Introduction: In the first part of this series we discussed why a nearly exclusively focus on economics is inadequate to oppose Trump and MAGA. Economic self interest is vitally important, but as we showed there is far more at work. In this part of this series we will examine the historical roots of MAGAism and its equivalent around the world. We start where we left off in Part One, which concluded by discussing the bullying mentality upon which much of the support for Trump is based:
We cannot successfully combat this bullying mentality based on moral appeals, nor based on identity politics. It can only be successfully combated through an appeal to working class solidarity. How and why that attitude has collapsed in the United States and how to pose the matter is the second part of this discussion. The issue involves an understanding of why Maga is part of a historical international tendency that actually goes back 30 years. It is essential to understand this tendency and its historical roots. Here we discuss this history.
Ultimately, to combat Trump and MAGA we must understand the reasons for his rise. This stems from complex world historical developments.
Just as in the natural world, in the political world problems are never as simple as they appear on the surface. That becomes clear when we consider the fact that Trump and the Maga movement are far from the only such tendency in the world today. Here are a couple of similar example examples:
- El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who was elected president of that country in 2019, and is playing a central role in Trump’s deportation policy;
- Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy since 2022;
- Victor Orban, who has been the Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, and is a close supporter of
Trump with Hungary’s Viktor Orban. He is just one of many such leaders who are similar to Trump.
Trump;
- Javier “chainsaw” Milei, president of Argentina since 2023 and also a close Trump supporter and role model for Elon Musk;
- Narendra Modi, who has been the Prime Minister of India since 2014.
There are also several similar politicians and political parties that, while not in power at this time, are making major gains. These include the British Trump equivalent, Nigel Farage, and his party, “Reform U K”, which it appears is headed towards at least being part of a coalition government in the next election in Great Britain. It also includes Germany’s Alternative for Germany or AFD, which in some ways is even more extreme than the US Republican Party.
In other words, this world historical trend has global historical roots, and it is those roots that we must understand if we wish to combat the results.
Putin sets the stage
What are the dynamics, the major developments, that are driving this world tendency?
To answer that, we can actually start by looking at an entirely different part of the world: The political developments in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. That collapse led to absolute chaos which dwarfed anything that we have seen in the United States or Europe since the end of World War II. For
Aleksandr Dugin: the theoretician for Russian fascism. Ideas matter.
various reasons, as explained in Oaklandsocialist’s article, Alexander Dugan: alchemist of “traditionalism“, mysticism and fascism, that chaos led to a deep seated yearning for a return to the old ways, not the old ways of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, which had been in general rejected, but even earlier – the old ways of feudal Russia, and czarism. It was the rebirth of a philosophy known as “traditionalism“ – a desire to return to ancient traditions. Central to this ideology is the view that society must center around rigidly defined class, caste and gender roles, and everybody must conform to the role in life into which they were born. Traditionalism is also connected to the view of a nation as being one “people” – an ethnic, religious or national group. In its own form appropriate to the culture and history of each individual country or society or grouping, that is exactly what we are seeing today, a birth of one form or another of traditionalism. This ideology is basically the ideology of 21st century fascism, and it is essential to understand it. The article about Dugin mentioned above as well as several suggested at the end of this article provide a more in-depth understanding of what Traditionalism is.
Traditionalism
The rise of religious fundamentalism, including amongst Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, is an important aspect of the rise of Traditionalism.
That birth of traditionalism in the capitalist world, from India to Hungary from Islamic fundamentalism and the rise of the Islamic State in much of the predominantly Islamic world, to Christian evangelism and Maga to the United States, can be explained in part by a profound 2018 article of Rana Dasgupta in the Guardian newspaper. The article is entitled The Demise of the nation state, and basically what Dasgupta describes in depth is how the globalization of capitalism has severely weakened the only form of political rule that workers have ever known under capitalism: rule through the nation states. Because globalization is weakening national governments’ actual ability to control events within their own borders, and because it coincides with enormous economic insecurity, it creates extreme anxiety. This anxiety is strengthened by economic anxiety, although that is very far from the sole issue. Dasgupta concludes, “the true extent of our insecurity will be revealed as the relative power of the US further declines, and it can no longer do anything to control the chaos. It helped create.” That was written five years ago, and it seems prophetic today. Dasgupta’s proposals for reform are entirely inadequate, and in fact, contradict the entire rest of the article, but that is not the point. The point is that Dasgupta described the psychological, which is to say political, consequences of the globalization of capitalism.
