Tag: Class

  • The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime

    The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime

    The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime,” Monthly Review 77, no. 11 (May 2025), pp. 1-24.

    “The Bosses of the Senate” by Joseph Keppler, originally published in Puck magazine, January 1889. Image via Library of Congress.
    “The Bosses of the Senate” by Joseph Keppler, originally published in Puck magazine, January 1889. Image via Library of Congress.

     

    One week after the January 20, 2025, inauguration of Donald Trump in his second stint as U.S. president, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memorandum to federal departments and agencies ordering a temporary pause of agency, grant and loan, and financial assistance spending throughout the federal government. This was the opening shot in what the right has called the “Cold Civil War.”1 The order for a general freeze on federal civilian spending was most likely written by the incoming 2025 OMB director, Russell Vought, then awaiting confirmation by Congress. For Vought “the stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country” and that these enemies “already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” which “they have aimed…at us.”2 Vought headed the OMB during the first Trump administration and was a key architect of Project 2025, the plan for the transition to a new absolutist executive, issued in 2022 by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.3 He wrote the chapter on the “Executive Office of the President of the United States” for Project 2025 and founded the Center for Renewing America, an active branch of Project 2025, which was charged with writing hundreds of executive orders in advance to be implemented immediately on the re-ascendance of Trump to the White House. Project 2025 included plans to close down whole federal departments, massively cut the federal work force, and drastically reduce federal expenditures, forcing states, local governments, universities, and the media to fall in line with the Trump regime’s dictates.4The OMB’s order to freeze federal civilian government expenditures affected spending that in fiscal year 2024 amounted to some $3 trillion, thus sending shock waves across the nation. On January 31, 2025, Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the United States District of Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order on the OMB actions. In response, the OMB rescinded their memo. However, the Trump administration, adhering to the “impoundment theory” that claimed the executive branch had the power to zero-out funds allocated by Congress, refused to comply fully with McConnell’s court order. The subsequent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which supported McConnell’s decision, pointed to a looming Constitutional crisis. Major figures in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have strategized in advance that the president can close down departments and impound congressionally authorized spending, while ignoring the courts, based on the sheer power of the executive office and the proposition that whatever the president does is lawful. If necessary, a state of emergency can be declared, suspending constitutional rights.5 Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has run roughshod over the federal government, seemingly empowered to take over and close whole agencies at will. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is claiming to have full power over the independent regulatory agencies within the federal government, such as the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, and even the Federal Reserve Board, under what is called the “unitary executive authority,” a controversial constitutional theory.6If the OMB order and the actions of Musk’s DOGE created a legal morass, the ideological intent of the Trump administration’s actions was nevertheless abundantly clear. According to the Vaeth/Vought memo, the purpose of the administration freeze on federal spending was to end “woke” and the weaponization of government, opposing “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” The initial freeze or “pause” on spending was designed to allow the administration to identify spending devoted to “DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion programs], woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,” together with expenditures on foreign aid, that were considered fraudulent uses of federal funding.7 In right-wing ideology, the overarching category is “Cultural Marxism,” which is seen as including the advocacy of critical race theory (CRT); environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives; DEI; LGBTQ+ rights; climate change actions; open borders; universal health care; and green energy.8 This attack on so-called Cultural Marxism was in line with Agenda 47 of the Trump/J.D. Vance campaign, which was aimed at “removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats” and going after the “Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions.”9

    The overall rationale behind these moves was provided by another Heritage Foundation document, also published in 2022, titled How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—And How Americans Can Fight It by Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, who went on to write NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It (2024).10 Cultural Marxism, which is seen on the MAGA right as pervading the universities and government, as well as penetrating into corporations, is viewed as having its genesis in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which broke with the economism of classical Marxism. In this distorted view, the new “Cultural Marxism” was carried forward by Frankfurt School Marxists like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm. It was to be given a more expansive form by postmodernists like Michel Foucault, ultimately leading to radical feminist theory and CRT. The work of Gonzalez and Gorka does not demonstrate the slightest attention to genuine scholarly research. Its purpose is not to promote intellectual inquiry, but rather a New McCarthyism. In their book, they claim that Joseph McCarthy in the anti-Communist witch hunt of the 1950s had carried out “important work,” but made the mistake of leveling charges that he “could not substantiate.” In today’s Cold Civil War, it is suggested, the McCarthyism needs to be resurrected on more solid foundations so as not to make the mistakes of the past—though in fact, the New McCarthyism is as devoid of substance as its 1950s predecessor.11

    The MAGA ideology that is now ensconced in the White House, and which has also spread to a considerable extent into the courts and Congress, has little to do with Trump himself, for whom it has served as a convenient weapon in his rise to power. Rather, its material basis is to be found in the growth of a larger neofascist movement, which, like all movements within the fascist genus, is rooted in a tenuous alliance between sections of the monopoly-capitalist ruling class at the top of society and a mobilized army of lower-middle class adherents far below. The latter see as their chief enemies, not the upper echelons of the capitalist class, but the upper-middle class professionals immediately above them and the working class below.12The primarily white lower-middle class overlaps with rural populations and adherents of religious fundamentalism or evangelicalism, forming a right-wing, revanchist historic bloc.

    The current mobilization of the lower-middle class by the right wing of monopoly capital, particularly, the tech, finance, and oil interests, is initially aimed at dismantling the present “administrative state,” replacing it with one more conducive to a neofascist project. Nevertheless, in the process, a widening political gap is already opening up between the billionaire rulers above and their MAGA army below, between different elements within the evangelical movement, and among those supporting a political dictatorship and those wishing to retain liberal-democratic constitutional forms.13

    In line with all movements in the fascist genus, the current regime will inevitably betray its mass MAGA supporters on the radical right, seeking to relegate them to a more and more subservient and regimented role and negating any policies in fundamental conflict with its capitalist-imperial ends. Nevertheless, a mass of think tanks and influencers has arisen that seek to rationalize the irrational, building on those ideological elements that appeal to a white lower-middle class, but ultimately serving the needs of the billionaire capitalist class. Understanding the basis of this new irrationalism and the forms of class rule associated with it is crucial in the counter-hegemonic struggle for a democratic, egalitarian, and sustainable—and thus socialist—future for humanity as a whole.

    MAGA’s Neofascist Ideology

    “The antonym of fascism,” Marxist economist Paul M. Sweezy wrote in 1952, “is bourgeois democracy, not feudalism or socialism. Fascism is one of the political forms that capitalism may assume in the monopoly-imperialist phase.”14 In the classical definition originating with Marxist theorists—and employed, as in the case of Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, in the Nuremberg trials—those movements and regimes belonging to the fascist genus have their material foundations in a tenuous alliance between monopoly capital and a mobilized petty bourgeoisie or lower-middle class. The latter were referred to by C. Wright Mills as the “rearguarders” of the capitalist system due to their generally regressive ideology, a product of their contradictory class location.15

    Such mobilization of the lower-middle class/stratum at the instigation of sections of monopoly capital occurs when the upper echelons of society see themselves as threatened by a variety of internal and external factors that jeopardize their hegemony. This leads to attacks on the liberal democratic state and the seizure of state power by a section of the ruling class, backed by an army of adherents from below—often initially by legal means, but soon crossing constitutional boundaries. Power is concentrated in the hands of a leader, a duce or Führer, behind whom lies giant capitalist interests. Key to fascist rule, once it gains its ascendancy over the state, is the privatization of large parts of government on behalf of monopolistic capital, a concept first articulated in relation to Adolf Hitler’s Germany.16 This is accompanied by extreme repression of segments of the underlying population, often as scapegoats. Such movements inevitably seek to secure their rule ideologically by gaining control of the entire cultural apparatus of society in a process that the Nazis called Gleichschalthung, or bringing into line.

    This general understanding of fascism was dominant in the 1930s and ’40s, extending into the late twentieth century. However, fascism, as a political formation, was eventually reinterpreted in liberal discourse in idealist terms as a pure ideology, conceptually decoupled from its class and materialist foundations and reduced to its outward form as extreme racism, nationalism, revanchism, and the growth of authoritarian personalities, all of which were seen as disconnected from capitalism itself. Much of this was in fact implicit in the criticism of “totalitarianism” developed by Cold War figures like Hannah Arendt, which presented fascism as an extreme system on the right conceptually divorced from capitalism, and the antonym of communism on the left.17 Fascism thus was reinterpreted in the hegemonic ideology as a form of violent authoritarianism/totalitarianism and a departure from capitalism, which was then identified exclusively with liberal democracy. Lacking any real historical-material foundations and ignoring class realities, such reformulations were mere means of shoring up the notion of capitalism itself and have proven useless in attempts to understand the reemergence of fascist and neofascist forces in our time.

    In addressing the current neofascism, it is crucial to see it as a product of material/class/imperial relations of late capitalism, which is not to be understood simply in terms of its “populist,” hyper-racist, hyper-misogynist, or hyper-nationalist outer forms but rather in terms of a substantive class-based critique.18 Fascism is at all times an attack on liberal democracy and the substitution of an iron-heel political order under the reign of monopoly-finance capital. Its revanchist ideology does not arise primarily from monopoly capital itself, but rather is chiefly a mechanism for the mobilization of right-wing forces drawn predominantly from the lower-middle class, enlisting an army of actual or would-be stormtroopers (whether wearing black shirts, brown shirts, or MAGA hats), and providing the justification for the dismantling of the liberal-democratic state.

    Although it is the real material-class forces rather than disembodied ideology that have to be kept primarily in mind, it is nonetheless true that ideas, once they emerge, can themselves become material forces. “Ideology,” Georg Lukács wrote, is “the highest form of [class] consciousness.”19 If we want to understand the nature of the emerging MAGA regime, we therefore have to explore its governing ideology and its forms of political organization. Very little of this, it should be underscored, emanates from Trump himself, who is often described within the MAGA movement as a somewhat defective, if useful, instrument of the new order.20

    Despite its importance in publishing Project 2025, the leading think tank for the Trump movement is not the Heritage Foundation, but rather the Claremont Institute, founded in 1979 in Upland, California. The Claremont Institute was originally a base for Straussian thought (derived from the ultraconservative political theorist Leo Strauss) but has evolved into the nerve center of MAGA. Its funding comes from megadonors, including the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund (a multibillion dollar fund managed by investment banker Thomas D. Klingenstein, chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute), the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation (managed by billionaire former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos), the ultraconservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.21 Its two main publications are The American Mind and the Claremont Review of Books. The Institute also has an additional branch, the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life, located in Washington, DC, across from the Capitol. Academics and pundits associated with the Claremont Institute dominate Hillsdale College in Michigan. Hillsdale publishes Imprimis, essentially a Claremont Institute MAGA publication. The Institute offers a number of fellowships, including the Lincoln Fellowship. Its website tracks so-called “BLM funding” (referring to the Black Lives Matter, or BLM movement) by corporations, claiming, on extremely questionable grounds, that $82.9 billion has been directed to the CRT/Woke/Cultural Marxist cause by corporations. As in MAGA ideology in general, corporations are condemned as morally corrupt for giving way to Cultural Marxism but are seldom criticized economically. This is consistent with the entire history of petty-bourgeois ideology as reflected in the nineteenth-century writings of such celebrated figures as Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideological outpourings, as Lukács noted, reflected “a contradictory twofold tendency” of a “critique of capitalist lack of culture,” while nonetheless supporting an order “located in capitalism.”22

    In 2019, Trump awarded the Claremont Institute the National Humanities Medal. On January 6, 2021, lawyer John Eastman, a member of the board of the Claremont Institute (where he remains to this day), supported by other Claremont Institute associates, played the leading role in organizing the MAGA assault on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. He also wrote the key memos directed at pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to invalidate the 2020 election in an attempt to reverse Trump’s loss to Joe Biden. All of this earned Claremont the reputation as the January 6 attempted coup’s “brain trust.”23

    The Claremont Institute was to become the main intellectual incubus of Trump II. More than a dozen Claremont associated pundits and former Claremont fellows regularly appear on Fox News. This includes, in addition to Eastman, such luminaries as Michael Anton, Claremont senior fellow and a high-level Trump State Department appointee; Christopher Caldwell, contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books and white supremacist commentator; Brian T. Kennedy, Claremont former president and current board member, and chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, which advances a new McCarthyism; Charles R. Kesler, Claremont Review of Books editor and leading proponent of a “Cold Civil War”; Charlie Kirk, former Claremont Lincoln Fellow and founder/CEO of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), with its “Professor Watch List” and its evangelical branch, TPUSA Faith; John Marini, Claremont senior fellow and leading right-wing intellectual critic of the “administrative state”; and Christopher F. Rufo, former Claremont Lincoln Fellow and notorious anti-CRT pundit.

