Birth of a Bonaparte?: Trump and the End of US Bourgeois Democracy

Bluebird argues that Donald Trump’s recent presidential victory has planted the seeds of a Bonapartist state and, as a result, the end of US bourgeois democracy may be in sight.

*Donald Trump (Rawpixel | National Archives and Records Administration).*

Preface to the Cosmonaut Edition

At the recommendation of Cosmonaut, a couple lengthy sections have been omitted from this version of our article. The omissions were not made because the sections in question were deemed to be of insufficient quality, but because their subject matter is really deserving of their own article(s). On this point, we completely agree with the editorial team at Cosmonaut. On the other hand, the sections in question, which dealt with the relation of the second Trump Administration to the US Military and Trump’s deportation plan, are arguably the most consequential of the subjects covered in this article. Given our intense work schedule, we don’t know exactly when we will be able to write a separate article on these subjects, which is why in two weeks time we will be publishing the “director’s cut” version of this article on our Substack. Complete or not, all the subjects covered in this article are still very much in development, which is why we will continue to watch them with the closest attention. We highly encourage other revolutionists to do the same.

Introduction

It brings us no pleasure to announce that our anticipation of a Donald Trump victory in the 2024 US Presidential election was well-founded. In a recent article written in the wake of the Trump-Biden debate, we discussed in excruciating detail all the forces at play in the 2024 Presidential election, how they evolved out of previous election cycles, and how they pointed towards a Trump victory. Before Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, we speculated that this would probably be insufficient to defeat Trump. Though we were hoping Trump, or more accurately, Trump’s movement, would be temporarily defeated, we did not see anything between July and November 2024 that inspired faith in us that Trump would lose the election. All of the debates, all of the polls, none of it changed the underlying forces driving this election cycle and US politics more broadly. We therefore stood firm in the face of it all, maintaining that while we would like extra time to prepare for the coming of an American Bonaparte, their arrival is probably already upon us.

Now that the polls are closed, the talking heads of the bourgeoisie are predictably vomiting out erroneous narratives. The explanations we intend to give here differ qualitatively from our bourgeois counterparts in the following way: we have no intention of making excuses for the “failures” of the Democratic Party. We do not endeavor to understand the Democrats’ loss so that they may enjoy future victories, but so that we can move through the current political crisis from an informed position, and, if possible, emerge on the other side. For us, the question is not a matter of how we got here, but of where we go from here? What is the correct response to an event which was as undesirable as it was foreseeable? These are the questions we are asking. Whether or not it’s even possible to answer them at the current moment, we don’t know. What we intend to do here is open the conversation; to begin to draw a sketch of how we are to move forward.

Since this article is a continuation of a previous piece, it may be helpful to provide a summary of that article here. Even if Biden had appeared younger and more energetic in his debate with Trump, it was not his affectation, but the message he tried to sell to the American people that caused us to believe that the Democrats would lose the 2024 election. In the debate, Biden hardly differentiated himself from Trump. Instead, his message was a less coherent version of what he said in his speech immediately following his victory in the 2020 elections: “I’ll work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as [I will for] those who did.”¹ Something that was desired by neither those who voted for him, nor wanted by those who didn’t vote for him. Biden’s entire administration was characterized by trying to manage irreconcilable contradictions that demanded a resolution, and instead his administration delayed and avoided anything resembling answers to the problems we discussed in our previous article. We were also quite clear that a Trump administration would offer no resolution to the contradictions which called forth the second Trump administration, but whereas Biden’s administration tried to ignore these contradictions, Trump appears to intend on giving them some attention.

Though Joe Biden had not even dropped out of the race when we wrote our previous article, we went decidedly against the view of Liberal media by asserting that any candidate likely to replace Biden stood no better chance of beating Trump than Biden himself. Nevertheless, we understood that the topics we were writing about were highly fluid, hence why we waited until October to publish our article despite anticipating almost everything that took place after the debate between Trump and Biden. We concluded the first half of our article by asserting that the old status quo was dead and that a new one was struggling to be born, but what that new status quo might look like required further exposition.

We then turned our attention briefly to the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Trump v. United States, as we believe that the Court created a framework whereby the President could constitutionally abolish the US Constitution with their decision in this case.

Then, finally, with all the context established, we explained that we believe that Trump is leading a highly developed Bonapartist movement in the United States. And that this is highly significant, as the rise of a Bonaparte anywhere in the world has always coincided with inter-imperialist war, but also because a Bonaparte has never come from the world’s foremost Capitalist country before. There are no limits to the destruction that might be caused by a fully-realized American Bonapartism, and that is something that the entire world should take very seriously.

We ended our last article, however, with a glimmer of hope—a glimpse of a potential phoenix rising from the ashes—as the forces driving the development of an American Bonapartism are the very same that drive the development of revolutionary Proletarian movements which will inevitably oppose Bonapartism. Trump, no matter how hard he tries, will not be able to fully kill the Proletarian movement, as the reindustrialization of the US required to wage a world war will necessarily provide a catalyst for the regeneration of the industrial Proletariat; the most revolutionary segment of the Proletariat. Hence, the more Trump embraces Bonapartism, the more fully realized American Bonapartism becomes, the more Trump creates the conditions for a viable American Bolshevism. What he will produce, above all else, are his own gravediggers. But in order that the realization of that glimmer of hope occurs, it is of utmost importance that people take action to build the movement that will oppose American Bonapartism. People do not simply passively experience history; history is made by people, but not in conditions of their choosing.

Two Rights Don’t Make a Left

As we watched coverage of the 2024 US Presidential election, we could not escape the feeling that we would be able to write the same article, regardless of which party won the elections. Only a few small tweaks and a change of titles would be necessary depending on which party was victorious: “Victory at What Cost?” if it was the Democrats, and “Birth of a Bonaparte?” if it was the Republicans. And so we start, as we will make clear, where any structural analysis of the election must start: with an examination of the contradictions within the Democratic Party.

Let us first begin by stating a basic fact: the Democratic Party is not a progressive party. This is not only evident in the Party’s support for the genocide of the Palestinian people, but also in the way the party has increased police funding, overseen the construction of “cop cities” all over the country,² and continued the US’ longstanding racist policies regarding immigration and border security. The reactionary tendencies of the Democratic Party are not new either, going all the way back to the Party’s inception, from the Trail of Tears, to slavery, to segregation. The fact that the Republican Party also enthusiastically supported segregation does not wash the blood off the Democrats’ hands.

