Birth of a Bonaparte?

Trump and the End of Bourgeois Democracy in the US

“[T]he revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically.” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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 resolutions 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. And the Democratic Party deserves credit where it is due for passing such historic legislation, but 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 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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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.⁸ 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,⁹ 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,¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 

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.¹² 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.¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵

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 their 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;¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 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 phenomenon. 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.¹⁸ 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,¹⁹ 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,²⁰ 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.²¹ Hardline Democrats have said that Latin Americans deserve to be deported for not voting for Harris,²² 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 Democrat²³ even though they did vote for Democrats that actually made appeals to the Arab American community,²⁴ 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶

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.²⁷

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.²⁸ 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 2024.²⁹ 

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.³⁰

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.³¹

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 2020.³² 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,³³ 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.³⁴

The lumpenproletariat is part of the proletariat insofar as they have nothing to sell but their ability to work, but 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.³⁵ However, the political lean of the finance sector ended up changing between July and November of 2024.³⁶ 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,³⁷ 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 for bourgeois democracy in the US.³⁸ 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.³⁹ 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. And 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.⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹ 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.

[Then there is also the question of how Trump and his Bonapartist movement will relate to the US Armed Forces. On the campaign trail, Trump spoke of his intentions to fire military personnel who don’t follow his political line. This has naturally prompted a multiplicity of interpretations. Some in government, such as Democratic Senator Jack Reed, have taken an alarmist position, warning that Trump is going to “destroy the Department of Defense”—we assume that Reed is speaking of the DoD’s operational capability, since it is more than capable of destroying its own reputation.⁴² Trump doesn’t seem interested in refuting the allegations of a military purge, having supposedly indicated a willingness to have former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, executed for treason.⁴³ Some reporters, like Ken Klipenstein, seem to think that the framing of Trump’s stated goals as a “purge” are hyperbolic, and that Trump is simply upholding the idea that the military should be accountable to civilian rule.⁴⁴

None of these interpretations, however, are terribly substantive or insightful. The fact that Trump has explicitly signaled that his decisions to retain or terminate military officials will be determined by the ability of said officials to follow Trump’s political line, rather than being determined by job performance, is an admission that Trump intends to perpetrate a political purge⁴⁵ of the military. The idea that Trump is just upholding the principle of civilian rule over the military similarly erroneous, as even when the military operates without the explicit direction of elected officials, the fact that the military faces no repercussions for operating autonomously means that they have the passive consent or passive approval of the civilian government to do so.

Ultimately however, there is a high likelihood that Trump’s military “purge” will not need to come to fruition, at least not the most excessive scenarios we could imagine. Firstly, while former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley has been a consistent critic of Trump and Trump’s clique, he is now retired, meaning that, if he even has any intention of obstructing Trump’s agenda, he can only do so by wielding indirect influence. Trump also has very little to gain by trying to charge military officials he dislikes with treason and executing them. That would create a political firestorm, an immense public backlash, and potentially alienate the military officials who are currently loyal to Trump, and that’s all assuming that such trials could be organized in a military or civilian court. Instead, it would be far more expedient for Trump to coerce the officials he dislikes into an early retirement with full military pension and security detail. A retirement “fit for an officer.” Even that, however, may prove unnecessary, as outgoing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, another notable Trump critic within the military, has said that the military will follow “all lawful orders” from the Trump administration.⁴⁶ Taken with the Supreme Court’s decision dealing with Presidential immunity for official acts, this all probably means that the military will comply with any order Trump gives, so long as it can be justified as an official act of the President.

Taken in totality, it looks like Trump will have an easier time pacifying the US military than Hitler had winning over the Wehrmacht, where tensions between the Wehrmacht and SA threatened to tear the Nazi regime apart when it was barely a year old.⁴⁷ On top of having a military loyal to him, Trump also has a majority in the Senate and a Supreme Court that legitimizes his every action. The only reason Trump may lose the House of Representatives is because he keeps nominating Republican Representatives for cabinet positions, but that might not be a hindrance for Trump given that 1) many of his stated plans seem to depend on waiting for Congress to go on recess, when neither house of Congress could obstruct his agenda; and 2) the Democratic Party establishment seems intent on moving further to the right, meaning that Trump may actually have an easier time enacting his agenda than during his first term as President. At the current moment, there does not appear to be any government organ with the clear ability or intention to obstruct Trump’s agenda.]

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.⁴⁸

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;⁴⁹ 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;⁵⁰ never mind the stubborn refusal to recognize any fault in the Biden administration;⁵¹ the problem is identity politics; the problem is capitulation to woke ideology;⁵² 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.⁵³

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,”⁵⁴ 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.”⁵⁵ 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.

