DONALD TRUMP, THE DEMOCRATS,
AND THE RULING CLASS

By A. Kronstadt

The ruling class versus the “deep state”

The ruling class has spoken and Donald Trump has managed to make himself president again. Trump was the victorious standard bearer of the Trump party over the Demopublican party, in which were consolidated the remains of the the previous Democratic and Republican parties of the Clintons and Obamas as well as the Bushes and Cheneys. As we will see, however, this molecular rearrangement of parties does not result in any power being lost to the ruling class.

We will mention the ruling class a lot here: they are the people who are permitted in the boardrooms when major economic decisions are made, including corporate owners themselves and their top managers, as well as certain political leaders including the Clintons, Bushes, and Cheneys, but probably not Obama. They include the major exploiters of labor and especially those who exploit the very exploiters of labor themselves. The ruling class overlaps with the capitalist class; not all capitalists are members of the ruling class, and not all members of the ruling class are active members of the capitalist class.

A good example of a person who is a member of the capitalist class but not a card carrying member of the ruling class is Donald Trump himself. He belongs to a side branch of the upper strata of American society that contends with the real ruling class for power and money but is not part of the mainstream like the figures mentioned above. He might be compared with Julius Caesar, if not historically then as a Shakespearean metaphor. Caesar was a member of the real ruling class in Rome who had squandered a lot of his money on private armies and bribes to enhance his own power. His game was to directly appeal to the masses, telling them that he was going to fix everything, but only if they put a crown on his head. Caesar was the first documented populist in European history, a model for Cromwell, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, and other bad news figures, and now for our Trump who as we will see is just a wanabee and who will ultimately be rejected.

In a sense, my admittedly Marxist use of the term “ruling class” overlaps with the right-wing concept of “deep state”. There is an inkling or perception among all the people that a stratum is out there which controls everything behind the scenes, and that the secrecy maintained by government and industry actually hides something. Ordinary people feel this way, because they are sensing something real. The “deep state” however has been distorted by the American right to represent all that they themselves fear in their own psyches—all that is elite and effete and faggy and that meets in the back of pizzerias to discuss kidnapping children. Hence it is more scientific if we stick to the term “ruling class”.

The new politics in America

The ruling class always hedges its bets, making certain that no matter who wins, they win. By 2016 the old Reagan generation, meaning not only the Bush/Cheney crowd but also the Clintons, had lost all of its appeal. They were terrified that the Obama era would continue for a whole generation and cost them more money on healthcare and education, or that Black people would actually progress to full equality and take something away from the ruling rich. There is no DEI in the ruling class—it remains white. The Reaganites and the Clintonites were all based on supply side economics: the ruling class would be allowed to do what it wanted, and the result would be a prosperity that trickles down to everyone and floats everyone's boat. The problem was that the rich Demopublicans could no longer sell the masses this magical picture of rational self interest. They could not conjure up prosperity or float anyone's boat anymore. The answer was to give us all a dose of the irrational—a fear of the other—a return to the old white people narrative such as that in Little House on the Prairie where the Indians are lurking in the bushes ready to put an arrow in your bodice. The facts do not matter; it is a matter of nerves and glands: of emotions. Thus Trump was born.

In the sense of appealing directly to the masses in an emotional and racist way, Trump is a fascist. It seems unlikely that he will effectively create a fascist regime because he is too old and started his climb to power too late in life. He has only four years to do what he wants, and being the embodiment of a windbag personality cult, his movement will not survive his death or retirement.

Biden/Harris: enablers of war mongering and genocide

While not minimizing the seriousness of having a deranged egoist in such a position of power, for those of for us who see through the veneer of the Democrats, Trump's victory must be relativized to some extent. If for example Trump is the American counterpart of Netanyahu, Biden/Harris have been the chief enablers of the real Netanyahu, to the tune of 43,000 deaths. Biden/Harris have played brinkmanship with Russia and have defined the fault lines of World War III, with the Axis comprising Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran, and the Allies centering on Anglo-America, Israel, and NATO. The Middle East and the Black Sea today are more volatile than the Balkans on the eve of World War I, and this situation arose on the Democrats' watch. It does not seem intuitively possible that Trump could bring us closer to war than Biden/Harris have done. In fact, with the Biden administration shipping long-range missiles to Ukraine, and the Department of Defense pronouncement that anything goes now that North Korea is in the picture, the present Democratic administration seems to be more prepared than Trump to flip the domino.

There are a multitude of ways in which the incumbent Democrats have pissed off the American voter. Although heretofore the Democrats and Republicans have amounted to about the same thing, the Democrats include a “progressive” sideshow that either wins or loses them votes, depending on the specifics of the scenario. Lately, however, far from pushing a real New Deal to eliminate poverty across the board, the progressives among the Dems have taken the path of identity politics. They have enshrined ephemeral doctrines coming from university special interest studies departments as if they were the bedrock of progressive thinking. Whether we are talking about transgender pronouns, Me Too, rainbow flags, or sanctuary cities, these have not been issues that affect the lives of most people, and which have importance only in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere. While the progressive wing of the Dems was pushing these ideologies that regular people did not understand, the mainstream Clinton Dems were still wedded to ideologies like globalization and trickle down economics, which had become outright bad for the American worker and lacked all attraction for the masses.

