19.06.2025

Cheap pageantry for birthday boy

‘No Kings’ vs ‘Big beautiful parade’. America is not in imminent danger of one-man dictatorship, but the authoritarianism of Trump’s regime is all too evident, argues Paul Demarty

On June 14, two distinct contingents of Americans faced off in a kind of war-dance.

The most obviously warlike was Donald Trump’s “big beautiful parade” - a supposedly solemn occasion to mark the 250th anniversary of the US army (there’s a certain level of artificiality about the date, but the colonial forces did formally found what was then the Continental Army on June 14 1775). This happy day also happened to be the birthday of a certain Donald J Trump. Some 7,000 troops marched through Washington DC, accompanied by battle tanks, Chinook helicopters and various other military toys. The crowds were on the small side - partly a matter of poor weather, and partly, we expect, the fact that DC is a solidly Democratic city, having not returned a Republican mayor since 1956.

Various liberals, meanwhile, were busy organising protests in American cities under the slogan, ‘No kings’, reaching back in their own way to the same revolution of the 1770s. Numbers are hard to come by, but seem respectable. However, their efforts were rather overshadowed by a lone-wolf attack in Minnesota, in which two state representatives were shot - one, Melissa Hortman, fatally - by a man impersonating a police officer (‘No kings’ demonstrations were called off in the state by wary organisers - terrorism works, apparently!).

All this excitement, of course, followed on from a week of heightened tension, provoked by sweeping and terroristic ICE raids on suspected illegal migrants - the closest thing Trump has to a praetorian guard. Protests in major cities, especially Los Angeles, spilled over into near riots, with military forces deployed to ensure the ICE thugs could go about their grim business undisturbed.

King Trump

The question arises, inevitably - does this all add up to a radical break with American politics heretofore? That is the idea of ‘no kings’ - we got rid of them in 1776, and Trump, with his executive gamesmanship and his militarism and even his dime-store-Versailles interior decorations, is bringing them back. But perhaps there is nothing to see here - Trump, as his fans would have it, is merely bringing back the old America; or, as some more sceptical liberal and left voices might have it, America was like this all along. Monarchical counterrevolution or business as usual? The answer, of course, is ‘yes’.

There can be no doubt that Trump 2.0 so far represents a significant power-grab on the part of the executive branch. Though the bloated omnibus ‘big beautiful bill’ continues its course through congress, Trump has ruled largely by executive order. Though Elon Musk has left the government under a cloud, he did a serviceable job of purging the ranks of the federal government of career civil servants who may not have been on board with all this. Those who survived may well be cowed. Marxists have no particular illusions in the nobility of the permanent state bureaucracy, but it does matter what replaces the pseudo-independence enjoyed by such people.

The president’s success, moreover, in surrounding himself with craven sycophants is also notable - both in contrast to the chaotic personnel regime of his first term, and recent administrations. George W Bush was generally guided by neoconservative ideologues and party machine types like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Barack Obama was a stronger personality who clashed frequently with his senior staff. Joe Biden was, it is now clear, barely awake for most of his term, again ceding considerable initiative to his subordinates.

This time around, Sun King Trump enjoys the most pathetic displays of loyalty. His ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, personally messaged him to assure him that “God spared you in Butler, PA [where he was shot last year] to be the most consequential president in a century, maybe ever … You have many voices speaking to you, Sir, but there is only one voice that matters: his voice.” We take it Huckabee is not referring to JD Vance there. He goes on for a few more paragraphs of bible-belt panegyric; and his doe-eyed pliability is a trait visible throughout the upper reaches of the government. It really is the stuff of the courts of later Roman emperors.

Trump’s militarised approach to immigration enforcement is, likewise, a significant step change. It is not unprecedented in American history, and indeed ICE itself is a product of the early ‘war on terror’. Its employment as an end-run around the judiciary nonetheless raises the temperature considerably. The targeted deportations of vulnerable pro-Palestine activists on campuses represent a serious threat to free speech - far more serious than the skulduggery of the Bush years or even the internet censorship efforts of the Biden administration. The government has begun mischievous litigation against the third-worldist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and no doubt other organisations of the left are on the hit list.

While dire warnings of an imminent descent into dictatorship are overblown, it all adds up to a massively more hostile environment for the American left than it has become accustomed to in recent years. The political agenda in the coming period will involve a lot more rearguard action, organising solidarity with victimised individuals, defending against lawfare, and so forth.

