Trump isn’t willing to re-industrialize America, but communists are. We must make this clear to all who want growth.

The forces within U.S. politics that oppose the agenda of the ultra-monopolists; that wish to end their degrowth efforts, their wars, their stranglehold over medicine, their attacks on liberties; are being confronted with a great obstacle in their mission. This is that Trump, the candidate who’s nominally aligned with such goals, is not truly willing to realize these goals. Nevertheless, many among this anti-monopoly element have invested themselves in MAGA.

When you look at how these MAGA-aligned anti-monopoly figures view Trump, quite often they show they’re already aware of Trump’s pro-imperialist record. For example Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, has made it clear she’s against many of the things Trump stands for. McArdle and other Libertarians like her have entered into an alliance with Trump not because they view him as a reliable fighter of the deep state, but because doing so can help them advance their own objectives. (Which by McArdle’s will they don’t intend to compromise on). 

Given their strategic place compared to communists, I believe it’s right for them to take the posture towards MAGA that they are. As unlike communists, they actually have hope for gaining direct policy influence through the Trump campaign. The Libertarians have adopted a practice where they’re running their own candidate, but working with Trump where possible so that he can give them more sway. This isn’t the kind of relationship with Trump that the organization I’m part of (the CPI) has; we lack the LP’s proximity to Trump’s circle, and we don’t fit in with this circle anyhow. CPI believes communists should be open to making alliances with people in the government, but we see that Trump isn’t one of the people who’s compatible with us in this way, and it’s not like we’ll change our values to win his favor. What CPI has instead done is join a coalition that includes the Libertarians, which lets us better take advantage of the opportunities MAGA’s contradictions are creating for us. The deep state is aware of this, because it’s attacked our coalition quite directly.

After seeing the ways in which the resistance towards the Ukraine proxy war has developed; and how the only strategy that’s seriously threatened NATO involves collaborations among different antiwar tendencies; I’ve become convinced that Trump’s likely second term will catalyze developments which we can greatly leverage. Developments where the lower levels of capital, which badly desire for Trump to re-industrialize the country, instead see the present degrowth policies continue. And where communists, if we take the initiative, will then be able to prove ourselves as the true force that can bring this growth.

We communists who’ve recognized the correctness of Deng’s theories; who see how socialism has needed to transition towards something with a market sector; are the ones that can truly help these smaller entrepreneurs. We advance a program not of trying to reform the present state into something that fosters growth, but of overthrowing this state, and building a new pro-industry state in its place. This is the great issue that unites us with these politically passionate business owners, who at first look to be our enemies. 

These lower-level capitalists are (at this stage) overwhelmingly anti-communist for a different reason than the ultra-rich are anti-communist. Whereas the ultra-rich hate communism for being pro-growth, the smaller bourgeoisie hate communism because they’ve been led to believe communism is anti-growth. The John Birch ideological tradition, which Trumpism carries on, views communism as simply being a program of governmental control. In reality, it’s the countries with communist ruling parties that are best embodying the vision which these pro-growth entrepreneurs want implemented. Which have been using their market sectors to facilitate massive economic expansions, lifting up all within their societies.

Trump and the figures who uncritically tail him say they’ll do this. But they won’t, as evidenced by how Trump has massively advanced the goals of the imperial war machine that’s blocking growth. In terms of its leadership MAGA is not revolutionary, even though its popularity depends on appealing to revolutionary impulses. Its leaders can only be expected to do whatever they think benefits themselves at the moment, and because the deep state holds the most sway within the present system, the deep state will be what predominantly guides Trump in his second term. Communists provide an alternative to the dead-end strategy of Trumpism, one that’s revolutionary in practice.

Many within the smaller bourgeoisie have turned to the Libertarian Party, and many among them support the LP’s building ties with MAGA. Even though I want to connect them and the working class MAGA supporters with communists, these business owners are already helping our cause in a certain way. The LP is injecting an ideological energy into MAGA that’s genuinely antiwar, opposed to the monopolists, and against the intelligence agencies. Which means it can bring more of these small entrepreneurial elements and conservative workers into the proximity of communists.

