Does the tired spectacle of electoral politics make your eyes roll? The carefully staged Truman Show where citizens are duped into believing their participation matters? The US is a masterclass in manufacturing consent, a well-choreographed farce where politicians prattle on about solving problems they have no intention or ability to fix. The performative outrage, the catered sit-ins, the hollow filibusters (looking at you, Cory Booker), the grotesque photo-ops of kneeling politicians in kente cloth (that infamous act of cultural cosplay by Pelosi and Co.) – it’s all theater. It is designed to keep us distracted and yapping about manufactured crises while ignoring the atrocities unfolding around us: the funding of an ongoing genocide, the Zionist project’s land grabs, Israel’s near-completion of its ‘final solution’ to the ‘Palestinian Question.’ Indeed, the examples are global, from debt slavery and forced privatization of water in Africa to funding state terror in Latin America.
And at the center of the current circus stands Donald Trump – not as an aberration, but as the logical conclusion of a decades-long capitalist project. Some call it Trumpism, a shorthand for this moment, just as Thatcherism and Reaganism personified the neoliberal onslaught of the 80s. But this isn’t just about one man. It never is. It’s about the system that produced him – a system in its death throes, lashing out with increasing desperation.
The Unitary Executive and the Ratchet Effect
Trump’s presidency didn’t emerge from nowhere. It was the inevitable result of the bipartisan neoliberal ratchet where each administration, whether draped in progressive platitudes or right-wing bluster, pushed policy further toward corporate oligarchy. Obama expanded the surveillance state and deported more immigrants than any president before him. Bush bailed out Wall Street while working-class families lost their homes. Clinton dismantled welfare and turbocharged mass incarceration. And Trump? He just says the quiet part out loud.
His brand of authoritarianism – racist, xenophobic, and anti-labor in practice but faux-populist in rhetoric – mirrored Thatcher’s union-busting and Reagan’s war on the poor. As David Harvey, the Marxist geographer, put it: “Capitalism never solves its crises. It just moves them around.” And under Trump, exacerbated crises have landed squarely on the backs of workers: wages are stagnating, rents are skyrocketing, and the executive branch is amassing frightening new powers.
The Myth of Inevitability and the Reality of Revolt
Marx and Engels once wrote that socialism was inevitable; capitalism’s contradictions would eventually force its collapse. But later Marxists, like Antonio Gramsci, warned against blind faith in historical destiny. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” Gramsci wrote from his fascist prison cell. “Now is the time of monsters.”
And what are Trump, von der Leyen, Starmer, Macron, Milei if not the monsters of this dying order? They preside over a world where the cost of living strangles workers, where entire generations are locked out of homeownership, where healthcare is a privilege, and where genocide is funded without hesitation. The Palestinian struggle lays bare the hypocrisy of Western “democracy” – the same politicians who kneeled for photo ops with Black Lives Matter went on to send billions to Israel’s war machine.
Rupture
Revolutions occur when people are pushed past the brink. When rent consumes 80% of a paycheck. When a single hospital bill means financial ruin. When parents skip meals so their kids can eat. Trumpism – like Thatcherism and Reaganism before it – is accelerating that process.
The ruling class knows the tide is turning. That’s why they’re militarizing police, criminalizing protest, and tightening their grip on power. But as Rosa Luxemburg warned: “Bourgeois society faces a choice – socialism or barbarism.” We’re already living the barbarism: in food lines that stretch for miles, in cops murdering with impunity, in bombs dropping on refugee camps.
The question isn’t if the working class will rise, but when. Because history doesn’t belong to the billionaires, the politicians, or the media hacks who spin their lies. It belongs to the rank-and-file workers – the ones who keep the world running while the exaggerated decadence of the elites reaches new heights of absurdity. Trumpism is just another name for a collapsing system. And when it falls, it will be at the hands of the people – not by voting but by seizing control of a world that is theirs to rebuild.