Appendix 1: Trump’s Deportation Plan

In our article Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!, which we have cited repeatedly in this article, we argued that the US was far too dependent on immigrant labor for either a Democratic or Republican administration to carry out deportations on the scale implied by their campaign messaging. We very much still hold this position. It does not follow, however, that these migrants living in the US are “safe” from state violence. We’ve come across at least one article which hypothesizes that even if the deportation plan were economically feasible, Trump may face too much resistance from Congress and the Pentagon.⁵⁶ However, the article is very open ended, hardly touching on any of the political and economic factors that we’ve touched on in our own articles.

In order to figure out what might happen, it may be useful to recite some basic facts: 1) It is economically impossible to deport all illegal immigrants from the US, as key sectors of the economy are too dependent on immigrant labor, both legal and illegal; 2) Trump does not need to deport all of the illegal immigrants, as deportations have historically been more of a disciplinary measure used by the American bourgeoisie to combat labor militancy among immigrant workers; 3) Trump’s proposed tariff policy, if enacted, would make the US even more dependant on immigrant labor to produce cheap consumer goods for the domestic and international market; 4) while slavery is illegal in the US, section 1 of the thirteenth amendment of the US Constitution allows slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for criminal activity;⁵⁷ 5) While some states have banned slavery and involuntary servitude, even as punishment for criminal activity, most states haven’t. Voters in California even rejected a ballot question that would’ve closed the prison labor loophole in the 2024 elections;⁵⁸ 6) undocumented immigrants, by virtue of the fact that they have not completed the paperwork to acquire US citizenship or work visas, are criminals under US law by their very existence within the borders of the US; 7) according to the ACLU, the US government treats all territory within 100 miles of an international border, an area in which an estimated ⅔ Americans live, as a constitution-free zone.⁵⁹

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that these facts could culminate in a boom for the prison industrial complex. We do not refer exclusively to private prisons here either, though private prisons will certainly profit from this boom should it occur, as federally operated prisons are still constructed and supplied by private companies. Repressing the US immigrant population with the criminal justice system rather than the US military doesn’t necessarily require the passage of any new laws, nor does it necessarily require the repeal of any old laws. The repression of undocumented migrants can be easily justified under the law, as these people have not followed the US’ draconian immigration policy. The infrastructure to accomplish this is already highly developed in the US (the country with the largest prison population in the world)⁶⁰ and would probably only require additional funding to increase the scale of this repressive infrastructure. Even increasing funding for the US prison industrial complex could probably be achieved relatively easily given that 1) it would be a continuation of the Biden administration’s criminal justice policy, which increased police funding⁶¹ and began the construction of “cop cities”⁶² across the country; and 2) the Democratic Party has largely adopted the Republican position on immigration, meaning that increasing funding for the prison industrial complex might be accomplished through bipartisan action. Then there is also the fact that many active US judges are Trump appointees, meaning that they are likely to interpret the law in accordance with the agenda of the Trump administration.

We generally don’t like engaging in any sort of speculation about what the future might hold, but as is the case with our anticipation of Trump becoming an American Bonaparte, the possibility of a massive expansion of the US prison industrial complex for the purposes of repressing immigrants has largely already been realized, as we explained extensively in our previous article. We hardly need to engage in any speculation because what we are describing, to a large extent, already exists. The underlying economic forces driving such developments (international economic competition driving the US economy into protectionism and reduction of labor costs) seem quite clear and easy to understand, even if we find the products of these forces to be utterly reprehensible. There is also historical precedent for what we are describing, as the very first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, was primarily a forced labor camp rather than a death camp.⁶³ Is it possible that Trump’s forced deportation plan becomes an empty promise like the US-Mexico border wall he proposed during his first term as President? Certainly. But as is the case with the future ascension of an American Bonaparte, we are less concerned with the fact that it has yet to happen, so much as we are concerned that all of the necessary pieces are in place and we do not see an obvious way of preventing it from happening. There has never been a more urgent need for Communists, socialists, trade unionists, women’s rights activists, civil rights activists, and members of all marginalized groups in the US to come together and organize in opposition to the second Trump administration. And we must not allow the resistance movement to be co-opted by liberals who just want another Democratic administration. The old status quo is dead, and our choices for what the new status quo will be are Socialism or barbarism.⁶⁴

Bluebird,

December, 2024

Appendix 2: A Reply to F.D. Signifier

This may seem like a random addition to an already long article, but we assure the reader that it will be worth their time. On November 27, 2024, the YouTuber F.D. Signifier released a video giving his own analysis of the 2024 Presidential election. In the video, he argues that white supremacy played an important role in Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. Considering that racial dynamics in the US were minimized in our analysis of the 2024 Presidential election, it may come as a shock to the reader that we are in agreement with Comrade Signifier, whose video offers a partial refutation of some of the arguments we made in this article. We are not, however, writing this appendix to simply tell the reader to go watch Signifier’s video, as there is much in it that should not be swallowed uncritically. Our intention in criticizing Signifier’s video is to do so constructively, as while we agree with his ultimate conclusion, we feel that he does not adequately support it, nor does he seriously engage with the broader question prompted by the conclusion he draws. While we don’t agree with Signifier on everything, we are an avid consumer of his content and appreciate the seriousness and academic rigor that he brings to much of his content. Signifier says in the video we are critiquing that he is not married to his conclusions, but perhaps he will be if he ever reads this. Now let us begin.