What happens when the anti-deep state principles advanced by McArdle’s wing of the Libertarian Party fully clash with Trump’s pro-imperialist opportunism? How are these kinds of Libertarians, and the parts of the MAGA base which have become ideologically influenced by them, going to react when they see Trump continue the monopolist policies at such a crucial moment? Since Trump left office, we’ve entered into a new stage of our class conflict. One where this country’s people, including many within the lower levels of the bourgeoisie, have come to be increasingly unified against the endless war paradigm. This comes from a desire for raised living standards, as in growth, amid a living standards crisis that Covid mismanagement exacerbated. More are coming to see that the lockdowns, and the inflation that’s perpetuating their destructive legacy, are connected to the wars our government keeps going.

This is why whereas four years ago the left-right cultural conflicts were being inflamed by our crises, now our crises are making the culture wars less impactful. The narrative managers are needing to scramble to divert people back towards focusing on such issues, with their primary strategy at the moment being to advance the anti-woke psyop. They want Libertarians and MAGA people to be distracted from Trump’s failures by anti-woke rhetoric, made to care more about the trending conservative outrage narratives than about what actually matters to people’s lives. Some will fall for this trick, while others won’t, and some will even join with the anti-imperialist coalition. These discourse psyops have grown more limited in their potential to change the popular consciousness, because the people’s objective reality is catching up with their subjective interpretations of this reality. 

It’s no longer possible to make the culture wars overwhelm our society’s conversations about the real problems we’re facing. And these conversations aren’t of the kind that Democratic Party “progressives” can control, like how they managed the opposition towards police brutality in 2020. They’re conversations about evils that the Democrats can’t plausibly claim to be opposed to: the war on Russia, the genocide against Palestine, the war on working families, the related war on non-monopoly enterprises. Communists can show ourselves to be reliable fighters against these things, and win the respect of all who are compatible with us.

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Pan-Americanism means following in Bolivar’s tradition, and upholding 1776 so we can build on its legacy

By the accounts of people who’ve created biographies of Simon Bolivar, he admired the USA’s founding fathers for their achievement. So why has Bolivar become the namesake for the foundational ideology of a great part of Latin American socialism? Why is Bolivarianism the thing that the arbiters of Venezuela’s anti-imperialist project affiliate themselves with? Because despite what many Marxists in the modern U.S. say, upholding 1776 is an essential part of being a socialist and an anti-imperialist. 

It’s a crucial aspect of what gives somebody the theoretical knowledge to be able to make socialism into more than a mere concept, and actually build socialism. Doing so in this hemisphere means being pan-American, and being pan-American means seeing that the great majority of countries in the Americas don’t need to be abolished. With some exceptions, which I’ll get into, these countries only need to be sublated into being workers states.

Understanding that Bolivar, Marx, Lenin, and other important revolutionaries have been correct in upholding 1776 is so important because it lets us answer the national and civilizational questions. It gives us the historical perspective we need in order to avoid making grave mistakes when it comes to dividing territory. Mistakes such as creating full land independence for every nation as an absolute, rather than taking the Leninist position of simply supporting the right of nations to self-determination. There’s a meaningful difference between these two things; this is the difference between what successful revolutions within the Americas have actually looked like, and the idealistic notions ultra-leftists have about what they should look like.

When Venezuela has begun its transition to socialism, this process hasn’t involved an effort to abolish Venezuela, like how the ultra-lefts I’m referring to want to abolish Mexico. And though imperialism’s propagandists accuse the Bolivarian government of oppressing indigenous people, as they do to practically every other anti-imperialist government, this path has objectively been the best one for the tribes within Venezuela and the country’s broader working masses. If Chavez had sought to abolish Venezuela, realistically he wouldn’t have come into power in the first place. And if he had been able to implement such a plan, he would have left the land even more vulnerable to imperialist counterrevolution. Splitting up a country always makes that country a weaker target for the reactionary forces, which is why Lenin and Stalin didn’t simply make every nation within the former Russian empire a fully separate entity. It’s basic practicality to not give up your gains within a war once you’ve attained them.

