By Dandy Andy
The recent Trump presidential victory in the US and the far-right assault it unloosed pose new challenges for the far left.
Some people have argued that the current developments signal “the end of America,” with the Trumpian dismantling of elements of the liberal state being one aspect of this decline. I have been listening to fables of the collapse of the American empire for forty years now, and America ain’t done collapsed yet, nor do i think it is about to. What we are seeing is the far-reaching reorganization of the American state and, by extension, the liberal states in the metropole. Far from appearing weaker, there is a clear gathering of the institutional far right in the European world around the US. While Reform UK and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany might be the most prominent examples, Musk and Vance’s recent shenanigans have played well with the European institutional far right in general and may well end up increasing the US’s influence in some areas—there are certainly no signs that it is declining.
In fact, the latter development indicates another process that is likely to unfold, albeit more slowly and unevenly: the reorganization of international alliances and power blocs. This process will likely lead to the weakening of a number of states that will find themselves outside of or at the periphery of a power bloc alliance they previously relied on, as well as to the increase of failed states in what is already the periphery.
The “dismantling” that is currently occurring in the US and other states in the metropole represents a clear program of eliminating the welfare aspects of the state and reducing its less aggressive international interventions, while further expanding the reach of capital, particularly big tech capital. The mass layoffs we are seeing are meant to weaken precisely those elements of the state that are not useful to the rapacious extension of big capital’s grip on every aspect of society and the economy.
None of this amounts to a de facto weakening of the American state. Depending on popular response, either a strengthening or a weakening of the state are possible outcomes. Of course, neither the strengthening or weakening of the state necessarily means a parallel strengthening or weakening of capital.
The key immediate issue is how this impacts real people’s real lives and how we position ourselves in relation to that.
Clearly, lobbying for social reforms is not our wheelhouse. We should be articulating a viable anti-capitalist option in such a way that people can see it as both possible and realistic. We currently lack the elements necessary to do so: a clear revolutionary position around which the far left can cohere; an interested, informed, and involved audience open to our ideas; the capacity to insert ourselves in unfolding struggles in a way that allows us to provide some degree of ideological and practical leadership.
That is a separate issue from how we position ourselves regarding struggles to maintain employment and existing social programs. In that case, we have a responsibility to side with people struggling to keep their jobs or protect existing programs necessary for their wellbeing. They aren’t abstractions; they are people who need to eat, clothe, and house themselves and their families. Such struggles should be an opportunity to advance a persuasive argument for the need to take a radical step toward a different sort of society. An examination of history tells us that mass left-wing struggles grow out of exactly these sorts of conflicts, but for that to occur a credible far-left force needs to enter the fray, pose the necessary questions, and provide at least a plausible outline of the answers in a way that engages people’s enthusiasm. A failure to do so inevitably surrenders these struggles to the Democratic Party and adjacent liberals in the US and the complementary liberal parties and movements elsewhere. However, to act on that level, we need all of the factors mentioned in the final sentence of the previous paragraph.
“Our starting point needs to include an acknowledgement that we are a weak, disorganized, and fragmented force facing a culminating point in the well-organized and protracted neoliberal assault on both the left and the liberal democratic state.”
The dilemma as i see it is that the current ascendancy of the far right is the outcome of forty years of patient and consistent organizing, while we, on the other hand, suffered significant setbacks and decline during those same decades. Put another way: we fought the law and the law won. The result is that the institutional far right is strong, and we are weak. The current constantly accelerating developments are beginning to provoke resistance that thus far remains within acceptable margins from the state’s point of view, but the growth of a mass movement is not to be precluded. If we are unable to credibly enter these ongoing struggles, then a liberal leadership is inevitable, possibly with some system-oppositional far-right activity on the side. Because the liberals are unwilling to colour outside the lines, any victories they score will be within the context of an overall defeat: “It could have been worse, at least we got. . .”
The result will be the chaos some people have predicted, but if there is no radical left strong enough to present a revolutionary option, then that is what it will be: chaos. That chaos will clearly take the form of rapidly increasing poverty, with the concomitant increase in homelessness, hunger (including starvation), drug addiction, physical and mental illness, the disabling of people. . . As always, the weight of these negative developments will fall most heavily on the people already most marginalized, while at the same time adding to their numbers.
To trot out a formula about how to deal with this would be trite to the point of absurdity, but, nonetheless, we need to sketch out at least a starting point from which we can hope to intervene in the unfolding crisis.
Our starting point needs to include an acknowledgement that we are a weak, disorganized, and fragmented force facing a culminating point in the well-organized and protracted neoliberal assault on both the left and the liberal democratic state.
In spite of our overall defeat, there have, of course, been attempts over the years to build new revolutionary movements: the anti-globalization movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; the relatively pallid antiwar movement that arose in response to the invasion of Iraq in 2001; the Occupy movement that rose and fell in 2011; the various “springs” of the twenty-tens; more recently, the George Floyd uprising. To varying degrees all of these movements had international reverberations and revolutionary implications. However, all of them also faded relatively rapidly without leaving behind any significant revolutionary structures. The more recent widespread pro-Palestinian movement provides an example of a mass action in which the far left has played an important and recognizable role. However, there is little to suggest that a basis has been laid for a more far-reaching movement.
It was under these conditions that the left greeted the far-right upsurge unleashed by Trump’s 2016 electoral victory. The new wave of far-right activity brought with it new ideologues, including, for example, Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos, and new movements like the Proud Boys, an increase in public militia activity, a plethora of Islamophobic and anti-migrant organizations, the reanimation of neo-Nazism and white supremacy in the form of groups like the Atomwaffen Division and Identity Evropa, as well new iterations of classic national socialism in the form of groups like Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Worker Party.