Signifier begins by stating that there are many legitimate reasons to criticize Kamala Harris, and that his purpose in making the video is not to defend Harris or her campaign strategy of trying to court conservative voters, but that it is also important to recognize the way American society ignores the voices of women of color. That being established, the way that conservative media and Harris’ own campaign team reacted to her election loss—arguing that she lost because her campaign was too left wing—is in keeping with a long tradition of women of color being portrayed as radicals even when that is demonstrably not the case. Though he doesn’t link to his source, an annoying tendency throughout the video, Signifier seems to substantiate this, showing a graphic from a poll which says that 93% of Trump voters thought that Kamala Harris was “too radical.”⁶⁵ We have little interest in disputing Signifier’s argument here, as it is simply true that society, broadly speaking, still doesn’t listen to the voices of women of color. It is also true, however, that many conservatives in this country think all Democrats are dangerous radicals, and would be saying as much about anybody who ran against Trump. Trump certainly tried to make this exact case when running against Biden in 2020,⁶⁶ but the fact that his framing of Biden was not even very widely parroted among mainstream conservatives let alone the general public does support Signifiers argument.⁶⁷

Like us, Signifier acknowledges that fewer people overall voted for Harris than for Biden, but he argues that this loss of votes was actually largely inconsequential to the election’s outcome, as in swing/battleground states—the states that have the largest impact on the outcome of Presidential elections—Kamala Harris performed similarly to Biden, slightly outperforming Biden in some battleground states, and losing very few votes in others.⁶⁸ This is significant because it means that in the states that really mattered, the Democrats did not lose a significant number of votes, leaving Trump with no other path to victory than to grow his voting constituency in these states, which is exactly how he won all seven battleground states in 2024.⁶⁹

After briefly talking about how third-party and protest voters did not spoil the election for Harris—something which we also argued—Signifier turns his attention to the split ticket phenomenon observed in the 2024 elections. The focus here is not on people who voted for Harris while voting Republican down-ballot or voted for Trump and voted Democrat down-ballot, as there aren’t really any discernible patterns there. Rather, Signifier’s focus is on people who voted for Trump, but also voted for progressive policies down-ballot. According to Signifier, some progressive policy initiatives got more votes than Trump in states won by Trump. However, Signifier is also talking about these split tickets while simultaneously making an argument about how misinformed the American public is, ultimately highlighting the fact that there is a serious disconnect between progressive politics and progressive policies in the US. We are again inclined to agree with Signifier, as it is quite common to hear variations on the phrase “how do we explain progressive politics and/or policies to the uninitiated without using the scary words” in many progressive spaces. Some online progressive pundits have gone a step further than Signifier, suggesting that this disconnect is simply because Americans are uniquely stupid,⁷⁰ and we wholeheartedly reject such suggestions, as it is no coincidence that Americans would be woefully misinformed in a country with such a highly developed corporate propaganda apparatus.⁷¹ This problem which Signifier and others are highlighting will only be overcome by rigorous organizing efforts, and we do not just refer to labor organizing or community organizing here, but also to organizing organizers, as the US needs a much more centralized and coherent left wing movement than the loose milieu that exists at the current moment.

Piggybacking off the argument we summarized in the last paragraph, Signifier states how progressive policy has historically only been popular in the US as long as racialized peoples are prevented from benefiting from said policies, citing how the bipartisan deconstruction of the New Deal coincided with the biggest political gains made by African Americans since the end of slavery. Again, we have no disagreements with Signifier here, as this has all but been proven by many scholars, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow being perhaps our favorite example. We will only say that acknowledging such realities prompt a larger question which we will address later.

Signifier then addresses the argument that since other Democratic women of color won their races, Harris’ loss can’t be credited solely to racism. Signifier rejects such lines of argumentation on the basis that the difference in scale and scrutiny applied to Congressional and Presidential races make them incomparable. He mentions that several of these Democratic women of color represent deep blue districts in deep blue states—many of which were also won by Harris in 2024—meaning that their election was all but assured after winning their primaries, which cannot be said for Harris in the Presidential race. We will concede these points to Signifier, as there is much truth in his observation, but Signifier’s argument does not nullify our variation on the points he is trying to tackle. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the Rust Belt states, offer powerful counterpoints. These states were also Democratic strongholds once upon a time, and Trump not only won them in 2024, but in 2016 as well.⁷²