To apply this reasoning, we need to recognize exactly why Bolivarianism is what’s explicitly defining Venezuela’s revolution. (As well as why the other anti-imperialist Latin American governments have also not dissolved the countries they run.) It’s because a country doesn’t need to do away with every aspect of itself in order to take on a revolutionary character. At the moment when its founders defeated Britain, the United States had a revolutionary role, for the same reason that the countries Bolivar liberated from Spain had a revolutionary role. Obviously the United States doesn’t have such a role now, and it hasn’t had one arguably since the 18th century. The solution isn’t to sneer at the patriotic sentiments of the country’s people, though. It’s to nurture the people's growing anti-imperialist impulses and class consciousness. Which is a task that’s undermined when the idealists wage their symbolic cultural battles against the U.S. flag.

I don’t know if the USA will continue to exist as “the USA” following its proletarian revolution; maybe the conditions will call for its character to change in that regard, it’s too early to say for sure. The important thing is that this revolution isn’t going to need to involve immediate and total tribal independence in order to represent progress. In fact, if we were to try to do this in a literal and absolute sense, it would create the equivalent kinds of problems that Lenin and Stalin knew to avoid. It would be an impossible task, as it would mean trying to have the tribes singlehandedly govern an overwhelmingly non-Native population. It would also be in conflict with the tribal entities that the idealist radicals claim to speak for, because it would be going ahead of what wishes they’ve articulated. Within a Leninist revolution, the indigenous First Nations will get sovereignty if they wish it, and trying to implement a “decolonial” model that overrides their will would ironically be chauvinistic. We can’t speak for the tribes, only the tribes can speak for themselves.

When I shared the idealistic view of the national question, I pointed to how the tribes in eastern Oklahoma have gained stewardship over their majority-white region, which is indeed something we should take note of. But I was mistaken to have blanketly advocated for the tribes to undergo the same process throughout all of their ancestral lands; because throughout a great deal of the country, the demographics aren’t of a character that makes such a thing feasible. There are many areas where the tribes that were originally there are no longer in their original territories, and this makes them unable to undergo the same process that’s occurred for the ones in east Oklahoma. Recognizing this isn’t chauvinism, it’s just seeing reality. 

Where the tribes push to regain their territory, they need to get what they desire. To promote the dogma that all the land should simply be returned to the tribes, without applying a scientific analysis to how the territory must best be distributed in each given area, is to obstruct the task of revolution. It’s to replace scientific socialism with dogmatic moralism, a moralism that’s detached from what the tribes have actually said they want.

To get an idea of what revolution on this continent is truly going to look like, look at where the forces of monopoly finance capital are arrayed, and which forces are working to defeat them. In an attempt to save their decaying imperial order, the finance capitalists have cultivated a layer of radicalism that seeks to negate history and dialectics in favor of ultra-leftism. This false opposition, and finance capital’s other counterrevolutionary tools, partly have the purpose of preserving colonialism. Which is ironic, since the bourgeois academics behind these ultra-left theories claim to be fighting colonialism. As long as “Marxism” stays in this idealistic form, and doesn’t take on a scientific socialist character, the system isn’t going to be seriously challenged. Which means that colonialism, and the other facets of capital’s rule, will remain in existence.

Among the most blatant modern examples of colonialism is Canada. Canada resembles the “Israeli” settler state more than the modern U.S. does, to the effect that it’s not nearly as able to be sublated into socialism as the U.S. is. It can actually be considered a fake country, because it hasn’t undergone the equivalent to the nation-creating process that the U.S. has. 

Whereas the size and diversity of the USA’s population has let its working class develop a clear patriotic heritage within the struggle, one that U.S. communists have historically been able to use as a rallying point, Canada is severely underdeveloped in this area. As the Canadian Alex Green has observed: “Canada lacks a cohesive identity or sense of itself as anything besides ‘not the US.’ Our population is tiny, spread mostly along the southern border, and in most of the land mass — the parts claimed by ‘the crown’ and private companies, and largely inhabited by Indigenous communities that have lived there since the beginning of human memory — anything resembling state services or essential infrastructure is few and far between.”