    Anton, a former managing director of investment at BlackRock and currently a senior researcher at the Claremont Institute, served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for strategic communication on the National Security Council in Trump’s first administration.24 He is now director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department under Marco Rubio. It was Anton more than any other single figure who connected the Claremont Institute to MAGA and the alt-right. His 2016 Claremont Review of Books article “The Flight 93 Election”—using the metaphor of the passengers who rushed the cockpit on the terrorist flight on September 11, 2001—was to go viral and played a major role in mobilizing militant support for the Trump campaign. Here Anton declared that the 2016 election was a “charge the cockpit or die election,” in which “you may die anyway” in the attempt, but if Hillary Clinton were to be elected, “death is certain.” Although the piece was disjointed, rambling, and illogical, the metaphor nonetheless caught on, catapulting Anton to right-wing celebrity status, and led to his appointment to Trump’s National Security Council with the support of the right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel.25

    In 2019, Anton published After the Flight 93 Election… And What We Still Have to Lose, which emphasized the need for a war on the entire left, earning the praise of Trump. This was followed in 2020 by his book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, in which he proposed that immigration should ideally be stopped altogether, while birthright citizenship (citizenship by virtue of simply being born in the United States, even if not to U.S. citizens) should cease immediately. China was the primary enemy, while peace should be made with Russia. The latter, Anton explained, belonged to the same “civilizational ‘sect’” as the United States and Europe, “in ways that China would never be.” Anton’s The Stakes, however, is best known for his explicit advocacy of a “red [that is, Republican or right-wing] Caesarism,” in which the presidency would become a “form of absolute monarchy” or “one-man rule” exhibiting widespread popular support—a position that was followed immediately after in his book with the exhortation to “reelect Trump!” Only when elected would Trump declare himself Caesar.26

    In a review on “Draining the Swamp” in the Claremont Review of Books, Anton popularized Marini’s Unmasking the Administrative State. Marini’s analysis is seen as a validation of Alexandre Kojève’s conservative rendition of G. W. F. Hegel’s German idealist philosophy, which in the right-wing view is seen as forming a justification for autocratic bourgeois rule as the end of history. Applied to contemporary institutions, the bureaucratic overlords of the administrative state are to be viewed as the “ruling class.” Marini and Anton thus argue that there is a need for Trump to smash the administrative state and replace it with more centralized rule. These same views led U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in an earlier stage of his career had employed Marini as a special assistant, to exclaim “We must read Marini!!”27

    Anton has declared that in order to win “we need bloggers, meme-makers, Twitter trolls, street artists, comedians, propagandists, theologians, playwrights, essayists, novelists, hacks, flacks, and intellectuals”—as well as Trump and right-thinking capitalists.28 His most iconoclastic act within the Claremont Institute itself was to write an article about the alt-right Nietzschean-fascist propagandist Bronze Age Pervert (known as BAP, now revealed as Romanian-American Costin Vlad Alamariu, who received a PhD from Yale), the author of Bronze Age Mindset. Anton’s role, in a 2019 Claremont Review of Books article titled “Are the Kids Al(t) Right?,” was to bring BAP/Alamariu into the MAGA mainstream in an effort to draw disenchanted white youth into the neofascist movement. Noting that BAP provided in his self-published Bronze Age Mindset a “simplified pastiche of Friedrich Nietzsche,” which had “cracked the top 150 on Amazon—not, mind you, in some category within Amazon but on the site as a whole,” Anton argued that it represented an opportunity for the MAGA right to dominate the underground youth discourse. BAP characterized the liberal elites, intellectuals, left thinkers, and the general population as “bugmen,” without heroism, similar to Nietzsche’s “Last Man.” Human beings in general were portrayed as belonging to mere “yeast” life. The solution lay in male bodybuilding through weightlifting, and the cultivation of the image of Greek Bronze Age heroes. BAP is a white supremacist, emphasizing Aryan purity and vile attacks on diverse populations everywhere. As Anton himself admitted, “the strongest and easiest objections to make to Bronze Age Mindset is that it is ‘racist,’ ‘anti-Semitic,’ ‘anti-democratic,’ ‘misogynistic,’ and ‘homophobic,’” making it more “outrageous” than Nietzsche. Yet, he pretends that BAP is “gentler” than thinkers like Karl “Marx, [V. I.] Lenin, Mao [Zedong]…[Che] Guevara, [Saul] Alinsky and Foucault, or any number of fanatics whose screeds are taught in the elite universities.” In the end, Anton underscored the importance of BAP’s attacks on “bugmen” and “bugtimes,” incorporating his views within MAGA.29

    A study of Bronze Age Mindset itself reveals venomous references to “the shantytowns of the Turd World,” and attacks, citing Nietzsche, on “pre-Aryan modes of life, the return of socialism, of the longhouse, feminism,” and “Satanic Marxist sects.” Athenian general Alcibiades, conquistadors Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, Napoleon Bonaparte, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfredo Stroessner (former dictator of Paraguay), and especially Bob Denard (a brutal twentieth-century French mercenary active in the Congo and the Comoros Islands) are BAP’s models of the return in modern times of Bronze Age Aryan humans. BAP’s favorite president, prior to Trump, is James K. Polk, who launched the Mexican-American War. The “white population” in the United States, he writes, seized Mexico “by their valor.” Feminism is seen as an abomination. “Nothing so ridiculous as the liberation of women,” BAP/Alamariu declares, “has ever been attempted in the history of mankind,” which he describes as an attempt to “return to pre-Aryan matriarchy.” He adds, “Social justice is a disgusting parasitism.” Today’s cities, subject to waves of immigrants, are “populated by hordes of dwarf-like zombies that are imported for slave labor and political agitation from the fly-swept latrines of the world.” He openly claims: “I believe in Fascism or something worse.” For all these reasons, according to BAP, Trump is to be supported in his conquest of government. “The Leviathan” of the administrative state dominated by the “bugmen,” he insists, must be smashed in order to create a new “primal order.” With the support of Anton and others, BAP was recognized as a kind of underworld Nietzschean influencer behind the MAGA movement, attractive to young, regressive white males. He was to become virtually required reading for young white staffers in the first Trump administration.30

    Anton was himself encouraged to read BAP by self-styled “Dark Enlightenment” thinker Curtis Yarvin, a neofascist close to both Anton and Vance (the MAGA heir apparent). Like Vance and Anton, Yarvin is heavily supported by Silicon Valley billionaire Thiel. Yarvin is also openly admired by Trump adviser and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen for his antidemocratic views. Vance calls Yarvin, whom he has also referred to in friendly banter as a “fascist,” “my number one political influence.” In the MAGA world, Yarvin remains something of a shadowy figure, despite the fact that he has articulated the more reactionary strategies of the Trump regime. He is an ex-computer programmer and right-wing blogger, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and advocate of a “Dark Enlightenment” or neoreactionary movement (“NRx”). Tucker Carlson devoted an entire show to interviewing Yarvin in 2021. He is best known for his anti-democracy arguments and insistence that the president can establish himself as a “national CEO” or even “dictator,” concentrating all power in the executive branch and superseding the legal system and the courts while shifting from an “oligarchical Congress” to a “monarchical president.” Americans, he insists, are “going to have to get over their dictator-phobia.”31

    Yarvin has weaponized J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, seeing the leftist elite or professional-managerial class as an “elf aristocracy,” the “lower-middle class” as “hobbits,” and “dark elves” like himself as defenders of the hobbits. Like Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, with whom he identifies, Yarvin sees himself as a proponent of MAGA; but, unlike Bannon, he deemphasizes the contradiction between the lower-middle class MAGA forces and the monopoly-capitalist billionaires at the top. Yarvin’s real allegiances are to the billionaires, rather than the lower-middle class. Indeed, he denies that he is a real fascist, despite the fact that he has applied the fascist label to himself, characterizing himself rather as a more straightforward supporter of dictatorship (or monarchy), since he has absolute contempt for the masses. Nevertheless, Yarvin sardonically states, “frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me”—if, he acknowledges, more talented and more evil.32

    Widely seen as a largely underground figure who has helped game the system for Trump, Yarvin has provided the general plan for an imperial presidency. He argues that real power is held “oligarchically” (distinguished from the classical notion of oligarchy as based on wealth) by people who control the media and the universities, constituting the “Cathedral.” The Cathedral can only be toppled by a monarch or dictator, acting as a CEO. Once Trump was elected, Yarvin contended, he could purge the federal bureaucracy (what Yarvin calls “RAGE,” or retire all government employees) by claiming he had an electoral mandate allowing him to transgress the law and bring both the courts and Congress to heel. All court orders requiring the president to desist should be ignored. The mainstream media corporations and the universities should be closed down. In a podcast, Anton said to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to—age-old move—gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully.” Yarvin responded, “It wouldn’t be unlawful. You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.” The president could apply this to every state and take “over all law enforcement authorities.” Like Anton, Yarvin declared of the president, “you’re going to be Caesar.”33

    Anton has stated that the universities are “evil,” a position strongly supported by Rufo, a former director at the intelligent design (creationist) Discovery Institute and a Claremont Lincoln Fellow.34 Rufo is widely celebrated in MAGA circles for his grand propagandistic exploits in turning CRT and DEI into toxic conceptions in the public mind. He is currently a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a contributing editor to its City Journal. In “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It” for Hillsdale’s Imprimis, Rufo argued that CRT was the product of Cultural Marxism and “identity-based Marxism.” In what has become a fundamental element of MAGA ideology, he contends that today’s Marxists are all identity-theorists and are opposed to “equality,” replacing it with “equity,” which is “little more than reformulated Marxism.” CRT, he pronounces, promotes “neo-segregation.” It violates the principle of civil rights and is discriminatory through its anti-white policies. In this way, civil rights law is to be redirected against racial minorities. Rufo associates CRT and BLM with anticapitalism and reverse racism. His assaults on CRT influenced Trump’s attacks on it in his first administration.35

    More recently, Rufo has argued for “laying siege to the institutions.” This includes attacking any corporations that instituted DEI policies, seen as the product of Cultural Marxism, CRT, and BLM—a neo-McCarthyite view shared by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Major targets are “radical gender theory” and what Rufo calls “the transgender empire.” He contends that “we must fight to put the transgender empire out of business forever.” Rufo and the MAGA right fulminate against the “college cartel” and argue that K–12 reeducation should start with the promotion of “Western Civilization.”36

    One of the most adamant critics of diversity on the MAGA right is Caldwell, who in his article “The Browning of America” argues that “‘Diversity’ has [always] been an attribute of subject populations.” Hence, recognizing it as a basis of social policy flies in the face of the principles of the founders of the U.S. Constitution. In an article on Robert E. Lee, Caldwell argued that left criticisms of the commander of the Confederate forces as a defender of the slaveholding South, and thus of slavery, were aimed at eliminating Lee as “the moral force of half the nation.”37

    Claremont Review of Books editor Kesler, a member of Trump’s 1776 Commission on U.S. History, intended to counter the 1619 Project on the history of U.S. slavery, has been a leading figure in promoting the MAGA notion of a Cold Civil War between the right and the so-called dominant forces on the left. The term “woke,” which arose first in the civil rights movement, has been massively turned around by the right since 2019, relying on conservative command of the media, to refer in a derogatory way to all contemporary progressive political and cultural causes. It is employed as a means of belittling social justice struggles against racism and gender inequality, while its most common usage is as a racist dog whistle.38

    The MAGA ideology’s Cold Civil War is closely attached to attacks on China. As chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger (which includes Bannon as a member), Claremont Institute board member Brian Kennedy is part of a movement to generate a new McCarthyism focused on Beijing. Claiming that Chinese Communism has infiltrated U.S. society in BLM clothing, he writes: “We are at risk of losing a war today because too few of us know that we are engaged with an enemy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) [sic], that means to destroy us.”39

    Christian nationalists are also being enlisted in the Cold Civil War/New McCarthyism. Kirk’s Turning Point USA became notorious in 2016 for its Professor Watch List, singling out mostly left academics across the country to be targeted by the right in a McCarthyite manner. Kirk, who also served on Trump’s 1776 Commission, has now become known as a mega “whisperer” to youth, in which he bullet points the “war on white people” and encourages white nationalism. His organization, working with the Claremont Institute, bussed MAGA supporters to the January 6, 2021, protest and assault on the Capitol. Yarvin, who has described slavery “as a natural human relationship” and promoted biological determinism and monarchy, was effusively praised by Kirk on his radio show and podcast, along with white supremacist Steve Sailer. Kirk is the author of Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West, published in 2024. According to the publisher’s blurb, “America…is under threat from a lethal ideology that seeks to humiliate and erase anyone that does not bow at its altar…. Kirk drags wokeism out of the shadows and details the exact steps needed to stop its toxic spread,” which “has already seeped into every aspect of American society.”40

    More recently, Kirk has transformed himself into the leading promoter of evangelical Christian nationalism within the MAGA movement, establishing a division of Turning Point USA called TPUSA Faith aimed at white evangelicals. He argues that the U.S. founders created a Christian nation and advocates the Seven Mountain mandate of extreme evangelical Christian nationalism, in which believers are required to seek to dominate all of reality, including family, religion, education, media, arts, business, and government. This is tied to endism and religious apocalypticism (Second Coming) views. Kirk has sought to promote hatred of LGBTQ+ and transgender people in order to motivate the evangelical movement to take on a more direct political role.41

    OMB director Vought is undoubtedly the most powerful Christian nationalist within the Trump administration itself. Writing in 2022 for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, Vought claimed that the Center for Renewing America, which he founded in 2021, had demonstrated on so-called legal grounds that “illegal aliens coming across” the U.S.-Mexico border constituted “an invasion,” thus allowing state governors, who, according to Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, are not allowed to “engage in War unless actually invaded,” to act forcibly against these “invaders,” independent of the federal government.42 As a Christian Nationalist organization, the Center for Renewing America is adamantly anti-Palestinian, opposing any attempt to allow Palestinians to immigrate to the United States, arguing that “One would be hard-pressed to identify a people or culture more fundamentally at odds with the foundations of American self-government than Palestinians,” who have “a culture poisonous to the health of and integrity of American communities,” and whose ideology, despite the counter-claims of “intersectional Marxists,” has as its aim the total annihilation of Israel. Vought’s Center for Renewing America is strongly in favor of the removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza and their resettlement in the lands of the Arab League.43

    Movements in the fascist genus have often relied on opportunistic shifts from left to right. A classic example of this is the Italian leftist thinker Enrico Ferri, a reactionary pseudo-socialist who was strongly attacked by Frederick Engels, and later became a follower of Benito Mussolini.44 The main intellectual vehicle for so-called “leftist” cooperation with MAGA ideology, operating in what is presented as a common anti-liberal vein, is Compact magazine, cofounded by Iranian-American rightist and former Trotskyist Sohrab Ahmari, a close associate of Vance and now the U.S. editor of UnHerd, and by national-populist Edwin Aponte, editor of Bellows, a MAGA-style publication. Compact magazine was once described in Jacobin as a “syncretic” magazine of both left and right.45 However, rather than representing some sort of meeting point of left and right, it is strongly supportive of Trump and Vance while successfully drawing in erstwhile leftist contributors, such as Christian Parenti and Slavoj Žižek (a contributing editor) into a publication in which pro-MAGA views are hegemonic.46 Yarvin, Anton, Caldwell, and Rufo have all written multiple articles for Compact on such topics as the nihilism of the left-wing ruling class, Cultural Marxism, CRT, dismantling the administrative state, and support for Viktor Orbán’s ultra-conservative government in Hungary and the neofascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.47

    Parenti, once a well-known leftist journalist, writes regularly for Compact. His columns have supported Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health. He has also written columns claiming that Trump is an anti-imperialist and that “‘Diversity’ Is a Ruling Class Ideology.” Since Trump’s reelection, Parenti has presented Trump and some of his department heads (Kennedy, Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence) as potential opponents of the “deep state” or surveillance-intelligence state, and thus in line with the left in this respect. However, this is a gross misperception of the nature of the Trump/MAGA regime itself, which has nothing to do with openness or democratic control, but which is establishing the basis for its own direct rule.48

