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Trump Is Primed to Lead the American Counter-Revolution
The MAGA/NatCon crowd on the verge of taking over government have made speech after speech outlining their ideas to wield radical violence on behalf of objectives as wide-ranging as eliminating the FBI to invading “sanctuary cities.”
Nov 26, 2024
The revolution may not be televised, but the counter-revolution sure will be.
In this new political era, the dominant military power in the capitalist world-system is ruled by a Venn Diagram of baddies—ethnonationalists, oligarchs, tech bros, and national security hawks. These elites take their opportunity to direct state power from the legitimacy afforded a single man. One of the only common elements about the diverse (but majority white and male) votes cast for Donald Trump is that they all saw Washington liberal elites as the enemy.
To put it differently, Trump voters were against one set of ruling-class elites and so cast their vote for a man who has surrounded himself with a different cadre of ruling-class elites, all of whom seem to fashion themselves as enemies of the previous dominant set. MAGA politics marks the emergence of political counter-elites with nothing short of revolutionary ambitions.
But what does that mean? Why is nobody talking about what is obviously emerging—counter-elites who are literally talking about revolution?
Defining Terms
In parsing the distinctions and overlaps among conservatives, reactionaries, and the forgotten category of counter-revolutionaries, everything is at stake.
Everybody’s go-to text today for these terms and concepts—terms that typologize the political right—seems to be Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. A fine book, but a product of its moment (2011) and definitely a distinct take rather than a consensus view about the right. Joe Mackay has also done some work parsing conservative and reactionary in particular.
George Lawson, meanwhile, has made a convincing case that in the context of the age of empires, “counter-revolution” was about countering the revolutionary projects that emerged after the French Revolution. This gave counter-revolution back then a Burkean quality, which is to say conservative in the literal sense—preserving the old order, tradition, and distributions of power. This is the conventional way of understanding counter-revolution.
But in the West right now, and specifically in America, there is no left-revolutionary situation to counter. This is why the dust-binned work of Arno Mayer might be the ideal way to make sense of where this current configuration of right-wing political power is taking America.
Seen through a Mayer-ian lens, Project 2025 is not “weird”—it’s a field manual for counter-revolution on the institutional and policy terrain.
Mayer wrote many classics, but the one that really speaks to our moment is Dynamics of Counter-Revolution. In that book, he offers three types of right-wing “forces of order” with different agendas. Two are straightforward but deserve explaining, while the third is both more controversial and more important to grasp right now.
He defined conservative thought as “designed to give coherence to the defense of traditional social, economic, and political institutions and of traditional aesthetics, morals, and manners.” Reactionaries, meanwhile, “advocate a return to a mythical and romanticized past. In this past they seek the recovery and restoration of institutions…which sustained a hierarchical order of privileges and prerogatives.”
Mayer’s counter-revolution is particularly relevant to the current moment. He defined this concept as the forces of “order, hierarchy, authority, discipline, obedience, tradition, loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and nationalism [that wield revolutionary methods,] mobilizing and regimenting superannuated, unhinged, and inert individuals and groups… that enables them to become a new but claimant political counterelite.”
Unpacking counter-revolutionaries even further, Mayer goes on to say that they combine “the glorification of traditional attitudes and behavior patterns with the charge that these are being corrupted, subverted, and defiled by conspiratorial agents and influences… its constructive purposes remain deliberately inchoate and equivocal.”
It is common to use reactionary or far-right to describe MAGA and NatCon politics. These guys are no Edmund Burkes, after all. Neither of these terms is wrong, but they say nothing about counter-revolution, which is something they actively talk about. To wit:
You Say You Want A Revolution, Well, You Know
It’s not just that they invoke revolution in their rhetoric. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) talked about revolution rhetorically while running for president, but proposed a pretty gradualist reform agenda… and a non-violent one at that.
The MAGA/NatCon crowd on the verge of taking over government, by contrast, have made speech after speech outlining their ideas to wield radical violence on behalf of objectives as wide-ranging as eliminating the FBI to invading “sanctuary cities” to bombing Mexico and initiating mass deportations of immigrants from everywhere. Seen through a Mayer-ian lens, Project 2025 is not “weird”—it’s a field manual for counter-revolution on the institutional and policy terrain.
The “fascist debate” about MAGA has been frustrating and unhelpful. Mayer’s category of counter-revolutionary, though, captures important features, only some of which are present in the “fascist” discourse:
- Nationalist
- Glorification of tradition
- Authority
- Hierarchy
- Counter-elite elite
- A need to purge “agents” who have corrupted the nation
- Mobilizing “unhinged and inert” groups of people
That checks out!