People who maintain that the Democratic Party is a progressive party will point to the New Deal, the Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act as progressive policy initiatives that were undertaken by the Democratic Party. While the Democratic Party deserves credit where it is due for passing such historic legislation, this does not ultimately change the fact that these progressive policies are an exception to the rule. The New Deal had explicit carve-outs designed to keep racialized peoples in poverty. The Democratic Party fought hard to maintain racial segregation until it was essentially forced to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts by mass movements.

There’s also the fact that all this progressive legislation was passed decades ago and has since been mostly deconstructed by both Democratic and Republican administrations. What has the Democratic Party done lately? Collaborate with Republican congress-members to pass a House of Representatives resolution denouncing the “horrors of socialism,”³ What kind of progressive party works with a reactionary party to denounce a social movement that is widely considered to be a progressive social force, not only around the world, but also in the US? Does any of this sound like the actions of a “progressive” party? What about “progressive” Party members like Ilhan Omar, or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez? For every progressive Democrat there are a dozen conservative/establishment Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Joe Manchin. The entire reason why these “progressive” Democrats get as much media attention as they do is because they are exceptions to the rule; they don’t perfectly fit the mold; they stand out among a background of cookie-cutter Democrats. All these “progressive” Democrats really do is help the larger party launder its image.

Despite all this, the Democratic Party is seen by many as a progressive party and enjoys the support of various progressive groups. The legacy of the New Deal has ensured that trade unions overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act have had a similar effect in terms of ensuring that civil rights groups overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party also enjoys broad support from the LGBTQIA+ community.⁴ While the Democratic Party has all of these progressive peoples in its voting constituency, it also has broad support from the capitalist class, who cares little for progressive politics, especially when it obstructs profit accumulation. We saw this contradiction play out in the Biden administration’s support for the genocide of the Palestinian people, where the administration has remained steadfast in its support for Israel despite roughly 77% of Democratic voters wanting a ceasefire.⁵

So, we arrive at the principle contradiction within the Democratic Party: on the one hand, we have progressive supporters, who are generally younger; and on the other hand, we have capital, which tends to be older, and is objectively conservative. The Democratic Party is barely able to win elections with this divided constituency. Losing either camp would spell the end of the Party as we’ve known it since roughly the 1970s.

This contradiction within the Democratic Party also manifests as a contradiction between short-term and long-term interests. Long-term interests dictate that the Democratic Party should work on consolidating the support of its younger progressive constituents, as they are a growing demographic that holds the key to the Party’s future. On the other hand, there are the conservative Capital interests in the Party’s constituency, who are antagonistic to the progressive elements of the Party’s constituency, but upon whom the Party also heavily depends to win elections.

In our earlier piece, we speculated that the Democrats were only able to win the 2020 Presidential election because the Chamber of Commerce, which traditionally leans Republican, threw its support behind the Democratic Party due to dissatisfaction with the Trump Administration’s handling of the pandemic.⁶ In truth, we do feel like this is a reductive explanation of how the Democrats won in 2020, but it was the only irregularity we noticed in the constituencies of each party, so it seemed, and still seems, to be among the most plausible explanations. We explicitly stated, however, that without the pandemic, it would be incredibly challenging for the Democratic Party to intentionally repeat a maneuver which was not intentional to begin with.⁷ The Democrats seem to have learned the opposite lesson, however, as the 2024 Presidential campaigns of both Biden, and later Harris, had numerous explicit overtures to conservatism. The endorsement of Harris by the Cheney family was arguably the highest expression of this.⁸ But the Biden and Harris campaigns’ adoption of Republican framing on the US-Mexico border also should not be ignored. These explicit overtures to conservatism had the predictable effect of alienating large chunks of the progressive segment of the Democratic Party’s voting constituency. Though the votes are not fully counted yet, it appears as though Trump will finish with roughly the same number of votes as in 2020, about 74-75 million votes,⁹ whereas it looks like Harris will have several million votes fewer than her predecessor Biden. Over 81 million people voted for Biden, but only about 75 million people voted for Kamala Harris.¹⁰

And now for an interesting question: what if the Democratic Party’s 2024 campaign strategy had worked? What if they had somehow been able to win conservative votes without alienating progressive voters? Well, with the Republican Party electorally defeated, there would no longer be a basis for unity among the two camps of the Democratic Party’s voting constituency. Any policy decision which favors one camp would risk alienating the other camp, leaving the Party paralyzed, even if there were no Republican opposition. The contradictions within the Democratic Party’s constituency are such that winning elections comes at the expense of being able to do anything once in power, and doing anything while in power comes at the expense of winning elections.

The basis for unity among the camps of the Democratic Party’s constituency is not to be found in the Democratic Party, but in the Republican Party. The two main camps of the Democratic Party’s voting constituency may be diametrically opposed to each other, but, under the right conditions, are able to unite on the basis of a mutual distaste for the Republican Party. Therefore, if the Republican Party did not exist, the Democratic Party would invent it.¹¹ Such a statement might sound hyperbolic if it were not an explicit strategy of the Democratic Party. In the 2022 midterm elections, for example, the Democratic Party actually donated money to the campaigns of Trump-aligned Republican candidates on the assumption that these candidates would be easier to defeat than moderate Republicans.¹² Even though Republicans flipped the House of Representatives during the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats’ strategy of funding the campaigns of Trump-aligned Republicans seems to have worked for the races that were targeted.¹³ This is illustrative of several points: 1) that it is indeed the Republican Party, specifically its most fascistic elements, which are the unifying force for the Democratic Party’s voting constituency; 2) the Democrats know this to be the case and design campaign strategies around this reality; 3) the broader efficacy of this strategy is highly questionable.¹⁴

Now consider this from the constituents’ perspective. Everyone involved in politics gets involved as a matter of personal interest. Sometimes this personal interest is quite shallow, as in the case of capitalists who only seek to enlarge their profits. For many other people, it can be a matter of life and death, as in the case of needing access to family planning. Everyone involved needs and/or wants something, and they use politics as the means by which they attempt to obtain it. So consider what it looks like to a voting constituent of the Democratic Party, who looks at the elected officials and sees contradictory sloganeering; certainly some slogans they agree with, but others they fundamentally disagree with; sees performative outrage and grandstanding from the Party when its out of power, but is impotent and useless once in power; sees the Party weaponize negative partisanship against its own constituents;¹⁵ all the while these constituents are not getting what they want from the politicians they are supporting. Is that a party that anyone would expect to indefinitely maintain the support of its constituents? Of course not. People expect results, and the Democratic Party, for reasons we have outlined above, is caught in a contradiction that leaves it unable to produce results for its constituents without tearing itself apart.