    Žižek has used Compact as a venue in which to engage in the most reactionary themes. Thus, in an article titled “Wokeness Is Here to Stay,” he presented a transphobic argument in which he declared that “the use of puberty blockers is yet another case of woke capitalism.” In this same anti-woke article, Žižek generalized from the experience of a Black professor who was strongly criticized by students from an Afro-pessimist standpoint (as detailed in a different Compact article). From there, Žižek went on to make the extraordinary racially charged statement, directed at a mainly white reactionary readership, that, “The black woke elite is fully aware that it won’t achieve its declared goal of diminishing black oppression—and it doesn’t even want that. What they really want is what they are achieving: a position of moral authority from which to terrorize all others.”49

    Compact magazine managing editor Geoff Shullenberger has specialized in bringing the ideas of BAP into the MAGA mainstream, both within Compact and elsewhere. Shullenberger also is the coeditor of COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear, opposing lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and masking in response to COVID-19 as due to the extremism of the left. Meanwhile, Compact columnist and MAGA “populist” supporter Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (2021), was appointed in 2025 deputy opinion editor of Newsweek.50

    The MAGA think tanks are a product of funding by big capital interests, often promoting, in this respect, a libertarian ideology, but melding this with the need to reach the white lower-middle class with its reactionary, nationalist-populist, revanchist, racist, misogynist, and anti-socialist perspective, as a way of developing a mass constituency. The resulting MAGA ideology is disseminated through wider media such as Fox News, talk radio, social media, YouTube videos, blogs, and podcasts. The influential infotainment site Breitbart, once headed by Bannon, has published numerous articles attacking Cultural Marxism, and specializes in sensationalized shock attacks on the left. Breitbart’s senior technology editor, Allum Bokhari, a former Claremont Lincoln Fellow, has written for Hillsdale’s Imprimis on the need for the right to control big tech, along the lines subsequently implemented by Musk at X.51

    Claremont Lincoln Fellow Raheem J. Kassam, a former chief of staff to Brexit leader Nigel Farage and a Bannon ally, is the former editor-in-chief of Breitbart London. More recently Kassam had cohosted Bannon’s MAGA radio show/podcast “War Room.” In 2018, Kassam became editor-in-chief of the Trumpist news website National Pulse, and appears frequently as an “expert” commentator on Fox News, where he has discussed “How Did America Fall to Marxism?”52

    MAGA analyses are also disseminated by way of conservative book publishing. Rufo’s best-selling America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023) and Kirk’s The MAGA Doctrine (2020) were both published by Broadside Books, HarperCollins’s imprint for ultra-conservative nonfiction, which absorbed the Fox News book brand. The big five English-language book publishers all have distinct imprints devoted entirely to ultra-conservative books aimed at white supremacist Republicans/MAGA.53 Anton’s After the Flight 93 Election, Kesler’s Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of America’s Greatness(2021), Kennedy’s Communist China’s War Inside America (2020), and Ungar-Sargon’s Bad Newswere all published by Encounter Books, established by the right-wing Bradley Foundation, a funder of the Claremont Institute. Established in 1998, Encounter Books deliberately took its name from the pseudo-left-liberal journal Encounter, which was exposed in the 1970s by Ramparts as a CIA-funded publication. Kirk’s Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (2024) was published with Winning Team Publishing, cofounded in 2021 by Donald Trump Jr.54

    All the new right concepts and talking points end up on social media. As Fox News host Jesse Watters stated, “We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left. It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, [Joe] Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”55

    Division in the Ranks

    The most extreme MAGA ideologues such as Bannon, Yarvin, and Anton are distinctly aware that the nationalist-populist MAGA movement is rooted in lower-middle class whites (whom the neofascist movement in both Europe and the United States is accustomed to referring to as “hobbits”), and only secondarily in privileged elements of the working class. MAGA think tanks often present a barely disguised contempt for the “lumpen,” “pitchfork-bearing proletariat,” or “proles,” namely the working class.56 Almost no positive references to the working class or attempts to approach the underprivileged are present in the mainline MAGA literature, which is understood as rooted in a fragile national-populist alliance between the billionaire class and the lower-middle class, both of which see the working class as their most dangerous enemy (exceeding their hatred even for the upper-middle class professional-managerial stratum). Funded by the mega-rich and dedicated to the idea, as Anton says, that “race trumps class,” the MAGA pundits and influencers are unable to address directly the question of the working-class majority without undermining their claim to a broad populism. The result is that they appeal primarily to whiteness and “middle America.”57 Occasional references are made to MAGA hat-wearing truck drivers and other workers, but this only constitutes a vain attempt to elude the reality of a political bloc that consists largely of the lower-middle class and a relatively small number of privileged workers. Although Bannon, representing MAGA’s radical right, refers to workers, it is always in a context where the lower-middle class looms larger.58

    This fundamental class division will remain. Although Trump made some gains with blue-collar workers in the 2024 elections, particularly in rural areas, his political base remains the lower-middle class, which is in large part hostile towards the working class below. The Trump program is destined to hit the working class hardest economically.59 It was Anton who was to make the most serious ideological attempt to escape this trap in an article in Compact titled “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism,’” in which he sought to examine Marxist theory and turn it on its head. Thus, he characterized Silicon Valley billionaire oligarchs in alt-right fashion as the “left,” the enemy of right-wing populism. Moreover, while the MAGA movement, he recognized, was fundamentally based in the lower-middle/middle class/the poor, its “natural” basis ultimately was to be sought in the majority that he sardonically referred to as the “proles.”60 His whole endeavor in this respect, however, was to fall flat in the face of the inescapable reality of a neofascist alliance between the billionaires and the lower-middle class—both of whom see the diverse working class as the ultimate enemy. Moreover, Anton’s contradictory attempt to create a right-wing populism that incorporated the working class and targeted billionaire oligarchs was at odds with his own role as a member of the national security establishment, dominated by the mega-capitalist class, which had him hobnobbing with some of its biggest players. He therefore quickly mended his ways. Although he persisted in criticizing “oligarchs,” they were refashioned in conformity with the hegemonic MAGA ideology as the members of the administrative state, no longer big money interests.

    Yet, if the mass MAGA movement with its racism and its small-property-based outlook is inherently anti-working class, even if it has attracted significant numbers of working-class voters, it also finds itself in conflict with the ultra-wealthy interests that have funded and mobilized it, making it a dangerous movement from the standpoint of monopoly capitalism itself. Once political power is achieved in regimes in the fascist genus, divisions quickly emerge between the top echelons of monopoly capital and its army of lower-middle class adherents. Having obtained control of the state and of the military and police powers, the ultra-wealthy ruling class has every reason to discard the more militant nationalist—often partially anticapitalist—elements of its “radical right” base. The classic historical instance of this was the Night of the Long Knives in Hitler’s Germany, from June 30 to July 2, 1934, in which the Nazi party’s paramilitary brownshirt wing, the Sturmabteilung, or “Assault Division,” known as its stormtroopers, were subjected to a bloody purge. The purge was aimed specifically at the Strasserism (named after Otto and Gregor Strasser), deeply embedded in the brownshirts within the Nazi movement, which was both antisemitic and, to a considerable extent anticapitalist, and belonged to a milieu of militant mass action or “revolutionary” nationalism. Elimination of Strasserism allowed the consolidation of fascism as a reactionary monopoly-capitalist state, repressing and regimenting its mass petty-bourgeois base.61

    In the very different conditions of the neofascist MAGA movement in the United States today, these same general contradictions appear, though minus the extreme violence. Many among the MAGA faithful were startled to see their lack of representation in the Trump cabinet following the 2024 election, a sharp contrast from the 2016 election. The Trump regime today has a cabinet of billionaires, surrounded by still further billionaires. Although there are extreme rightist operatives whose views are similar to those of the MAGA masses in the second Trump White House—such as Stephen Miller, who, despite being Jewish, appears to support white Christian nationalism, and is currently deputy chief of staff for policy—they are overshadowed by the mega-capitalists. Right from the start, it was clear that high-tech financial capital rather than the MAGA hat-wearing base was to be in charge. As Gary Stout, a Washington attorney, wrote in Pennsylvania’s Observer-Reporter, Trump “is now creating a new political elite of oligarchs that has no accountability to Congress or loyalty to his own MAGA movement.”62

    This contradiction, splitting the MAGA movement/Trump regime, was immediately apparent in the conflict over H-1B visas for foreign workers. These visas are widely used by multinational corporations to hire foreign technical workers in specialty occupations, especially high-tech, bringing in relatively low-paid skilled workers from India, China, and elsewhere. H-1B visas have been heavily criticized within the MAGA movement, since they undercut relatively high-paid U.S. jobs. Voicing the outrage of the MAGA faithful, Bannon declared prior to Trump’s inauguration that Musk, who came out strongly for the H-1B visas, was “evil” and that he would have him driven out of the White House. Bannon raged in national-populist terms against wealthy “oligarchs,” not only “the lords of easy money,” but more importantly the tech overlords of Silicon Valley, representatives of “technological feudalism,” who were now dominating the MAGA movement, and were opposing “the populist, nationalist revolution.” MAGA militant Laura Loomer presented racist arguments in which she declared: “Our country was built by white Europeans…. Not by third world invaders from India.” Openly attacking Musk on X, Loomer suddenly found herself demonetized on the platform.63 The fact that this represented a fundamental division between billionaire monopoly-finance capitalists and high-tech oligarchs at the top and the lower-middle class MAGA base was evident in an article by Kevin Porteus of Hillsdale College titled “Putting Americans First,” published in The American Mind. He advanced the argument that “America First” should mean “Americans…first.”64Breitbart likewise ran story after story against H-1B visas. The rebellion over this issue, however, was soon put down by Trump, who, himself a billionaire, sided with Musk, indicating that his own companies employed foreign workers on H-1B visas. Faced with a division between monopoly-finance capital and his own militant MAGA movement, Trump chose the former.

    The fissure between a capitalist ruling class of billionaires and the neofascist movement on the ground will only widen. The MAGA movement expects lower taxes under Trump, which will no doubt be partially forthcoming, but paid for to a significant extent by drastic cuts in social services. Expectations of lower prices, especially with new tariffs being instituted, will be dashed. Moreover, like all tax reductions under monopoly capitalism, the new Trump tax cuts will be highly regressive, benefiting the rich most of all and further widening the gap between the top and the bottom of U.S. society. The cutbacks on civilian government will hurt the vast majority of the population, including the lower-middle class. With nearly all social spending that benefits the bottom 60 percent of the population, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security now in the crosshairs of Musk’s DOGE, the carnage is likely to be severe. Although the MAGA movement is characterized by extreme nationalism, monopoly-finance capital and its high-tech overlords are geared to accumulation on a world scale and global financial expropriation. They rely on the exploitation not only of the global proletariat, but also the increased exploitation and expropriation of U.S. workers. Implementation of ruling-class policies on globalization, financialization, imperialism, war, and hyperexploitation under the new regime will inevitably push much of the U.S. lower-middle class back into the working class, polarizing and destabilizing the society still further.

    Trump’s neofascist regime is a desperate act of a declining empire. It has supplanted neoliberalism only in the sense that the right wing of the ruling class itself is now in direct and open command of the state, seeking to restructure it as a vehicle of resurgent hegemony. The conflict between neofascism as a more regressive global capitalist project designed to preserve and enhance the power of the ruling capitalists with their global interests, on the one hand, and the national-populist movement of the MAGA radical right focused primarily on the conquest of the administrative state, on the other, means that the mega-capitalist interests will continually betray the MAGA “populist” base, viewed as mere cannon fodder in the Cold Civil War.

    Trump appointed billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy as the codirector of DOGE along with Musk. Ramaswamy is the founder of the giant pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences and author of the bestselling 2023 book Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. He resigned from his DOGE position to run for governor of Ohio. With Ramaswamy departing, Musk was left as the sole power at DOGE. Ramaswamy has played a leading role in attacking corporate ESG and DEI. Recognizing that corporations had increasingly introduced limited ESG and DEI programs in response to environmental and social issues, pundits on the MAGA right, including the opportunistic plutocrat Ramaswamy, were able to make the existence of such programs a popular “anti-corporate” moral issue. The result is that many corporations now have, not unwillingly, reversed themselves in line with Trump. Some have dropped the “diversity” and “equity” from DEI while hypocritically retaining “inclusion.”65

    The sheer arrogance of the capitalist oligarchs and their managers can be seen in the rise of Thiel as a dominant figure in the Trump orbit, undoubtedly the most powerful figure connected to the regime with the exception of Musk (and the president himself). In 2022, Thiel characterized himself as leader of a “Rebel Alliance,” as in Star Wars, fighting the “imperial stormtroopers” of the U.S. establishment and engaged in a struggle aimed ultimately at China.66 In 2009, he declared “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” causing him openly to reject the latter.67 He is currently tied to six members of the National Security Council who are beholden to him financially and politically and are part of his industrial network: Vance (whose political campaigns were financed by Thiel), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (who is associated with Thiel’s military-tech network), Secretary of Energy Chris Wright (who sits on a board of the energy startup Oklo, in which Thiel is a major investor), National Security Advisor Mike Waltz (whose 2022 Florida campaign was funded by Thiel), Rubio (whose 2022 reelection bid was financed by Thiel), and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (who is on the payroll of the Thiel-funded Saving Arizona PAC).68

    Thiel, like Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump himself, stands for the interests of the “masters of the universe.”69 Despite libertarian ideology and a neofascist ethos, there is little to connect the financial plutocrats materially with the lower-middle class. Given that the so-called destruction of the administrative state is leading to more centralized monopoly-capitalist control of the state in the interests of the plutocrats, the selling out of the MAGA movement on the ground is palpably obvious.

    A further contradiction in the MAGA movement lies in its promotion of its Christian white nationalism, splitting the evangelical movement. Exit polls indicate that some 80 percent of white evangelical voters support Trump. Yet, the freezing of USAID by Trump and Musk generated strong opposition from Christian affiliated aid groups. The resulting deep division in conservative circles undoubtedly affected the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the stoppage on foreign aid. Trump’s establishment of a White House Faith Office headed by the controversial televangelist Paula White-Cain, known for her promotion of the capitalist-oriented “prosperity gospel,” together with his creation of a task force headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, aimed at ending “anti-Christian bias,” have upset the traditional separation of church and state. This weaponization of evangelicalism to reinforce a Christian nationalism directed at supporting the MAGA state has led to widening criticisms within the evangelical and wider Christian communities.70 Trump’s redoubled support for Israel’s extermination of Palestinians is unpopular with younger evangelicals, who are increasingly rejecting Christian Zionism.