According to Theda Skocpol in States and Social Revolutions, revolution consists of “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures… accompanied by and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below.” Counter-revolution, then, is a similarly rapid and radical transformation of the world but with two distinctions. One is that it comes from the top (by elites) even more than from below. The other is that the content of the revolution, following Mayer, is reactionary.
And now that MAGA has more institutional power to transform America than any group in the past 100 years, the future will look less like Nazi Germany 2.0 than a project of counter-revolution to transform the social order and existing distributions of power in society. American government will be ethnonationalist. It will be patriarchal. It will be violent. It will redound to the benefit of oligarchs. And it will threaten to destabilize the world.
Disturbingly, the architecture for this counter-revolutionary project has much source material to draw on in the form of existing U.S. foreign policy and the existing balance of forces between capital and labor. Even the counter-revolutionary’s impetus to dehumanize its enemies has gotten a substantial boost from the dehumanization that permeates U.S. policy, from the Mexico border to Palestine.
That “normal” U.S. politics has gifted the counter-revolution so much of what it needs to wreak havoc on the world should prompt a re-examination of what is normal.
Is “Counter-Revolution” Right?
Mayer’s various arguments are not beyond critique. His analysis of counter-revolution ties closely to the making of World War I, which he saw as an external solution to domestic political conflict between left and right. But all the belligerents in World War I were not polarized in the same ways when it came to left-right conflict. And although there is evidence that the world war had domestic political motivations, there’s not enough evidence to suggest it was more important than alternative motivations (inter-imperial competition, the boomerang effect of colonialism, the balance of power’s inevitable system failure, the “cult of the offensive,” national status pathologies, etc).
A slightly amended argument would carry more weight: World War I tilted Western politics in favor of counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries, even if that was not its primary purpose. It’s hard to argue with that.
Nevertheless, what makes Mayer notable is the very shape of these important arguments. He’s bringing together an analysis of geopolitics with left-right politics. His formulations are compatible with neoclassical realism in international relations but have much more meaning and content than that theoretical tradition.
And in the final analysis, if Mayer’s counter-revolutionary diagnosis applies to the current admixture of ethnonationalists, oligarchs, tech bros, and national security bros, then the political horizons of the progressive left are going to have to transcend donating money to the Democratic Party.
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Why Sean O’Brien’s RNC Speech Was a Bad Move
It’s bad enough for a union leader to play into the charade that common ground might be found with the anti-union, employer-funded Republican party. It’s even worse when that party is scapegoating our fellow workers.
Jul 19, 2024
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien spoke at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention on Monday. This was a bad move.
Much of the speech would have been fine if he had delivered it somewhere else. O’Brien railed against corporate greed, singling out Amazon and the private equity vultures that killed Yellow Freight. He called for stronger labor laws. Nobody says that stuff at the Republican convention, so some unionists were pleased to hear righteous themes reach a new audience.
But it almost didn’t matter what he said—the far louder message was where he said it. The convention is not a forum where policy is debated. It’s a coronation pageant.
What’s the message to immigrant Teamsters—and the immigrant workers the Teamsters hope to organize—when their union leader shares a stage with speaker after speaker blaming them for low wages and calling for their families to be torn apart?
There’s a reason why the party gave O’Brien a prime speaking slot on day one, and why Trump, who has zero interest in O’Brien’s pro-worker proposals, beamed through the speech.
Having the Teamster president there—talking tough, laying into the corporate elite—is great for Trump’s fake-populist brand. It lends credibility to his “I’m for the little guy” shtick.
It’s bad enough for a union leader to play into the charade that common ground might be found with the anti-union, employer-funded Republican party. It’s even worse when that party is scapegoating our fellow workers.
What’s the message to immigrant Teamsters—and the immigrant workers the Teamsters hope to organize—when their union leader shares a stage with speaker after speaker blaming them for low wages and calling for their families to be torn apart? Last night the party handed out printed signs to convention delegates that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”
The Jury Is In
In an interview with Fox News before his speech, O’Brien described himself as a lifelong Democrat—but said the Teamsters rank and file is split between the parties, he hoped to speak at both conventions, and he was willing to work with anyone on labor’s issues.
The event was smartly stage-managed, though. A parade of speakers just before O’Brien, billed in giant letters as “Everyday Americans,” told touching stories about working three jobs and not being able to afford gifts for the grandkids. Each one blamed President Joe Biden and said a Trump administration would restore prosperity.
O’Brien’s talking points were so similar—workers are getting the short end of the stick, government is dysfunctional—that he seemed to be agreeing with them, even if he didn’t outright blame Biden or endorse Trump.
