by Angus McFarland
Maine
Anxiety runs high over the Trump administration’s actions in his second term, and there is no question that things will get worse for the vast majority of working people in the near future. Through executive orders, memoranda, and cabinet appointments, he has shown that his agenda is to create a vicious, pro-corporate, right wing executive branch and reward his socially conservative base of support. His unwillingness to pay lip service to democratic processes in pursuit of these goals points to a deeply authoritarian view of government.
These policies may be shocking in their awfulness, but a look back over presidents of the neoliberal era (the era of privatization, deregulation, and anti labor policies starting in the Carter administration) shows they are not unprecedented. In order to oppose the assault on our rights that Trump is already carrying out we must understand what it is in its proper historical context. Trump is not the political outsider shaking up Washington with a bold new approach that he claims to be, but rather “Trumpism” is an accelerated continuation of a half century of terrible right wing Republicans and bought-and-paid-for “centrist” Democrats.
Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and others have made the claim that the Trump administration represents a new move towards oligarchy. But the US has been ruled by the capitalist class, and particularly by the richest among them, for a very long time. A study of which voters’ policy preferences were enacted by the government, looking at data from between 1981 and 2002 (a period that Trump spent mostly filing bankruptcies for his failed businesses), found that “economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”
A Legacy of Capitalist Brutality
The unbroken thread that connects Trump to Carter and every President in between is pro-corporate, anti-worker policy. The attacks sometimes come slower, sometimes faster, sometimes stronger or weaker, but always in the same direction: less taxes for the rich, less safety net for the working class, less regulations for corporations, less compensation, less benefits, less services, and less rights for workers.
Carter kicked off the neoliberal era. He rejected the price controls that Nixon had been forced to enact to fight inflation, instead nominating Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker’s anti-inflation plan was the Volcker Shock, a sharp rise in interest rates that caused mass unemployment, recession, and financial crises in the US and all over the world. Carter also deregulated trucking, rail, air travel, and telecommunications, sweeping away many of the gains won by workers since the Great Depression.
Reagan took Carter’s policy direction and distilled it down to the cruellest form he could devise. He was the most “Trumpian” of the neoliberal era presidents. The set of policies that came to be known as “Reaganomics” are very similar in approach to Trump’s: tax cuts for the rich, cuts to services for workers and the poor, and “shrinking the federal government,” which is a euphemism for privatization. In his 1980 acceptance speech for the Republican Party nomination, he coined a new slogan, characterizing his coming administration as “…a great national crusade to make America great again.”
A year into his presidency, when the PATCO union air traffic controllers who’d endorsed him in the elections went on strike, Reagan, instead of following through on campaign promises to support the union and improve staffing and safety, instead promptly fired the 11,000+ workers. This “shock and awe” anti labor move may well have inspired the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers to date by Trump and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Trump’s military policies are partially lifted from Reagan as well. In his executive order titled “The Iron Dome for America,” Trump refers to his missile defense shield plan as a fulfillment of Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) commonly known as the “Star Wars” program. In fact, Trump’s “Space Force” was first proposed in Reagan’s SDI.
From their mainstreaming of racism, to their careers as TV hosts, to their mishandling of the Covid 19 and AIDS epidemics (respectively,) the parallels between Trump and Reagan are too numerous to list here.
Reagan’s vice president George H W Bush, despite running as a “compassionate conservative,” largely held the line established by Reagan. He signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which had been proposed by Reagan in 1980 and was enacted by Clinton in 1993. It encouraged US and Canadian firms to relocate production to exploit cheap labor in Mexico, driving down wages and benefits for all workers. His aggressive foreign policy, from Panama to Iraq, was no different than Reagan’s.
The End of History?
The collapse of the Stalinist system in the USSR and Eastern Europe allowed the global capitalist class to kick their neoliberal programs into even higher gear due to the lack of a counterweight that the Soviet Union, despite all its flaws, provided to capitalism. The resulting wave of privatization, beginning in 1992, gave them an economic and propaganda victory that helped to silence critics of neoliberalism. Clinton, George W Bush, and Obama rode this wave into the 21st century, holding the line established by their predecessors. Pro-corporate, anti-worker, privatizer, deregulator, war-maker: any of these descriptors could apply to any of them.
The recession of 2007/2008 in many ways was neoliberalism coming home to roost. Obama’s failure to deviate from the capitalist consensus and help the working class meaningfully recover played a big role in Trump being able to win in 2016. Biden, who ran and won against Trump in 2020, didn’t radically differentiate himself from Trump’s policies. Promising rich donors in 2019 that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he was elected, he proceeded to deliver on that promise. He thinly disguised his corporate tax cutting as “tax incentives” in his Inflation Reduction Act, which did little to nothing to reduce inflation. This, along with his administration’s enthusiastic support of Israel’s unpopular and genocidal war in Gaza, helped ensure a second Trump term.
If every administration moves in roughly the same direction, how can we change that direction to one that favors equality and justice for the working people of America and the world at large? The answer may be found during the last presidency of the previous era, that of Richard Nixon. Despite his being a rabid right-winger and anti-communist cold warrior, the Nixon years saw the end of the Vietnam War, the Roe v. Wade decision, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. These were not caused by any secret sympathy of Nixon’s but because he faced union pressure and a large and powerful mass movement in the streets.
We Can Fight, We Must Fight
Despite Trump’s overreaches and power grabs, he is not all-powerful and will face resistance. While we cannot trust the courts or the Democrats in opposition to fight on our behalf, we can oppose the Trump administration with a new mass movement, rooted in working class struggle. Such a movement, armed with a socialist program and effective tactics, could not only force meaningful reforms, but would threaten the whole rotten capitalist system that keeps putting the most corrupt and vicious of their stooges into the White House.
Trump represents no truly new or unprecedented threat. Should he be voted out of office in four years or impeached in two, and the American system of capitalism left intact, the general direction of corporate domination will continue, perhaps at a slower pace, perhaps faster. What we, the working class of this and every country, must work for, organize for, and fight for is the abolition of the capitalist system. We must replace it with a system that radically reorders the priorities of political action from fostering inequality and the domination of the ruling capitalist class to satisfying the human needs of all. We must fight for socialism.
Independent Socialist Group 