These Native peoples within “Canada” continue to be heavily exploited and policed. And the synthetic nature of “Canada” places the tribes in conflict with the “Canadian” identity, moreso than is true for the American identity in relation to the tribes here. What we call Canada is a front for not just settler-colonial extraction, but colonial extraction of the foreign kind. This continues to be true despite the “independence” from Britain that Canada has supposedly gained. The only reason why we don’t see the UK act with outward involvement in Canadian politics is because the Canadian state doesn’t challenge the monopoly finance interests of Britain’s new empire. If a Canadian bill were to go against these interests, the King would have the authority to not provide his “assent” for it, and thereby block it. And if a Canadian prime minister were to act against these interests, the King would be able to fire them. 

This represents part of the unfinished business of the American revolution. 1776 stopped the British empire from having authority over much of the continent, but we have yet to kick the crown out of North America. And this problem is fundamentally tied to all the other aspects of the class struggle, including the fight for Native liberation in both the U.S. and “Canada.”

To win the class struggle, we need to wage a serious campaign against U.S. hegemony. This is something that’s disregarded by the default ideological forces within “land back” circles, because the “land back” label is not something that comes from an indigenous mass base; the phrase has become so popular because it’s the slogan that elites have used to capture the Native liberation movement. Using its NGOs, “radical” academics, and media psyops, finance capital has diverted many developing radicals away from the resistance towards U.S. hegemony, and towards instead centering the vulgarized “land back” slogan. This has led them to focus mainly on fighting the lower levels of capital—as in the enterprises small enough to only have a domestic presence—which helps the monopolists. 

International monopoly finance capital is fine with U.S. radicals focusing on fighting the petty-bourgeoisie, and on attacking patriotic symbols. Imperialism is going to remain just as strong if we embrace this mode of practice; if anything, it will get fortified by this. It helps the monopolists in their efforts to degrow the economy, and to spread a sense of nihilism among the people about their own communities and society. They want us to be dominated by thoughts like “I hate this country and everything about it,” rather than engaging in revolutionary optimism so we can connect with the people.

The latter is the mindset of the anti-monopoly coalition which has emerged since the start of the Ukraine proxy war; the communists, libertarians, and other antiwar actors in this coalition are fighting the fights that truly matter, rather than either side of the culture wars. The imperial system’s intelligence trackers have taken notice of this coalition, and have announced their desire to counter it. As a communist, this is why I’ve joined the Center for Political Innovation, which is one of the Marxist organizations within this grouping. You don’t need to join CPI or any other one org to contribute to this effort; my minimum suggestion is that you enter into this struggle in whatever ways you can, while being open to forming connections with whoever proves themselves to be a good ally in the fight against the hegemon.

We won’t win unless we confront our class enemies on an international scale, the scale at which they’re operating. If we think small, and fixate on attacking the enemies of our enemies, then we’ll continue to lose. That’s the meaning of pan-Americanism as it exists in our time. It means accounting for all the fronts in the war against monopoly capital, not just throughout the Americas but also everywhere else. Since Bolivar’s time, capitalism has developed to its highest stage in monopoly finance imperialism, so his pan-American vision can now only be fulfilled by orienting ourselves against this system. We will unite workers of all colors, and all the allies they can find, in their fight against monopoly power. Then when we’ve overthrown our monopoly capitalist dictatorship, we’ll do whatever is necessary to liberate the indigenous Canadians. We will build on the legacy of 1776, and defeat imperialism for all time.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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Multipolarity’s rise has limited the empire’s attack options, & made communists better able to exploit ruling class divisions

There’s something crucial for the resistors of war and empire to understand about U.S./China relations at this stage, which is that the PRC and its partnered countries have become strong enough to greatly limit Washington’s feasible routes for attack. It’s not in the hegemon’s best interests to start a direct war with China. Which means that though the Trumpian wing of the ruling class wants to attack China above all, it’s increasingly constrained in how it can do this. 

