The role that MAGA and the Republican Party now have is one of posturing as the pseudo-revolutionary alternative to the Democratic Party, with its full embrace of the new cold war agenda and its blatantly anti-working class politics. The wing of the GOP that’s become dominant over the last decade has seen the direction the American people have been going in, where the workers have gotten disillusioned with our economic system, and increasingly positioned itself as the force which can advance these people’s interests. That’s why the Republican National Convention had a union leader speak, why Trump has attacked the free trade deals which past Republicans have led, and ultimately why these right-wing politicians have been selling themselves as antiwar. They know that the winning strategy for the opponents of the Democrats is to portray themselves as the ones who can end monopoly capital’s degrowth efforts, which are fundamentally connected to the endless wars.
This is why Trump winning in 2024 will be the worst thing that could happen to MAGA: Trump has a mandate to drain the swamp and re-industrialize America, yet his record shows he’s not going to do this. The diplomacy with the DPRK was essentially the only way Trump broke from the foreign policy model of the neocons; he continued and expanded on all of the wars, including the war against Russia despite his rhetoric about being friendly towards it. And now, when the inflation crisis has greatly increased how much his base cares about defeating the war machine, for Trump to repeat this cycle will mean that the coalition he’s built is going to become unstable.
Trump has invested in getting votes from Libertarians, to the point where it’s now public knowledge that there will be a Libertarian Party member in Trump’s cabinet. Trump has said he’ll end the conflict in Ukraine, and picked the especially anti-Kiev JD Vance as his running mate. So how are the anti-NATO parts of his coalition going to react when they see nothing fundamentally change?
Many of the people in the broader MAGA base are going to become independents, while certain anti-NATO conservatives or libertarians who hold political power may become actively hostile towards Trump. And the fight they’ll be waging, where they’re trying to overcome the imperialist power structure that Trump is part of, will overlap with the fight of the labor forces which have been connecting with the conservative base. S.M. Cifone, a member of the Amalgamated Transit Union, has written of how the Teamsters leader is already working to drive this wedge between the conservative workers and the Republican elites:
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) President, Sean O’Brien, to mixed reactions spoke to the Republican National Convention (RNC) Monday night. In a much-criticized speech, O’Brien gave a speech aimed more at the Conservative worker watching at home (and some who may be delegates in attendance) and not the ruling class elites in the room. O’Brien gave a carefully worded speech that show what many class-oriented trade unionists have been saying for a long time, the political system has thrown the American working class under the bus a long time ago. What should grab the attention of workers watching at home is the crowd’s reaction as O’Brien spoke, when speaking in vague, general terms of support for workers it was mostly applause, but when anything that could substantively benefit workers was mentioned the crowd went quiet.
Cifone concludes that “We as class-oriented trade unionists must lead the way in shifting workers from a ‘left-vs.-right’ political debate to a ‘Them vs. Us’ class-based politics. The way forward is to build an anti-monopoly working-class party that unites all true progressive forces behind a vibrant and militant class-oriented labor movement.” This strategy that the more revolutionary labor leaders have intuitively been coming to, where they build strategic alliances with certain bourgeois elements to show the workers how they represent a superior alternative to these elements, mirrors the one Lenin came to. Wrote Lenin on how the communists of his time were planning to give these bourgeois politicians a test of integrity, and then appeal towards the workers when these politicians failed this test:
If the Hendersons and the Snowdens reject a bloc with the Communists, the latter will immediately gain by winning the sympathy of the masses and discrediting the Hendersons and Snowdens; if, as a result, we do lose a few parliamentary seats, it is a matter of no significance to us. We would put up our candidates in a very few but absolutely safe constituencies, namely, constituencies where our candidatures would not give any seats to the Liberals at the expense of the Labour candidates. We would take part in the election campaign, distribute leaflets agitating for communism, and, in allconstituencies where we have no candidates, we would urge the electors to vote for the Labour candidate and against the bourgeois candidate. Comrades Sylvia Pankhurst and Gallacher are mistaken in thinking that this is a betrayal of communism, or a renunciation of the struggle against the social-traitors. On the contrary, the cause of communist revolution would undoubtedly gain thereby.
Because both the Republicans and the Democrats are bourgeois candidates, with the Republicans only trying to make themselves appear more labor-friendly at this moment, we shouldn’t vote for Trump. Only make it clear that we side with the MAGA workers, and with the lower-level MAGA bourgeoisie who want growth, in their fight against monopoly finance capital. A fight which, as they’ll see during Trump’s second term, extends to the same candidate they’re supporting. Because like the Hendersons and the Snowdens did, the Trumps and the Vances will discredit themselves by not delivering on the people’s needs at a crucial moment.
This tendency for MAGA to be brought under monopoly capital’s control doesn’t mean that figures like Vance aren’t going to create further divisions within the ruling class. Divisions that we can exploit, in the way Lenin said communists could take advantage when “all the class forces hostile to us have become sufficiently entangled, are sufficiently at loggerheads with each other, have sufficiently weakened themselves in a struggle which is beyond their strength.”
Realistically, we can’t expect the Vance wing of the Republican leadership to become our allies; within Trump’s government, the Libertarians will likely be the only ones who actually embrace us, as they already are. What the Vance wing can do, though, is disrupt the war against Russia; if not by influencing Trump’s Russia policy, then at least by creating upsets that harm the neocon wing. As Lenin implied, we don’t need all of the rogue elements within the ruling class to join with us; we only need certain parts of these elements to befriend us, while the other parts feud with the dominant faction and thereby weaken the bourgeois state. Any kind of ruling class division is to our benefit.
We shouldn’t expect Trump to carry forth an anti-imperialist agenda, but he’ll fail to do this at his own cost. The imperialist narrative managers are working to turn MAGA in a more neocon, culture war-centered direction, and solidify monopoly capital’s co-optation of it. Yet it’s this maneuver that will make MAGA no longer effective as a controlled opposition tool, and let the communists connect with far more of the masses. Pursuing this strategy is not all we’ll need to do in order to fulfill our party-building project; the biggest demographic we need to reach is not the Trump base, but the types of Americans who’ve been alienated from bourgeois politics. We can’t do this, though, without taking advantage of the divisions within the ruling class and the contradictions within MAGA. The most strategically smart figures in labor are calling for us to build a workers party on the basis of this strategy; we need to follow their advice.
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