The central mistake of liberal anti-Trump politics was to treat Trumpism as aberration rather than symptom. Four years of 'this is not who we are,' of appeals to American exceptionalism, of nostalgia for a bipartisan consensus that was always more myth than reality — and the underlying conditions that produced Trump remained entirely unaddressed.
When Trump lost in 2020, there was a liberal sigh of relief that confused electoral defeat with the defeat of a political tendency. The tendency, rooted in decades of economic dislocation, cultural backlash, racial resentment, and institutional decay, was not defeated. It was, if anything, more organized.
The Infrastructure of Reaction
The contemporary American right has built formidable organizational infrastructure:
- A media ecosystem that reaches tens of millions daily
- A network of think tanks and policy shops that developed detailed blueprints for administrative transformation (most notoriously Project 2025)
- A legal movement that has reshaped the federal judiciary
- A grassroots base that has captured school boards, county commissions, and state legislatures across the country
This infrastructure will persist regardless of who is the Republican presidential nominee. It will be available to whoever commands the loyalty of the Republican base — and the base has been thoroughly, probably irreversibly, Trumpified.
The Left Response
The inadequacy of liberal anti-fascism is a separate question from the adequacy of socialist strategy. A left response to authoritarian nationalism cannot be reducible to defending the liberal status quo — which produced Trumpism in the first place — or to a defensive crouch that abandons any transformative politics.
The failures of neoliberal governance are what opened the door to the right. That argument requires offering something — a vision of working-class solidarity, economic transformation, and genuine democracy — that liberalism cannot.— Political Analysis, February 2024
The task is simultaneously to build maximum resistance to authoritarian consolidation while arguing, clearly and without apology, that those failures created the conditions we now face.
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About the author
Political Theorist
Sidoc Haytu is a political theorist specializing in Marxism and the cultural politics of race and gender. He is the author of several essays on care work, wages, and the gendered division of labor.
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