    The most potent attack from within evangelicalism has emerged from preachers such as Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, assistant director for partnerships and fellowships in Yale University’s Century of Public Theology and Public Policy, in his 2018 book Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from the Slaveholder Religion. Working closely with Protestant minister Reverend William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, Wilson-Hartgrove was motivated by his opposition to the Trump movement to address the “original sin” of the dominant white evangelicalism in the United States, which, rather than simply an evangelical movement as such, was from the first a “slaveholder’s religion.” Emerging within the evangelical community itself and receiving considerable acclaim, Wilson-Hartgrove’s critique of the slaveholder’s religion has served to bring into the open the most acute contradictions of the Christian nationalist ideology.71 As he wrote,

    The sad reality is that we [evangelicals] chose a side in the 19th century and our movement is still infected by the slaveholder religion that was funded by plantation owners. That faith did not go away after the Civil War; it doubled down and prayed for “redemption” from Reconstruction. And it rejoiced when white supremacy campaigns across the South regained power and established Jim Crow segregation. Mid-20th century, when the balance of power was again challenged by America’s civil rights movement, slaveholder religion reasserted itself, criticizing Dr. King for “politicizing” the gospel and favoring “law and order” systems that perpetuated inequality. The Southern Strategy aimed to harness slaveholder religion by creating a Moral Majority that would feel righteous for their support of the status quo.

    Donald Trump did not create the crisis we now face, but his presidency is exposing the truth about who we are as evangelicals—not a movement divided between left and right, but a people of faith who must now choose between slaveholder religion and the Christianity of Christ.72

    For “400 years,” slaveholder religion, Wilson-Hartgrove argued, has taught people to fear people of color. “Because slaveholder religion’s god ordained white supremacy, white people learned to fear equality and the black political power that challenged the social order they were taught to value.” It is not a return to the politics of “redemption” that is the answer, he argues, but completing the politics of Reconstruction.73

    Betrayal and Revolt

    The Trump regime is a regime of betrayal. It is already leading to the abandonment of the lower-middle class, which through the MAGA movement brought it into power, as well as the working-class majority.74 What it offers to its core lower-middle class constituency is a kind of nationalist culturalism, which is a mere veil for a system of far more centralized capitalist control of the state in a White House now filled with billionaires, ultimately leading to the increased economic exploitation and expropriation of the underlying population. The material betrayal of the working class will be absolute, economically and politically. For such a regime of capitalist overlords to continue, it will have to increase its repression of the body politic at every step. Its greatest fear is that the enraged masses, especially the working-class majority, would mobilize and rise up in resistance, bringing with it all of those in the society as a whole who are committed to democratic rule and to the survival of humanity in the face of growing environmental perils.

    The political and ideological successes of the MAGA movement were made possible in part by a liberal-left that abandoned the working class economically and politically under the mantle of postmodernism and identity politics, severed off from questions of exploitation, poverty, and economic and social decline. This requires a return to what Marx called the “hierarchy of…needs,” emphasizing within this real material needs, including jobs, health care, housing, free human development, community, the environment, and the right to control one’s own body—needs vital to the population as a whole, and ultimately inseparable from democratic control of the society.75 Viewed in this way, the only way to combat the current reactionary trend is based on socialist principles of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, putting the needs of the population as a whole, and those most oppressed, first. This struggle will have to emanate in the main from a resurgent, reunited working class, historically the most diverse, democratic, and revolutionary section of society, the guarantors of humanity’s future.

    Notes

    1. Matthew J. Vaeth, “Memorandum for Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies/Subject: Temporary Pause of Agency, Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs,” Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President, January 27, 2025; Travis Gettys, “‘Reads Like a Hostage Note’: Trump Order Flagged as ‘Mass Fraud’ by Ex-Official,” Raw Story, January 28, 2025; Charles R. Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War,” Imprimis47, no. 10 (October 2018).
    2. Vought quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings,” New York Times, February 4, 2025.
    3. For a leading MAGA proponent of “Caesarism” as constituting the inner telos of the Trump regime, see Michael Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2020), 303–18.
    4. Max Matsa, “Senate Confirms Project 2025 Co-Author as Trump Budget Chief,” BBC, February 6, 2025; Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Audrey Ash, and Kyung Lah, “Hidden Camera Video Shows Project 2025 Co-Author Discussing His Secret Work Preparing for a Second Trump Term,” CNN, August 15, 2024; Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky, “Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency,” Center for American Progress, October 1, 2024.
    5. Vaeth, Memorandum, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs”; Melissa Quinn, Richard Escobedo, and Kristin Brown, “Trump Administration Rescinds Federal Funding Freeze Memo After Chaos,” CBS News, January 29, 2025; Daniel Barnes, Chloe Atkins, and Dareh Gregorian, “Appeals Court Rejects Trump Administration Bid to Immediately Reinstate Funding Freeze,” NBC News, February 11, 2025; Bill Barrow, “How Donald Trump and Project 2025 Previewed the Federal Grant Freeze,” Associated Press, January 28, 2025.
    6. Cass R. Sunstein, “This Theory Is Behind Trump’s Power Grab,” New York Times, February 26, 2025.
    7. Vaeth, Memorandum, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.”
    8. Lance Cashion, “How to Recognize Cultural Marxism and Critical Theories,” Revolution of Man (blog), August 31, 2023; Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Cornell Gorka, NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It (New York: Encounter Books, 2025), 15, 238, 265–69. The current right-wing attack on “Cultural Marxism” is derived from attacks on “Cultural Bolshevism” in Nazi Germany. Ari Paul, “‘Cultural Marxism’: The Mainstreaming of a Nazi Trope,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, June 4, 2019, fair.org.
    9. Trump/Vance Campaign, “Agenda 47: Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions,” July 17, 2023.
    10. Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It, Special Report No. 262, Heritage Foundation, November 14, 2022; Gonzalez and Gorka, NextGen Marxism; Tanner Mirrlees, “The Alt-Right’s Discourse of ‘Cultural Marxism’: A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate,” Atlantis Journal 39, no. 1 (August 2018); Cashion, “How to Recognize Cultural Marxism and Critical Theories.” All of these works are poorly researched, poorly documented, unscholarly, and shallow, not conforming to academic standards in any way. As Baruch Spinoza said, “Ignorance is no argument.”
    11. Gonzalez and Gorka, NextGen Marxism, 17–18, 148–99, 242.
    12. See John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 20–22, 121.
    13. For criticism of how white evangelical Christians in the United States have embraced a “slaveholder religion,” capitulating to the religious views propounded in the Antebellum South and in the Jim Crow period, see Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (Lisle, Illinois Inter-Varsity Press, 2020); Darrell Hamilton II, “It’s Time to Break the Chains of Slaveholder Religion,” Baptist News, September 17, 2020.
    14. Paul M. Sweezy to Paul A. Baran, October 18, 1952, in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital, eds. Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 86–87.
    15. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942); Doreen Lustig, “The Nature of the Nazi State and the Question of International Criminal Responsibility of Corporate Officials at Nuremberg: Franz Neuman’s Behemoth at the Industrial Trials,” Working Paper 2011/2, History and Theory of International Law Series, Institute for International Law and Justice, 2012; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 350–54. On the lower-middle class/monopoly capitalist alliance in societies belonging to the fascist genus, see also Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), 455; Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 54; Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1974); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 134–76; Paul A. Baran (Historicus), “Fascism in America,” Monthly Review 4, no. 6 (October 1952): 181–89.
    16. Maxine Y. Sweezy (see also Maxine Y. Woolston), The Structure of the Nazi Economy(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941), 27–35; Gustave Strolper, German Economy, 1870–1940 (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1940), 207; Germá Bel, “The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 3 (2006): 187–94; Foster, Trump in the White House, 27–43, 65–66.
    17. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017); Reuven Kaminer, “On the Concept of ‘Totalitarianism’ and Its Role in Current Political Discourse,” MR Online, August 15, 2007; Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 2–3.
    18. Baran, “Fascism in America,” 182.
    19. Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 151.
    20. Christopher Caldwell, “Speaking Trumpian,” Claremont Review of Books 24, no. 19 (Fall 2024): 19–22.
    21. Andy Kroll, “Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup’s Brain Trust,” Rolling Stone, January 12, 2022; Influence Watch, “Thomas D. Kligenstein Fund,” influencewatch.org (n.d.).
    22. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 730. Lukács’s reference to Carlyle here is directly relevant to the present. Leading MAGA ideologue Curtis Yarvin writes: “I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist.” Matt McManus, “Yarvin’s Case against Democracy: Curtis Yarvin Is too Elitist for Fascism,” Commonweal, January 27, 2023.
    23. Marc Fisher and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Claremont Institute Triumphed in the Trump Years. Then Came Jan. 6,” Washington Post, July 30, 2022; Elisabeth Zerofsky, “How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right,” New York Times, August 3, 2022; Kroll, “Revealed.”
    24. Kate Brannen and Luke Hartig, “Disrupting the White House: Peter Thiel’s Influence is Shaping the National Security Council,” Just Security, February 8, 2017.
    25. Michael Anton, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books (online), September 5, 2016.
    26. Michael Anton, After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose (New York: Encounter Books, 2019); Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (see especially section on “Caesarism” in chapter 7 and the sections on “Immigration,” “Reelect Trump!” and on “Foreign and Defense Policy” in chapter 8.
    27. Michael Anton, “Draining the Swamp,” Claremont Review of Books, 19, no. 1 (Winter 2018/19).
    28. Anton, “Draining the Swamp.”
    29. Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t) Right?,” Claremont Review of Books 19, no. 3 (Summer 2019). On Nietzsche’s “last man” see Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: Modern Library, 1917), 10–13 (prologue, section 5).
    30. Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Vlad Alamariu), Bronze Age Mindset (self-published, 2018), 12, 14, 40, 44, 52, 56, 72, 76, 80, 84, 92, 104, 110, 112–14, 118, 120–22, 126, 132–36; Ben Schreckinger, “The Alt-Right Manifesto that has Trumpworld Talking,” Politico, August 23, 2019; BAP quoted on fascism in Ali Breland, “Is the Bronze Age Pervert Going Mainstream?,” Mother Jones, October 2, 2023; Sophie Nicolson, “Bob Denard: French Mercenary Behind Several Post-Colonial Coups,” Guardian, October 15, 2007.
    31. Jason Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump: The Obscure ‘Dark Enlightenment’ Blogger Influencing the Next US Administration,” Guardian, December 21, 2024; Ian Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing through Trump’s Washington,” Politico, January 30, 2025; Ian Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups that Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview,” Politico, July 18, 2024; Jacob Siegel, “The Red-Pill Prince: How Computer Programmer Curtis Yarvin Became America’s Most Controversial Political Theorist,” The Tablet, March 30, 2022; Curtis Yarvin interviewed by David Marchese, “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening,” New York Times, January 18, 2025; “Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) on Tucker Carlson Today,” YouTube video, 1:15:35, September 8, 2021,
    32. Jeremy Carl, “Beyond Elves and Hobbits,” The American Mind, July 22, 2022; McManus, “Yarvin’s Case against Democracy.”
    33. Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump”; Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe”; Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups that Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual World View”; Curtis Yarvin, “The Cathedral or the Bizarre,” The Tablet, March 30, 2022; Curtis Yarvin, “The Nihilism of the Ruling Class,” Compact, December 16, 2022. On the classical notion of oligarchy, see Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
    34. Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Case for the Future,” Compact, July 21, 2023.
    35. Christopher F. Rufo, “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It,” Imprimis 50, no. 3 (March 2021).
    36. Christopher F. Rufo, “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” Imprimis 51, no. 4/5 (April/May 2022); Christopher F. Rufo, “Inside the Transgender Empire,” Imprimis 52, no. 9 (September 2023); Scott Yenor, “Repeal and Replace Today’s Education Cartel,” Law & Liberty, March 28, 2024, lawliberty.org; Frederick M. Hess, “Challenge the College Cartel,” The American Mind, July 2, 2019; Giancarlo Sopo, “Trump Must Break Up the College Cartel,” The American Mind, December 6, 2024.
    37. Christopher Caldwell, “The Browning of America,” Claremont Review of Books 15, no. 1 (Winter 2014/15); Christopher Caldwell, “There Goes Robert E. Lee,” Claremont Review of Books21, no. 2 (Spring 2021).
    38. Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War.”
    39. Brian T. Kennedy, “Facing Up to the China Treat,” Imprimis 49, no. 9 (September 2020).
    40. Ali Breland, “Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Really Seem to Mind White Nationalism,” Mother Jones, February 13, 2024; Robert Draper, “How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right,” New York Times, February 10, 2025; Charlie Kirk, Right-Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (Lewes, Delaware: Winning Team Publishing, 2024); Foster, Trump in the White House, 40.
    41. Mike Hixenbaugh and Allan Smith, “Charlie Kirk Once Pushed a ‘Secular Worldview.’ Now He’s Fighting to Make America Christian Again,” NBC News, June 12, 2024.
    42. Russell Vought, “Renewing American Purpose,” The American Mind, September 29, 2022; U.S. Constitution, Art. 1, Sect. 10, Cl. 3.
    43. Center for Renewing America Staff, “Primer: Palestinian Culture is Prohibitive for Assimilation,” Center for Renewing America, December 1, 2023; Miles Bryan, “The Christian Nationalist Legal Scholar Behind Trump’s Purges: Russell Vought and His Racial Philosophy Explained,” Vox, February 20, 2025.
    44. John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 263–64.
    45. Matt McManus, “Social Democracy and Social Conservatism Aren’t Compatible,” Jacobin, August 22, 2023.
    46. On Žižek, see Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” Counterpunch, January 2, 2023.
    47. See Michael Anton, “America Against the Deep State,” Compact, September 16, 2022; Christopher Rufo, “What Conservatives See in Hungary,” Compact, July 28, 2023; Christopher Caldwell, “Germany Considers the Alternative,” Compact, February 10, 2025. In a curious statement, Žižek wrote: “I love Compact for a simple reason: because it’s precisely not compact—it is a battlefield of ideas in conflict with each other. Only in this way can something new emerge today.” In fact, Compact is a publication where the MAGA philosophy is hegemonic, and which includes some former leftists moving right.
    48. Christian Parenti, “The Left Case for Kash Patel,” Compact, December 31, 2024; Christian Parenti, “Why RFK Must Take on the CIA,” Compact, December 11, 2024; Christian Parenti, “Diversity is a Ruling-Class Ideology,” Compact, January 19, 2023; Christian Parenti, “Trump’s Real Crime is Opposing Empire,” Compact, April 7, 2023; Christian Parenti, “The Left-Wing Origins of the ‘Deep State’ Theory,” Compact, February 28, 2025. Aside from the contradictory nature of an argument that sees Trump as the enemy of the deep state, this concept, which played so centrally in the Trump I administration, has been largely dropped in MAGA ideology as self-defeating, while Trump II has focused on slashing the administrative state.
    49. Slavoj Žižek, “Wokeness Is Here to Stay,” Compact, February 22, 2023; Vincent Lloyd, “A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell,” Compact, February 10, 2023; Melanie Zelle, “Žižek Has Lost the Plot,” The Phoenix (Swarthmore College), March 2, 2023.
    50. Geoff Shullenberger, “What BAP Learned from Feminism,” Compact, September 22, 2023; Geoff Schullenberger, “The Philosophy of Bronze Age Pervert,” Mother Maiden Matriarch with Louise Perry, Episode 35, October 15, 2023; Elena Louisa Lange and Geoff Shullenberger, COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear (London: Routledge, 2024).
    51. Allum Bokhari, “Who Is in Control?: The Need to Rein in Big Tech,” Imprimis 50, no. 1 (January 2021).
    52. Rosie Gray, “Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam Is Out: The Editor of Site’s London Bureau Was One of the Last Steve Bannon Allies Left within the Organization,” The Atlantic, May 23, 2018; “The National Pulse’s Kassam: How Did America Fall to Marxism?,” Grabien, June 6, 2020; Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (New York: Encounter Books, 2021).
    53. Amanda Crocker, “F*ck Big Book,” Canadian Dimension, February 20, 2025.
    54. Anton, After the Flight 93 Election; Charles R. Kesler, Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of America’s Greatness (New York: Encounter Books, 2021); Brian T. Kennedy, Communist China’s War Inside America (New York: Encounter Books, 2020); Kirk, Right Wing Revolution. Peter Collier, the founder of Encounter Books, was a former leftist and coeditor of Ramparts magazine along with David Horowitz, when they uncovered Encountermagazine’s CIA funding. He afterward moved to the far (together with Horowitz).
    55. Jesse Watters quoted in David Siroto, “How to Combat the Information War,” The Lever, February 24, 2025, levernews.com.
    56. Steve Bannon, “America’s Great Divide: Interview with Steve Bannon,” PBS Frontline, March 17, 2019; Michael Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism,’” Compact, November 30, 2022; Foster, Trump in the White House, 32–33, 72; Steve Inskeep, “Steve Bannon Says MAGA Populism Will Win—as Trump Is Surrounded by Billionaires,” NPR, January 19, 2025; Jeremy Carl, “Beyond Elves and Hobbits,” The American Mind, July 22, 2022.
    57. Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism.’”
    58. On the lower-middle class basis of the MAGA movement, see Foster, Trump in the White House, 19–21, 63; Les Leopold, “The Myth of MAGA’s Working Class Roots,” UnHerd, February 16, 2024; Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 14, 243–47; David Doonan “Alienated, Not Apathetic: Why Workers Don’t Vote,” Green Party US, August 5, 2019, gp.org; Phil A. Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Class Conflict (London: Reaction Books, 2018), 36–37. There are of course no hard lines between the working class and the lower-middle class or petty bourgeoisie. Not income and property alone, but also urban/rural divisions and education play a role in the determination of classes in the political sense. The lower-middle class is far more significant politically than it is demographically because of its higher voter turnout when compared to the working class.
    59. Taylor Popielarz, “An Old Steel Town Highlights How West Virginia Went from Deeply Blue to Trump Country,” Spectrum News NY1, May 24, 2024.
    60. Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism.’”
    61. Karl Dietrich Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration’ (Gleichschaltung): The Consolidation of National Socialist Rule in 1933 and 1934,” in Republic to Reich, ed. Hajo Holborn (New York: Vintage, 1972), 124–28; Foster, Trump in the White House, 25–29.
    62. Gary Stout, “The Marriage of MAGA and Billionaires Is Already Rocky,” Observer-Reporter, January 25, 2025.
    63. Steve Inskeep, “Steve Bannon Says MAGA Populism Will Win—as Trump Is Surrounded by Billionaires”; Rana Foroohar, “MAGA vs. the Billionaires,” Financial Times, January 5, 2005; Nia-Malika Henderson, “Trump Inauguration: Old MAGA vs. New MAGA’s Cage Match Begins,” Bloomberg, January 20, 2025; Thomas D. Williams, “Steve Bannon: I Will Do Anything’ to Keep Elon Musk Out of the White House,” Breitbart, January 11, 2025.
    64. Kevin Porteus, “Putting Americans First,” The American Mind, January 8, 2025.
    65. Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (New York: Center Street, 2023); Steve Rattner, “What Big-Business Leaders, Including Democrats, Say Privately About Trump,” New York Times, March 3, 2025.
    66. Peter Thiel interviewed by Peter Robinson, “Peter Thiel, Leader of the Rebel Alliance,” Uncommon Knowledge Podcast, Hoover Institution, November 9, 2022.
    67. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009.
    68. Max Chafkin interviewed by Belinda Luscombe, “Who’s Afraid of Peter Thiel?: A New Biography Suggests We All Should Be,” Time, September 21, 2021; Deborah Veneziale, “Trump’s Nationalist Conservative White Christian Agenda,” MR Online, February 28, 2025; Jessica Matthews, “How Peter Thiel’s Network of Right-Wing Techies Is Infiltrating Donald Trump’s White House,” Fortune, January 17, 2025; Brannen and Hartig, “Disrupting the White House.”
    69. Rob Larson, Mastering the Universe (Chicago: Haymarket, 2024), xi.
    70. Ed Kilgore, “”Trump is Dividing Evangelicals Now, Too,” New York Magazine, February 13, 2025; Sam R. Schmitt, “‘Give Cheerfully, Give Abundantly’: White American Prosperity Evangelism, Financial Obedience, and Religious Corruption in the Trump Era,” Activist History Review, May 11, 2018; James Bohland, “The Truth About MAGA: Plutocrats in Populist Clothing,” Fair Observer, October 29, 2024; Jessica Washington, “How Trump Twisted DEI to Only Benefit White Christians,” The Intercept, February 22, 2023.
    71. Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel, 33–35; Hamilton, “It’s Time to Break the Chains of Slaveholder Religion.”
    72. Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, “In the Age of Trump, a Moment of Decision for Evangelicals,” Durham Herald Sun, April 26, 2018.
    73. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “Fear Is the Slaveholder Religion’s Tool of Control,” Sojourners, April 22, 2019.
    74. Sharon Parrott, “Well, That Was Quick: Trump’s Total Betrayal of Working People Is Now Complete,” Common Dreams, February 26, 2025.
    75. Karl Marx, Texts on Methods (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 195.