When analyzing elections, we cannot limit our analysis to only looking at statistics; those statistics must be placed in their broader social context. For example, when the “Blue Wall” crumbled for Clinton in 2016, it came as a shock to political pundits, but things like the deconstruction of the New Deal and the undermining of labor unions and domestic industry through Democratic legislation like NAFTA meant that it was only a matter of time before that Blue Wall crumbled. Clinton’s decision not to campaign in those states in 2016 only accelerated a process that had been underway for years prior to 2016. Aside from spending a few minutes talking about Michigan in particular, Signifier does not seriously engage with much of the social context in which the election happened.⁷³ On the contrary, he shows a greater tendency to try reconstructing the social context of the election from the statistics themselves. His analysis of said statistics is further hindered by completely neglecting how the Coronavirus pandemic, a once in a lifetime catastrophe, shaped the dynamics that drove the 2020 election. Instead, Signifier treats the 2020 election like any other election, completely neglecting that the social conditions surrounding the 2024 elections almost perfectly mirrored those of 2016 rather than 2020, something we accounted for in the article we wrote prior to the election.⁷⁴

The strongest part of Signifier’s analysis of the 2024 election comes when he looks at Trump’s battleground state performance. Since Kamala Harris essentially matched Biden’s 2020 performance in these states, this meant that Trump’s only possible path to victory would be by enlarging his constituency, and he did just that; definitively refuting our thesis that his victory was not a result of growth, but of consolidation of his constituency. This naturally prompts the question: where did these votes come from? According to Signifier, these Trump voters are white males from suburban and rural areas, and we see no reason to disagree with him. Signifier makes a big mistake with his next statistic however, something we don’t hold against him, as we also get dizzy looking at this many numbers.

Signifier asserts that white suburban turnout was lower for Harris (47%) than it was for Biden (50%), while Trump made gains with this demographic between 2020 (48%) and 2024 (51%). At first glance, the statistics shown by Signifier would seem to confirm this, as Trump’s margin of gain equals Harris’ margin of decline, but this is where percentages can be deceiving. If we assume that Signifiers statistics only apply to swing states (he once again does not link to his source), then we know that turnout for Harris in battleground states was roughly equivalent to Biden in 2020.⁷⁵ The statistics shown by Signifier also say that the percentage of urban voters that voted for Harris is the same as for Biden in 2020, so in the battleground states where Harris outperformed Biden, it was probably driven by increased suburban and rural turnout for Harris. This means that Harris didn’t lose voters, Trump gained voters. As Signifier explains, there were many ballots on which Trump was the only candidate voted for, leading him to outperform several of his Republican colleagues who also won their races. Can this be explained by racism towards Harris? Absolutely. However, these suburban and rural voters are also exactly the kinds of middle classes who are predisposed to support a Bonapartist figure like Trump, even in countries where race isn’t a factor.

Signifier continues his line of argumentation by saying “the only difference on paper between Harris and Biden is their skin color and sex organs.”⁷⁶ This once again completely eschews the fact that the 2020 and 2024 elections happened under completely different circumstances. Signifier doesn’t engage with this. Signifier says that he is confident that if a heterosexual white man like Biden ran the same campaign as Harris, Trump would’ve been defeated, but this also completely forgets that the entire reason why Kamala replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee for President was because it was assessed that Biden would lose the election to Trump following the debate between the two men. This was further confirmed when a former speechwriter for Barack Obama said in an interview on Pod Saves America that the Biden campaign’s internal polling had Biden losing to Trump by at least 400 electoral college votes.⁷⁷ As we’ve already discussed, Harris even managed to match Biden’s swing state performance.

We reiterate that we agree with Signifier that white supremacy played a role in Trump’s victory, but Signifier’s explanation leads us to more of a “schrodinger's white supremacy,” rather than any real manifestation of the phenomenon that can be causally linked to Trump’s victory. This is also somewhat evident in Signifier’s next point: that Trump’s 2024 election performance surpasses that of Barack Obama in 2008. Signifier doesn’t even show statistics on screen to support this argument, so it is up to us to figure out how he arrived at this conclusion. If we simply go by national vote totals, then Trump’s 77 million votes in 2024 does indeed surpass the 69 million votes won by Obama in 2008, but so does Harris’ 75 million votes. Signifier’s statement appears more true if we compare Trump’s 2024 battleground state performance (51.2%) to Obama’s 2008 battleground state performance (47.1%),⁷⁸ but this actually doesn’t provide us with much insight because, aside from Nevada and North Carolina, the 2008 battleground states were different from the 2024 battleground states.⁷⁹ If we look at Trump’s 2024 performance in the 2008 battleground states, then Trump’s 44.5% does not beat Obama’s 47.1%.

Even though he did not outperform Obama in the 2008 battleground states, there is something to be said about the fact that out of Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia, Trump won all but Colorado and Virginia in 2024, whereas Obama won all but Missouri in 2008. Ohio and Florida are easily the most urban of these states, but overall the 2008 battleground states are largely suburban and/or rural. The fact that Trump won these states in 2024 while underperforming Obama’s 2008 victory once again points not towards vulgar conceptions of white supremacy, but the kind of middle class crisis that gives rise to Bonapartism. This is further reinforced by the fact that Trump won Ohio; yet another Rust Belt state.