National consciousness
The view of being French, or Syrian or American developed in the first place out of the rise of capitalism itself. The rise of capitalism created the nation states, as we know them, and at least in the industrialized world created a national rather than a local or regional consciousness. The next leap in consciousness for workers would be a truly international consciousness. Such a consciousness is already developing, especially amongst tens of millions of youth and others who understand the looming catastrophe of global climate disruption. But many tens of millions of others, including, perhaps a majority of the working class and countries like the United States, have formed the opposite conclusion. “Build a wall around our own country. Keep all foreigners out. Beggar thy neighbor in order to get ahead. America First.” This is the consciousness in one way or another upon which Trump and similar politicians based themselves. The only realistic alternative to that is a consciousness of being part of an international working class, to see one’s “community” or group based on class lines. And to understand that today the interests and fate of our class – the working class – is more connected across national borders than ever before in history.
In order to defeat Trump and Maga – and similar forces around the world – it is insufficient to simply oppose what they stand for; one must have an alternative. The psychology of Maga is based on a yearning to return to the – largely imagined – vision of the old days, a vision of a nation bound together by old culture and traditions, in other words, national unity. The only alternative is to argue for a different sort of unity: international working class solidarity. That might sound like a dream or a cliché on the surface, but what alternative is there? Look at it from a very immediate and practical point of view:
The UAW’s Shawn Fain. He campaigned against Trump and then turned around and supported one of Trump’s most disastrous policies.
Shawn Fain and the union leadership
Recently, the president of the United Auto Workers, Shawn Fain, gave a speech in which he supported Trump’s tariffs. He saw this as the only alternative to so-called “free trade”. And what he advocated was in effect to take industrial jobs away from workers in Mexico, China and any other country, and return those jobs to workers in the United States. That makes solidarity with those workers in those other countries impossible. Fain’s approach is the approach of the entire union leadership in one form or another. It flows logically from the conciliatory policy of the entire union leadership, Shawn Fain included. Here is an example: In the 2021 UAW workers at John Deere here in the United States went on strike. At that time, Oaklandsocialist explained how the UAW‘s strikers at John Deere could Win it all and transform the labor movement by, number one, returning to the strike methods of the 1930s, and number two, adopt a truly international approach. As we wrote at that time, “John Deere has plants in Rosario, Argentina, Montenegro, Brazil and Manheim, Germany, and in India. It also has several plants in China. The UAW should immediately reach out to the workers in those plants to build direct worker-two-worker links and for immediate joint action leading to further international solidarity.” Such solidarity in action would include adopting the policy that if workers in any country strike John Deere, workers in all countries would join them and shut down John Deere entirely. The same approach could be taken in the auto industry in general and even in the tech industry. But failing that approach the labor movement instead calls for taking the jobs away from workers in other countries and bringing them to workers in the United States. That guarantees that international solidarity is ruled out. But if we rule out international working class solidarity, then the only alternative is nationalism, which is exactly what Trump and Maga base themselves on.
And so, we come full circle. During the 2024 election campaign, Shawn Fain campaigned against Trump, calling him a “scab”. Today, he gives critical support to Trump because he supports Trump’s tariffs. The nationalist chickens come home to roost.
In other words, the union leadership has capitulated to the dictatorship of capital. In their view, the best workers can do is to try to hold their heads above water or maybe marginally get ahead at the expense of other workers, whether those other workers are immigrants or workers in an entirely different country. (In the case of the John Deere strike here in the U.S., workers twice rejected the tentative agreement proposed by the union leadership. They found those proposals inadequate. Ultimately their resistance was ground down and they reluctantly accepted a third proposal of that leadership.) No wonder Maga has found a home amongst workers in this country!
Gaza today. No campaign for a better world can ignore Israel’s historic crime, nor US’s collaboration with that crime.
Gaza!
But there is another, and in a way, even more profound issue: as we write this, Israel is wreaking an actual holocaust on the people of Gaza and is preparing to do the same on the people of the West Bank. They are mass murdering children, old people, first responders, reporters, UN workers – anybody who gets in their way or might expose the crimes against humanity for which they are guilty in Gaza. As this is being read, Israel is denying food to the people of Gaza, literally starving the to death. In the West Bank, they have stepped up the wide scale ethnic cleansing, which will inevitably tend to lead towards the same sort of holocaust which they are bringing about in Gaza. How can we, the opponents of Trump’s cruelty, his bullying, his appeal to individualism, selfishness, greed, and nationalism, how can we oppose that if we ignore all of this horrific holocaust created by Israel? How can we stand for international working class solidarity while we ignore the greatest historical crime being carried out right in broad daylight since the days of the Nazi holocaust? And unlike the Nazi holocaust which was partially hidden at the time, this one is being carried out right out in the open. It is documented almost every day in all its horror.The question of whether we can ignore this world historical crime and still stand for something better answers itself. We cannot. Even partially ignoring it (which is what the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez tour tends to do) means a moral failure which will rot any movement against Trump from the inside out.