Death by a thousand identities

The Democrats of the twenty-first century have doomed themselves by adopting a bloodless hypereducated form of rhetoric the hallmark of which is the use of acronyms instead of real words. Do you support BLM? The chant “Black Lives Matter” rallied huge multiracial crowds in NYC during the furor after the chokehold death of Eric Garner at the hands of an NYPD undercover officer. As the acronym “BLM”, however, it became a bureaucratic entity and a convenient target for Fox News and New York Post guttersnipes who defend and savor police violence. “BLM” as an acronym turned police violence into a racial issue rather than a freedom issue. The multiracial character of the movement to restrain police authority disappeared because everyone was expected to focus on the racial aspect of everything—not just police behavior but every aspect of civil society. One could no longer even talk about diabetes anymore without emphasizing that the ailment chiefly affects Black people and that white people are getting resources that should rightfully go to Black people. This 21^st century rhetoric about racial injustice sounded really sophisticated and even radical at first, being based on the “1619 Project” and the best thinkers from Black studies departments in the great universities. In the end this rhetoric turned out stale and divisive and did more to rally white nationalism that to rally black people against Trump and his white nationalist bigotry.

Were the patrons of the Stonewall Tavern who in 1969 rioted against police oppression of gay people “LBGTQ”? Would they have risked their necks for an acronym? It seems as if the gay rights movement, one of the greatest freedom movements in world history, was packaged up and put on the shelf when this bloodless abbreviation was coined. Regular people, including gay bar patrons, do not think the same way as professors in Black studies, gay studies, transgender studies or any other kind of identity-based university studies department. Black people do not think the same way as the professors in Black studies departments and women definitely do not think the same way as the professors in ivory tower women's' studies departments. It is only the intellectual arrogance of the brother-sisterhood of those with doctor's degrees that makes them think so. The reason why Trump won is that his rhetoric has emotion in it, and caters to peoples' psyches instead of seeking to educate them.

More and more the Dems have come to be perceived as the party of social engineering with a mission to wipe out the evil habits of the unwashed masses. Their success in jacking up the price of cigarettes to save all of us addictive personalities from ourselves led the “liberal” social tinkerers to an arrogant belief in their ability to clean up all of the evil in the world, even at the expense of creating greater evils. You can prove that global warming exists, but can you prove that Democratic hobby horses like carbon taxes or congestion pricing will ever clean it up? For the most part, these things are just speculative and indirect ways of dealing with the human influence on the environment. If the entire world does not participate in these measures simultaneously, they will just increase the cost of living for particular strata of the population and probably drive them away from the Democrats. The reduction in actual CO2 emissions will turn out to be marginal, and the world will continue to heat up. Like Trump's proposed tariffs against China they could go either way—they could perhaps promote some positive action but are more likely to just make everything more expensive for us.

Inept engineers of our lives

We Americans much to our credit do not like to be regimented. It is hard for people who have been subjected--by Democratic regimes such as those in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago--to Covid-19 lockdowns, mask mandates, and compulsory vaccination to conceive of Trump as the authoritarian one. Public health bureaucrats mostly on the Democratic end of the spectrum, such as Anthony Fauci, were fully aware that the Covid-19 virus was of laboratory origin. They had collaborated with and financed the irresponsible gain of function experiments that turned a routine animal virus into a deadly human pathogen. Rather than admit the truth, they came up with a pandemic response as crazy and convoluted as the experiments that created the virus. They locked down and suffocated industry, turned children and teenagers into isolated neurotics, and transformed the streets of New York into a ghostly, masked dystopia. As a final insult to our intelligence and dignity they came up with a vaccine mandate backed up with the threat of losing one's job; some Democratic officials even suggested forcing senior citizens to take the vaccine by proposing to curtain Social Security for “vaccine resisters”.

Trump may indeed be and ideological fascist, but I challenge anyone to point out anything more fascistic during Trump's first term than the lockdowns and vaccine mandates which were, by and large, the handiwork of the Democrats.

The Democrats devour their own

Sen. Bernie Sanders has hit the nail on the head with his indictment of the Democratic Party for its sellout of the American people. It may now well be time to replace the lame Dems with a new party representing the people as a whole in terms of general human needs. One needs food and shelter to be Black, white, male, female, gay, straight or transgender; however, one cannot eat an identity. The ruling class has little problem with this “diversity” claptrap so long as it only costs them minimally. There have been rich women for a long time, with rich gay people and gender nonconformists going back to ancient Rome and beyond. It is with the more general issues like food, healthcare, and particularly housing and land use that the ruling class begins to feel hit in the wallet. This is why the Dems ultimately failed to offer the people anything that could draw them away from Trump. The ruling rich are all natural-born cheap bastards whether their ancestors came from Scotland or not.