    2025, Volume 77, Number 01 (May 2025)

  • The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime

    The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime

    The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime,” Monthly Review 76, no. 11 (April 2025), pp. 1-22.

    Trump in the White House

    U.S. capitalism over the past century has had without question the most powerful, most class-conscious ruling class in the history of the world, straddling both the economy and the state, and projecting its hegemony both domestically and globally. Central to its rule is an ideological apparatus that insists that the immense economic power of the capitalist class does not translate into political governance, and that no matter how polarized U.S. society becomes in economic terms, its claims to democracy remain intact. According to the received ideology, the ultra-rich interests that rule the market do not rule the state—a separation crucial to the idea of liberal democracy. This reigning ideology, however, is now breaking down in the face of the structural crisis of U.S. and world capitalism, and the decline of the liberal-democratic state itself, leading to deep splits in the ruling class, and a new right-wing, openly capitalist domination of the state.

    In his farewell speech to the nation, days before Donald Trump triumphantly returned to the White House, President Joe Biden indicated that an “oligarchy” based in the high-tech sector and relying on “dark money” in politics was threatening U.S. democracy. Senator Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, warned of the effects of the concentration of wealth and power in a new “ruling class” hegemony and the abandonment of any traces of support for the working class in either of the major parties.1

    Trump’s ascendancy to the White House for the second time naturally does not mean that the capitalist oligarchy has suddenly become a commanding influence in U.S. politics, since this is in fact a long-standing reality. Nevertheless, the entire political milieu in recent years, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis, has been moving to the right, while the oligarchy is exercising more direct influence over the state. A sector of the U.S. capitalist class is now openly in control of the ideological-state apparatus in a neofascist administration in which the former neoliberal establishment is a junior partner. The object of this shift is a regressive restructuring of the United States in a permanent war posture, resulting from the decline of U.S. hegemony and the instability of U.S. capitalism, plus the need of a more concentrated capitalist class to secure more centralized control of the state.

    In the Cold War years following the Second World War, the guardians of the liberal-democratic order within the academy and media sought to downplay the overriding role in the U.S. economy of the owners of industry and finance, who were supposedly displaced by the “managerial revolution” or limited by “countervailing power.” In this view, owners and managers, capital and labor, each constrained the other. Later, in a slightly more refined version of this general outlook, the concept of a hegemonic capitalist class under monopoly capitalism was dissolved into the more amorphous category of the “corporate rich.”2

    U.S. democracy, it was claimed, was the product of the interaction of pluralist groupings, or in some cases mediated by a power elite. There was no functional ruling class hegemonic in both the economic and political realms. Even if it could be argued that there was a dominant capitalist class in the economy, it did not rule the state, which was independent. This was conveyed in various ways by all of the archetypal works of the pluralist tradition, from James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), to Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), to Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961), to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State (1967), stretching from the conservative to the liberal ends of the spectrum.3 All of these treatises were designed to suggest that either pluralism or a managerial/technocratic elite prevailed in U.S. politics, not a capitalist class governing both the economic and political systems. In the pluralist view of actually existing democracy, first introduced by Schumpeter, politicians were simply political entrepreneurs competing for votes, much like economic entrepreneurs in the so-called free market, producing a system of “competitive leadership.”4

    In the promotion of the fiction that the United States, despite the vast power of the capitalist class, remained an authentic democracy, the received ideology was refined and bolstered by analyses from the left that sought to bring the power dimension back into the theory of the state, superseding the then dominant pluralist views of figures like Dahl, while at the same time rejecting the notion of a ruling class. The single most important work representing this shift was C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956), which argued that the “ruling class” conception, associated in particular with Marxism, should be replaced by the notion of a tripartite “power elite” in which the U.S. power structure was seen as dominated by elites coming from the corporate rich, the military top brass, and elected politicians. Mills famously referred to the notion of the ruling class as a “short-cut theory” that simply assumed that economic domination meant political domination. Challenging Karl Marx’s concept of the ruling class directly, Mills stated, “The American government is not, in any simple way nor as a structural fact, a committee of ‘the ruling class.’ It is a network of ‘committees,’ and other men from other hierarchies besides the corporate rich sit in these committees.”5

    Mills’s view on the ruling class and the power elite was challenged by radical theorists, particularly by Paul M. Sweezy in Monthly Review and initially by the work of G. William Domhoff in the first edition of his Who Rules America? (1967). But it eventually gained considerable influence on the broad left.6 As Domhoff was to argue in 1968, in C. Wright Mills and “The Power Elite, the concept of the power elite was commonly viewed as “the bridge between the Marxist and pluralist positions…. It is a necessary concept because not all national leaders are members of the upper class. In this sense, it is a modification and extension of the concept of a ‘ruling class.’”7

    The question of the ruling class and the state was at the center of the debate between Marxist theorists Ralph Miliband, author of The State in Capitalist Society (1969), and Nicos Poulantzas, author of Political Power and Social Classes (1968), representing the so-called “instrumentalist” and “structuralist” approaches to the state in capitalist society. The debate revolved around the “relative autonomy” of the state from the capitalist ruling class, an issue crucial to the prospects for a social democratic movement’s takeover of the state.8

    The debate took an extreme form in the United States with the appearance of Fred Block’s influential essay “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule” in Socialist Revolution in 1977, in which Block went so far as to argue that the capitalist class lacked the class consciousness necessary to translate its economic power into the rule of the state.9 Such a view, he argued, was necessary to make social democratic politics viable. Following Biden’s defeat of Trump in the 2020 election, Block’s original article was reprinted in Jacobin with a new epilogue by Block arguing that, given that the ruling class did not rule, Biden had the freedom to institute a working-class friendly politics along New Deal lines, which would prevent the reelection of a right-wing figure—one “with far greater skill and ruthlessness” than Trump—in 2024.10

    Given the contradictions of the Biden administration and the second coming of Trump, with thirteen billionaires now in his cabinet, the whole long debate on the ruling class and the state needs to be reexamined.11

    The Ruling Class and the State

    In the history of political theory from antiquity to the present, the state has classically been understood in relation to class. In ancient society and under feudalism, as distinguished from modern capitalist society, no clear distinction existed between civil society (or the economy) and the state. As Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State in 1843, “the abstraction of the state as such was not born until the modern world because the abstraction of private life was not created until modern times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product,” realized fully only under the rule of the bourgeoisie.12 This was later restated by Karl Polanyi in terms of the embedded nature of the economy in the ancient polis, and its disembedded character under capitalism, manifested in the separation of the public sphere of the state and the private sphere of the market.13 In Greek antiquity, in which social conditions had not yet generated such abstractions, there was no question that the ruling class governed the polis and created its laws. Aristotle in his Politics, as Ernest Barker wrote in The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, took the position that class rule ultimately explained the polis: “Tell me the class which is predominant, one might say, and I will tell you the constitution.”14

    Under the regime of capital, in contrast, the state is conceived as separate from civil society/the economy. In this respect, the question arises at all times as to whether the class that rules the economy—namely, the capitalist class—also rules the state.

    Marx’s own views on this were complex, never deviating from the notion that the state in capitalist society was ruled by the capitalist class, while recognizing varying historical conditions that modified this. On the one hand, he argued (together with Frederick Engels) in The Communist Manifesto that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”15 This suggested that the state, or its executive branch, had a relative autonomy that went beyond individual capitalist interests but was nonetheless responsible for managing the general interests of the class. This might, as Marx indicated elsewhere, result in major reforms, such as the passage of ten-hour workday legislation in his time, which, although appearing to be a concession to the working class and opposed to capitalist interests, was necessary in order to ensure the future of capital accumulation itself by regulating the work force and ensuring the continuing reproduction of labor power.16 On the other hand, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx pointed to quite different situations where the capitalist class did not rule the state directly, giving way to semi-autonomous rule, as long as this did not interfere with its economic ends and its command of the state in the last instance.17 He also recognized that the state might be dominated by one fraction of capital over another. In all of these respects, Marx emphasized the relative autonomy of the state from capitalist interests, which has been crucial to all Marxist theories of the state in capitalist society.

