In response to recent steps by Donald Trump’s administration at home and abroad, Democrats and the middle-class left have launched new attacks on the president. All political issues get reduced to “for or against Trump,” ensuring that the fundamental class division in society that shapes all politics — between the tens of millions of workers on one side and the capitalist ruling families on the other — is obscured.
As a result, the “lesser-evil” choices presented by the capitalist rulers’ Democratic and Republican parties are made to appear as the only alternatives working people have to choose from.
Debate among Democrats about what went wrong for them in 2024 has largely been set aside, replaced by hysteria about the team Trump has assembled and the steps they’ve taken. Illinois Gov. Jay Robert Pritzker declared the president and his supporters “Nazis” Feb. 19, as Democrats did throughout 2024. Now the liberal media say Trump is creating a “constitutional crisis.”
The new frenzy of Trump hatred is amplified by the tens of thousands of upper-middle-class do-gooders who honeycomb federal agencies, seeking to administer the lives of working people. With Trump appointee Elon Musk cutting back parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy, some in this self-serving layer see their perks and road to personal advancement threatened.
Trump’s establishment of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “is brute dictatorship of the worst kind,” Harvard professor Laurence Tribe insisted in the New York Times.
Many politically correct administrators also react against Trump’s upending of their policies on diversity, equity and inclusion; his assertion of the scientific fact that there are only two sexes; and his administration’s ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports. These steps are widely popular among working people.
Liberals also complain that the new administration’s push for talks to end Moscow’s war on Ukraine, and its use of tariffs to have their way against rivals and allies alike, is undermining U.S. interests. In fact, Trump is utilizing the U.S. rulers’ vast economic and military clout to try to impose stability on their terms, the better to monopolize resources and markets and extend U.S. imperialism’s predatory reach.
Trump, like Joseph Biden before him, tries to line working people up behind our “own” ruling class and against all foes, and in doing so, against fellow workers worldwide.
Trump’s foreign policies, Nicholas Kristof complains in the Times Feb. 19, “mark an abandonment of the rules-based international order that amplified American soft-power.” “Soft-power” is Kristof’s cover-up for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and elsewhere aimed at preserving Washington’s position at the head of the global imperialist pecking order.
Vance on free speech in Munich
A special target of liberal outrage is Vice President J.D. Vance’s Feb. 14 address on free speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
Vance told the gathering that the greatest threat to Europe “is not Russia, it’s not China,” but growing attacks on free speech and working-class voters by woke-minded governments across Europe. “If you’re running in fear of your own voters there is nothing America can do for you,” he said.
Liberal commentators in the U.S. condemned Vance’s remarks, arguing that German and other European governments need to limit free speech to protect abortion rights, silence “hateful content” and political views that align with Moscow’s, and to prevent the rise of “another Hitler.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rebuked Vance for meeting with Alice Weidel, leader of Alternative for Germany, a conservative bourgeois party that liberals call “far right.” Its rising support, liberals insist, shows working people are becoming more bigoted and reactionary.
A working-class road forward
The political conflicts at Munich reflect the sharpening rivalries between the world’s imperialist powers. Each is driven to push its own national interests amid today’s wars and economic crises at the expense of their competitors.
Since the U.S. rulers moved more aggressively worldwide after the fall of the Soviet Union, these conflicts have grown. By acting on the false premise that they’d won the Cold War, the U.S. rulers believed they could assert their power unopposed, accelerating imperialisms’ inexorable drive toward a third world war.
More workers sense the problems we face today run very deep and that neither the Democrats nor Republicans have any interest in dealing with what our class confronts. But until working people break from the rulers’ Democratic and Republican parties and set out to build a party of our own, a party of labor, we won’t be able to make progress.
“The shrewd imperialists knew that the only way people would run toward the fox would be if you showed them the wolf,” Malcolm X explained after the 1964 presidential election, which pitted Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater. Malcolm X and the Socialist Workers Party, which ran its own candidate, Clifton DeBerry, for president that year, were the only political forces claiming to speak for working people that didn’t urge a vote for Johnson, in order to keep out Goldwater.
The Socialist Workers Party is running candidates for municipal and statewide offices around the country in 2025. They explain that all political questions are class questions. Working people need to chart an independent political road forward built on our sharply counterposed class interests against the bosses and their parties. Join the SWP campaign!