A lot of time and money has been invested in the propaganda campaign that sought to downplay the assault on the Capitol on 6 January. We heard that Trump was finished, isolated and without support in his party. With Joe Biden at the White House, the capitalists intended to lower the high level of social polarization, a danger for the stability needed by the ruling class. That was their wish, but the facts show a very different reality.
Social devastation and imperialist decay
Since Biden's inauguration, not even a year ago, his politics are already falling apart: from the disaster in Afghanistan to the inability to stop the plague of poverty and inequality in American society. The trillion-dollar plans announced with great fanfare have not gone to fight precariousness or guarantee public social services, but once again to fill the pockets of big business.
According to USA Today, only 26% of the population supports the president's economic policy and the general rejection reaches 55%. The social devastation spreads, while reactionary Trumpist demagoguery strengthens and expands its support among those millions of small and middle class landowners, hit by the crisis and terrified of losing their comfortable social status; also among backward sectors of workers.
While fortifying his base, Trump has taken control of the Republican Party, purging its leadership of all critical elements who opposed to the shift to the extreme right, as happened with Liz Cheney, daughter of Bush's vice-president.
A war against the vanguard of the movement: Trump attacks women's and migrants' rights
Addressing those desperate sectors who fear the end of stability, of the "American dream" and of America's position as an unrivalled power, Trump has given them a banner to fight for and pointed to a culprit: the working class and, in particular, its vanguard which has been at the forefront of mass mobilisations in the last period. Focusing on these sectors, Trumpism is claiming revenge.
It is using its positions - state to state - to attack the most elementary social and democratic rights. One example is the banning of abortion rights on virtually all grounds - including rape and malformation - in the states of Texas and Arkansas. They are the first in a list of 19 other states that plan to approve legislative initiatives along these lines with a Republican majority.
Women and LGBT people have always been in their sights. But the hate of Trumpism is even greater when it comes to the African-American working class, who rose and fought after the murder of George Floyd.
New laws have been passed in Georgia, Texas, Arizona or Florida limiting the voting rights of African Americans and migrants, as well as voting by mail, aim to hit them hard.
Oklahoma, meanwhile, has passed provisions to grant immunity to drivers who kill or injure protesters if claims to be getting away of a riot. Five Republican states have pushed through legislation to ban what they see as unpatriotic teaching, blaming whites and calling racism as a systemic problem.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is being the pure example for migrant hatred. He has sent border guards on horseback, with whips, to hunt down - literally - blacks, against Haitians that try to enter the US fleeing misery. The images have caused such a social uproar that the White House has been forced to promise to take action against these agents. Abbott, for his part, has defiantly responded that, in the face of any sanction against the agents, he will offer them a job as police officers. A call to organize the army of reaction in full view of the public.
While Trumpism it’s proud of his racism and chauvinism without any complex, the Biden administration allows it. He has not fundamentally changed Trump's immigration policy, or any other.
We must raise a revolutionary alternative to stop the advance of Trumpism!
The fight against alleged "electoral fraud" has been the unifying factor around which the rank and file of Trump is growing. This is how he prepared the assault on the Capitol and tried to prevent election recounts in many cities.
Since then, the former president has redoubled his agitation to keep his ranks tight. His movement collected more than 1.5 million signatures to recall the Democratic governor of California, but finally did not get the votes needed to recall him. This battle, on a national scale, has been a call to give a banner to its social base: the battle goes on, we must be organized and prepared.
After what happened in California, he has given instructions in other states to force private audits to recount the votes. Arizona has already done so and the result was even better for Biden! It does not matter. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will have another recount.
Even when his own audits has shown that there was not electoral fraud, still 36% of Americans and 78% of Republicans believe that Biden did not legitimately win the election. The advance and strengthening of Trumpism is rooted in two factors: social decomposition fuelled by the capitalist crisis and the failure of Democrats reformist policies and of its leadership.
The sectors of the Democratic Party that present themselves as its left wing (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez...), beyond gestures and words, endorse Biden's policy, which has not only been incapable of stopping Trumpism but is actually strengthening it.
Biden and his administration refused to prosecute the assailants of the Capitol by preventing any serious investigation. They are responsible for looking aside in this Coup d'état, and keeping in place all those who, from their military and police posts, allowed it to happen. In addition, Biden continues with Trump's nationalist agenda and his imperialist aggression against China, and has signed with the Republicans plans to save the big monopolies with trillions of dollars. Biden makes and will make Trumpism stronger, of that there is no doubt.
To cut off the advance of reaction it is necessary to break completely with the politics of the Democratic establishment. The militant left, social and community activists, militant trade unionists must raise a united front policy to build a workers' party based on the fight of all the oppressed. Only a socialist alternative can put an end to the dictatorship of capital.
A fundamental part of the ruling class still wants to calm the situation by parliamentary game and the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy. But polarisation - not only on the left, but also on the right - is an objective tendency in this chaotic period of American capitalism. The turn of the Republican Party towards openly extreme right-wing positions shows that they will not shake turning their backs to elections, independence justice or the Constitution. In the future, they could support, without shame, all kinds of authoritarian measures or the most savage repression if they see their privileges in danger.
There is no time to lose in the face of the threat of Trumpism; we must build a revolutionary left in the US and around the world!