In case there’s any doubt: Billionaire Trump, who as an employer has fought unions and stiffed workers, and as a TV personality made “You’re fired” his catchphrase, is not for the little guy. There’s no mystery how labor would fare under his administration. This guy was already president, and we saw the results.
He cut back workplace safety inspectors to their lowest numbers in history. His Labor Board rolled back union rights so far that labor lawyer Robert Schwartz had to delete an entire chapter from The Legal Rights of Union Stewards.
He stacked federal agencies and courts with anti-union zealots who made millions of workers ineligible for overtime pay, made it harder for workers to unionize and easier for bosses to steal wages, and lots more. His Supreme Court made the whole public sector “right to work.” He celebrated a massive tax giveaway to the rich, and never offered a word of support to workers on strike. He tried to slash Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. He opposed any increase in the minimum wage.
He waged war on federal employee unions with attacks on their collective bargaining and due process rights, and shut down the government in a stunt that forced them to go without pay for 35 days. He called climate change a hoax and removed references to it from government documents, while workers suffered the effects of fires, hurricanes, and heatwaves.
Corporate tycoons and alums of his first administration have put together an even more draconian plan for a second term. They want to abolish overtime pay, public sector unions, the federal minimum wage, prevailing wage agreements, the Department of Education, and child labor laws.
Divisive Nonsense
O’Brien singled out Senator JD Vance, the party’s vice presidential nominee, as someone Teamsters can work with, saying, “He’s been right there on all our issues,” though the AFL-CIO says Vance has voted with working people 0% of the time. This year Vance co-sponsored with Senator Marco Rubio a bill to legalize company unions.
O’Brien praised Missouri Senator Josh Hawley too, even though he voted against the Butch Lewis Act that saved 400,000 Teamsters’ pensions, and his AFL-CIO scorecard is barely better than Vance’s at 11%. Hawley put out an op-ed the next morning touting the new “Pro-Labor Conservatism.”
“The C-suite long ago sold out the United States, shuttering factories in the homeland and gutting American jobs,” Hawley wrote, “while using the profits to push diversity, equity, and inclusion and the religion of the trans flag.”'
Hating on workers in other countries makes impossible the only effective strategy against multinational employers: solidarity across borders.
This is divisive nonsense. What CEOs do with their profits is buy mega-yachts and ridiculous watches; transgender workers are not to blame for runaway plants. The problem with corporate DEI is that it’s often hollow, but equality is actually a union value, something we fight for—and bosses usually resist, because things like equal pay for equal work cost money. Yet O’Brien retweeted the op-ed with the comment, “@HawleyMO is 100% on point.”
The most ominous theme in O’Brien’s speech was nationalism. He hammered on the phrase “American workers” and said Amazon’s worst crime is a lack of allegiance to the United States—aligning nicely with right-wing “America First” talking points. Yet his audience was the same party that opposes warehouse safety bills, opposes bills to make it easier to organize a union, and opposes the joint-employer rules that would hold Amazon accountable.
Hating on workers in other countries makes impossible the only effective strategy against multinational employers: solidarity across borders. Are unions going to ally ourselves with right-wing politicians—who, when it comes to foreign policy, back anti-union governments across the world—or are we going to ally with workers in other countries to take on companies like Amazon?
Hawley’s op-ed bashes China and backs “America First” energy policies he claims would help auto workers by repealing electric-vehicle mandates. But the United Auto Workers are taking a different road. The union is not opposing the transition; it’s organizing EV workers. And rather than take an America First line, the UAW has been building an alliance with the growing independent union movement in Mexican auto factories—recognizing that solidarity is in the interests of workers on both sides of the border.
The best way to fight the race to the bottom is to help build a strong independent labor movement in Mexico, China, and everywhere else. The real Republican agenda is to turn working people against each other while our employers laugh all the way to the bank.
Real Problems, Wrong Solution
O’Brien presents his “we can work with either party” approach as powerful and pragmatic, a departure from labor’s longstanding alliance with the Democrats. It looks like he’s trying to solve two problems.
One is to stop the Democratic Party from taking us for granted, so they’ll fight harder for labor’s priorities. Good, but we can only do that by challenging them with real labor candidates, whether in primaries or via the third-party route. Cozying up to Republicans is self-defeating.
The other problem is tough, and not unique to the Teamsters: What to do about Trump’s appeal in our own rank and file? The union deserves credit for initiating a more participatory presidential endorsement process than ever before. Its 300 locals held town hall meetings where members hashed out the issues. The union hasn’t released the results of its straw polls yet, but conversations like those are a good start.
Union leaders, though, should lead. They owe it to their own members—and to every member of the working class who would be harmed by a second Trump administration—to fight to keep anti-worker politicians out of office.