The response of the far left was to substantially reorient itself around anti-fascism. The poignancy and success of that movement varied from place to place and is, in any case, open to debate more generally. Nonetheless, the far-right organizations and movements were substantially undermined by a combination of anti-fascist counter-demonstrating and doxing, their own missteps, the debacle of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, key among them, infighting, and increased state repression, particularly following the riot at the Capitol Building in January 2021. Many of these groups are trying to use the opening created by the second Trump victory to regenerate their activity, and it remains to be seen how successful that effort will be.
“The anti-fascist movement and the far left failed to develop a strategy for resisting the institutional far right that over the last decade has become more powerful in the European world, and to some degree internationally, with the 2025 inauguration of Trump signifying a Rubicon crossed.”
What the anti-fascist movement and the far left in general failed to do was to develop a strategy for resisting the institutional far right that over the last decade has become more powerful in the European world, and to some degree internationally, with the 2025 inauguration of Trump signifying a Rubicon crossed.
So where does that leave us, a weak far left, facing an increasingly powerful international far right?
First, we must recognize that we are dealing with a population that has been largely immobilized by some forty years of neoliberalism and a left that has been substantially weakened by successive defeats, which profoundly complicates mass organizing. We need also recognize that the pressure of daily life for numerous people, young people in particular, is one of unstable, poorly paid employment, food insecurity, out-of-control housing costs, diminished access to health care, a social safety net that is in tatters and is currently being further stripped away on a daily basis, and a growing fear of repression. People in already economically and/or politically marginalized communities face, in addition, a significant growing threat of violent attack from both the state’s repressive apparatus and violent sections of the extra-parliamentary far right, which has signalled quite loudly that it sees an opening to move aggressively against its perceived enemies.
How do we foresee addressing food insecurity? How can we defend people’s right to adequate secure housing? What solution do we see to the health care crisis? What solidarity and protection can we offer to LGBTQ+, most particularly trans, people who are currently the target of a widespread attack that unifies almost all of the far right? How can we stand with migrants and Muslims under attack? What do we have to offer to communities of color faced with unabashed and open white supremacy? How do we intend to make space in our movement for disabled people now threatened with the loss of the minimal supports won through decades of struggle?
“How do we foresee addressing food insecurity? How can we defend people’s right to adequate secure housing? What solution do we see to the health care crisis? What solidarity and protection can we offer to LGBTQ+, most particularly trans, people who are currently the target of a widespread attack that unifies almost all of the far right? How can we stand with migrants and Muslims under attack? What do we have to offer to communities of color faced with unabashed and open white supremacy? How do we intend to make space in our movement for disabled people now threatened with the loss of the minimal supports won through decades of struggle?”
Without concrete answers to these very real questions of daily life and death for numerous people, our politics constitute little beyond rhetoric. A look back on past successful revolutionary movements shows us that they always approached mass organizing with a program that crystallized the demands of their target audience and offered a realistic starting point for solutions. At this point, we lack not only programmatic cohesion and clarity, we have little more than the basic rudiments necessary to create that cohesion and clarity. This is a gap we need to close posthaste if we hope to develop the capacity to meaningfully intervene in the unfurling crisis.
There is, of course, only one way for us to meaningfully close that gap, and that is to interact with the individuals and organizations active in the communities we need to build meaningful ties with and participate in their struggles. This is not without its complications, of course, because the groups that play a leading role in many of these struggles do not share our politics. This means that we will often be interacting with people whose primary objective is to win reforms, gain state financial support, and secure legal protection within the context of the bourgeois state. Recognizing that any oppressed community has the right to lead its own struggle, we must find a way to offer support without surrendering the centrality of anti-capitalism as essential to meaningful long-term success in any struggle. We must equally resist the urge to back burner any elements of our political vision in the pursuit of temporary unity. In short, we must do the painstaking work of elucidating a revolutionary position in a way that suits the conditions we find ourselves working in and building comradely ties with like-minded people within the community we are working with—they always exist. The onus is on us to do this work honestly and respectfully, because it is only through the trial and error of shared victories and defeats that comes from ongoing involvement in unfolding struggles that we can win the trust necessary to open the space for the larger discussion that needs to occur.
Building these ties is, however, only one aspect of the work that needs to be done if we hope to develop a movement that poses an actual threat to capitalism. If our goal is greater than impeding the current far-right assault on society, perhaps even winning a few reforms, then we need to break through current predominance of single-issue movements and build a mass movement that encompasses our numerous struggles on equal footing. In short, i see no way to push back and potentially defeat the current far-right assault except with an organized united front.
I realize that many people on the far left will recoil from that idea because of the historic tendency of liberalism and social democracy to submerge anti-capitalist politics in that context, and that is, of course, always a genuine risk. That said, i fail to see how the current far left, even were it to get its own house in order, could hope to play a meaningful role in the coming crisis outside of such an alliance, given its limited numbers. Nor do i see how the various communities under attack can push back the far-right offensive without building solidarity across movements and acting in concert.
In the context of a united front, the far left would face the same challenges as it does working with the politicized segments of any community, albeit on a grander and more complicated scale—the difficulty of building unity with diverse movements expressing a range of liberal and left politics in a way that neither dilutes nor obscures our anti-capitalist objectives. Once again, under the current conditions and given our numbers, if we are unable to do this we are de facto left at the margins and destined to irrelevance.
I have little more than this brief outline to offer, and i am fully aware that what i am proposing is quite possibly, even likely, out of our reach, but i am equally aware that we are at a historical inflection point that resembles nothing else i have seen in fifty years on the left. The time span for us to act if history is not to leave us behind is likely flittingly brief. A failure on our part to meet that brief moment almost certainly consigns us to oblivion and likely to the dustbin of history.