In some ways, it is actually to the benefit of the Democratic Party that they lost the 2024 Presidential election and US Senate, as a new Republican administration has the potential to unify the Democratic Party’s constituency in a way that would be impossible under a Democratic administration. The actual results of the 2024 Presidential election tells a different story, however. As already stated above, Kamala Harris is on pace to finish with far fewer votes than Joe Biden did in the 2020 Presidential election. This does not necessarily mean that the Democratic Party’s constituency is shrinking, as other Democratic candidates performed well in their races. Dearborn, Michigan offers a striking example of this phenomena. In 2020, Joe Biden won 69% of the vote in Dearborn, whereas Kamala Harris won only 36% of the Dearborn vote in 2024, while Donald Trump won 43%. This cannot be attributed to racism and/or sexism directed at Kamala Harris however, as Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian Muslim woman, won her race with 62% of the Dearborn vote.¹⁶ Other Democratic women of color like Representatives Ilhan Omar and Summer Lee also won their races. All this implies that the Democratic Party is not necessarily losing constituents, but it does imply that the Party’s constituents have grown impatient enough that they are no longer willing to “vote blue no matter who.” If the Democratic Party refuses to acknowledge this reality, as they have done so consistently, then it will spell the end of the Party as a force in American politics.

So will the Democrats learn from yet another entirely predictable election defeat? Of course not. We can already see this in the ways that Democratic Party hardliners have reacted to Trump’s election victory. Hardline Democrats have blamed racism and sexism for Harris’ defeat,¹⁷ even though other Democratic women of color won their races and out-performed Harris. Hardline Democrats blasted Jill Stein as a “spoiler” prior to the election,¹⁸ only for Trump’s margin of victory to be so large that Harris still would have lost if every Stein voter had voted for Harris instead.¹⁹ Hardline Democrats have said that Latin Americans deserve to be deported for not voting for Harris,²⁰ even though the Democratic Party’s adoption of Republican framing on the US-Mexico border actively alienated Latin American voters. Hardline Democrats have blamed Arab Americans for not voting Democrat even though they did vote for Democrats that actually made appeals to the Arab American community,²¹ whereas Kamala Harris sent Richie Torres and Bill Clinton to Michigan, the state with the largest Arab American population, to defend the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.²² In short, rather than acknowledge that their campaign strategy actively alienated voters that they needed in order to win the election, hardline Democrats are rejecting the idea that they are in any way responsible for their election loss. Instead of learning the correct lessons from their failure, hardline Democrats maintain that they have no lessons to learn. This is the same way they reacted to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 election, which was an even more outrageous response at the time, as Clinton at least managed to win the popular vote.

What does all of this add up to? Let us recite the facts. The Democratic Party has lost the ability to manage the contradictions among its constituency. It ignores its constituency as long as they turn out to vote Democrat, and treats them with contempt when they do not. It cannot make policy and win elections at the same time. And on top of all of this, it refuses to acknowledge any of these realities and learn from its mistakes. The result of all of this has been entirely predictable: the Democrats are now losing support when they are in power and when they are out of power. This all points towards the end of the Democratic Party, at least as it has existed for the past several decades. Given everything we have discussed so far, we believe that this assertion would hold true even if the Democrats had won the 2024 Presidential election. The contradictions which are now tearing the Party apart are intensifying whether the Democrats win or lose.

Under normal circumstances, we might speculate that in spite of all the Democratic Party’s problems, they might still flip Congress in the 2026 midterm elections, as it is quite common for Congress to flip in midterm elections. But we’re no longer living under normal circumstances. The Democratic Party’s voting constituency is severely fractured, as they could not be unified by the threat of a second Trump Presidency. There is also a greater-than-zero chance that there will be no midterm elections once Trump takes office, since there’s no telling what Trump could be capable of in his second term as President.

But why would we even want a “return to normal”? The “old normal” is precisely what produced Trump. The “old normal” wasn’t good for most people. The “old normal” was never sustainable. The conditions we currently find ourselves in are the results of that “old normal.” There is no salvation to be found in the old status quo, nor in the current one. What we require is a real movement which seeks to abolish the current state of things.

Some readers of this article and our other work may be asking “what point is there in all this criticism of the Democratic Party? If the Republican Party is such a massive problem, then why not criticize them instead of the Democrats?” These questions are incredibly misplaced for several reasons. Firstly, as we have tried to explain, we will never be rid of the Republican Party as long as the Democratic Party exists because the latter depends on the existence of the former. If, by some miracle, the Republican Party ceased to exist, or simply became a non-factor in US politics, there would be nothing to contain the contradictions within the voting constituency of the Democratic Party. Without the Republican Party, the Democratic Party would tear itself apart. The Democratic Party cannot be part of any solution to the current crisis in US politics because it is part of the problem.

Secondly, what could we possibly say about the Republican Party that hasn’t already been said? The Republican Party is a vanguard of American reaction whose decadence is only exceeded by that of the Democratic Party. The Republicans have embraced fascist ideology, fascist policy, and are leading the charge to abolish bourgeois democracy in the US. They make no effort to conceal any of this. What is accomplished by criticizing the Republican Party? They are already widely acknowledged to be awful by their detractors; their most ardent supporters will not listen to any criticism, no matter how true or biting that criticism might be; and those who are in between these two extremes will likely be alienated from the Republican Party once the Party’s policies go into effect. The Republicans do not succeed in their goals because of their popularity, but in spite of their unpopularity.²³

The Significance of Trump’s Victory

Seeing as how we anticipated Trump’s election victory in July, as well as that the removal of Biden as the Democrats’ nominee would not prevent Trump from winning the Presidential election, it may seem strange that we would want to write about the significance of Trump’s victory. While so many events played out exactly as we anticipated, the reasons for why those events ended up happening changed in ways we did not anticipate. Any analysis of the election, and by extension politics in the US more broadly, would be incomplete if we did not seriously engage with facts that we believe to be highly significant.