We get why union leaders want “access”; they’ve been shut out of real influence for so long. But it’s delusional to think that Trump might swap out his anti-worker—really, anti-humanity—policies; they are at the core of his being. One more person kissing his ring won’t change that.
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We Need an Alternative to Nuclear-Armed Nationalism
If “war made the state and the state made war,” then the state, as currently perceived, at least by those besotted with military power, is the problem.
Apr 13, 2024
An enormous flash, a mushroom cloud, multi-thousands of human beings dead. We win!
Nuclear weapons won’t go away, the cynics—the souls in despair—tell us. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t, as Gen. James E. Cartwright, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, once put it, “un-invent nuclear weapons.” So apparently we’re stuck with them until the “big oops” happens and humanity becomes extinct. Until then: Modernize, modernize, modernize. Threaten, threaten, threaten
David Barash and Ward Wilson make the case that this is completely false: We’re not “stuck” with nuclear weapons any more than we’re stuck with obsolete and ineffective technology of any sort, bluntly pointing out: “Crappy ideas don’t have to be forgotten in order to be abandoned.”
“Useless, dangerous, or outmoded technology needn’t be forced out of existence. Once a thing is no longer useful, it unceremoniously and deservedly gets ignored.”
We live in a self-declared democracy but we, the people, are not the ones with real authority here. Those who run the show seem essentially blind to the consequences of militarism, war and, for God’s sake, nukes.
This is a valid and significant challenge to the cynicism of so many people, which is an easy trap to get caught in. Nuclear weapons will eventually go the way of the penny-farthing (huge front-wheeled) bicycle, according to the authors. Humanity is capable of simply moving beyond this valueless technology—and eventually it will. The genie has no power to stop this. Praise the Lord.
Transcending cynicism is the first step in envisioning change—but envisioning change isn’t the same thing as creating it. The next step in the process is hardly a matter of “better technology”—i.e., a better (less radioactive?) means of killing the enemy. The next step involves a change in humanity’s collective consciousness. As far as I can tell, we’re caught—horrifically caged—in the psychology of a border-drawn, divided planet. Social scientist Charles Tilly once put it with stunning simplicity: “War made the state and the state made war.”
The human race cuddles with the concept of “state sovereignty.” It’s the basic right of the 193 national entities that have claimed their specific slices of Planet Earth—and I certainly understand the “sovereignty” part. Who doesn’t want to make his or her own life decisions? But the “state” part? It’s full of paradox and contradiction, not to mention a dark permission to behave at one’s worst. The militarism that worships the nuclear genie couldn’t exist without state sovereignty.
To me the question in crucial need of being asked right now is this: What is our alternative to nationalism, which currently claims free reign on the planet? And nationalism strides with a lethal swagger—especially nuclear-armed nationalism. For instance, as The Associated Press recently reported:
President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons if its sovereignty or independence is threatened, issuing another blunt warning to the West just days before an election in which he’s all but certain to secure another six-year term.
Or here’s The Times of Israel: “Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said Sunday that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas could be to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip...”
Plunk! Finish the job!
And then, of course, there’s the global good guy—USA! USA!—leading the charge to bring peace to the world wherever and however it can: for instance, by claiming “sovereignty” (you might say) over the national interests of South Korea and declaring, as Simone Chun puts it at Truthout, a “new Cold War with China” and implementing a “massive expansion of the provocative U.S.-led military exercises in the Korean Peninsula.”
Wow, a new Cold War! Over 300,000 South Korean troops and 10,000 American troops, in a series of war games known as “Freedom Shield 2024,” have conducted numerous field maneuvers, including bombing runs, at the North Korean border.
Chun writes: “The combined United States Forces Korea (USFK) and South Korean forces far overshadow those of North Korea, whose entire military budget is $1.47 billion compared to that of South Korea at $43.1 billion, not to mention that of the U.S. at $816.7 billion...”
“The U.S. is using North Korea as a pretext for its new Cold War against China,” she goes on, “and, with its control of 40% of the world’s nuclear stockpile, is even willing to risk nuclear war to further its geopolitical aims.”
And she quotes Noam Chomsky who, addressing the country’s blatant indifference to this risk, points out that “the United States always plays with fire.”
How do we get it to stop?
We live in a self-declared democracy but we, the people, are not the ones with real authority here. Those who run the show seem essentially blind to the consequences of militarism, war and, for God’s sake, nukes. Having power means having the ability to threaten—and, if necessary, cause—harm... beyond their divinely sanctioned borders, of course (not counting the likely consequences that know no borders).
If Tilly is right—if “war made the state and the state made war”—then the state, as currently perceived, at least by those besotted with military power, is the problem. Knowing this is the beginning... but of what? Survival means finding an answer.
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