The Democrats that have faced off with Trump during the years 2016 though the present have been a party ruled by a very narrow elite unwilling to give any newcomers a taste of power. This was made clear in the Wikileaks dumps, which opened the biggest window on the hidden mechanism of U.S. politics in recent history. The layer at the top, still dominated by Bill and Hillary Clinton, no longer feels that it has the need for open conventions or primaries. In the contemporary Democratic party, the grown-ups anoint the candidates, be they Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, and the children's job is to respectfully obey and vote as they are told. The Dems have always been the party of the ruling class, but even when they were sponsoring segregationist governors and running the Vietnam war they did a better job of making it look that the rank and file were in charge. Primaries and open conventions made it look like decisions were rising up from below rather than crashing down on people's heads from above. However, since the end of the Obama years, the veil of democracy has been stripped away. The pronouncements of candidates Clinton, Biden, and Harris are perceived by the voters as what they are—vague, fake, programmed from on high. Even the vulgar rantings of Donald Trump have more substance than the anemic platitudes of the Democrats.

It is an interesting question whether the Democrats are simply self-destructing from their own impotence, or whether the ruling class is using the moribund Dems in a kamikaze action to destroy democracy and bring about a more authoritarian society. Could the Democrats possibly be putting on such a bad performance by accident? Remember that starting all at once in 2016 or thereabouts, emanating almost entirely from Democratic circles, a series of divisive social phenomena spread through America. The Me Too movement guaranteed that the war between man and woman would always prevail over the class struggle. When there were not enough actual incidents of abuse like those committed by Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, it became sufficient to disseminate innuendo, and/or elevate minor “microaggressions” into something that could get a person “cancelled”. A spirit of self-censorship replaced the love of controversy that shaped American politics from the beginning. In contrast to the Democrats, Republican politicians and in particular Donald Trump were much less vulnerable to being brought down by their microagressions or even mega-agressions because their ideological baggage did not require that kind of moralizing. Me Too was like a neutron bomb that killed off the Democrats and left Trump standing.

With Me Too we saw the spread of a destructive moral panic catalyzed by a nucleus of real incidents which received enormous attention from the media. What the “movement” supposedly represented was a belated feminist revolution, but what resulted was a Stalinist purge of men based on a principle of “believe the women”. With all objectivity and presumption of innocence gone, accusations flew like in the Salem witch trials, resulting in an atmosphere of paranoia and a wall between man and woman, especially in progressive, enlightened, liberal or radical circles, whatever we choose to call the circle of people around us. It proved to be a deadly chemical reagent specifically suited for dissolving these circles of people. On the other side of the equation it drove men into Trumpian circles and contributed to the great pro-Trump gender gap on Nov. 5, 2024. Me Too had the effect of driving men en masse away from progressive ideas.

As feminism's evil twin, Me Too, grew in strength, identity politics debilitated the real feminist movement. The 2016 demonstrations in New York and Washington against Trump's anti-women policies foundered as their leaders mutually accused one another of antisemitism and anti-Arabism. Never having found a home among working class women at all, feminism ceased to be a grass-roots force and at present seems to have degenerated into a cheering section for the rich and famous among the female corporate elite.

What is to be done?

Under a second Trump administration, people who once called themselves “The Left” must regroup according to their fundamental values. I would propose that the values that we at the Shadow have always adhered to are peace, freedom, and wide availability of human necessities for all.

We must get rid of irrelevant baggage and the sense of purism that divides. We must morph in a libertarian direction that assures others that we support their freedom. Even the freedom to believe that the world was created by God in six days must be respected. For too long have regular people believed that leftist intellectuals were coming to take away their religion: we do not have to believe in religion ourselves but we must radically defend freedom of religion, as well as all other forms of freedom of expression.

We must abandon nationalism and identity politics and once again speak of the brotherhood of humans. If that is too sexist, let us then speak of the humanhood of humans. We can no longer go running around with all of our little flags, sparring about the pecking order of oppression. Trump will simply pick us off one by one at that rate.

We must be willing to admit certain truths even if they seem to be of a right-wing rather than left-wing character, because the ground has shifted and those labels are not accurate anymore. Islamic fundamentalism is evil for the same reason that Zionism is evil. Both of these ideologies deny human solidarity and lead to a narrowing of the mind. American Black people are not third-world people but Americans who must share fully in the wealth of America. American Black people do NOT have more in common with impoverished Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe than with white people in the U.S. W.E.B. Du Bois would disagree with this, but he is not running for any office; furthermore he is dead and and was wrong about a lot of things even while alive.

Freedom of speech and the press are not the ideology of the rich, but the tools that common Americans of all descriptions need to survive and prosper. Yes, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. However, this does not negate all Jeffersonian concepts and values. Freedom of expression, untrammeled and exercised without fear, is the key instrument of the continued fight against racism and other forms of oppression. The abolition of slavery is an ongoing process.

Let us jettison empty identities and bring back human solidarity in the era of Trump.