Our anticipation of Trump’s victory in the 2024 Presidential election rested on several observations: 1) As already discussed in this article, the pandemic was probably the deciding factor in the 2020 election and the strategy run by the Biden campaign probably would not have been successful under normal circumstances; 2) while Biden outperformed Trump in 2020, Trump also outperformed his 2016 campaign, adding about 12 million votes to his constituency; 3) The finance sector of the economy, whose political lean has historically correlated with the winner of the Presidential election, was leaning Republican.²⁴

Our first observation, that the campaign strategy run by Biden in 2020 could not be replicated outside the conditions of the pandemic, proved to be spectacularly correct, as Kamala Harris lost by a much wider margin than we would have speculated in July. Therefore, we will move onto the second factor we believed would contribute to a 2024 Trump victory: the growth of his constituency. Trump was able to enlarge his constituency among a diverse number of demographics that all deserve special attention.

The first of these were African American and Latin American voters. While people find various ways to express that the Democratic Party has done little to appeal to these groups in recent memory, it doesn’t automatically follow that these groups would run straight into the arms of the Republican Party, which has become even more hostile than usual to racialized people in recent years. It is also inaccurate to simply explain African and Latin American voters shifting towards the Republican Party as them “voting Republican in spite of the Party’s racism,” as this is also frequently the case when these groups vote for the Democratic Party. There is something which is drawing these voters to the Republican Party, and it is more complicated than the presence, or lack thereof, of racism.

As it regards African American voters, all sources indicate that Trump’s gains with them were small. The safest assumption would probably be to say that Trump has held on to the African American small business owners with which he made gains in the 2020 Presidential election.²⁵ Trump’s gains among Latin American voters tells a very different story. The margin by which Trump increased his share of the Latin American vote from 2020 is probably too large to simply explain as increased support from small business owners, as some sources say that over 50% of Latin American men and 37% of Latin American women voted for Trump in 2024.²⁶

This massive shift is likely being driven by a number of factors. Firstly, we must acknowledge a fact that mainstream political pundits struggle to comprehend: that Latin Americans are arguably the most dynamic voting demographic in the US. The Cuban diaspora in Florida, for example, has a longstanding reactionary reputation, as many of these people descend from those deposed by the Cuban Revolution. As a result, Cuban Floridians have been known to lean heavily Republican for decades. The Puerto Rican diaspora, by contrast, has a reputation for being more traditionally liberal, although the diaspora is known to contain extremely progressive tendencies too, owing in no small part to Puerto Rico’s status as a colony of the US. Racial divides also exist among Latin Americans Many Latin Americans consider themselves white, and vote like white voters. Many Latin Americans also experience racism from other Americans, and vote like voters from racialized communities. Border states like Texas, New Mexico, and California have large populations of natural-born Latin American US citizens, but the fact that these natural-born citizens still have to compete with undocumented migrants on the labor market can contribute to strong anti-immigrant sentiments, even though the only difference between them and the workers they’re in competition with is that they were born on opposite sides of an imaginary line. These are just some of the many factors that make Latin American voters an incredibly dynamic voting demographic, and only by acknowledging this quality and the contradictions therein can we understand how someone as racist as Trump could expand his vote total among Latin Americans by such wide margins as to render social class an insufficient explanation.²⁷

On the other hand, it is possible that Trump’s gains with Latin American voters may be largely illusory, as the statistics we’ve cited can only count those who actually voted. We know that fewer people voted in this election than in 2020. It may simply appear that more Latin Americans voted for Trump because of how many voters did not show up to vote Democrat. Whether Trump actually increased his popularity among Latin Americans or not, it is entirely the fault of the Democratic Party and their terrible campaign strategy, which we have already outlined in the previous section of this article.²⁸

Ultimately, Trump did not win by expanding his coalition, as it is unlikely that he would have won had the Democrats not lost so many votes from 2020. The story of Trump’s 2024 election victory is not so much a story of growth, so much as it’s a story of consolidation. Even though Trump lost the 2020 election, the high vote counts of both he and Biden were, at the time, speculated to be an anomaly, as the necessity of mail-in voting created by the pandemic allowed both candidates to reach more voters than during a regular election. With the passage of the 2024 election however, we can see that Trump’s 2020 vote total was not a fluke, but, in actuality, was the emergence of a political formation which Trump began constructing in 2016. The 2024 election served as an affirmation of the vitality of the formation Trump has built.

However, there’s nothing remarkable about Trump making gains among African American and Latin American business owners in 2020, since their interests are naturally aligned with those of a businessman like Trump. The truly remarkable aspect of the Trump coalition is that segment of working class voters, particularly in the Rust Belt, that he has managed to hold onto from 2020 to 2024.

Historically, it has been possible to pacify the proletariat by offering concessions to it, which is essentially the underlying logic of Social-Democracy. But Trump offers no concessions, he makes no promises to raise taxes on corporations or strengthen regulations which would benefit the working class. As a capitalist, Trump’s own class interests are totally antithetical to those of the proletariat, yet we see broad support for Trump among specific segments of the working class, specifically those who are now closer to the lumpenproletariat. And herein lies the secret to Trump’s appeal to workers in the Rust Belt: the workers are still there, but the jobs are gone. Decades of offshoring and economic crisis has left the Rust Belt in a state of extreme decay. Hence why it is called the “Rust Belt”: in reference to the rust that has accumulated on industrial facilities that have ceased operation. If there were any doubt about Trump’s support among former industrial workers in the Rust Belt, those doubts were laid to rest when he won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—all Rust Belt states.²⁹

The lumpenproletariat is part of the proletariat insofar as they have nothing to sell but their ability to work, the class interests of the Lumpenproletariat differ from the rest of the proletariat. The fact that the lumpenproletariat is often formally unemployed or underemployed means that they must first find employment before they can even realize the necessity of seizing the means of production. The precarious existence of the lumpenproletariat makes them ideal scabs/blacklegs/strikebreakers for the bourgeoisie, and in this regard the lumpenproletariat often finds itself at odds with the rest of the proletariat. They thus form a reactionary substratum of the revolutionary class. For this reason, the right figure, in the right conditions, with the right rhetoric, can weaponize the reactionary tendencies of the lumpenproletariat. This is a key feature of Bonapartism, albeit one that doesn’t get as much attention as other aspects of the phenomenon.

The class composition of Bonapartism often confounds many a vulgar Marxist, as it appears not to be the dictatorship of a single class, but a dictatorship of several classes with opposing interests. It is precisely this class formation, however, that furnishes everything we need to understand Bonapartism and how it works. The traditional class formation of Bonapartism consists of the bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie, the peasantry (where the peasantry still exists), and the lumpenproletariat. With the exception of the lumpenproletariat, all of these classes have an interest in maintaining private property, and it is on this basis that Bonapartism is able to unite them. The Bonapartist formation is able to add the lumpenproletariat to its constituency by employing them in the police, the national guard, and the standing army, among other things.