Signifier concludes his analysis of the election by saying that “the data points to Trump turning out a kind of voter that only votes for him.” We don’t deny that these people are white supremacists, as Signifier argues, but this prompts questions about how and why these white supremacists exist. We know that people are not born white supremacists. White supremacy is something that people are socialized to believe in as they grow up. Scholars like Frantz Fanon have even written at length about the ways that white supremacy can even manifest within black communities.⁸⁰

So where does white supremacy come from? Does it exist in underground deposits? Does it grow on trees? Certainly not. White supremacy is a social construct which functions to divide the working class. We outlined this function at length in Part 1 of our article Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce! For an outline of its origin, we will quote Michelle Alexander:

“Fearful that such measures might not be sufficient to protect their interests,⁸¹ the planter class⁸² took an additional precautionary step, a step that would later come to be known as a racial bribe. Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the race-based system of slavery. Their own plight had not improved by much, but at least they were not slaves. Once the planter elite split the labor force, poor whites responded to the logic of their situation and sought ways to expand their racially privileged position.”⁸³

Though it has evolved in step with changes in the broader US economy, the structural maintenance of white supremacy has consistently revolved around ensuring that even the poorest whites are generally able to enjoy access to private property and secure employment. Since this arrangement has existed for centuries in the US, it is to be expected that the people who benefited from it would cling so tightly to it even once such privileges can no longer be guaranteed by the existing mode of production. Michelle Alexander’s scholarship not only shows the class dynamics at the origin of white supremacy, but that this class character has persisted, and is arguably now at the most apparent it has been since its inception. By the end of The New Jim Crow, Alexander explains how in order to maintain a semblance of color-blindness, it has become necessary for white supremacy to allow more radicalized people into positions of power while simultaneously trampling more white people than at any other time since the inception of white supremacy. This means that nowadays, though racial inequality remains widespread, there are more people of all colors in government as well as behind bars. This makes it much easier to observe that the people with political power in the US are bourgeois, regardless of their skin color, while the people being exploited and repressed are mostly proletarian.

This brings us back to Kamala Harris. Whereas many black Democrats get their start in politics doing various types of activism and advocacy for oppressed groups, Harris got her start as a prosecutor in California in the 1990s! As we are sure Signifier is aware, California, despite its progressive reputation, has a long history of systemic racism. It’s the state where Ronald Raegan started his political career; the state where the Black Panthers were originally founded to protect black people from police brutality. Since at least the 1970s, there have been “deputy gangs” in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.⁸⁴ The Rodney King Beating and Los Angeles Riots happened as Harris was starting her career as a prosecutor, albeit in a different county than where she worked. She would eventually preside over the entire California penal system when she became the state Attorney General in the 2010s, and all the same problems of police brutality and systemic racism persisted. Scholars have been saying for decades that the US criminal justice system has been the country’s primary lever of white supremacy, especially since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and it is precisely this system which Kamala Harris has defended and worked within in some capacity for her entire career, and she follows a long line of Democrats in that regard. It was also in the 1990s that the Clinton administration passed its infamous 1994 crime bill. And we know that Signifier is aware of all of this because he made a video about it.⁸⁵

We can talk all day about the white supremacists in Trump’s constituency, but the reality is that he didn’t create them. Trump is simply stoking a fire which he didn’t start. He is as much a symptom of the problem as he is a problem unto himself. The same cannot be said of the Democrats, who for decades have knowingly and deliberately created the wave that carried Trump back into the White House. He is the personified id of American politics; a monument to the shortcomings of the American experiment. We reiterate: if the Republican Party did not exist, the Democratic Party would invent it. To bring it back to Signifier’s thesis, however, to the extent that he proves that white supremacy played a role in Trump’s election victory, all he does is set the stage for an examination of the class dynamics driving the development of the white supremacist phenomenon. He proves that behind race there lurks the specter of class. So we can only reply: race issues are class issues.

Appendix 3: Where did the Democrats Actually Lose Votes?

As covered in Appendix 2, the vote totals of Kamala Harris in the battleground states, those that most influenced the outcome of the Presidential election, do not decrease substantially from Biden’s 2020 vote totals in those states, dropping only 0.3% by our estimates.⁸⁶ That being said, we know from the national vote totals that Harris did underperform Biden’s 2020 campaign. For us, this prompts the questions of where did the Democrats actually lose votes, what insights can be drawn from finding where the Democrats lost votes, and what implications do those observations carry for the arguments made in this article so far?

