At the moment, the U.S. left is having its latest series of arguments about how to view the parts of the masses that comprise the MAGA movement. It’s a retread of the dispute that leftists and Marxists had last year, after the release of the conservative-coded working class song Rich Men North of Richmond. This argument wasn’t truly about the song, but about whether we should include MAGA types in anti-imperialist and labor outreach. Now this theme within the discourse has emerged again, largely due to one Twitter user saying in response to Trump’s signing a tractor: “I don’t think you understand how popular he is with normal Americans.” This viral post has prompted a backlash from liberals and “red” liberals; one that’s not truly centered around whether Trump is worth supporting, but rather comes from a desire to refute the notion that farmers have revolutionary potential.
It’s telling that this effort to exclude farmers from the class struggle is being carried out in the context of farmers protests across Europe. The liberal narrative managers are preparing for a scenario where the equivalent happens in the United States, and their task becomes to gatekeep the class struggle in a more direct way. That moment of escalation in our class conflict just got brought closer, if unintentionally, by something Trump has done: fully embrace the pro-Ukraine stance.
When Trump said this week that he’ll get the European countries to match what the U.S. is sending to Ukraine, it represented the conclusive end of MAGA. We’ve been getting to this point for a long time, because Trump began showing his willingness to comply with the new cold war agenda from the start of his presidency. This has only confirmed he’ll even more strongly embrace that agenda in 2024. What Trump and his circle call “MAGA” is now nothing more than an empty slogan, one which has come to lack the transgressive character it used to have.
When I say MAGA was transgressive, I don’t mean that it was itself going to turn into something revolutionary. I also don’t mean Trump and his opportunistic clique are revolutionaries. I mean that MAGA was only able to gain the influence it had because it was designed to take advantage of a growing proto-revolutionary consciousness. To appeal towards the anti-imperialist, anti-monopolist impulses that have been emerging among the conservative base since the Bush era, when we experienced an economic meltdown that the people still haven’t recovered from. It was this event that in large part got conservatives to turn against the war machine, prioritize opposing big pharma, and adopt an overall sense of hostility towards the highest levels of capital. That’s what truly made the highest levels of capital feel threatened by MAGA: its existence was evidence that many Americans, including right-leaning Americans, had become antagonistic towards the predominant ideology of the elites.
MAGA didn’t need to have an especially high amount of working class supporters in order to have this renegade character. Even though the narrative that Trump is a “candidate of the working class” has been misleading—with his base’s class demographics truly being closer to those of a typical Republican politician—even many of the more relatively comfortable voters within this base have largely undergone that anti-establishment consciousness shift. The conservative base chose him because he claimed to be willing to defeat the highest levels of capital, and that alone tells us the character of this base has changed much since the start of the century. Just because his voters aren’t particularly working class, doesn’t mean our permanent economic crisis hasn’t had an effect on them.
The biggest and most impactful part of this change on the American right is that the majority of U.S. conservatives have come to no longer be compatible with huge aspects of neocon foreign policy. Even three years into the Trump presidency, when Syria was undeniably Trump’s war, the great majority of the MAGA base didn’t want U.S. involvement in Syria. This advancement in consciousness had happened without the guidance of ideologically trained anti-imperialists, and so it was incomplete; these same voters were still susceptible to propaganda against certain countries, like Venezuela, Iran, and China. A mass mindset shift had still happened, though, and Trump’s success depended on him at least convincing his supporters that he could combat certain pro-imperialist policies.
This is what refutes the arguments of the leftists who’ve concluded farmers have no revolutionary value. They might say that there’s enough of a difference between the protesting European farmers and U.S. farmers for their stance to be correct. But when MAGA has depended on a social base that’s broken from the ideology of the highest-level capitalists, making such a sweeping judgment about farmers and all others within this base isn’t the wisest thing to do.
Somebody’s revolutionary potential doesn’t depend on how socioeconomically low they are, it depends on how they view the system in which we live. And if an element of the petty-bourgeoisie has been coming to have antagonism with the highest levels of capital, then why can’t we take advantage of this? Why can’t that element join with the socialist revolution on this continent, like much of China’s petty-bourgeoisie joined with China’s revolution? The USA is not exceptional, which means communists don’t need to constrain themselves to the parts of the masses that “left” social media spaces judge to be acceptable allies.
As our class conflict intensifies, and more political actors get prompted to choose which side they’ll ultimately be on, we’re seeing those anti-establishment conservative elements be abandoned by Trump and the other right opportunists. Now that Trump and his collaborators have pivoted towards so fully and openly backing the new cold war, Trump’s best option is to instead prioritize winning over the minority of conservatives who remain in the neocon mindset. He’ll likely still get the other kinds of conservatives to vote for him, because the right tends to vote Republican and we can’t expect to turn millions of MAGA types into communists by November. That doesn’t mean this total betrayal of the antiwar cause by Trump and other “MAGA” politicians hasn’t created a political vacuum. A vacuum that communists can help fill.
This partly means getting MAGA supporters to turn against Trump for his betrayal of the antiwar cause, and to become Marxists (or at least consistent anti-imperialists). It also means filling the anti-establishment role within the discourse that MAGA is no longer able to fill, and thereby appealing towards many people who never supported MAGA in the first place. MAGA was inherently divisive, because it was based within the right-wing side of the culture war. It furthered resentment and inhuman policies towards immigrants, helped initiate the recent rise in legislative attacks against gay and trans people, and facilitated the introduction of extreme anti-abortion laws that are only supported by a shrinking minority of hard-right Christians.
This doesn’t mean the PSL types have been correct for prioritizing pro-abortion protests over anti-imperialism, or for acting like everyone who doesn’t share progressive social views is an enemy. It only means that MAGA was limited in its potential to gain mass support, and that the anti-establishment current which replaces it could therefore become more popular than MAGA ever was. Imagine an anti-imperialist, anti-monopolist movement that’s not held back by the culture war. That’s what the communists who’ve broken from liberal tailism are working to bring about. By disguising himself as an anti-imperialist, Trump was only imitating the kind of movement that the people of this country need and want. We must provide them with that authentic version of anti-establishment politics.
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