But how does Bonapartism resolve the contradictions that exist, not only between these classes, but within the classes that are part of the Bonapartist formation? Well, it doesn’t, nor can it, as Bonapartism is a product of all of them. The extreme crisis conditions which cause these warring classes to unite are such that their mutual interest in the preservation of private property overrides the antagonisms that exist between them. “The contradictions are not resolved, but settled” as we like to put it.

Because the contradictions within and between the classes of the Bonapartist formation cannot be resolved, and because they are brought together by extreme economic crisis which demands immediate attention, there is no room for democracy under the Bonapartist regime. If the contradictions which give rise to Bonapartism were resolvable through the medium of bourgeois democracy, then there would be no need for Bonapartism. And, indeed, as long as bourgeois democracy is capable of resolving contradictions among the bourgeoisie, or as long as the bourgeoisie believe that bourgeois democracy is still able to accomplish this task, we generally do not see Bonapartism replace bourgeois democracy. The coup d’etat of Louis Bonapart would not have been possible if the National Assembly had not vested so much power in his office over the course of his solitary term as President of the Second French Republic. After failing to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923, Hitler, after being appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg, would constitutionally overthrow the Weimar Republic using the Enabling Act passed by the Reichstag. In all instances, Bonapartism has only been able to abolish bourgeois democracy with the active or passive consent of the Bourgeoisie.

This brings us back to the 2024 Presidential election and our reasons for anticipating a Trump victory. During our research, we found the political lean of the finance sector of the economy to correlate closely with the winner of the Presidential election.³⁰ However, the political lean of the finance sector ended up changing between July and November of 2024.³¹ By November, finance was leaning Democrat, yet Trump won the election anyway. The last time a Presidential candidate won their election without winning the finance sector of the economy was when Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential election. If we try to explain this as a product of Obama out-fundraising and out-spending Romney, then it becomes impossible to explain Trump’s victory in the 2016 Presidential election, as Hillary Clinton out-fundraised and out-spent Trump in that election.

Deeper study of the statistics reveals a more nuanced story. In the 2004 and 2008 Presidential elections,³² the winner was whoever raised the most money and whose party won the support of the finance sector of the economy. Even though Obama did not win the support of the finance sector in 2012, the fact that he out-fundraised his opponent in the process of winning the election is still compatible with a Marxist understanding of bourgeois democracy, but can also be seen as evidence that bourgeois democracy was beginning to break in the US. Then Trump won in 2016 despite being heavily out-fundraised and out-spent by Hillary Clinton. If 2012 is where we see cracks forming in the US system of bourgeois democracy, then it would be reasonable to assume that 2016 was where the system broke. That is, it would have been reasonable to assume had Joe Biden not won the support of the finance sector while also out-fundraising and out-spending Trump in the process of winning the 2020 Presidential election, suggesting a return to form in the US.³³ But in 2024, the trends in fundraising and support from the finance sector broke completely. Kamala Harris out-fundraised and out-spent Trump, she had the support of the finance sector of the economy, and she still lost. Not only did Harris lose the Presidential election, but Republicans also managed to flip the Senate and will probably retain control of the house of representatives. This suggests a complete breakdown of bourgeois democracy in the US.

A Bonaparte is Born?

If we had to summarize our understanding of Bonapartism in a single phrase, it would be: bourgeois dictatorship without bourgeois democracy. Contemporaneous accounts of Bonapartism, wherever the phenomenon has emerged, have identified how it is a product of bourgeois society and how it serves bourgeois interests. Bonapartism arises as the result of a crisis of bourgeois democracy. When bourgeois democracy can no longer function as a medium for resolving contradictions among the bourgeoisie, bourgeois democracy is abandoned in favor of Bonapartism. Indeed, Bonapartism is usually unable to usurp bourgeois democracy without the passive or active consent of the bourgeoisie, which only comes after the failure of bourgeois democracy.

As we make clear in our last article, Bonapartism has not established itself in the US yet, but all the things that are required to create a Bonapartist State currently exist in the US.³⁴ The only thing currently holding back the rise of Bonapartism in the US is bourgeois democracy; a dire situation, as it is bourgeois democracy which births Bonapartism. When we say that bourgeois democracy is the only thing preventing the establishment of a Bonapartist State in the US, what we mean is that Bonapartism will not usurp bourgeois democracy until the latter has definitively failed. As we concluded in the previous section of this article, if bourgeois democracy has not yet failed in the US, then it is currently in the process of doing so.

This prompts the question of what the abolition of bourgeois democracy could look like in the US. We’ve previously argued that the immunity granted to the President by the Supreme Court in its decision in the case Trump v United States created a framework by which it may be possible to constitutionally overthrow the government. Whether or not such a coup attempt would succeed depends on Trump finding the right pretext to do something like dissolve Congress, or suspend elections, etc. However, with Republicans winning control of the US Senate, and likely to maintain control of the House of Representatives, the task of abolishing bourgeois democracy could potentially be simplified.

Republican control of Congress means that the legislative branch of the US government is less likely to obstruct Trump’s agenda, meaning that a standoff between the two branches of government will probably not happen. Instead, the stage has been set for something like the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933 in Weimar Germany. With Republican control of Congress, the only way the Democratic Party could obstruct Trump’s agenda (assuming they’re even interested in obstruction) would be by weaponizing the filibuster in the Senate. But this would be out of character for the Democratic Party, and it has the potential to backfire on them. Firstly, weaponizing the filibuster under these conditions could cause the Democratic Party to alienate the support it still has among the Bourgeoisie, the only real support the Party has left after hemorrhaging its voting base during the 2024 elections. Gridlock in Congress would result in more policy being made at the executive level, which would be another step towards Bonapartism and allow Trump to make the case that he alone can resolve the country’s current political crisis. Weaponization of the filibuster by the Democrats would give the Republicans a pretext to ban the filibuster in the Senate, something which the Supreme Court may allow Trump to do using the executive order. Once Democrats have been robbed of the last means by which to stall the Republican agenda, Congress could vote to concentrate unprecedented power in the executive branch, or maybe even vote to abolish Congress. Experience has so far shown that as long as the right pretext is found for justification, the current Supreme Court will probably rule it to be within the framework of the US Constitution.