Clearly the Democrats did not lose votes evenly across the country, as a 0.3% loss across the country would result in Harris having a vote total only slightly lower than Biden in 2020. This is further confirmed by the fact that the nationwide vote decline from 2020 to 2024 (7.7%) is higher than the state-by-state average (5.7%), once again suggesting that the decline in votes was not evenly distributed. The picture begins to sharpen when we compare the average declines in the states won by Harris and the states lost by Harris.⁸⁷ In states lost by Harris, the average decline in votes from 2020 to 2024 was 4.8%, and 7.1% in states won by Harris. In other words, Democratic vote totals generally declined more in states won by Harris than in states lost by her.

The decline is even worse in the biggest Democratic strongholds. In California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois, the average decline was 13.2%; more than double the state-by-state average. Democrats experienced their biggest decline in California, where Harris’ vote total was 16.5% lower than Biden’s in 2020, which is all the more embarrassing given that it’s Harris’ home state! The large decline in these states also can’t be discarded as anomalies since the statistics show a trend of declining Democratic votes in more solidly Democratic states. The decline in voter turnout in these Democratic strongholds, and Democratic-leaning states more generally, can’t be credited to deliberate measures like gerrymandering⁸⁸ or voter suppression either because political power never deliberately supresses its own base.

What insights do we gain if we adopt F.D. Signifier’s position: that anti-black racism is the cause of this drop in turnout for Harris? It might be true insofar as turnout for Harris was lower than Biden on average, but probably isn’t a sufficient explanation for states like California and New York, where the drop in turnout far exceeds the national average. While we don’t deny that white supremacy played a role in the 2024 election, we established in Appendix 2 that it’s highly questionable as to whether or not it was the decisive factor, and that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party share in the blame for perpetuating the white supremacy that exists in the US.

Instead, we see the greatest drop in turnout for Kamala Harris in the states where Democratic power is paradoxically the most secure. The results show that Trump didn’t even come close to flipping the Democratic states that experienced the biggest drops in Democratic turnout. All of the Democratic strongholds discussed above have had Democratic Governors and Democrat-controlled state legislatures for multiple elections cycles, with few, if any, interruptions. This points to widespread dissatisfaction among Democratic voters with their elected officials. California Governor Gavin Newsome, who was also considered for Biden’s replacement in the 2024 election,⁸⁹ for example, has an favorability rating of only 27% and an unfavorability rating of 49.2%.⁹⁰ This pattern is repeated with New York Governor Kathy Hochul,⁹¹ Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy,⁹² and to a lesser extent with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.⁹³

This, of course, prompts the question of why Democratic voters would be dissatisfied with their elected officials, and we could not give a more thorough explanation than that given in the “Two Rights Don’t Make a Left” section of this article. The Democratic Party’s constituency contains irreconcilable contradictions which the Party has lost the ability to manage. The statistics discussed in this appendix completely confirm our thesis that “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.”⁹⁴

Additionally, the fact that the average drop in Democratic voter turnout was lower in states lost by Harris also confirms our thesis that it is the threat presented by the Republican Party that provides the unifying force for the Democratic Party’s voting constituency. Beyond the general average drop in Democratic turnout, it is hard to observe any easily explainable trends in these states. The decrease in Democratic voter turnout in Mississippi, for example, was the highest of any state won by Trump (13.5%). Since Trump won Mississippi without losing the state popular vote, we can say that gerrymandered voting districts probably weren’t a decisive factor in him winning this state, but this doesn’t negate the possibility of other forms of voter suppression playing a role. In Georgia, on the other hand, Democrats had the highest increase in turnout of any state at 3%. The fact that Democrats saw increased turnout, but Trump still won without losing the state popular vote means that neither gerrymandering nor general voter suppression were decisive in Trump’s victory in Georgia; all we can say is that he won. The fact that Democrats saw a lower average decline in turnout in Republican-leaning states than in Democratic-leaning states despite the numerous ways in which Republicans can hypothetically suppress Democratic turnout in these states points squarely to our thesis that the Republicans are what unify the Democratic Party’s voting constituency.

If F.D. Signifier’s election analysis cast any doubt on the correctness of our own election analysis, then the information discussed in this appendix almost entirely reaffirms the arguments we originally put forward about why the Democrats lost the election: 1) If the Republican Party did not exist, the Democratic Party would invent it. 2) Without the Republican Party, the contradictions within the Democratic Party’s constituency would destroy the Democrats. 3) The Democratic Party has lost the ability to manage these contradictions, which have become so stressed that the Democrats’ voting constituency could not be unified by the threat of a second Trump Presidency. 4) As a result of this, the Democratic Party is now losing support both when it is in power and when it is out of power. 5) This spells the end of the Democratic Party.

Bluebird,

January, 2025

1

2. 1. Manthey, Grace. 2022. “Despite 'defunding' claims, police funding has increased in many US cities.” ABC News.

2. “Cop Cities, USA.” 2024. Is Your Life Better. 

