13.02.2025

The American Sulla

Concessions won during the New Deal and the civil rights era are under attack. The old world order is being shredded. Edith Fischer, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation in Australia, looks at Trump 2.0 and his programme

Elon Musk, the richest man alive and perhaps the most powerful individual on earth, once called for an ‘American Sulla’. Invoking the name of the optimates’ despot, Musk seeks to conjure up the figure of a reactionary dictator, come to suppress the populares and restore the minoritarian political order. In Trump, Musk believes he has found his Sulla.

The vicissitudes of the new American regime are not the result of personal vanity and madness of the man himself, or to the particular predilections and absurdities of his political clique. They are a coherent, if at times schizophrenic, programme for the reorganisation of the dominant regime of accumulation in the US and its position in the world system. This programme represents the interests of a distinct section of the US bourgeoisie, which is aiming for the greatest transformation of the American social formation since the New Deal.

The trajectory of American capitalism is in many ways shaped by the sedimented historical defeats of the US working class, whose systematic lack of political independence, and unique stratification by race and skill, gave rise to a form of state capitalism in the New Deal period. This fused the workers to their employers, limited corporatism at the level of the state, and constrained the social wage. This social compact was bought by the rising wages guaranteed by productivity increases in industry, and the falling price of consumer durables that gave rise to the vast suburbanisation of American life following World War II.

At the same time, the American proletariat expanded to include millions of white-collar workers in bureaucracy, administration and the culture industry - all fuelling a vast increase in the scale of the administrative state. Similarly, suburban civilisation was served by a huge growth in cheap service work - everything from nail salons to house cleaning. This created a growing division between a propertied, skilled working class that lived in the suburbs, and a growing proletariat working two jobs to pay rent on their rat-infested urban slums. This vast division in the working class was the political basis for the cross-class alliance that brought the New Right to power, hulking across the country from the Sunbelt to DC.

The emergence of neoliberalism was precipitated by what Giovanni Arrighi called the “signal crisis” of the American-led world system: the stagflation and oil shock of the 1970s. This crisis signalled the apogee of American capitalism, and the beginning of the long decline. Over the course of the following decades, the predictions of the likes of Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein were borne out in practice. Systematic disinvestment saw the industrial base stripped of its capacity. The labour aristocracy that this industry had fed collapsed into poverty, while trade union power was thoroughly smashed by the Reaganite offensive. Even the cadres of the American state have been slowly underfunded, crowded out by contractors and systematically deskilled.

Trump then stands within a particular relation to Reagan: best understood as both the completion of Reaganism’s historic task of dismantling the New Deal-civil rights state, and also the negation of Reaganism’s neoliberal mode of political operation. While Reagan was the Sulla for the epoch of generalised free trade, Trump is the Sulla for the epoch of direct inter-imperialist conflict.

Democrats

Who are the Democrats? First of all, they are the party of the haute bourgeoisie, of high finance, of the transnational corporations. Overwhelmingly, the largest bloc of capitalists supports the Democrats, along with the various institutions of the state. This class is represented in politics by the multilateralists, the liberal internationalists; they are the party of the UN, Nato and free trade. In short, they are the ‘party of order’.

However, like all bourgeois parties, the Democratic Party is a hegemonic coalition of multiple classes. Nowhere is this more true than in America, where the party-state is so institutionalised as to make serious political fragmentation functionally impossible. The Democrats are a coalition of the urban middle classes, professionals, managers, petty capitalists, intellectuals and public servants - fused with organised labour (represented by the social-imperialist AFL-CIO union bloc) and politicised layers of the black and migrant working class.

The Democratic Party relies on mobilising its working class base in order to win elections. However, it must ultimately govern in the interests of its ruling class benefactors. This creates a particular political dynamic which has been widely commented upon by the socialist movement. The bourgeois liberals and republicans are quick to mobilise the spectre of reaction in order to mobilise their base, whipping them up with fears of an imminent clerical-reactionary takeover of the state apparatus. However, in practice, the Democrats are a party of the bourgeoisie and will ultimately seek the unity of the bourgeois state over any popular front of all classes. Inside the Democrats, the most advanced sections of the American workers are strangled.

Why did they lose? The Democratic Party has been defeated precisely because it could not offer a strategy to save American hegemony from its historic demise. Trump offers such a strategy. The Democratic Party offers nothing to its multiracial working class base, and in turn they did not vote. Voter turnout has fallen significantly since the 2020 election, and the Democrats were unable to rally the popular front they constantly attempt to summon. They are led by a liberal political caste that is wholly out of touch with reality, and unable to produce a politics with mass appeal. And so the House of Biden and the dream of a Harris presidency collapsed.

Trumpism

The Republican Party is the party of extractive capital, of mining and logging, of the rancher capitalists and farmers, of agricultural producers, and of small and medium capitalists in the American regions. If the Democrats are the party of the universities, then the Republicans are the party of the country clubs and the chambers of commerce. Importantly, the presidential election saw the defection of a bloc of financial-technology capital to the Trump campaign.