But why would Congress vote to abolish itself when simply banning the filibuster would probably accomplish the same goal? Would a government in which the executive and legislative branch work in concert be meaningfully different in practice from a government in which legislative power is absorbed into the executive branch? Practically speaking, the answer is no. But the aggressive regressive tax policy Trump promised to implement on the campaign trail would be a disaster for the working class in the US, with the potential to push voters back towards the Democratic Party in the 2026 midterm elections.³⁵ If the correct pretext is found, such as the 2026 midterm elections coinciding with a massive domestic or international crisis, that could be used as grounds to disband elections. “There is too much turmoil for us to be focusing on campaigning and elections. Trying to hold elections will only delay us from addressing a crisis which demands our immediate attention.” That is the line of argumentation that is often deployed in the face of such intense crises.³⁶ The right crisis could not only serve as pretext to suspend elections, but also to concentrate power in the executive branch. At that point, Bonapartism would already exist in every practical sense. It would only become necessary to switch to a more classic version of Bonapartism near the conclusion of Trump’s term in office, when he is unable to constitutionally run again—just like Louis Bonaparte. As long as Trump can make the case that he can do so as an “official act,” the Supreme Court will probably allow it.

Bonapartism has not established itself in the US yet, but we are now a step closer to it than we would have been had Trump been defeated. Had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, then Trump would probably be too old to run for President in 2028, if he’s even still alive by that point. This would raise questions about who would take command of Trump’s movement once he’s gone.

All of the people around Trump, whether they be members of his inner circle or members of his family, seem to be terribly incompetent and lack Trump’s charisma. But was Louis Bonaparte not incompetent and lacking in charisma? Perhaps it is not that there is nobody in Trump’s camp that is capable of replacing him, but that there are many people capable of replacing him. Perhaps when the Sultan Trump coughs, the princes will draw their swords. But the winner of this power struggle will not necessarily be the most cunning or the most ruthless. The Bonaparte is not a person, but a process personified. Whoever succeeds Trump will be whoever is able to manage the contradictions within Trump’s movement. We remind the reader that the Bonaparte cannot resolve the contradictions which give rise to Bonapartism, but these contradictions can be temporarily managed under the right conditions.

If we ended our last article by saying that Bonapartism is coming to the US, we now feel confident in stating that it will have arrived in every practical sense once Trump is sworn into office on January 20, 2025. Though he will not have taken the formal step of abolishing bourgeois democracy in the US, it doesn’t seem like he will do so until the 2026 midterm elections get closer. The only question left is whether or not Trump alone, or perhaps with the help of Congress, has the power to actually formally abolish bourgeois democracy in the US. And given everything we’ve discussed so far in this article, we cannot definitively say that he is incapable of accomplishing this. In our opinion, the question of whether or not Trump will succeed in abolishing bourgeois democracy will depend less on whether or not he tries, and more on exactly how he chooses to go about it. It will probably come down to a decision by the Supreme Court, and that isn’t terribly reassuring.

What is to be Done?

For decades, there have been debates within the US Left on how it should relate to the Democratic Party. In more recent years, this debate has predominantly been over whether or not the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest left wing organization in the US, should break with the Democratic Party, and what this break should look like if it were to happen. On one side of this debate, there are those who believe that pushing the Democrats to the left is more realistic than constituting a third party—this strategy is often referred to as “realignment.” On the other side, there are those who argue that it is preferable to sever all ties with the Democrats and constitute a third party—this strategy is referred to as the “clean break.” Between these two positions is what is referred to as the “dirty break,” which essentially advocates for strategically running in elections as Democrats while working towards constituting an independent third party.³⁷

In practice, however, the synthesis of clean breakers and realigners within the same organization always meant that the practice of the DSA resembled the dirty break, as some members worked on pushing the Democrats leftwards while other DSA members tried to find ways to differentiate the DSA from the left wing of the Democratic Party. The reality was that practical matters were always quite dirty. The only real question was whether or not the break would ever come to pass, and if so, how?

We may now have an answer to the question of how the break happens. Since losing the Presidential election, in addition to several other races in 2024, the Democratic Party has refused to acknowledge that these losses were the result of their nonsensical campaign decisions. Rather than admit that the Democrats’ aggressively conservative campaign platform alienated their progressive constituents, many Democratic strategists and media figures have instead tried to gaslight the US public into thinking that the Democratic Party performed poorly in the 2024 elections because it moved too far to the left! Never mind the courting of an endorsement from the Cheneys; never mind the open dismissal of working class constituents in favor of courting conservative suburbanites;³⁸ never mind the material support for the genocide of the Palestinian people; never mind the adoption of Republican framing on the US-Mexico border and attempted passage of aggressive anti-immigrant legislation;³⁹ never mind the stubborn refusal to recognize any fault in the Biden administration;⁴⁰ the problem is identity politics; the problem is capitulation to woke ideology;⁴¹ the problem is our voting constituency! This is the state of the Democratic party in the year 2024; pathetic; spineless; hopelessly narcissistic; in a cold war with its own supporters.

Thankfully, the progressive individuals and groups who constituted the life-blood of the Democratic Party have not taken this gaslighting lying down. Ashik Siddique, co-chair of the DSA, had this to say in an article which contested the narrative that progressivism cost the Democrats in the 2024 elections:

Whether Democrats decide to get behind the kinds of truly life changing programs that motivate ordinary people to get off the couch, or decide to keep running “Republican lite” campaigns for no one, our membership is growing with people who are going to fight for and win what is right. The only thing we won’t do is apologize for it.⁴²

If that is the position of DSA’s leadership on the 2024 election results, one can only imagine the positions of those to the left of the DSA, who were more openly hostile towards the Democratic Party from the beginning.

Even more interesting is what we overheard while helping recount votes for a union brother who flipped a historically Republican-leaning district and was elected to the Maine state House of Representatives. While we were in the state capitol recounting votes, we overheard the organizer of the Democratic vote-counters mutter under their breath, “conservative Democrats are destroying the party.” There seems to be a consensus, though expressed by different people in different ways, that the Democratic Party is experiencing an existential crisis, and may have been truly shattered by the 2024 elections.

At the moment, it seems unlikely that the Democratic Party will be able to realign itself by shifting its politics to the left. Firstly, because it already hemorrhaged many of those voters in this election. Those voters are probably unlikely to ever return to the Democratic Party after everything that it has done during the 2024 elections. Secondly, many of the Democrats who ran on progressive platforms in 2018 and 2022, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and John Fetterman, have shifted rightwards with the Party, making progressive voters less likely to trust them in the future. Running on a progressive platform won’t be as effective if progressive voters doubt your sincerity.