    It has long been understood that the capitalist class has numerous means of functioning as a ruling class via the state, even in the case of a liberal democratic order. On the one hand, this takes the form of fairly direct investiture in the political apparatus through various mechanisms, such as economic and political control of political party machines and the direct occupation by capitalists and their representatives of key posts in the political command structure. Capitalist interests in the United States today have the power to decisively affect elections. Moreover, capitalist power over the state extends far beyond elections. Control of the central bank, and thus of the money supply, interest rates, and the regulation of the financial system, is given over essentially to the banks themselves. On the other hand, the capitalist class controls the state indirectly through its vast external class-economic power, including direct financial pressures, lobbying, the financing of pressure groups and think tanks, the revolving door between the main actors in government and business, and control of the cultural and communications apparatus. No political regime in a capitalist system can survive unless it serves the interests of profit and capital accumulation, an ever-present reality facing all political actors.

    The complexity and ambiguity of the Marxist approach to the ruling class and the state was conveyed by Karl Kautsky in 1902, when he declared that “the capitalist class rules but it does not govern”; shortly after which he added that “it contents itself with ruling the government.”18As noted, it was precisely this issue of the relative autonomy of the state from the capitalist class that was to govern the famous debate between what came to be known as the instrumentalist versus structuralist theories of the state, represented respectively by Miliband in Britain and Poulantzas in France. Miliband’s views were very much determined by the demise of the British Labour Party as a genuine socialist party in the late 1950s, as depicted in his Parliamentary Socialism.19 This forced him to face up to the enormous power of the capitalist class as a ruling class. This was later taken up in his The State in Capitalist Society in 1969, in which he wrote that “whether it is…appropriate to speak of a ‘ruling class’ at all is one of the main themes of this study.” Indeed, “the most important of all questions raised by the existence of this dominant class is whether it also constitutes a ‘ruling class.’” The capitalist class, he sought to demonstrate, while “not, properly speaking, a ‘governing class’” in quite the same sense that the aristocracy had been, did indeed rule fairly directly (as well as indirectly) over capitalist society. It translated its economic power in various ways into political power to such an extent that for the working class to challenge the ruling class effectively, they would have to have to oppose the structure of the capitalist state itself.20

    It was here that Poulantzas, who had published his Political Power and Social Classes in 1968, came into conflict with Miliband. Poulantzas laid even greater stress on the relative autonomy of the state, seeing Miliband’s approach to the state as assuming too direct a rule by the capitalist class, even if it conformed closely to most works by Marx on the subject. Poulantzas emphasized that the capitalist rule of the state was more indirect and structural than direct and instrumental, allowing room for a greater variance of governments in class terms, including not only specific capitalist class fractions but also representatives of the working class itself. “The direct participation of members of the capitalist class in the State apparatus and in the government, even where it exists,” he wrote, “is not the important side of the matter. The relation between the bourgeois class and the State is an objective relation…. The direct participation of members of the ruling class in the State apparatus is not the cause but the effect…of this objective coincidence.”21 While such a statement may have seemed reasonable enough in the qualified terms in which it was expressed, it tended to remove the role of the ruling class as a class-conscious subject. Writing during the high point of Eurocommunism on the Continent, Poulantzas’s structuralism, with its emphasis on Bonapartism as pointing to a high degree of relative autonomy of the state, seemed to open the way to a conception of the state as an entity in which the capitalist class did not govern, even if the state ultimately was subject to objective forces stemming from capitalism.

    Such a view, Miliband countered, pointed either to a “super-deterministic” or economistic view of the state characteristic of “ultra-left deviationism” or to a “right-deviation” in the form of social democracy, which typically denied the existence of a ruling class outright.22 In either case, the reality of the capitalist ruling class and the various processes through which it exercised its rule, which the empirical research of Miliband and others had amply demonstrated, seemed to be short-circuited, no longer part of the development of a class struggle strategy from below. A decade later, in his 1978 work State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas shifted his emphasis to arguing for parliamentary socialism and social democracy (or “democratic socialism”), insisting on the need to retain much of the existing state apparatus in any transition to socialism. This directly contradicted the emphases of Marx in The Civil War in France and V. I. Lenin in The State and Revolution on the need to replace the capitalist ruling-class state with a new political command structure emanating from below.23

    Influenced by Sweezy’s articles on “The American Ruling Class” and “Power Elite or Ruling Class?” in Monthly Review and by Mills’s The Power Elite, Domhoff in the first edition of his book, Who Rules America? in 1967, promoted an explicit class-based analysis but nonetheless indicated that he preferred the more neutral “governing class” to “ruling class” on the basis that “the notion ruling class” suggested a “Marxist view of history.”24 However, by the time he wrote The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America in 1978, Domhoff, influenced by the radical atmosphere of the time, had shifted to arguing that “a ruling class is a privileged social class which is able to maintain its top position in the social structure.” The power elite was redefined as the “leadership arm” of the ruling class.25 Yet, this explicit integration of the ruling class into Domhoff’s analysis was short-lived. In the subsequent editions of Who Rules America?, up through the eighth edition in 2022, he was to bend to liberal practicality and to drop the concept of the ruling class altogether. Instead, he followed Mills in lumping owners (“the upper social class”) and managers together in the category of the “corporate rich.”26 The power elite was seen as CEOs, boards of directors, and boards of trustees, overlapping in a Venn diagram with the upper social class (which also consisted of socialites and jet setters), the corporate community, and the policy-planning network. This constituted a perspective known as power-structure research. The notions of the capitalist class and the ruling class were no longer to be found.

    A more significant empirical and theoretical work than that offered by Domhoff, and in many ways more pertinent today, was written in 1962–1963 by the Soviet economist Stanislav Menshikov and translated into English in 1969 under the title Millionaires and Managers. Menshikov was part of an educational exchange of scientists between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1962. He visited with “the chairman of the board, president and vice-presidents of dozens of corporations and of 13 out of the 25 commercial banks” that had assets of a billion dollars or more. He met with Henry Ford II, Henry S. Morgan, and David Rockefeller, among others.27 Menshikov’s detailed empirical treatment of the financial control of corporations in the United States and of the ruling group or class provided a solid assessment of the continuing dominance of financial capitalists within the very rich. Through their hegemony over various financial groups, the financial oligarchy was differentiated from the mere high-level managers (chief executive officers) of the corporate financial bureaucracies. Although there was what could be called a “millionaire-manager bloc” in the sense of Mills’s “corporate rich,” and a division of labor within “the ruling class itself,” the “financial oligarchy, that is, the group of people whose economic power is based on the disposal of colossal masses of fictitious capital…[and] which is the foundation of all the main financial groups,” and not the corporate executives as such, ruled the roost. Moreover, the relative power of the financial oligarchy continued to grow, rather than diminish.28 As in Sweezy’s analysis of “Interest Groups in the American Economy,” written for the National Resource Committee’s Structure of the American Economy during the New Deal, Menshikov’s detailed analysis of corporate groups in the U.S. economy captured the continuing family-dynastic basis of much of U.S. wealth.29

    The U.S. financial oligarchy constituted a ruling class, but one that generally did not rule directly or free from interference. The “economic domination of the financial oligarchy,” Menshikov wrote,

    is not tantamount to its political domination. But the latter without the former cannot be sufficiently strong, while the former without the latter shows that the coalescence of the monopolies and the state machine has not gone far enough. But even in the United States where both these prerequisites are available, where the machine of government has served the monopolies for decades and domination of the latter in the economy is beyond doubt, the political power of the financial oligarchy is constantly threatened by restrictions on the part of other classes of society, and at times is actually restricted. But the general tendency is for the economic power of the financial oligarchy to be gradually transformed into political power.30

    The financial oligarchy, Menshikov argued, had as its junior allies in its political rule of the state: corporate managers; the top brass of the military; professional politicians, who had internalized the inner necessities of the capitalist system; and the white elite who dominated the system of racial segregation in the South.31 But the financial oligarchy itself was the increasingly dominant force. “The striving of the financial oligarchy for direct administration of the state is one of the most characteristic tendencies of American imperialism in recent decades,” resulting from its growing economic power and the needs that this generated. Nevertheless, this was not a smooth process. The finance capitalists in the United States do not act “unitedly” and are themselves divided into competing factions, while hindered in their attempts to control the state by the very complexities of the U.S. political system, in which diverse actors play a part.32 “It would seem,” Menshikov wrote,

    that now the political power of the financial oligarchy should be fully guaranteed, but this is not the case. The machine of a contemporary capitalist state is big and cumbersome. Capture of positions in one part does not ensure control over the entire mechanism. The financial oligarchy owns the propaganda machine, is able to bribe politicians and government officials in the centre and the periphery [of the country], but it cannot bribe the people who, notwithstanding all the restrictions of bourgeois “democracy,” elect the legislature. The people do not have much of a choice, but without formally abolishing democratic procedures, the financial oligarchy cannot fully guarantee itself against undesirable “accidents.”33

    However, Menshikov’s extraordinary work, Millionaires and Managers, published in the Soviet Union, had no influence on the discussion of the ruling class in the United States. The general tendency, reflected in Domhoff’s shifts (and in Europe by Poulantzas’s shifts), downplayed the whole idea of a ruling class and even a capitalist class, replaced by the concepts of the corporate rich and the power elite, producing what was essentially a form of elite theory.

    The rejection of the concept of the ruling class (or even of a governing class) in Domhoff’s later work coincided with the publication of Block’s “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” which played a significant role in radical thought in the United States. Writing at a time when Jimmy Carter’s election as president seemed to liberals and social democrats to present the picture of a leadership that was distinctly more moral and progressive in character, Block argued that there was no such thing as a ruling class with decisive power over the political sphere in the United States and in capitalism in general. He attributed this to the fact that not only the capitalist class, but also separate “fractions” of the capitalist class (here opposing Poulantzas) lacked class consciousness and therefore were incapable of acting in their own interests in the political sphere, much less governing the body politic. Instead, he adopted a “structuralist” approach based in Max Weber’s notion of rationalization, in which the state rationalized the roles of three competing actors: (1) capitalists, (2) state managers, and (3) the working class. The relative autonomy of the state in capitalist society was a function of its role as a neutral arbiter in which various forces impinged but none ruled.34

    Attacking those who argued that the capitalist class had a dominant role within the state, Block wrote, “the way to formulate a critique of instrumentalism that does not collapse, is to reject the idea of a class-conscious ruling class,” since a class-conscious capitalist class would strive to rule. While he noted that Marx utilized the notion of a class-conscious ruling class, this was discounted as merely a “political shorthand” for structural determinations.

    Block made it clear that when radicals like himself choose to criticize the notion of a ruling class, they “usually do so in order to justify reformist socialist politics.” In this spirit, he insisted that the capitalist class did not intentionally, in a class-conscious manner, rule the state either through internal or external means. Rather, the structural limitation of “business confidence,” as exemplified by the ups and downs of the stock market, ensured that the political system remained in equilibrium with the economy, requiring that political actors adopt rational means to ensure economic stability. The rationalization of capitalism by the state, in Block’s “structuralist” view thus opened the way for a social democratic politics of the state.35

    What is clear is that by the late 1970s, Western Marxist thinkers had abandoned the notion of a ruling class almost entirely, conceiving of the state as not only relatively autonomous, but in fact largely autonomous from the class power of capital. This was part of a general “retreat from class.”36 In Britain, Geoff Hodgson wrote in his The Democratic Economy: A New Look at Planning, Markets and Power in 1984, that “the very idea of a class ‘ruling’ should be challenged. At the very most it is a weak and misleading metaphor. It is possible to talk of a class being dominant in a society, but only by virtue of the dominance of a particular type of economic structure. To say that a class ‘rules’ is to say much more. It is to imply it is somehow implanted into the apparatus of government.” It was crucial, he stated, to abandon the Marxist notion that associated “different modes of production with different ‘ruling classes.’”37 Like the later Poulantzas and Block, Hodgson adopted a social democratic position that saw no ultimate contradiction between parliamentary democracy as it had arisen within capitalism and the transition to socialism.

    Neoliberalism and the U.S. Ruling Class

    If there was a broad abandonment of the notion of the ruling class in Western Marxism in the late 1960s and ’70s, not all thinkers fell into line. Sweezy continued to argue in Monthly Reviewthat the United States was dominated by a ruling capitalist class. Thus, Paul A. Baran and Sweezy explained in Monopoly Capital in 1966 that “a tiny oligarchy resting on vast economic power” is “in full control of society’s political and cultural apparatus” making the notion of the United States as an authentic democracy misleading at best.38

    Except in times of crisis, the normal political system of capitalism, whether competitive or monopolistic, is bourgeois democracy. Votes are the nominal source of political power, and money is the real source: the system, in other words, is democratic in form and plutocratic in content. This is by now so well recognized that it hardly seems necessary to argue the case. Suffice it to say that all the political activities and functions which may be said to constitute the essential characteristics of the system—indoctrinating and propagandizing the voting public, organizing and maintaining political parties, running electoral campaigns—can be carried out only by means of money, lots of money. And since in monopoly capitalism the big corporations are the source of big money, they are also the main sources of political power.39

    For Baran and Sweezy, writing in what has been called “the golden age of capitalism,” the power of the ruling-class domination of the state was demonstrated by the limits placed on the expansion of civilian government spending (generally opposed by capital as interfering with private accumulation), allowing for gargantuan military spending and vast subsidies to big business.40 Far from exhibiting features of Weberian rationality, the “irrational system” of monopoly capitalism, they argued, was beset by problems of overaccumulation manifested in the inability to absorb surplus capital, which could no longer find profitable investment outlets, pointing to economic stagnation as the “normal state” of monopoly capitalism.41

    Within a few years of the publication of Monopoly Capital, in the early to mid-1970s, the U.S. economy entered into a deep stagnation from which it has been unable fully to recover in the half-century that has followed, with economic growth rates sliding decade after decade. This constituted a structural crisis of capital as a whole—a contradiction present in all of the core capitalist countries. This long-run crisis of capital accumulation resulted in the top-down neoliberal restructuring of the economy and state at every level, instituting regressive policies designed to stabilize capitalist rule, which eventually led to deindustrialization and deunionization in the capitalist core and the globalization and financialization of the world economy.42

    In August 1971, Lewis F. Powell, only months before accepting President Richard Nixon’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote his notorious memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce aimed at organizing the United States in a neoliberal crusade against workers and the left, attributing to them the weakening of the U.S. “free enterprise” system.43 Hence, at the very same time as the left was dropping the notion of a class-conscious U.S. ruling class, the U.S. oligarchy was reasserting its power over the state, leading to a political-economic restructuring under neoliberalism that encompassed both the Republican and Democratic parties. This was marked in the 1980s by the institution of supply-side economics or Reaganomics, colloquially known as “Robin Hood in reverse.”44

    Writing in The Affluent Society in 1958, Galbraith had stated: “The American well-to-do have long been curiously sensitive to fear of expropriation—a fear which may be related to the tendency for even the mildest reformist measures to be viewed, in the conservative conventional wisdom, as the portents of revolution. The depression and especially the New Deal gave the American rich a serious fright.”45 The neoliberal era and the reemergence of economic stagnation, accompanied by the resurrection of such fears at the top, led to a stronger assertion of ruling-class power over the state at every level aimed at reversing working-class advances made during the New Deal and the Great Society, which were wrongly blamed for the structural crisis of capital.