The U.S. wouldn’t be able to win a war with China, and this has been true for a long time. Which doesn’t just put the global anti-imperialist forces at a greater advantage; it puts anti-imperialists in the core in a better place as well. Because if the MAGA faction of the ruling class can’t realize its foreign policy fantasy, then we can exploit this faction’s efforts at obstructing the Ukraine war effort without contributing towards anti-China warmongering. This is at least true so long as we navigate our situation properly.

The ones in charge of the military grasp the practical reality of Washington’s weaknesses on China. This means that even when the most fanatical anti-China hawks have had the most power, military officials have quietly provided a counter-balance. In 2020, Jamie Seidel of the NZ Herald reported on some of the empirical evidence for Washington being outmatched by China, covering how military strategists viewed the prospect of a conflict with the PRC:

Unnamed US defence sources reportedly told The Times that such a conflict was the scenario of a recent intensive war game session conducted by the Pentagon. The results, they say, were "eye-opening". The scenarios were different and diverse. Some involved clashes in the South and East China Seas. One – the worst-case scenario – was an out-and-out war in 2030. The US reportedly came out second-best every time. And that has serious implications for South-East Asia's security. "The 2020s will see greater risk as China begins to get the capability to challenge the US at sea and in the air (also in space and in cyberspace)," says Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) analyst Dr Malcolm Davis. "That could tempt it to make moves in the South China Sea and against Taiwan. The US may not be ready to meet that challenge. Every simulation that has been conducted looking at the threat from China by 2030 have all ended up with the defeat of the US," China Power Project director Bonnie Glaser of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank in Washington told The Times.

It’s because of this that for as much as Trump demonized China during his presidency, and intensified the economic war against it, by the end of his term he didn’t bring about the massive confrontation we’d seemed to be headed for. And when Biden further escalated tensions with Russia, leading the Ukraine conflict to the stage it’s now at, the quagmire outcome further confirmed that the U.S. wouldn’t be able to handle a war over Taiwan. Is Trump’s team hoping for such a war? It’s apparent they are. Does this mean the likely next presidential administration will be in a place where it feels comfortable carrying through these plans? After the backfiring of Washington’s Ukraine maneuver, it’s probable that the geo-strategists are more apprehensive about confronting China than ever. In the end, it doesn’t matter what a political actor wants, what matters is whether they can get the thing they wish for.

Many of MAGA’s leaders have been working against Ukraine aid with the motive of making Washington pivot towards war with China. Others have done so with more domestically focused motives, namely a desire to end the harm that the Ukraine conflict’s inflation is bringing upon smaller business enterprises. But within the wing of MAGA that Trump represents, there’s a commitment to advancing both Zionism and anti-China maneuvers, with the war on Russia being viewed as a less preferable thing to focus on. 

This is where the great strategic advantage that multipolarity’s rise has given U.S. communists comes in. Because of how much deterrence power China has gained, and how much Ukraine has further weakened the hegemon, these China hawks are engaged in an ever-less realistic endeavor. I’m not saying a war with China is impossible; I’m saying World War III has already begun by the definition of many observers, and this means the empire can’t commit its resources to a war against China unless it wildly changes its strategy.

Even if Trump realizes his plan for pivoting to China, and foists Ukraine funding onto Europe so Washington can better focus on Taiwan, the realities shown by those 2020 war simulations are still going to be present. The U.S. couldn’t beat China even prior to when the Ukraine proxy war escalated, so would abandoning Ukraine truly change this? In practice, what the “war with China but not with Russia” actors are doing is weakening the empire, creating divisions within the U.S. ruling class that revolutionaries could take advantage of. And that’s what we need to do.

We shouldn’t trust Trump, or the people in his circle who simply tail after him, to do anything that advances our goals. Judging from Trump’s first term, he’s likely to follow the wishes of the Russia hawks, and take a passive path amid the deep state’s aggressive behind-the-scenes pressuring. The real risk that the deep state sees within MAGA comes not from Trump, but from the political actors and popular masses within MAGA who genuinely believe in MAGA’s ideals; who want to end the wars, dismantle the intelligence apparatus, and re-industrialize our society. We need to look for these elements within MAGA, and show them they can find principled leadership in communists. 