3. 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. (Savage, Luke. 2023. “Democratic Leaders’ Craven “Socialism” Vote Is a Symptom of Political Cluelessness.” Jacobin Magazine.)

4. 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.

5. “American Attitudes: Palestine and Israel in the 2024 Election.” 2024. Arab American Institute. 

6. By happenstance, we came across these statistics when researching for the third appendix to this article. We feel that they broadly reflect our hypothesis about the divided constituency of the Democratic Party.

7. Olbrysh, Ryan, Molly Ball, Leslie Dickstein, Mariah Espada, and Simmone Shah. 2021. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Time.

8. “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.” (Bluebird. 2024. “Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!” The Revolutionist:Substack.)

9. Kadidal, Shayana. 2024. “Torturers for Harris.” The Nation. 

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.”

13. McCarty, Dario. 2022. “Democrats Spend Millions on Republican Primaries.” Open Secrets.

14. Chappell, Bill. 2022. “The Democrats’ Strategy of Boosting Far-Right Republicans Seems to have Worked.” NPR.

15. 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. (Debenedetti, Gabriel, Jeremy B. White, Sam Sutton, Carly Sitrin, Bill Mahoney, and Josh Gerstein. 2016. “They Always Wanted Trump.” Politico.)

16. 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. 

17. See Appendix 3 for further explanation.

18. Sledge, Mathew. 2024. “In Dearborn, Rashida Tlaib did Nearly Twice as Well as Kamala Harris.” The Intercept.

19. Ventura, Juliann. 2024. “Axelrod: Racism, Sexism Partly to Blame for Harris Defeat.” The Hill.

20. “Democrats attack third-party candidate Jill Stein in razor-thin race.” 2024. Al Jazeera.

21. “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.”(Michael, Logan. 2024. “Democrats Blame Everyone but Themselves Amidst Historic Election Failure.” Flagler College Gargoyle.)

22. Middle East Eye Instagram Account. 2024.

23. Mustafa, Maysa. 2024. “Muslims, Arabs face baseless attacks on social media over Harris election loss.” Middle East Eye.

24. See above comments and sources referencing what happened in Dearborn, Michigan.

25. Al-Sheikh, Y.L. 2024. “Harris's Gaza Policy Was a Disaster on Every Level.” The Nation.

26. 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. (Baio, Ariana. 2024. “More Americans are saying they are Republican than Democrat. Will it impact the election?” The Independent.)

27. 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.

28. Davis, Mike. 2020. “Mike Davis, Trench Warfare, NLR 126, November–December 2020.” New Left Review.

29. Molski, Max. 2024. “How voting demographics changed between 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.” NBC Washington.

30. 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.

31. Manuel, Obed. 2024. “Why Latino Voters’ Turn to Trump, GOP May Not Have Been as Sharp as Exit Polls Showed.” NPR.

32. Further study has proven us wrong on this point. See Appendices 2 and 3 for explanation. Trump’s 2024 performance was strong enough in battleground states that, even if Democrats had not lost a single vote, Trump would’ve won the election without winning the popular vote.

33. Polling shows that Harris actually received more votes from unionized workers than Biden, however, Trump’s performance with non-unionized workers was better in 2024 than in 2020, pointing towards our theory about him creating a Bonapartist class formation by appealing to those workers who are closer to the lumpenproletariat. (Glass, Aurelia, and David Madland. 2024. “While Other Voters Moved Away From the Democrats, Union Members Shifted Toward Harris in 2024.” Center for American Progress Action Fund.)

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. “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.” (Bluebird. 2024. “Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!” The Revolutionist:Substack.)

40. 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.

41. Novikov, Illia, and Hanna Arhirova. 2023. “Ukraine's president rules out holding elections next spring and calls for unity in fighting Russia.” AP News.

42. Stewart, Phil, and Idrees Ali. 2024. “How a Trump Presidency Could Lead to a Purge at the Pentagon.” Reuters.

43. Ibid.

44. Klippenstein, Ken. 2024. “Trump's Military "Purge" and Next Defense Secretary.” Klip: Substack.

45. Technically any mass termination would be a purge in the literal sense of the word, but we understand that “purge” is a very politically charged term, and so we are using it in the more colloquial sense here.

46. Ali, Idrees, and Phil Stewart. 2024. “US military ready to carry out lawful orders of next Trump administration, avoid politics, Pentagon chief says.” Reuters. 

47. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1978. “The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism: Chapter XVIII.” Free Association Books.

48. For a crash course on these positions in the DSA, we recommend this article.

49. “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 (Slaughter, Jane. 2024. “Viewpoint: We Won’t Win Until We’re Troublemakers.” Labor Notes.)

50. Johnson, Adam. 2024. “The Democrats' Hard-Right Turn on Immigration Is a Disaster in Every Way.” The Nation.

51

52

53. Siddique, Ashik. 2024. “We Democratic Socialists of America Will Not Apologize. We Will Stand for What is Right.” Newsweek.

