans) and MAGA. MAGA would still end up having a left and a right contingent: the Communists which would be pushing toward American socialism as the way to actually Make America Great, and the Nazis, who would be pushing their pseudo-radical and astro-turfed race essentialism and Hitler fetishism on the American masses. It is essential to remind the American working class and all American patriots that their grandparents fought with the Communists to destroy the scourge of Nazism, and that if today they turn around and willingly accept that which their ancestors were willing to sacrifice their lives to destroy, they would be spitting not just on their lineage, but on America itself, whose ideals have always been much more aligned to the vision of communism than the hell of Nazism. It will be up to us, the Communists, to present to the American people our vision of socialism. This cannot be a vision of something foreign that will be artificially implanted on our unique histories and traditions, but as the logical and practical conclusions of the values of 1776 and the notion – enunciated by Lincoln and accepted as common sense by our people – that government should be of, by, and for the people. This is, fundamentally, what MAGA’s grievances are rooted in, what their aspirations and desires (for stability and security, for peace, economic prosperity, for a return to an organic American culture not imposed from above by the NGO’s, the Academy, and the media) entail. Such a reality, thoroughly absent in our current conjuncture, where government is of, by, and for big corporations, big banks, and investment firms, can only become actualized when the working class obtains political power. In other words, only a socialist America will be able to live up to the values of our country. If this simple message cannot be successfully communicated to MAGA and the general American working class, we will be at the mercy of a destiny shaped by Fuentes and the Nazis. Pretty soon we will be in a situation where political actors in America will be forced to choose what political vision they will align themselves with: MAGA Communism or the Nazis. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE. Archives May 2025
2 Comments
Jon
5/30/2025 11:41:23 am
> "It has been, as Noah Khrachvik calls it, “reproletarianized.”
Jon
6/2/2025 05:37:24 pm
Adding to this. Leave a Reply. |
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