When a clown moves into a palace,
he doesn’t become a king.
The palace becomes a circus.

— Turkish Proverb

I. The Majority Defines the National Character

Americans are an odd and dangerous people. I mean that they are odd in that they generally consider themselves superior to all others throughout the world. That Americans see themselves as exceptional is a political and cultural truism. They are dangerous because they are a people of extremes, a deeply anti-intellectual people who pride themselves on being crass through their involvement in bread and circus events in sports, shallow television watching, and obsessive computer use and social media engagement as if these could be considered serious pastimes. They are a people, who also like any other people across the face of the earth, mirror the leadership that guides the welfare of their country. The fact that Donald J. Trump was elected the United States President on November 5th should be of no surprise for the serious observer of the American national character. It is the statistics that are important in gaging not only an election in any country or nation state, but it is also telling in giving history an account of the national character of a people. According to the British news online outlet, the Guardian, “Republicans are on track to win the popular vote in a presidential election for the first time in 20 years, with Donald Trump lead”.

Donald J. Trump is an obscene caricature of a man, who was elected by a majority of Americans who are also obscene caricatures of themselves, a people obsessed with their own self-interests with no interest in the collective needs of the nation’s people. As Marx wrote about such a people who are only involved with narcissistic interests, whether it be political or economic self-interests, “The representation of private interests ... abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to this object”. Trump and his followers are primitive capitalists bent on achieving their imperialistic fantasies which are personal and politically hegemonic in nature. The other millions of Americans who refuse to be a part of such a despicable political charade, will ultimately have to realize that it is only through the building of a revolutionary theory for the American masses, who are leaderless at this stage in American history, that any actual historical change can take place. For these masses, eventually, there will need to be a commitment to the initiation of civil war. As a military historian, I see that the United States is imploding from within like an earthquake which will take down everything within its clash of earth plates releasing a horrific, seismic political catastrophe.

II. How the Class Struggle Revealed Itself in the US Presidential Election

Amid the naïve, idealistic atmosphere of the liberal Left in the United States, what I will term a “Harvest Festival”, there was a belief that the nominee, Kamala Harris, an Indian and African American woman for the Democratic party, would succeed in winning the Presidential race, since it was perceived as having a strong contingent of political allies which included not only large union membership voters, college and university students, a profound segment of American women voters, but also an array of bourgeois corporations, millionaires and even billionaires who supported the neo-liberal progressive agenda. What these Americans did not count on was the Trump Brocken, a mountain, using the German word for mountain, of conflicting promises that fed on the majority of American’s anxieties and fears, and that this was the heartbeat of the election itself. In the important historical work entitled The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, the historian, Robert A. Brady, wrote about the so-called progressives and Social Democrats and both their euphoric and confused expectations before the ascendency of the Nazi Party in the nineteen thirties:

Unclear in their thinking, confused in their picture of the array of reactionary political forces to which they were in

in theory opposed… Everything they did lacked the cement of theory and the force of direction. They compromised to the right and the left…For the time being, the extent and the nature of the compromises of the Social-Democratic Party made were not realized. Its spokesmen were carried along on a wave of mass Protest strong enough to make those who floated at its base. But appearances were deceiving; compromising on all fronts, they united against the left, and consciously or unconsciously promoted the interests of the right.

The Democratic Party had no actual political theory to convince the American people that they were actually a party of change. The Democratic president candidate herself is a part of the wealthy classes within the United States class structure. According to one information outlet that deals with investment information, “Harris and her husband, lawyer Doug Emhoff, have an estimated net worth of about $8 million, according to Forbes.

Harris' wealth comes from her years in politics, the books she's written, and investments she shares with Emhoff. Here's how Harris made her millions…

In 2016, Harris was elected to the Senate, with a salary of $174,000 a year. As vice president, Harris receives $235,100 per year. Harris has also earned over $500,000 in royalties from books she has written, including "Smart on Crime," "Superheroes Are Everywhere," and her memoir, "The Truths We Hold." Harris and her husband Emhoff have between $2.9 million and $6.6 million in retirement accounts, other investments, and cash, according to Barron's analysis of Harris' 2024 financial disclosure.” But candidate Harris was in good company, class-wise, with those millionaires and billionaires who contributed to her Democratic party campaign. According to the financial website Forbes the following statistics can be gleaned:

Our breakdown records 83 billionaires supporting Harris and 52 backing Trump so far (see the lists for both below). Many more billionaires may still financially back a candidate, but their donations won’t be learned until after the election, when final Federal Election Commission reports are issued in December. Billionaires leaning toward Harris may seem incongruous, since she often criticizes Trump for advocating for policies favorable toward billionaires—but there are practical reasons why the ultra-wealthy may favor Harris.