Even the Bernie Sanders constituency, as we have known it since 2016, is probably gone. Those who were just old enough to vote for Bernie in 2016 are in their mid-twenties now. Many of his youngest supporters are nowadays probably to Sanders’ left, evidenced by the fact that almost every activist under 30 cites Bernie as an influence, ourselves included. There are others who have probably moved to the right with Bernie. Just as Bernie’s progressive message has now been reduced to “Joe Biden is the most pro-union/pro-labor President since FDR,”⁴³ the supporters that followed Bernie’s example are probably unprincipled Democratic Party hardliners in practice, whose progressivism is limited to their rhetoric. An extremely small contingent of Bernie’s constituency may even have become part of the Trump constituency in 2024—the podcaster Joe Rogan could be representative of these individuals, as he was a 2016 Bernie supporter who has since embraced conservatism. It’s difficult to say exactly how the Bernie constituency has fractured without statistics, but everything we’ve observed in the media and among the company we keep suggests that the Bernie constituency as it has been known is now gone. And with the Bernie constituency, any chance the Democratic Party had at a second life is probably gone as well.

In summary, the Democratic Party is by all means dead in the water. It has, by its own actions, killed any chance it had at prolonging its existence by realigning its politics to be more in line with those of its voting constituents. This in no way means that the Party will disappear overnight, as it still maintains a large voter base. However, for the first time in a very long time, there is an open window for a real third party with a progressive platform to compete in the electoral arena. The only way to subvert the emergence of a serious progressive third party might be by a resurgence of “resistance liberalism.”⁴⁴ However, the people entertaining this idea are not being taken seriously outside of their liberal echo chamber. The Biden administration was the culmination of resistance liberalism, and if that’s all that resistance liberalism can produce, then it will only result in more Republican administrations as long as the institutions of US democracy remain intact. Resistance liberalism had its chance, and it proved incapable of creating real change.

The direction for the future seems clear. It appears that the Democratic Party will not allow itself to be realigned. Since the Democrats have declared war on their constituents, there is also no longer a question of whether progressive groups like the DSA should pursue a clean or dirty break from the Party; the Party is now instigating the break. Though it may come with growing pains, we believe these developments are to be welcomed, as it will only make it easier for real left wing groups to cut ties with the Democratic Party and start to build a real movement in the United States. Many of us never liked the Democratic Party in the first place, and only entered into coalition with them on practical grounds. But if the Party has indicated that it no longer wants its own constituency, then we will gladly take them and show them what a real progressive movement can do.

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.