    With deepening stagnation of investment and of the economy as a whole and with military spending no longer sufficient to lift the system out of its doldrums as in the so-called “golden age,” which had been punctuated by two major regional wars in Asia, capital needed to find additional outlets for its enormous surplus. Under the new phase of monopoly-finance capital, this surplus flowed into the financial sector, or FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate), and into asset accumulation made possible by government deregulation of finance, the lowering of interest rates (the famous “Greenspan put”), and the reduction of taxes on the rich and corporations. This led to the creation of a new financial superstructure on top of the productive economy, with finance growing rapidly alongside the stagnation of production. This was made possible in part by the expropriation of income flows throughout the economy via increases in household debt, insurance costs, and health care costs, along with reductions in pensions—all at the expense of the underlying population.46

    Meanwhile, there was a massive corporate shift of production to the Global South in search of lower unit labor costs in a process known as the global labor arbitrage. This was made possible by new communications and transportation technology and by globalization’s opening up whole new sectors of the world economy. The result was the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy.47 All of this coincided in the 1990s with the vast growth of high-tech capital accompanying the digitalization of the economy and the generation of new high-tech monopolies. The cumulative effect of these developments was a vast increase in the concentration and centralization of capital, finance, and wealth. Even as the economy was more and more characterized by slow growth, the fortunes of the rich expanded by leaps and bounds: the rich got richer and the poor got poorer while the U.S. economy stagnated its way into the twenty-first century beset with contradictions. The depth of the structural crisis of capital was disguised temporarily by globalization, financialization, and the brief emergence of a unipolar world, all of which was punctured by the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009.48

    As the monopoly-capitalist economy in the capitalist core became increasingly dependent on financial expansion, inflating financial claims to wealth in the context of stagnant production, the system became not only more unequal, but also more fragile. Financial markets are inherently unstable, dependent as they are on the vicissitudes of the credit cycle. Moreover, as the financial sector came to dwarf production, which continued to stagnate, the economy was subject to greater and greater levels of risk. This was compensated for by increased bloodletting of the population as a whole and massive state financial infusions to capital frequently organized by the central banks.49

    There is no visible way out of this cycle within the monopoly-capitalist system. The more the financial superstructure grows relative to the underlying production system (or the real economy) and the longer periods of upward swings in the business-financial cycle, the more devastating the crises that follow are likely to be. In the twenty-first century, the United States has experienced three periods of financial meltdown/recession, with the collapse of the technology boom in 2000, the Great Financial Crisis/Great Recession arising from the bursting of the household mortgage bubble in 2007–2009, and the deep recession sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

    The Neofascist Turn

    The Great Financial Crisis had lasting effects on the U.S. financial oligarchy and the entire body politic, leading to significant transformations in the matrices of power in the society. The speed with which the financial system appeared to be headed towards a “nuclear meltdown,” following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, had the capitalist oligarchy and much of the society in a state of shock, with the crisis quickly spreading around the world. The Lehman Brothers collapse, which was the most dramatic event in a financial crisis that had already been developing for a year, was brought on by the refusal of the government as the lender of last resort to bail out what was then the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank. This was due to the George W. Bush administration’s concern over what conservatives called the “moral hazard” that could result if large corporations took on highly risky investments with the expectation of being rescued by government bailouts. However, with the whole financial system teetering following the Lehman Brothers collapse, a massive and unprecedented government rescue attempt to safeguard capital assets was organized primarily by the Federal Reserve Board. This included the institution of “quantitative easing,” or what was effectively the printing of money to stabilize financial capital, resulting in trillions of dollars being injected into the corporate sector.

    Within establishment economics, the open acknowledgment of decades of secular stagnation, which had long been analyzed on the left by Marxist economists (and Monthly Review editors) Harry Magdoff and Sweezy, finally surfaced within the mainstream, along with the recognition of Hyman Minsky’s financial instability theory of crisis. The weak prospects for the U.S. economy, pointing to continuing stagnation and financialization, were recognized by orthodox as well as radical economic analysts.50

    Most frightening of all to the U.S. capitalist class during the Great Financial Crisis was the fact that, while the U.S. economy and the economies of Europe and Japan had descended into a deep recession, the Chinese economy had barely stalled and then powered itself up again to near double-digit growth. The writing on the wall was clear from that point on: U.S. economic hegemony in the world economy was rapidly disappearing in line with China’s seemingly unstoppable advance, threatening the hegemony of the dollar and the imperial power of U.S. monopoly-finance capital.51

    The Great Recession, although leading to the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president, saw the sudden eruption of a political movement on the radical right based primarily in the lower-middle class that opposed bailouts of home mortgages, seeing this as benefiting the upper-middle class above and the working class below. Conservative talk radio, catering to its white lower-middle class audience, had from the start opposed all government bailouts in the crisis.52 However, what came to be known as the radical-right Tea Party movement was sparked on February 19, 2009, when Rick Santelli, a commentator on the business network CNBC, went on a tirade on how the Obama administration’s plan for home mortgage bailouts was a socialist plan (which he compared to the Cuban government) to force people to pay for their neighbors’ bad home purchases and upscale houses, violating free market principles. In his rant, Santelli mentioned the Boston Tea Party, and within days Tea Party groups were being organized in different parts of the country.53

    The Tea Party initially represented a libertarian tendency that was bankrolled by big capital, particularly the big oil interests represented by brothers David and Charles Koch—each then in the top ten billionaires in United States—along with what is known as the Koch network of wealthy individuals largely associated with private equity. The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission removed most restrictions on the funding of political candidates by the wealthy and corporations, allowing dark money to dominate U.S. politics as never before. Eighty-seven Republican Tea Party members were swept into the U.S. House of Representatives, mostly from gerrymandered districts where Democrats were virtually absent. Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favorite, was elected to the U.S. Senate from Florida. It soon became apparent that the role of the Tea Party was not to initiate new programs but to prevent the federal government from functioning at all. Its biggest achievement was the Budget Control Act of 2011, which introduced caps and sequestrations designed to prevent increases in federal spending benefiting the population as a whole (as opposed to subsides to capital and military spending in support of empire), and which produced the largely symbolic government shutdown of 2013. The Tea Party also introduced the racist conspiracy theory (known as birtherism) that Obama was a foreign-born Muslim.54

    The Tea Party, which was less of a grassroots movement than a conservative media-based manipulation, nonetheless demonstrated that a historical moment had arisen in which it was possible for the sections of monopoly-finance capital to mobilize the overwhelmingly white lower-middle class, which had suffered under neoliberalism and was the most nationalist, racist, sexist, and revanchist section of the U.S. population based on its own innate ideology. This stratum was what Mills had referred to as “the rearguarders” of the system.55 Consisting of lower-level managers, small business owners, rural small landowners, white evangelical Christians, and the like, the lower-middle class/stratum in capitalist society occupies a contradictory class location.56 With incomes generally well above the median level for society, the lower-middle class is above the working-class majority and generally below the upper-middle class or professional-managerial stratum, with lower levels of education and often identifying with representatives of big capital. It is characterized by the “fear of falling” into the working class.57 Historically, fascist regimes arise when the capitalist class feels particularly threatened and when liberal democracy is unable to address the fundamental political-economic and imperial contradictions of the society. These movements rely on the ruling-class mobilization of the lower-middle class (or the petty bourgeoisie) along with some of the more privileged sectors of the working class.58

    By 2013, the Tea Party was waning but continued to retain considerable power in Washington in the form of the House Freedom Caucus established in 2015.59 But by 2016, it was to metamorphose into Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement as a full-fledged neofascist political formation based on a close alliance between sections of the U.S. ruling class and a mobilized lower-middle class, resulting in Trump’s victories in the 2016 and 2024 elections. Trump chose Tea Party member and Koch-supported radical-right politician Mike Pence from Indiana as his running mate in 2016.60 In 2025, Trump was to make Tea Party hero Rubio Secretary of State. Speaking of the Tea Party, Trump declared: “Those people are still there. They haven’t changed their views. The Tea Party still exists—except now it’s called Make America Great Again.”61

    Trump’s MAGA political bloc no longer preached fiscal conservatism, which for the right had been a mere means of undermining liberal democracy. Nevertheless, the MAGA movement retained its revanchist, racist, and misogynist ideology geared to the lower-middle class, along with an extreme nationalist and militarist foreign policy similar to that of the Democrats. The singular enemy defining Trump’s foreign policy was a rising China. MAGA neofascism saw the reemergence of the leader principle in which the leader’s actions are considered inviolable. This was coupled with increased ruling-class control, via its most reactionary factions, of the government. In classical fascism in Italy and Germany, privatization of governmental institutions (a notion developed under the Nazis) was associated with an increase in the coercive functions of the state and an intensification of militarism and imperialism.62 In line with this overall logic, neoliberalism formed the basis for the emergence of neofascism, and a kind of cooperation ensued, in the manner of “warring brothers,” leading in the end to an uneasy neofascist-neoliberal alliance dominating the state and the media, rooted in the highest echelons of the monopoly-capitalist class.63

    Today, direct rule by a powerful section of the ruling class in the United States can no longer be denied. The family-dynastic basis of wealth in the advanced capitalist countries, despite new entrants to the billionaire club, has been demonstrated in recent economic analyses, notably Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.64 Those who argued that the system was run by a managerial elite or by an amalgam of the corporate rich, in which those accumulating the great fortunes, their families, and networks remained in the background and the capitalist class did not and could not have a strong hold on the state, have all been shown to be wrong. The reality today is less one of class struggle than class war. As billionaire Warren Buffett stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”65

    The centralization of the global surplus in the U.S. monopoly-capitalist class has now created a financial oligarchy like no other, and the oligarchs need the state. This is above all true of the high-tech sector, which is deeply dependent on U.S. military spending and military-based technology both for its profits and for its own technological ascendance. Trump’s support has come mainly from billionaires who have gone private (not basing their wealth in public corporations listed on the stock exchange and subject to government regulation) and by private equity in general.66 Among the biggest disclosed bankrollers of his 2024 campaign were Tim Mellon (the grandson of Andrew Mellon, and heir to the Mellon banking fortune); Ike Perlmutter, former chair of Marvel Entertainment; billionaire Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and owner of Palantir, a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining company (U.S. Vice President JD Vance is a protégé of Thiel); Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, two of the leading figures in Silicon Valley finance; Miriam Adelson, wife of the deceased casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson; shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, an heir of the Uihlein brewing—Schlitz beer—fortune; and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, owner of Tesla, X, and SpaceX, who provided over a quarter of a billion dollars to the Trump campaign. The dominance of dark money, exceeding all previous elections, makes it impossible to trace the full list of billionaires supporting Trump. Nevertheless, it is clear that tech oligarchs were at the center of his support.67

    Here it is important to note that Trump’s backing in the capitalist class and among the tech-financial oligarchs was not principally from the original Big Six tech monopolies—Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and (more recently) the AI technology leader Nvidia. Instead, he was mainly the beneficiary of Silicon Valley high tech, private equity, and big oil. Although a billionaire, Trump is a mere agent of the political-economic transformation in ruling-class rule taking place behind the veil of a national-populist grassroots movement. As Scottish journalist and economist and former Scottish National Party Member of Parliament George Kerevan has written, Trump is a “demagogue but still only a cypher for real class forces.”68

    The Biden administration primarily represented the interests of neoliberal sections of the capitalist class, even if making some temporary concessions to the working class and poor. Prior to his election he had pledged to Wall Street that “nothing fundamentally would change” if he were to become president.69 It therefore was deeply ironic that Biden warned in his farewell address to the country in January 2025: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” This “oligarchy,” Biden went on to declare, was rooted not only in “the concentration of power and wealth” but in “the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex.” The foundations of this potential tech-industrial complex feeding the new oligarchy, he claimed, was the rise of “dark money” and uncontrolled AI. Recognizing that the U.S. Supreme Court had become a stronghold of oligarchic control, Biden proposed an eighteen-year term limit for U.S. Supreme Court justices. No sitting U.S. president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has so strongly raised the question of direct ruling-class control of the U.S. government—but in Biden’s case, this was at the moment of his departure from the White House.70

    Biden’s comments, though perhaps easy to discount on the basis that oligarchic control of the state is not new in the United States, were no doubt induced by a sense of a major shift taking place in the U.S. state with a neofascist takeover. Vice President Kamala Harris had openly described Trump as a “fascist” during her campaign for president.71 More was involved here than political maneuvering and the usual revolving door between the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S. political duopoly. In 2021, Forbes magazine estimated the net assets of the members of Biden’s cabinet at $118 million.72 In contrast, Trump’s top officials encompass thirteen billionaires, with a total net worth, according to Public Citizen, of as much as $460 billion, including Elon Musk with a wealth of $400 billion. Even without Musk, Trump’s billionaire cabinet has tens of billions of dollars in assets, compared to the $3.2 billion in assets of his previous administration.73

    In 2016, as Doug Henwood noted, major U.S. capitalists viewed Trump with some suspicion; in 2025 the Trump administration is a regime of billionaires. Trump’s radical right politics has led to the direct occupation of government posts by figures out of the Forbes 400 richest Americans with the aim of overhauling the entire U.S. political system. The world’s three wealthiest men stood on the crowded dais with Trump during his 2025 inauguration. Rather than representing a more effective leadership on the part of the ruling class, Henwood sees such developments as a sign of its internal “rot.”74

    In the addendum that Block wrote to his article “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule” when it was reprinted by Jacobin in 2020, he pictured Biden as a largely autonomous political agent in the U.S. system. Block contended that unless Biden instituted a social democratic politics aimed at benefiting the working class—something Biden had already promised Wall Street he would not do—then someone worse than Trump would emerge victorious in the 2024 election.75However, politicians are not free agents in a capitalist society. Nor are they responsible mainly to voters. As the adage goes, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” Prevented by their big donors from moving even slightly to the left in the election, the Democrats, fielding Biden’s vice president Harris as their presidential candidate, lost as millions of working-class voters who had voted for Biden in the previous election and had been abandoned by his administration abandoned the Democrats in turn. Rather than supporting Trump, former Democratic voters chose in the main to join the biggest political party in the United States: The Party of Nonvoters.76

    What has emerged is something indeed worse than mere repetition of Trump’s earlier term as president. Trump’s demagogic MAGA regime now has become a largely undisguised case of ruling-class political rule supported by the mobilization of a primarily lower-middle class revanchist movement, forming a right-wing neofascist state with a leader who has proven he can act with impunity and who has shown himself able to cross previous constitutional barriers: a true imperial presidency. Trump and Vance have strong ties to the Heritage Foundation and its reactionary Project 2025, which is part of the new MAGA agenda.77 The question now is how far this political transformation on the right can go, and whether it will be institutionalized in the present order, all of which depends on the ruling class/MAGA alliance, on the one hand, and the Gramscian struggle for hegemony from below, on the other.