A letter signed by more than a dozen billionaires last month endorsing Harris explained their belief Harris “will continue to advance fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment,” indicating the support for the status quo as the U.S. economy and stock market exhibit strength, while a recent survey of millionaire investors—which found a 57% to 43% split in Harris’s favor—identified technology, healthcare and sustainability stocks as the sectors most poised to benefit from a Harris win, a mix friendly to many of her billionaire backers from Silicon Valley, who grew familiar with Harris during her time as a California prosecutor.

In the harsh world of reality, if one studies closely how the American bourgeoise has remained in control since the time of the inception of the American nation, then it becomes clear how and why the class struggle becomes acrimonious, confusing and eventually scapegoating. A characteristic of Americans is to blame others, whether it be national minorities or perceived enemies abroad, for their economic tribulations and social hardships. As the Germans placed blame on the Jews under the Hitler regime, the Americans are prone to placing blame on national minorities, immigrants, and the working class. Scapegoating took place in Germany when the Jewish and Slavic immigrants who were escaping the Russian Revolution only to become a bellwether for the Nazi Party officials to latch onto and thus destroy what was perceived as a leftist threat after the violent revolution that had occurred in 1918-1919. In the United States, after the military defeat in the Vietnam War, along with serious economic recessions in the 1970’s and finally with a continuation of a sluggish American economy, and the hostility of millions of Americans toward the mass immigration that occurred with thousands of peoples fleeing their homes in South America, Central America and Mexico.

These immigrants were escaping the embittered and endless poverty that was created ironically by United States’ client-states who attempted to imitate American capitalism but with even more horrific results. Also, central to the overall despair of Arab Americans, thousands of American college and university students, and even working-class Americans was the Question of Gaza and their quest for sovereignty. The Democratic Party nominee did not listen to the demands of those Americans who were in crises over the Palestinian genocide, nor did the Biden regime change their foreign policy regarding the nationalistic and fascist invasion by Israeli military forces (IDF) into the enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank. The Democratic presidential nominee did not break away from the reactionary foreign policy of the Biden Regime, and in essence there was no difference in outlook than that of the racist foreign policy that Trump and his cohorts were advocating against Arab nations, which included Iran and the Palestinian people. Lenin once said more or less that the left becomes right and the right becomes jleft. Such is the quagmire that the Democratic leadership led itself and its millions of supporters into like lemmings falling over a cliff into a raging sea.

One may also ask what was the position of the Communist Party of the United States of America regarding the overall presidential contest, including its evaluation objectively of the Democratic nominee? In an essay written in People’s World, one Marxist journalist for the party wrote a leftist but not always detailed analysis of the class struggle regarding the presidential election. I would like to quote some of the commentary of that essay entitled The Morning After: A Marxist Analysis of the Trump Victory:

Marxists – the real ones, not the phantom ones Trump alleges are plotting to take over the country – always try to avoid being taken in by appearance or detached idealism, which the ruling class uses to hide or distort the real essence of things.

Trump and the MAGA faction of the Republican Party are the vehicle for the country’s most right-wing capitalists. Collectively, anti-worker corporations, predatory hedge funds, and finance capital spent hundreds of millions to elect him and a GOP Senate. The names are familiar ones: Susquehanna Group, Koch Industries, Blackstone, Walmart, TD Ameritrade, Wynn Resorts, Home Depot, Energy Transfer Partners, Sequoia Capital, Johnson & Johnson, and more. They put their guy back in the White House, and their paid politicians will be running Congress. Don’t think they won’t take full advantage of the opportunities that brings.

We’ll need to look at a number of questions if we really want to analyze this election from a class perspective: Who voted and how? Why did they vote like they did? Who didn’t vote, and why not? The corporate press and its commentators are spitting out all kinds of statements aimed at splitting the working class. They say Latinos didn’t turn out, too many Black men went over to Trump, women voted against abortion bans but also cast ballots for Trump, and Arab Americans were too single-minded when it came to Gaza.