President-elect Joe Biden’s victory speech in full.
Grace Manthey, “Despite ‘defunding’ claims, police funding has increased in many US cities,” ABC News, October 16 2022; “Cop Cities, USA,” Is Your Life Better, 2024.
109 Democratic representatives voted in favor of the resolution denouncing the horrors of socialism. That’s just over half of all Democratic Party representatives in the House of Representatives at the time. Even some “progressive Democrats”, such as California’s Ro Khanna, voted in favor of the resolution. See: Luke Savage, “Democratic Leaders’ Craven “Socialism” Vote Is a Symptom of Political Cluelessness,” Jacobin Magazine, February 4 2023.
The donations made to the Democratic Party by organizations representing these communities is one way of substantiating the support these communities have for the Democratic Party.
“American Attitudes: Palestine and Israel in the 2024 Election,” Arab American Institute, November 4 2024.
Olbrysh, Ryan, Molly Ball, Leslie Dickstein, Mariah Espada, and Simmone Shah. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” Time, February 4 2021.
“Despite being the face of America’s Party of Order, important Republican donors had lost faith in Trump’s ability to restore order, so Biden was elected to be the President of order. Despite having a challenging task laid before him, Biden has essentially succeeded in his mission, but in doing so, he has destroyed the material basis for his successful 2020 Presidential run.” See: Bluebird, “Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!,” The Revolutionist Substack, October 12 2024.
Shayana Kadidal, “Torturers for Harris,” The Nation, September 18 2024.
Current vote totals now put Trump at over 77 million votes. So he did slightly enlarge his constituency from 2020. But we do not feel this changes the contour of our argument, as the Democrats still lost many more votes than Trump gained.
We also understand that it is not the popular vote, but the electoral college which decides who will be President. But the point stands that one cannot even win the electoral college if not enough people turn out to vote for you. It is the Democratic Party’s own fault that their turnout was so low, and we will not be helping them make excuses for why that was the case.
This is a paraphrase of a joke that was often made about the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) in the years following World War I: “If bourgeois society did not exist, the SPD would invent it.”
Dario McCarty, “Democrats Spend Millions on Republican Primaries,” Open Secrets, July 15 2022.
Bill Chappell, “The Democrats’ Strategy of Boosting Far-Right Republicans Seems to have Worked,” NPR, November 11 2022.
For example, in the midterm races where the democrats deliberately employed this strategy, it worked. Even though she did not go so far as to give money to Trump’s 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton and her campaign team thought that Trump would be an easy opponent to defeat, and delighted in watching him become the Republican nominee for President. Joe Biden had no choice but to run against Trump in 2020 because Trump was the incumbent President, and won, but probably more because of the Coronavirus Pandemic rather than any deliberate campaign strategy. And finally, Kamala Harris ran against Trump in 2024, and lost. Therefore, while it is true that Trump, and those aligned with him, provide a unifying impetus to the Democratic Party’s divided voting constituency, this impetus is not strong enough to consistently win elections. Will the Democratic Party ever learn this lesson? We think not. See: Gabriel Debenedetti, Jeremy B. White, Sam Sutton, Carly Sitrin, Bill Mahoney, and Josh Gerstein, “They Always Wanted Trump.” Politico, November 7 2016.
For those who don’t know, negative partisanship is when one votes for a candidate they dislike in order to defeat another candidate they dislike even more. This has been a theme in Democratic Party campaigns for years at this point. Especially since the beginning of the “Trump era” of American politics, Democrats have increasingly asked their voters to vote against Republicans rather than for Democrats. With the former, there is no need for any policy platform, no need to appeal to your voting base.
Mathew Sledge, “In Dearborn, Rashida Tlaib did Nearly Twice as Well as Kamala Harris,” The Intercept, November 6 2024.
Juliann Ventura, “Axelrod: Racism, Sexism Partly to Blame for Harris Defeat,” The Hill, November 6 2024.
“Democrats attack third-party candidate Jill Stein in razor-thin race,” Al Jazeera, October 11 2024.
“For every swing state, Stein’s total votes were comfortably less than the difference between Harris and Trump. If every single Stein voter cast their ballot for Harris instead, Trump still would have won, comfortably.” See: Logan Michael, “Democrats Blame Everyone but Themselves Amidst Historic Election Failure,” Flagler College Gargoyle, December 11 2024.
Middle East Eye Instagram Account, November 7 2024.
Maysa Mustafa, “Muslims, Arabs face baseless attacks on social media over Harris election loss,” Middle East Eye, November 6 2024; also, see above comments and sources referencing what happened in Dearborn, Michigan.
Y.L Al-Sheikh, “Harris’s Gaza Policy Was a Disaster on Every Level,” The Nation, November 19 2024.
The Republicans have become more popular in recent years, but they are not a “popular” party in the sense of being broadly popular with a majority of the American people. It is only half true to say that the Republicans are getting more popular, as it misses that the Democratic Party is becoming more unpopular at the same time. Raw statistics also can’t explain why this realignment is happening, only that the realignment is happening. Exact figures can vary from one source to another, but they are at least in agreement that the Democratic Party is becoming more unpopular and the Republican Party has become more popular. See: Ariana Baio, “More Americans are saying they are Republican than Democrat. Will it impact the election?,” The Independent, October 9 2024.
Why is the political lean of the finance sector of the US economy important to note in relation to US Presidential elections? Well, the United States is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (something which we substantiate in our article “Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism”), and finance is the largest sector of the economy. Therefore, the incredible economic power of finance should translate into political influence in a bourgeois democratic country like the US. If statistics are anything to go by, then this is indeed the case in the US, as there is a strong correlation between the political lean of the finance sector and the party that wins the Presidential election. But more on that later.
Mike Davis, “Mike Davis, Trench Warfare, NLR 126, November–December 2020,” New Left Review 126 (Nov/Dec 2020).
Max Molski, “How voting demographics changed between 2020 and 2024 presidential elections,” NBC Washington, November 6 2024.
In other ways, it may be more accurate to say that social class is still the determining factor in how Latin Americans vote, as different social classes can vote the same way for different reasons. Latin American workers may vote Republican in the hope that the Party’s anti-immigrant platform, if implemented, will result in less competition with immigrant labor. Latin American business owners, on the other hand, may vote Republican because the Republican Party’s aggressive anti-labor platform appeals to all businessmen; big and small; black and white.
Obed Manuel, “Why Latino Voters’ Turn to Trump, GOP May Not Have Been as Sharp as Exit Polls Showed.” NPR, December 9 2024.
The Democrats once again have nobody to blame for this but themselves, as the impact of Democratic legislation like NAFTA cannot be overstated when talking about the decay of the Rust Belt.
We must stress, however, that we never believed this correlation was causal. Finance may be the largest sector of the US economy, but it is not the entire US economy. If every other economic sector found itself at odds with Finance, for example, this would be a very easy way of explaining an instance in which the political lean of Finance did not correspond to the winner of a Presidential election.
In July, the finance sector of the economy favored the Republicans by 4.24 percentage points; a massive margin considering the immense influence of the finance sector and the fact that much smaller margins have the potential to be quite decisive in an atmosphere of political gridlock. By November, however, the finance sector had swung to favor the Democrats by 2 percentage points.
At the time of writing, 2004 is the earliest year for which statistics are available on Open Secrets for which statistics are available for money raised and spent by Presidential candidates. If we find another source which reliably tracks money in politics further backwards in time, or if Open Secrets adds to the statistics available on its website, we will be looking very closely at them.
We also remind the reader that while Biden won in 2020, his margin of victory was extremely narrow. Even in victory, his campaign probably underperformed relative to the financial and institutional support his campaign received.
“Are we saying that it is a foregone conclusion that Trump will win the Presidential election and use the new sweeping immunity of the executive office to abolish bourgeois democracy in the US? No. The question of what could happen is impossible to answer in advance. Something could happen tomorrow, or the day after that, that changes everything and makes everything in this essay irrelevant. To us, the question of whether or not an American Bonaparte will emerge is secondary to the directly observable fact that all of the necessary pieces are now in place.” See: Bluebird, “Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!,” The Revolutionist Substack, October 12 2024.
This, of course, would probably also depend on the Democrats running on a progressive platform in 2026. This will probably allow them to win back some of the votes they lost in 2024, maybe even flip a few seats in the House of Representatives and/or Senate. But will it be enough? Will progressive supporters forgive the Democrats for abandoning them in the 2024 election? Will progressive voters forget how Democrats like Senator John Fetterman ran on a progressive platform in the 2022 midterms, only to shift to the far-right of the Democratic Party and distance themselves from any form of progressivism once elected? The Democrats have, by their own doing, killed almost any trust that existed between the Party and its voting constituency. As a result, even genuinely progressive Democrats like Rashida Tlaib are in danger of losing in the 2026 midterms, as they will be representing a party that fundamentally lacks public trust and/or confidence.
Illia Novikov and Hanna Arhirova, “Ukraine’s president rules out holding elections next spring and calls for unity in fighting Russia,” AP News, November 7 2023.
For a crash course on these positions in the DSA, we recommend this article.
“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” — Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer. See: Jane Slaughter, “Viewpoint: We Won’t Win Until We’re Troublemakers,” Labor Notes, November 14 2024.
Adam Johnson, “The Democrats’ Hard-Right Turn on Immigration Is a Disaster in Every Way,” The Nation, February 8 2024.
Kamala Harris Appears on ‘The View’.
Democratic strategist issues ‘hard truth’ to party members after losing election.
Ashik Siddique, “We Democratic Socialists of America Will Not Apologize. We Will Stand for What is Right,” Newsweek, November 21 2024.
During the Biden Presidency, it felt like Bernie was obligated to utter this phrase during every media appearance. And understandably so since he was the only somewhat progressive official in a very conservative administration. But rather than challenge the administration from the inside, he contented himself with doing damage control for it, effectively allowing his progressive image to be co-opted and perverted in the process.
Sarah D. Wire “The Donald Trump Resistance is Ready for When Democrats Stop Grieving,” USA Today, November 22 2024.