That’s how we can leverage this part of the crises the imperial system is experiencing: by taking on that leadership role during the moments when the controlled opposition forces have exposed their own hypocrisy, and the ones who oppose monopoly capital are looking for genuine allies.

As we work to win over the types of MAGA people who have the potential to become disillusioned with Trump, and with the elements in the government that can’t stand Trump’s pro-imperialist opportunism, all the while we need to be advancing the larger goal: to lead the broader masses towards revolution. The MAGA base is only one part of the people, and we can’t overthrow the state just by making allies with the potential rogue ruling class factions. We can’t depend on either of these things to get us to victory, as important as they are to our overall mission; our work in these areas needs to be done on the foundation of a party-building project. One which brings together all the revolution-compatible elements that exist in the country. And this project can only succeed on the basis of principled internationalism; of acting in solidarity with all the peoples around the globe who are resisting imperialism. 

That’s why it’s crucial for us to make clear that we support both Russia and China while we take advantage of the MAGA wing’s obstruction of the Ukraine proxy war. We can’t conceal our support for China to try to win over the most obstinate Sinophobes within this element, because though that would win us some more allies in the short term, in the long term it would render us an appendage for the right. This would be the inverse to the mistake the PSL makes, where it distances itself from Russia to try to win more liberals to its ostensibly pro-China position. Tailing either the Democrats or the Republicans is wrong. The only kind of political force that can win the class war is one which is unapologetic in its communism and its anti-imperialism.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.

The empire managers are comfortable with Trump winning, yet a specter of collapse haunts the imperial state

With finance capital’s success at assimilating Trump into the U.S. imperial geo-strategic agenda, it seemingly looks like the deep state has gotten a victory. It’s proven itself able to keep the executive branch under the control of the intelligence centers and the war machine, even after the finance capitalists briefly worried in 2016 that Trump wouldn’t be a reliable arbiter of their foreign policy designs. Yet when you look at the entire picture, it becomes apparent that this “victory” for the deep state is a hollow one. Finance capital’s being able to control Trump hasn’t gotten rid of the imperial state’s deeper risk factors for collapse. Which shows how limited the new cold warriors are in their ability to maneuver this situation.

At this point, now that Biden has fully revealed his neurological deterioration, it’s quite possible that Trump is the preferred candidate for the forces advancing the Gaza genocide and the new cold war. Even though the Democratic Party is imploding following last week’s debate, Trump’s record of murdering Soleimani, aggressing against Russia more than Obama, expanding the occupations around China, and advancing a brutal policy towards Latin America puts the imperialists at ease. Trump’s statement earlier this year that he’ll effectively work to increase aid to Ukraine by getting the European countries to pay more confirmed he presents no true danger to the plans of the geo-strategists. There’s something the intelligence centers and think tanks have been doing lately, though, that indicates they view many of the people around Trump as threats, and that they fear much of the MAGA base could join in an anti-imperialist mobilization. 

What they’ve been doing is naming the more isolationist actors within Trump world as being serious impediments to the Ukraine war effort. Last month, the Ukraine-based State Department outfit the Data Journalism agency published a report called Roller Coaster from Trumpists to communists. The forces in the U.S. impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it. In its section on Trump, the Agency says:

The core of the effort to decrease U.S. support for Ukraine consists of Trumpists—politicians, media figures, activists, and experts aligned with Donald Trump, including Trump himself. Members of Congress aligned with him obstruct bills aiding Ukraine, with the most vocal ones spreading their views to millions via social media. Though Trump has not directly opposed Ukraine post-invasion, he has noted that Russia "will eventually...take over all of Ukraine," frequently stating that Ukraine lacks the capability to defeat Russia. In April 2024, media outlets reported on Trump's "secret peace plan," suggesting that Ukraine should cede Crimea and Donbas to Moscow. On April 20, 2024, just before the House of Representatives vote on Ukrainian aid, Trump didn't endorse the bill but publicly recognized for the first time that "Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!" He criticized European allies for their insufficient support of Ukraine. 