Rather than generic talk about saving democracy from fascism, which was too abstract, polling data out of Pennsylvania suggests the Democrats might have gotten more traction by going after real elites – corporate CEOs, business lobbyists, bank bosses, and big political donors. But because the top echelons of the Democratic Party are themselves so intertwined with some of these same forces, criticizing them too harshly was politically (and financially) difficult for them. Unions and the organized segments of the African-American community, women, Latinos, and others played a key role in mobilizing the anti-MAGA vote, and without exception, all of these groups voted for Harris over Trump. Early numbers suggest her percentage share of union votes, for instance, may be higher than Biden’s in 2020.

This is no surprise, given the surge we’ve seen in militant labor organizing, the national uprising for Black Lives, and the Women’s Marches, and the fights against border crackdowns of both the Trump and Biden varieties over the past few years. Left groups, too, like the Communist Party, threw their all into the struggle to beat Trump and block the road to fascism.

I have given a voice in my essay to the Communist Party USA by revealing that the party is indeed committed to socialist democracy in the Marxist-Leninist sense. Although the author talked about all the contradictions that were embedded in the presidential contest, he did not reveal in more serious factual terms how the Democratic Party leadership is controlled by the American bourgeois ruling elite. The essay did not convey in more detailed terms what it meant by class struggle regarding the various contending classes, and finally there was no mention of a revolutionary political theory that Lenin stressed if there was to be a revolution in any country.

The author quoted the great Bulgarian communist party leader, Georgi Dimitrov, “Fascism aims at the most unbridled exploitation of the masses but it approaches them with the most artful anti-capitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, the trusts, and financial magnates.”.

Though this statement is politically profound, the author fails to mention how Dimitrov attempted to overthrow a decadent and corrupt Bulgarian government, and, subsequently, had to go into exile in the Soviet Union. Later in 1933, Dimitrov rose to international political prominence, when he was accused of helping in the organizing of Reichstag fire. At his trail in Germany, Dimitrov refused counsel and mounted a brilliant and eloquent defence against his Nazi party accusers. After the trial, he relocated to Moscow and was elected head of Comintern. I mention these historical activities about Dimitrov because he was motivated by an actual revolutionary political theory for his country.

Dimitrov also understood the stages of social and revolutionary development not only in his country but in Europe as well. One may quote a great man like Georgi Dimitrov as long as one takes into account the historical moment he lived in and not superficially apply such a communist commitment to theory and practice to a country like the United States where no such communist party or political revolutionary theory has evolved within the context of the American class struggle. The two American parties represented two oligarchies. Both parties have more in common than differences than it appears on the surface, and both are concerned with their own nationalistic and globalist economic self-interests and not with the welfare of the ordinary American working people.

Let us look at some of the class demographics that defined the United States Presidential election. According to the neo-liberal newspaper, The New York Times, the various class interests were revealed in such a way that class allegiance to the two parties occurred:

Working-class voters have been moving their support toward Republicans for years, a trend that has been especially true for white voters with less than a college education. Mr. Trump appears to be poised to maintain that foothold on Tuesday.

A national New York Times/Siena College poll of the nation’s likely electorate taken in late October found that 64 percent of white voters without a college degree planned to cast a ballot for Mr. Trump, and just 34 percent for Ms. Harris. And while Ms. Harris retains much higher support among nonwhite voters without a college degree, support for Democrats has been slipping over time even among minority voters.

But the observations of statistics of class and education also went through a change regarding the white working-class voters. According to the Vanderbilt University political-science-research website -

Starting with survey data from the 2016 election and then working farther back, they conducted their own analyses to determine the truth of those key assumptions. One was simply wrong: only about 30 percent, not a majority, of Trump’s supporters were white working-class. A related assertion, however, was true: of white working-class voters, most (about 60 percent) did indeed support Trump. Nevertheless, Lupu said, the statistic has taken on a misleading significance. He typically sees it cited as proof that, compared to previous Republican candidates, Trump appealed uniquely to white working-class voters—possibly because of his rhetoric or policy positions. In reality, Trump demonstrated broad appeal among Republican voters. Moreover, the white working class has been increasingly voting Republican since 1992, and 2016 support for Trump was in line with that trend.