Ukraine
The same points also apply to Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. There the slaughter has not been quite so horrific, partly because Ukraine has allies. Among other things, this results in their having arms. The invasion of Ukraine also has major significance because of the international role of Putin as the central force for international fascism and related movements, as our pamphlet Putin, Assad and the Syrian Disaster points out. And Putin has a powerful ally: Donald Trump.
Conclusion: A better world is possible, but only if we fight for it
In order to succeed, the movement against Trump and Maga must also present an alternative. The economic measures called for by some like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are okay, but the entire point is that this is entirely inadequate; we must present a view of a different world, a world based on international working class solidarity. That is what the present support for Trump (as explained in Part One of this series) shows. That is what the history recounted above shows. It is impossible to present an alternative, a better world, while ignoring the horrific suffering, the holocaust being brought about by Israel (with U.S. support) on the Palestinian people or the similar crimes against the people of Ukraine. The fact that Trump is allied with Netanyahu and Putin proves the case. A better world is possible… but only if we fight for it.
Further reading: There is a tendency in the United States to just want to “get on with it” and go out and organize. This might seem very practical, but the entire history of our movement shows that in reality it’s a dead end. Oaklandsocialist is dedicated to looking at the forces at work beneath the surface, at looking at how history plays a huge role in determining the present. It is no accident that these articles focus on Russia. That is because Putin and those around him are the centralizing and leading force of global reaction, including fascism. It’s impossible to understand these forces without understanding Putin & Co. If readers have gotten this far, we urge you to take the next step and look at some of these suggested articles below… and subscribe to Oaklandsocialist!
The Demise of the Nation State, by Rana Dasgupta. As explained above, this very long article shows how the old political arrangements are breaking down.
Aleksandr Dugin: Alchemist of “Traditionalism”, mysticism and fascism. As we said, “Traditionalism” is the ideology of 21st century reaction and even outright fascism so it is essential to understand this ideology, including how it developed. Dugin is the main bard of Traditionalism. This article explains how he came to this view and goes more into depth about what Traditionalism is.
“Traditional values in Russia”: The rise of Traditionalism and homophobia: This article deals with the following:
- Putin and Russian Traditionalism
- Traditionalism: a global phenomenon
- Christian fundamentalist Traditionalism in the United States
- A summary of what Traditionalism is and the reasons for its global rise
- Traditionalism, the patriarchal nuclear family and homophobia
- Traditionalism: the philosophy of 21st century fascism
Putin, Assad and the Syrian disaster. This pamphlet was written in 2018. A lot has changed since then, most especially the overthrow of Assad and Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. But how and why Putin developed as he did is vital for understanding these more recent changes. That is what this pamphlet discusses.
The “Traditionalist” world view behind right wing populism, interview with Ben Teitelbaum. Teitelbaum is the author of War for Eternity. He spent a lot of time talking with Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin. In this interview, he discusses the whole concept of Traditionalism, and more. For those looking for a good book to read, you could not do much better than his War for Eternity.
Ultimately, to combat Trump and MAGA we must understand the reasons for his rise. This stems from complex world historical developments.
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Categories: History, Trump, Uncategorized, United States
Hi John. In the first paragraph, you write that we cannot combat Trump’s bullying mentality based on moral appeals. But later you define ignoring Gaza as a moral failure. I’m just trying to understand your arguments better.
Good question. As I explained, the most effective way to combat Trump’s bullying is through explaining the necessity for working class solidarity, which is the opposite of what Trump and Maga stand for. That does not mean we ignore our own state of mind, our own morale or “morality” if we understand “morality” to mean that which enables us to more clearly see and fight for working class unity.
A journalist reporting on the Virginia colony in the 1650’s, had to explain to his European readers that “white people” was the new label that Europeans were calling themselves over here now. So, it can truly be said that Europeans came to America, and sent “white people” back. The label was created in America at precisely the time they were institutionalizing Africa slavery in the colonies. That why it had such an incredibly strong material foundation, and became the template almost every other form of racial and sexual oppression. The label first appear in laws forbidding marriage between “white people” and Negroes.
When John writes about “the working class,” I get the feeling that he’s only thinking about white workers. Like when he says “perhaps a majority of the working class and countries like the United States, have formed the opposite conclusion. “Build a wall around our own country. Keep all foreigners out. Beggar thy neighbor in order to get ahead. America First.””
