Image by Artur Ament.

A year into Trump’s second term clarifies what his presidency aims to accomplish. On the one hand, his initiatives and their impacts are widely overemphasized. Far less well recognized are how received conditions and conventional Party politics in the US produced Trump and most of what he does. Underlying both Trump, US politics, and their whole environment are the basic changes in US capitalism that both shape and reflect its declining place in the world. These include especially certain class, race and gender aspects of those changes.

Trump’s Republican Party (GOP) never stopped being a coalition. On the one hand, the Party’s major donors have mostly been leading members of the class of private US employers. Those donors provide the key funds that higher Party officials use to organize and mobilize the other side of the coalition, particularly blocs of voters. Major donors divide into three groups: those who give to the GOP, those who give to the DEMs, and those who patronize both. Both parties use the money from their major donors to organize their mass of voters, win offices, and thereby reward those donors. The GOP and DEMs compete for voters using their respective donors’ money. The donor class’s donations protect it from serious or sustained criticism by either major US Party. They are costs of that class’s hegemony. Neither coalition dares to offer such criticism, for fear of threatening its capacity for donations and, by extension, the party’s very survival.

From time to time, one Party performs better than the other in working this “Coalition-Politics”. It gets more money from donors and/or undercuts donations to the other party. It is more successful than the other party in securing or building blocs of voters. The other party then fights back. In the decades before Trump, the Republican Party coalition declined. While the GOP delivered dutifully to its major donors, it merely fed symbols more than changed realities to its voting masses. The GOP loudly opposed abortions but never actually stopped them. It supported fundamentalist Christianity but more in words than deeds. It endorsed neoliberal globalization and celebrated the profits it brought to its donors, but it barely acknowledged, and far less compensated, the losses it imposed on the US working class.

Over recent decades, the DEMs coalition also endorsed neo-liberal globalization and likewise celebrated its profitability as if it were “good for all America.” Some DEM leaders gave lip-service recognition to workers’ losses from globalization. They likewise claimed “concern” that globalization aggravated US inequalities of wealth and income and “hollowed out of the middle class.” However DEMs offered little more than rhetoric, since big donations from globalization’s leading beneficiaries remained a key DEM party goal. US workers hurt by globalization thus felt increasingly alienated, disappointed and betrayed by the DEM coalition. Meanwhile, that coalition redirected its focus and appeal toward women and racial/ethnic minorities as voting blocs. Opposing the discrimination those blocs had long suffered in the US entailed far less risk of losing major corporate and individual donors. Only a relatively few voices on the progressive left of the DEM coalition criticized the costly impacts of globalization on the working class. DEM leadership undertook only modest “progressive” steps (although often claiming to do more than those steps actually achieved). For not really doing more, of course, DEMs blamed the GOP.

So long as this sort of politics worked for the DEMs, the GOP adopted a “me too” approach suggesting sympathy for the interests and women and........

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