Both mainstream medias use the term “trend” within the context of their findings without mentioning for good reason how economic anxieties and racial phobias and the most backward instincts can and do play a role in voting in the United States. Also, what is grimly enlightening is the movement of Hispanic voters to the right. It was the internationally known newspaper outlet Reuters which revealed the nature of the Hispanic vote in the United States -

The starkest increase may have been the 14-percentage-point swing in Trump's share of Hispanic voters, according to an exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Some 46% of self-identified Hispanic voters picked Trump, up from 32% in the 2020 election when Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Hispanics have largely favored Democrats for decades, but Trump's share this year was the highest for a Republican presidential candidate in exit polls going back to the 1970s, and just higher than the 44% share won by Republican George W. Bush in 2004, according to data compiled by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. In counties where more than 20% of voting-age Americans were Hispanic, Trump's margin over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris improved by 13 points relative to his 2020 performance against Biden.

Trump and his political underlings were able to play to the more reactionary character of the Hispanic male’s machismo. A vast majority of Hispanics and Latinos, excluding the Mexican American people generally who are used to a more Federalistic rule of government in the USA, admire the Caudillo, a warlord or powerful military figure because that is part of their lived experience and what they are used to. It is my conjecture that this as well as their economic ambitions played a role in the Hispanic and Latino vote for Trump. To many of the thousands and thousands of Hispanics, Trump is a home-grown ‘Caudillo’, although in their political naivete, they do not realize how much Trump and his supporters despise them while at the same time using them as pawns in the electoral presidential election. There was the same kind of naivete among the Italian and German middle class and national minorities who voted Mussolini and Hitler into power, ultimately to their regret and demise as they paid for the ignorant vote with their lives.

In my interpretation of the Presidential election, I would like to state how Western Marxism, particularly the Marxist advocation in the United States does not deal stringently enough with the race and colonial question. It was compromised to some extent with the Frankfurt school of Marxist thought which decried Marxist-Leninism for a more bourgeois sociological interpretation and political activity, fueled by a theoretically attempted synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical sociological research which Herbert Marcuse at Stanford University made fashionable. This led to the desecration of Marxism as nothing but an academic pursuit in American universities which American students fell victim to, including certain leaders within the Communist Party USA. The brilliant and astute Italian Marxist philosopher, Domenico Losurdo stated about the decline of a robust Marxism in the Western world, including that of the United States -

… in the United States, religion played no role in the definition of who was Black. It was instead blood, every one drop of blood, that mattered. If we then examine the antebellum United States, we are forced to reach a conclusion: state racism emerged there more clearly than even in the Third Reich… as we know, for the first decades of the history of the North American Republic, almost all of the presidents owned Black slaves.

And Losurdo would be even more explicit in defining what the American Marxist leadership and its intellectuals fail to take into account regarding the colonial question as part of the class struggle in the United States -

We see Nazism’s principal ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, three years before Hitler’s rise to power, refer to the “racial state” that was alive and well in the U.S. South as a model to keep in mind when building the racial state in Germany.

What is ironic and tragic about the US presidential election is the way African American males voted for Trump, a man who has consistently made racial slurs against African Americans. It is tragic because possibly these same black men who voted for Trump may find themselves more economically and socially marginalized with the possibility of being murdered for the color of their skin. According to an NBC news analysis, “An NBC News poll at that time showed that at least 20% of Black men would support Trump — an alarming number for Democrats. Vice President Kamala Harris took over from Biden, who stepped aside under pressure in July. In the end, however, the poll from November 2023 held true: 78% of Black men selected Harris in Tuesday’s presidential election, according to the NBC News National Exit Poll. That figure was below Biden’s 2020 mark of 80%.”  It is apparent that the statistics reveal political contradictions in that 20% of black men voted for a man they know to be racist against blacks while 78% voted for an ethnic minority whom they know is a member of the millionaire class.

With the emergence of a second Presidential Trump regime, African Americans will find themselves in a dangerous racial repression in someways similar to what the Jews encountered after Hitler came to power, intent on exterminating the Jewish people whom he thought of as ‘vermin’.

Only three days after the Trump victory in the electoral polls, one of the mainstream networks, CNN revealed, “Authorities across the United States are investigating after racist text messages – some with references to “slave catchers” and “picking cotton” reminiscent of the country’s painful and bigoted past – have been received by children, college students and working professionals from unrecognized phone numbers in the wake of the presidential election.” These incidents so soon after the re-election of Donald Trump bring with them an ominous warning about the future of national minorities in the United States.