Behind them, the reactionary MAGA movement draws up the entire middle strata of the American regions: the local elites of the towns; the evangelical churches and traditionalist Catholics; the petty producers and independent contractors - all the varied layers that stand against the proletariat. In turn, layers of the American working class - in particular white, non-unionised workers - have long supported the Republicans.

The Republican coalition is just as fractious as the Democrats. Christian theocrats, ethnic nationalists and Silicon Valley anarchists are not natural allies. What draws them together is a common sense of grievance - a sense that their position as the ‘rightful rulers’ of the social order is being denied by liberal political domination over the state apparatus.

The programme of Trumpism is more radical now than it was eight years ago. It can be broadly understood to consist of five elements: (1) Aggressive trade policy and tariff regimes; (2) Competition with European capital; (3) A reorientation to direct ‘spheres of influence’ imperialism, rather than multilateralism; (4) A deportation regime to discipline American labour markets; (5) Strengthening the basis of social reproduction in the family.

The traditional Yankee leadership of the Republican Party (such as the Bush clan) has either been jettisoned or bent the knee. Gone are the days of free-trade Republicans: Trump promises radical economic nationalism, a brutal tariff regime that is guaranteed to drive inflation, and a recession-inducing wave of austerity in the federal government. The aim is to unleash a storm of inflation and unemployment that would see workers’ wages reduced to poverty levels. It is only on the basis of such a dire assault that competitive domestic manufacturing and small-capitalist profitability can be restored. This will no doubt provoke a furious response. But with the American working class disorganised, there is no clear road to defeat the Trumpist programme.

Such a revolutionary programme is also going to shatter the Trumpist base. The small and medium capitalists are certainly fervent in their support of economic nationalism and attacks on the wage rate. But inflation will also decrease their savings, devalue their assets and tighten their ability to consume the luxuries they so covet. This layer may soon find itself high and dry, as economic shocks shake the nation.

With birth rates falling, America is reliant on immigration to sustain the population growth capitalist accumulation demands. However, mass immigration destabilises the ethnic coalitions that guarantee the power of local elites, especially outside the big cities. The only alternative to immigration is to reinvigorate the family unit, which functionally means throwing women into domestic servitude. Attacks on abortion and gay rights, demands to censor pornography and crackdowns on “sexual degeneracy” - all act to defend the family, which is in fact the nucleus of private property. We should not underestimate the popularity of patriarchal ideology, especially amongst the young. Reactionary patriarchal politics plays on the oedipal structure of the family unit, and it stirs up great feelings of resentment and disappointment.

There is a misapprehension, even by some socialists, that Trump and his coalition are opposed to war and military adventures abroad. Even more absurd is the claim that Trump is some kind of anti-imperialist. Trump’s initial cabinet is a war cabinet: staffed with anti-Iran hawks, militarists and anti-China cold warriors. Whatever isolationist rhetoric Trump might pander to, he is not opposed to the fundamental dynamics of the American empire, or even to military intervention. What Trump is seeking is a renegotiation of the terms under which the empire is organised.

American gentry

The view that the small and medium capitalists are less imperialist than their haute bourgeois cousins is erroneous in the extreme. Nicolas D Villarreal outlines this fact masterfully in his essay, To hell with the American gentry:

The problem of allocating surplus with limited economic growth is one that has had a time-honoured, consistent solution for those societies that are unable to give up the bloated excesses of their ruling classes: imperialism. It should be noted that Trump’s insistence on withdrawing the US military across the world wasn’t so much about non-intervention as securing better terms of payment for US support, to turn the US empire once again into a profit-making enterprise ... The continued rise of petty-bourgeois power entails a movement away from the global trade system supported by the American military, and instead towards the old way of exclusive spheres of influence.

Because of this necessity of imperialism to support such an ‘aristocracy’, this paradise for the gentry will still entail massive financial monopolies - only ones that are pointed outward rather than inward. This is necessary to impose the vast rents on the countries within the empire’s sphere of influence, to gorge on ever more labour time and resources.

Such a reorganisation of imperialism is already underway. By threatening Nato - both by sabre-rattling over Greenland and placing tariffs on Canada - Trump is indicating a shift away from the multilateral imperialism that has historically guaranteed American supremacy. In turn, by placing sanctions on Taiwan, Trump has destabilised the ‘pivot to Asia’ that was at the centre of imperialist strategy throughout the Obama years.

Such a turn is not without its real benefits: by seizing Canada and Greenland, and by asserting American control over the Panama Canal, Trump would control two vital trade routes and vast reserves of strategic resources, including land and fresh water. Trump is promoting an imperialism of direct annexation, inter-imperialist competition and treaty ports. It is a return to an epoch of direct spheres of influence.