Despite his remarks, Trump remains a pivotal figure for those consistently against supporting Ukraine, according to our survey. In February 2023, a group of 10 Republicans led by U.S. House member Matt Gaetz initiated the Ukraine Fatigue Resolution, advocating for the cessation of military and financial aid to Ukraine. Mr. Gaetz has been a vocal critic of aid to Ukraine. He, along with co-sponsors like Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie (Kentucky), and Barry Moore (Alabama), in November 2022, pushed for a stronger audit of funds the U.S. provides to Ukraine.

Though this peace plan has continued to be relevant to Trump’s campaign, with Trump’s advisers having presented him with a new version of it last week, we shouldn’t trust Trump to implement it. Whether he does depends on whether he views doing so as in his best interests, which means the deep state can sway him towards abandoning the plan. It can do this by making an example out of the figures around Trump who support negotiations with Russia, a process that’s going to involve revivals of McCarthyist tactics.

The great danger the deep state faces is that these efforts to intervene within White House politics, to suppress all forces within the Trump government that challenge the neocons, will backfire. What happens if these political policing forces can’t keep control over the narrative? If they go too far, and do something like target the pro-negotiations officials with fraudulent criminal charges? This could strengthen the solidarity of the imperial state’s enemies, and provoke a backlash from the forces within the discourse that consistently support civil liberties. The stir that the fraudulent charges against Uhuru have been creating among media figures like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan could again appear, except in relation to these governmental deep state targets.

Even if the policing doesn’t take the form of legal persecution, the Data Journalism Agency’s list shows a growing unease over whether the imperial state can remain unified. There are emerging fissures within this state, ones that haven’t gone away just because Trump has capitulated to the new cold warriors. And these divisions within the ruling class are having effects on the consciousness of the masses, because the figures who’ve been leading or providing narrative support for Ukraine negotiation efforts have massive platforms. Tucker Carlson is named in the Agency’s report because of this. 

Like the other right-wing political actors the report talks about, Carlson isn’t seen as a threat by NATO’s intelligence centers because he’s a revolutionary figure, or because he’s consistently antiwar; the bulk of these actors only challenge the war on Russia, while pushing for war with China and Iran. The trackers see them as threats because of the ways they’re destabilizing the discourse; because they’re swaying millions of conservatives towards a position that’s partially antiwar, which isn’t seen by the geo-strategists as acceptable. The types of conservatives the deep state has no problem with are ones like Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, who take a pro-Ukraine stance. And the bulk of conservatives and libertarians are not compelled by the foreign policy arguments of these figures, a fact that represents a major ideological threat towards the war machine.

The way for communists to respond to these splits within bourgeois media and politics is not by tailing the selectively antiwar side of the bourgeoisie, but by taking advantage of the historical process that this inter-elite conflict is catalyzing. We need to bring in the parts of the MAGA base that are open to expanding their existing  consciousness, and coming to support not just Russia but also China, Iran, and communism. A way we could do this is by vocally opposing the deep state during the next moments when the deep state acts against MAGA figures and supporters. This will be an opportunity to leverage the unstable situation that a second Trump term is going to create; the situation where Trump again fails to defeat the deep state at a moment when our economic conditions desperately require an end to the wars. 

Should Trump give in to the pressure these attacks will create, and potentially even betray the members of his circle who support peace, this will create backlash. Backlash from elements of MAGA, and from MAGA-allied forces that care about peace. As Trump and the other top MAGA leaders act in an unprincipled fashion, communists need to show that we’re principled in the ways these leaders aren’t. 

This effort to gain greater respect among the conservative and libertarian elements with revolutionary potential is a crucial part of how we win. If we can leverage the infighting among the ruling class in this way, we’ll better be able to reach the demographic that communists must focus on connecting with above all, which is the workers who’ve been alienated from bourgeois politics. This strategy of making connections with the disillusioned parts of MAGA is a crucial part of our larger mission: to win the broader masses, and thereby become in place to overthrow the state.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.