We should keep in mind that the majority of Southern states as well as some northern states, voted in Trump as the next president of the United States. What is not mentioned among the so-called progressive parties, what is not studied enough is the very idea of what a national movement means in terms of the self-determination and rights of national minorities and American workers. Stalin spoke of this issue, writing, “Whether the proletariat rallies to the banner of bourgeois nationalism depends on the degree of development of class antagonisms, on the class consciousness and degree of organization of the proletariat. The class-conscious proletariat has its own tried banner, and has no need to rally to the banner of the bourgeoisie”. An American professor, Dr. Cranston Knight, said to me during our conversation about the two presidential contenders, “Harris and Trump represent a continuation of the old Plutocracy since the inception of the United States”. Once national minorities in the United States through a Socialist revolution acquire regional autonomy instead of being subjugated to pseudo and self-interested ‘State Rights’ under a federal capitalist system, then the American national question becomes more valid and not just a romantic political illusion.

III. American Neo-Liberal Foreign Policy and its Ascent to a Fascist Foreign Policy

American foreign policy is on the cusp of engineering a Third World War that could ignite in the Ukraine or the Middle East. There are many American historians and media pundits who are careful in commenting in a direct way on the predatory aspects of American foreign policy either because they fear losing their tenure at a university or because they do not want the purchasing of their academic books to decline in the American marketplace. They are in effect a rather cowardly group of men and women because of their own deep class self-interests which are wedded to the capitalist American system, and they always live with the trepidation or fear of being publicly ostracized. I would like to give an example of such a historian, Stephen Kotkin is a preeminent historian on Russia, who recently was very coy and subtle about his approach to the coming in of the Trump regime. He stated in an interview -

As a historian, my tendency is to focus less on the cut and thrust of politics of the moment and more on the longer term, the structural directions and the big drivers of change. The deepest structural trend for the U.S. is, in some ways, the gulf that opened up between our commitments and our capabilities. We have been talking about taking on more commitments—whether it’s bringing Ukraine into NATO or signing a treaty alliance with Saudi Arabia—even as there are doubts at home and abroad about whether we have the will and the capabilities to meet our current commitments. Whether our defense industrial base is up to the task of defending all our current treaty allies. And doubts about our fiscal situation, which has been very severely eroded and will likely erode still more under Trump 2.0, as it did under Biden and Trump 1.0.

Notice that the American historian in his address to American foreign policy and its various international issues in the mainstream media outlet Foreign Affairs uses such terms as “politics of the moment”, “structural directions” and “our capabilities” while avoiding discussing the tragic circumstances of innumerable thousands of Palestinians who have lost their lives in Gaza due to the Israeli invasion. According to The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), “nearly 70 percent of verified deaths were of women and children.” It was the United States foreign policy under the previous Trump and the Biden regimes that have played their insidious role in enabling the state of Israel to massacre the Palestinian people in Gaza. It is well known that Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are politically close in their perception of world affairs. Both are politically reactionary and dangerous to any paradigm of a world order. It is my view that unless Trump and/or Netanyahu are removed from power, either or both are capable of creating a conflagration of war in the Middle East.

During the interview, Kotkin when discussing Iran, for instance, never mentions that it was Trump who issued the directive for the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani which was against the protocol of international law. Kotkin refers to the defense industrial base without even mentioning or discussing the war in the Ukraine or the Middle East. The selling of weapons to Israel only increases the political and economic power of the United States’ military industrial complex. President Eisenhower warned the American people about this in his farewell address, “But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” I may be a military historian, but I also like everyone else have no choice but to be involved in the class struggle. I am a national minority born in the Midwest, in Kansas, and being born there, and having served and having had family members who served in the military, I understand in many different ways the warning that Dwight D. Eisenhower raised about the American military-industrial complex and how it could destroy us all here in the United States.

Whether the United States becomes intent upon overreach from an imperialist position to one of a fascist position regarding its foreign policy throughout the world remains to be seen. If the United States has the maturity among its people to change course politically in the course of the days, weeks, months and years to come, it can only do so by acknowledging that America’s domestic policies are tied inexorably to its foreign policies which are fueled by the military-industrial complex. No American, regardless of class, can endure without a more socialist democratic vision that is the embodiment of all and benefits all of the American people. This political achievement of socialist democracy can only be accomplished through the heroic epic of civil war and revolution.

Editor's Note:

The views and informations expressed in the article are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect the views of The International. We believe in providing a platform for a range of viewpoints from the left.