    Western Marxism and the Western left in general has long abandoned the notion of a ruling class, believing that it was too “dogmatic” sounding or constituted a “short-cut” to the analysis of the power elite. Such views, while conforming to the kinds of intellectual fine points and needle threading characteristic of the mainstream academic world, inculcated a lack of realism that was debilitating in terms of understanding the necessities of struggle in an age of the structural crisis of capital.

    In a 2022 article entitled “The U.S. Has a Ruling Class and Americans Must Stand Up to It,” Sanders pointed out that,

    The most important economic and political issues facing this country are the extraordinary levels of income and wealth inequality, the rapidly growing concentration of ownership…and the evolution of this country into oligarchy.…

    We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society—160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn.…

    In terms of political power, the situation is the same. A small number of billionaires and CEOs, through their Super Pacs, dark money and campaign contributions, play a huge role in determining who gets elected and who gets defeated. There are now an increasing number of campaigns in which Super Pacs actually spend more money on campaigns than the candidates, who become the puppets to their big money puppeteers. In the 2022 Democratic primaries, billionaires spent tens of millions trying to defeat progressive candidates who were standing up for working families.78

    In response to the 2024 presidential election, Sanders argued that a Democratic Party apparatus that has spent billions in perpetrating “an all-out war against the entire Palestinian people” while abandoning the U.S. working class has seen the working class reject it in favor of the Party of Nonvoters. One hundred and fifty billionaire families, he reported, spent nearly $2 billion to influence the 2024 U.S. elections. This has placed an open ruling-class oligarchy in power in the federal government that no longer even pretends to represent the interests of all. In fighting these tendencies, Sanders stated, “Despair is not an option. We are fighting not only for ourselves. We are fighting for our kids and future generations, and for the well-being of the planet.”79

    But how to fight? Faced with the reality of a labor aristocracy among the more privileged workers in the core monopoly-capitalist states who aligned themselves with imperialism, Lenin’s solution was to go deeper into the working class while also going wider, basing the struggle on those in every country of the world who have nothing to lose but their chains and who are opposed to the present imperialist monopoly.80 Ultimately, the constituency of Trump’s neofascist ruling-class state is 0.0001% thin, constituting that portion of the U.S. body politic that his billionaire cabinet can reasonably be said to represent.81

    Notes

    1. “Full Transcript of President Biden’s Farewell Address, New York Times, January 15, 2025; Bernie Sanders, “The US Has a Ruling Class—And Americans Must Stand Up to It,” Guardian, September 2, 2022.
    2. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (London: Putnam and Co., 1941); John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1952); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 147–70.
    3. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper Brothers, 1942), 269–88; Robert Dahl, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale, 1961); John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: New American Library, 1967, 1971).
    4. C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 77–92.
    5. Mills, The Power Elite, 170, 277.
    6. Paul M. Sweezy, Modern Capitalism and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 92–109; G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1st edition, 1967), 7–8, 141–42.
    7. G. William Domhoff, “The Power Elite and Its Critics,” in C. Wright Mills and The Power Elite, eds. G. William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 276.
    8. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1975); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1969).
    9. Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,” Socialist Revolution, no. 33 (May–June 1977): 6–28. In 1978, the year after the publication of Block’s article, the title of Socialist Revolution was changed to Socialist Review, reflecting the journal’s explicit shift to a social-democratic political view.
    10. Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” 2020 reprint with epilogue, Jacobin, April 24, 2020.
    11. Peter Charalambous, Laura Romeo, and Soo Rin Kim, “Trump Has Tapped an Unprecedented 13 Billionaires for His Administration. Here’s Who They Are,” ABC News, December 17, 2024.
    12. Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1974), 90.
    13. Karl Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, eds. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957), 64–96.
    14. Ernest Barker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (New York: Russell and Russell, 1959), 317; John Hoffman, “The Problem of the Ruling Class in Classical Marxist Theory,” Science and Society 50, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 342–63.
    15. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 5.
    16. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 333–38, 393–98.
    17. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963).
    18. Karl Kautsky quoted in Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 51.
    19. Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961).
    20. Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 16, 29, 45, 51–52, 55.
    21. Nicos Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” in Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory, ed. Robin Blackburn (New York: Vintage, 1973), 245.
    22. Ralph Miliband, “Reply to Nicos Poulantzas,” in Ideology in Social Science, ed. Blackburn, 259–60.
    23. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), vol. 25, 345–539. On Poulantzas’s shift to social democracy, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1998), 43–46.
    24. Domhoff, Who Rules America? (1967 edition), 1–2, 3; Paul M. Sweezy, The Present as History(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953), 120–38.
    25. G. William Domhoff, The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling-Class Domination in America(New York: Vintage, 1978), 14.
    26. G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (London: Routledge, 8th edition, 2022), 85–87. In the 1967 edition of his book, Domhoff had critically remarked on Mills’s lumping of the very rich (the owners) and the managers together in the category of the corporate rich, thereby erasing crucial questions. Domhoff, Who Rules America? (1967 edition), 141. On the concept of liberal practicality see C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination” (New York: Oxford, 1959), 85–86; John Bellamy Foster, “Liberal Practicality and the U.S. Left,” in Socialist Register 1990: The Retreat of the Intellectuals, eds. Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch, and John Saville (London: Merlin Press, 1990), 265–89.
    27. Stanislav Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 5–6.
    28. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, 7, 321.
    29. Sweezy, The Present as History, 158–88.
    30. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, 322.
    31. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, 324–25.
    32. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, 325, 327.
    33. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, 323–24.
    34. Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” 6–8, 10, 15, 23; Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1375–80.
    35. Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” 9–10, 28.
    36. Wood, The Retreat from Class.
    37. Geoff Hodgson, The Democratic Economy: A New Look at Planning, Markets and Power(London: Penguin, 1984), 196.
    38. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 339.
    39. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 155.
    40. On the golden age of capitalism, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1996), 257–86; Michael Perelman, Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 175–98.
    41. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 108, 336.
    42. On economic stagnation, financialization, and restructuring, see Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986); Joyce Kolko, Restructuring World Economy (New York: Pantheon, 1988); John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
    43. Lewis F. Powell, “Confidential Memorandum: Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” August 23, 1971, Greenpeace, greenpeace.org; John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America(New York: Nation Books, 2013), 68–84.
    44. Robert Frank, “‘Robin Hood in Reverse’: The History of a Phrase,” CNBC, August 7, 2012.
    45. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: New American Library, 1958), 78–79.
    46. See Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
    47. John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019). The application of financialized criteria to corporations fed the merger waves of the 1980s and ’90s, with all sorts of hostile takeovers of “underperforming” or “undervalued” companies frequently leading to the company being cannibalized and their parts sold to the highest bidder. See Perelman, Railroading Economics, 187–96.
    48. István Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
    49. See Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “Grand Theft Capital: The Increasing Exploitation and Robbery of the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review 75, no. 1 (May 2023): 1–22.
    50. See John Cassidy, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009); James K. Galbraith, The End of Normal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015); Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis; Hans G. Despain, “Secular Stagnation: Mainstream Versus Marxian Traditions,” Monthly Review 67, no. 4 (September 2015): 39–55.
    51. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific,” Monthly Review 76, no. 3 (July–August 2024): 6–13.
    52. Matthew Bigg, “Conservative Talk Radio Rails against Bailout,” Reuters, September 26, 2008.
    53. Geoff Kabaservice, “The Forever Grievance: Conservatives Have Traded Periodic Revolts for a Permanent Revolution,” Washington Post, December 4, 2020; Michael Ray, “The Tea Party Movement,” Encyclopedia Britannica, January 16, 2025, britannica.com; Anthony DiMaggio, The Rise of the Tea Party: Political Discontent and Corporate Media in the Age of Obama (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
    54. Kabaservice, “The Forever Grievance”; Suzanne Goldenberg, “Tea Party Movement: Billionaire Koch Brothers Who Helped It Grow,” Guardian, October 13, 2010; Doug Henwood, “Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class,” Jacobin, April 27, 2021.
    55. C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 353–54.
    56. On the concept of contradictory class locations, see Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London: Verso, 1978), 74–97.
    57. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); Nate Silver, “The Mythology of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support,” ABC News, May 3, 2016; Thomas Ogorzalek, Spencer Piston, and Luisa Godinez Puig, “White Trump Voters Are Richer than They Appear,” Washington Post, November 12, 2019.
    58. The analysis here is based on John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
    59. Kabaservice, “The Forever Grievance.”
    60. Liza Featherstone, “It’s a Little Late for Mike Pence to Pose as a Brave Dissenter to Donald Trump,” Jacobin, January 8, 2021.
    61. Trump quoted in Kabaservice, “The Forever Grievance.”
    62. Foster, Trump in the White House, 26–27.
    63. Karl Marx, Herr Vogt: A Spy in the Worker’s Movement (London: New Park Publications, 1982), 70.
    64. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014), 391–92.
    65. Warren Buffett quoted in Nichols and McChesney, Dollarocracy, 31.
    66. On the growing role of private equity in the economy, see Allison Heeren Lee, “Going Dark: The Growth of Private Markets and the Impact on Investors and the Economy,” U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, October 12, 2021, sec.gov; Brendan Ballou, Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America (New York: Public Affairs, 2023); Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023).
    67. George Kerevan, “The American Ruling Class Is Shifting Towards Trump,” Brave New Europe, July 19, 2024, braveneweurope.com; Anna Massoglia, “Outside Spending on 2024 Elections Shatters Records, Fueled by Billion-Dollar ‘Dark Money’ Infusion,” Open Secrets, November 5, 2024, opensecrets.org.
    68. Kerevan, “The American Ruling Class Is Shifting Towards Trump.”
    69. Igor Derysh, “Joe Biden to Rich Donors: ‘Nothing Would Fundamentally Change’ If He’s Elected,” Salon, June 19, 2019.
    70. Biden, “Full Transcript of President Biden’s Farewell Address.”
    71. Will Weissert and Laurie Kellman, “What is Fascism? And Why Does Harris Say Trump is a Fascist?,” Associated Press, October 24, 2024.
    72. Dan Alexander and Michela Tindera, “The Net Worth of Joe Biden’s Cabinet,” Forbes, June 29, 2021.
    73. Rick Claypool, “Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Represents the Top 0.0001%,” Public Citizen, January 14, 2025, citizen.org; Peter Charalambous, Laura Romero, and Soo Rin Kim, “Trump Has Trapped and Uprecedented 13 Billionaires for his Administration. Here’s Who They Are,” ABC News, December 17, 2024.
    74. Adriana Gomez Licon and Alex Connor, “Billionaires, Tech Titans, Presidents: A Guide to Who Stood Where at Trump’s Inauguration,” Associated Press, January 21, 2025; Doug Henwood, “Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class,” Jacobin, April 27, 2021.
    75. Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule” (2020 reprint with epilogue).
    76. Domenico Montanaro, “Trump Falls Just Below 50% in Popular Vote, But Gets More Than in Past Election,” National Public Radio, December 3, 2024, npr.org; Editors, “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 76, no. 8 (January 2025). On the historical and theoretical significance of the Party of Nonvoters, see Walter Dean Burnham, The Current Crisis in American Politics(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
    77. Kerevan, “The American Ruling Class Is Shifting Towards Trump”; Alice McManus, Robert Benson, and Sandana Mandala, “Dangers of Project 2025: Global Lessons in Authoritarianism,” Center for American Progress, October 9, 2024.
    78. Bernie Sanders, “The US Has a Ruling Class—And Americans Must Stand Up to It.”
    79. Bernie Sanders, “Bernie’s Statement about the Election,” Occupy San Francisco, November 7, 2024, occupysf.net; Jake Johnson, “Sanders Lays Out Plan to Fight Oligarchy as Wealth of Top Billionaires Passes $10 Trillion,” Common Dreams, December 31, 2024.
    80. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), 120.
    81. Claypool, “Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Represents the Top 0.0001%.”

    2025, Volume 76, Number 11 (April 2025)

  • Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

    Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

    Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological RevolutionCapitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming 2022), 693 pp.

    Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by the onset of a new, more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population.

    What caused this massive shift in the history of the earth? In this comprehensive study, John Bellamy Foster tells us that a globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul its own nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations, throwing into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary emergency, exploring the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of the capitalism’s alteration of the planetary environment, is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.

    What people are saying about Capitalism in the Anthropocene

    John Bellamy Foster has returned Socialism to a serious and sincere engagement with nature. He is as adept at navigating the latest scientific literature as he is comfortable with the immense body of Marxist theory. JBF is a key reference for the elaboration of our political struggles and for the expansion of our political imagination.

    Vijay Prashad, Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research