This is only true for that majority of white workers that put Trump in the White House. Yes, I know that he can argue that technically he’s correct because white workers are such a majority, and the more progressive workers of color can be dissolved into this singular “working class” in such a way that this progressive minority disappears. When he refers to “the working class” it don’t get the feeling that he’s talking about people that look like me.
He goes on to say “Maga is part of a historical international tendency that actually goes back 30 years.” I would say it goes back considerably further than that—see above. After all, Trump is using a 1798 law to deport probably exclusively immigrants of color without any due process. He looks to the period after Black Reconstruction was overthrown, and the US was conquering colonies of brown people as when America was great before. And his most fervent efforts seem focused on overturning the gains made in the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and 70s, including those made by women and LBGT.
He says “The psychology of Maga is based on a yearning to return to the – largely imagined – vision of the old days, a vision of a nation bound together by old culture and traditions, in other words, national unity.” This is obviously the vision of a white nation that largely excluded black and brown people
This brings me to my main problem with John’s piece. He speaks of “nationalism” when he should be speaking of “white nationalism,” as when he say “the only alternative is nationalism, which is exactly what Trump and Maga base themselves on.” That’s just patently false, if nationalism refers to a unity of all citizens of a nation. What we are dealing with here is “white nationalism.” Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, & Donald Trump, aren’t nationalists, they are white nationalists. They have the goal of creating a white ethno-state in which black and brown people are powerless, expelled, or exterminated. John completely disappears that. Every administration from George Washington to Biden was a nationalism, not internationalism, administration. This Trump administration distinguishes itself by being a white nationalist, white supremacist, regime of a new type.
White nationalism is a new form of nationalism, in that it seeks to create a new supra-nationalism. That’s why the label white people was created in the first place. It was a largely successful effort to replace the various European nationalities that populated the North American colonies with a single white nation. The 30 year old “historical international tendency” that John sees MAGA as being a part of is an international white nationalist tendency. I think you will find that Bukele, Milei, and Modi think of themselves as “white” even if you don’t. Dugin “traditionalism“ is largely a cover for white nationalism.
John erases this important problem which has stopped the US working class from being what it should be, so he can jump right to the goal of international working class unity. That’s how he could pen this piece without ever using the words “white,” “race” or “racism.” The problem is that every black or brown person has been living in a climate of fear since Trump’s inauguration, because we can see that the hammer is falling on us first. And in reading this piece, we’ll see those concerns obscured. This is no way to build the working class unity John says he wants.
I disagree with Clay that this all boils down to white nationalism. Capitalism created the nation states and it has ruled through the nation states for its entire history. Yes, white nationalism has been a huge part of this, especially in the United States. But the breakdown of the nation states and the rise of nationalism is far more than that. Take, for example, what happened when the British voted in Brexit. One of the immigrant groups that was most subject to attack was the Poles. Or consider the attacks on Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa. Traditionalism goes far beyond white nationalism. One of the foremost Traditionalist heads of state is Narendra Modi in India whose rule is based on a return to Hindu “traditions”, not being “white” as Clay claims, and is against the Muslims in India. The Islamic fundamentalists base themselves on traditionalism as do the rulers in Iran. And I think Clay’s claim that Dugin’s traditionalism is simply a cover for white nationalism is mistaken.
In fact, when one looks at the origins of traditionalism, one sees the exact opposite of what Clay claims. As I explain in this article https://oaklandsocialist.com/2023/03/17/aleksandr-dugin-alchemist-of-traditionalism-mysticism-and-fascism/, Dugin ” started by reading two philosophers: René Guénon and Julius Evola. Guénon was a founder of a school of thought called “Traditionalism”. He believed in the eternal truth of the ancient ways, first delving into Hinduism and then into Islam. He converted to Islam and lived out the latter part of his life in Egypt. The author of Eternal Wars, Benjamin Teitelbaum, explains that Guénon “celebrated timeless values.” He was apolitical, interested in just exploring some great “truths” for all times and places. Teitelbaum also explains that for traditionalists, human history is a cycle that “proceeds through four ages, moving from golden to silver to bronze to dark, and then – after a cataclysmic event – back to golden again.”’
Inwould also remind Clay that “family values” plays a huge role in traditionalism, and that this theme features first and foremost an attack on LGBTQ people as well as women. In Russia, for example, it is illegal to be openly gay but legal for a man to beat his wife, as long as that beating doesn’t result in her being in the hospital overnight, in which case it’s a misdemeanor.