If the Israeli government succeeds in dragging America into its war on Iran - and there are not many Republicans in Congress or the government who need all that much in the way of dragging (indeed not many Democrats either) - then things will get worse again. It is probably coincidence that this big military parade happened during the early stages of this war; but even so, we can expect much more in the way of aggression against those who dare to criticise the US war machine, and much more of the vulgar troopolatry that has so disfigured American culture since, particularly, the September 11 attacks.

Continuity

Yet that brings us to the partial truth on the ‘nothing to see here’ side. Trump did not invent the unitary executive theory of government that he uses as a bludgeon against his enemies, real and perceived. It is the operative theory of the conservative legal movement, represented by forces like the Heritage Foundation, which has had such stunning success in packing the Supreme Court with fanatically rightwing and ostentatiously corrupt scoundrels. These people have been at it for many decades.

Trump inherits an effectively inoperable Congress, which has barely legislated outside vast, executive-led omnibus bills for many years. He inherits the bloated military and intelligence apparatus created to fight the war on terror, and promises to bloat it further still. The use of immigration controls as a political weapon against dissidents has recent precedent in the ‘war on terror’, and more distant ones in the red scares that followed both world wars. One could look even further back - the abrogation of habeas corpus by Abraham Lincoln as a military expediency in the civil war, say (a more honourable case, given the stakes); or Andrew Jackson’s gloating indifference to court judgments against his genocidal Indian clearances.

The history of the United States is, like the history of all bourgeois states, two-sided: it fights always under the banner of liberty, of freedom from arbitrary domination, and indeed realises some freedom from some forms of arbitrary domination for some people. At the same time, the state could only survive by means of such domination - whether in the massacres of native peoples, enslavement of Africans (decisive for the country’s economy in its formative centuries), low-level warfare against labour unions by Pinkerton mercenaries, colonialism or, more latterly, global military and economic dominance.

All of these mechanisms are costly, both in raw economic terms and in connection with the available bases of political support. Slavery was ended by war, as - in another way - was the resistance of the native peoples. The Gilded Age robber barons gave way to various forms of class compromise, culminating in the military Keynesianism of the ‘new deal’. That in turn ground to a halt, giving rise to the neoliberal order, which has steadily frayed in the last two decades. The US has maintained control of the central levers of political and economic power in the global order, but at the cost of much of its industrial base and the reduction of once thriving communities to penury in the polluted ruins of their factory towns.

It is this discontent that has given us Trump, at a moment when the American state order is attempting some kind of geopolitical pivot towards great-power conflict in Asia. In principle, Trump is very much on board with this. Yet it has proven difficult to disengage from Europe and the Middle East; the Ukraine war is yet to be settled, which means Trump must keep shelling out to keep the Ukrainians fighting and, as I write, it seems almost certain that the US will openly involve itself in a calamitous war against Iran, with no clear endgame beyond fantasies of total victory, and which is already drawing forces away from the Pacific theatre to fight in the Gulf.

In this respect, Trump very much represents continuity - with the strategic paralysis attendant on US relative decline. Whatever the outcome of the Iran bloodbath, the winner will be China.

Bread and circuses

With such grim immediate prospects, we can expect Trump to rely on the old imperial playbook of bread and circuses - the sort of circuses where people get eaten. More mawkish militarism, more cheap grandstanding, more assaults on the hated enemies of “real America”. Moreover, this is hardly a mere question of Trump as an individual: if he is replaced in good order in 2028 - no guarantees there - can we really believe that his successor will give up the executive privileges Trump has won for the Oval Office by way of his brinksmanship?

In After virtue, the late Alasdair MacIntyre tells the story of King Kamehameha II of Hawaii, who in 1819 swept away his society’s elaborate system of taboos (the word ‘taboo’ is itself derived from Polynesian languages) in a matter of months. In MacIntyre’s view, this ancient system could only be dispatched so easily because it had already lost its connection to the fundamentals of social life, such that it survived only as a series of eccentric and basically meaningless prohibitions. Perhaps there is something of Kamehameha about Trump - the American constitutional order has already been reduced to a barely functional state, and all that remains is to strip away its superficial veneer of stability and good order. It took a prickly vulgarian to do the dirty job - but the job will stay done.

For this reason, the ‘no kings’ framing as it is - as a defence of that failed, tyrannical constitutional order - cannot satisfy us. The only way out is through a revolutionary, democratic refounding, and the task of the left remains to delegitimise the existing constitutional order.

In this, it must separate itself from the liberals for good.