54. 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.

55. Wire, Sarah D. 2024. “The Donald Trump Resistance is Read for When Democrats Stop Grieving.” USA Today.

56. Rashid, Hafiz. 2024. “Military Not So Keen on Being Part of Trump's Deportation Plans.” The New Republic.

57. “US Constitution: Amendment XIII, Section I.” 1789. National Constitution Center.

58. Austin, Sophie. 2024. “California voters reject measure that would have banned forced prison labor.” AP News.

59. 1. “The Constitution in the 100 Mile Border Zone.” 2014. American Civil Liberties Union.

2. “Know Your Rights: The 100 Mile Border Zone.” 2018. American Civil Liberties Union.

60. Dyvik, Einar H. 2024. “Countries with the most prisoners 2023.” Statista.

61. Manthey, Grace. 2022. “Despite 'defunding' claims, police funding has increased in many US cities.” ABC News.

62. “Cop Cities, USA.” 2024. Is Your Life Better.

63. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2024. “Dachau | Holocaust Encyclopedia.” Holocaust Encyclopedia.

64. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1916. “The Junius Pamphlet: Chapter I.” Marxists Internet Archive.

65. How the F*ck Did Trump Actually Win?

66. Krieg, Gregory, and Eric Bradner. 2020. “Trump wants Americans to believe Biden is a radical leftist. It’s a tough sell.” CNN.

67. Khanna, Kabir. 2020. “POLITICS Polling analysis: Do voters view Biden and Trump as moderate or extreme?” CBS News.

68. “Presidential battleground states, 2024.” 2024. Ballotpedia.

69. Ibid.

70. Is Everyone Stupid? An Election Investigation – SOME MORE NEWS

71. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. “Manufacturing Consent.” Pantheon Books.

72. “Presidential battleground states, 2024.” 2024. Ballotpedia.

73. For example, Harris’ consistent tendency to defend government support for the genocide of Palestinians should have been seen as a predictor that she would lose Michigan, the state with the highest Arab population, which constituted an important part of the constituency that delivered Biden to the White House in 2020. North Carolina was won by Trump in both 2020 and 2016. The fact that either of these states were considered battleground states by mainstream analysts in 2024 simply defies logic in our opinion.

74. Bluebird. 2024. “Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!” The Revolutionist:Substack.

75. See Appendix 3 for an expanded explanation.

76. How the F*ck Did Trump Actually Win?

77. Lang, Alex. 2024. “Biden’s Polling Said Trump Would Win at Least 400 Electoral Votes Before President Quit the Race, Obama’s Aide Claims.” The Independent.

78. We derived these percentages by first excluding all third party votes from our calculations, adding up the votes for each state in which the candidate was victorious, and then dividing by the total number of votes cast for Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates in these states.

79. We used this article from ABC News to figure out which states were considered battleground states in the 2008 Presidential election.

80. Fanon, Frantz. 1951. “Black Skin, White Masks.” Grove Press.

81. Alexander spends the preceding pages explaining that indentured servitude was the dominant form of labor in early colonial America, for both black and white laborers. The shift to specifically black slave labor was driven by three factors: 1) increasing demand not only for more laborers, but also more control over laborers than could be achieved through indentured servitude; 2) Native Americans were in a better position to resist enslavement, making them unsuitable candidates for enslavement; and 3) it was feared that enslaving whites would disincentivize poor Europeans from coming to the Americas.

82. The actual name for the class of large plantation owners.

83. Alexander, Michelle. 2010. “The New Jim Crow: Chapter I.” The New Press.

84. Castle, Cerise. 2021. “A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.” Knock LA.

85. The Problem with Black Cops

86. Since state-by-state vote totals were not available on Ballotpedia, we used this CNN election map for the 2020 election while still using Ballotpedia for the 2024 election.

87. We have also included the votes cast in the District of Columbia since it carries 3 electoral college votes and was part of our data set.

88. The intentional drawing of voting districts to disproportionately favor a given political group.

89. Cameron, Chris, and Adam Nagaourney. 2024. “Who Will Replace Biden at the Top of the Ticket?” New York Times.

90. “Newsom Favorable/Unfavorable Ratings.” 2024. The Hill.

91. “Hochul Job Approval & Favorability Ratings Up a Little, Remain Negative; Only 33% of Voters Would Re-Elect Hochul, 57% Want ‘Someone Else.’” 2024. Siena College Research Institute.

92. McKinely, Sean P., Andrew E. Smith, Zachary S. Azem, and Tracy Keirns. 2024. “Healy's Popularity Declines, Housing & Immigration Seen as Most Important Problems.” UNH Scholars Repository.

93. “Pritzker Favorable/Unfavorable Ratings.” 2024. The Hill.

94. Bluebird. 2024. “Birth of a Bonaparte?: Trump and the End of US Bourgeois Democracy.” Cosmonaut Magazine.