This article was originally published in May 2025, in issue #1 of International Marxism, international political journal of International Socialist Alternative. Click here to subscribe, or buy issue #2, which is going to press around the world today.
In the first volume of Leon Trotsky’s essential book, History of the Russian Revolution, he comments briefly on the role of personality in history. While it is never the decisive factor, it has relevance, particularly in a context of regimes of personal rule – be they the monarchies of yesteryear, the military dictatorships of the 1930s, or the “strong man” rulers of the 2020s. Looking at the individual traits of the last Russian Czar and Czarina, Trotsky suggests that their personalities were reflections of the decaying system they presided over, condemned to imminent overthrow in the great socialist Russian Revolution. “Frequently,” he writes, “the ‘distinguishing traits’ of a person are merely individual scratches made by a higher law of development.”
What can be said of Donald Trump today, with this thought in mind? He is greedy, jealous, self-obsessed, bullying, resentful, racist, misogynistic, generally bigoted, and clearly lacking in any semblance of basic human solidarity. Surely, it cannot be a mere historical coincidence that these are the defining traits of the key political figure of this moment in history; a moment characterized by the decadence of international capitalism and its descent into an epoch of concentrated reaction and parasitism. Trump is currently the personal epitome of 2020s capitalism and imperialism, dangerous and senile, as it viciously resists its historic decline.
The Epitome of the New Political Era
However, Trump’s personification of the new political era is far more profound than that. The nature of his rise, his regime, his political agenda, and the manner of his rule all neatly express the deep crisis of the system. Trump the man, but more importantly, Trumpism the political phenomenon, reveals the ugly face of 2020s capitalism.
Politically, Trumpism is the product of the collapse of the “centre” – in other words, of the dominant political forces and ideas of the era of neoliberal globalization. After more than 30 years of anti-working-class brutality, it only prepared the way for new and deeper crises for the system. Now, its demise has led to a redrawing of the political map, in the shape of deep polarization. This process has had an expression on both left and right. Bernie Sanders’ insurgent primary campaigns ran concurrently with Trump’s rise from 2016-20 in the case of the U.S. The same pattern marked waves of political crisis in Europe and Latin America throughout the turmoil of the last couple of decades.
However, following the failures and betrayals of left reformist leaders and formations, and the rise and fall of historic mass movements without winning decisive victories for working class people – trends which marked the 2010s in particular – it is the right-wing expression of this process which has (temporarily) gained the upper hand. Trump’s second election victory, which was both bigger and nastier than his first, has cemented his leadership of this international trend.
Trumpism, as the broad phenomenon can now be unquestionably labelled, has been expressed in the rise of new right populist and far right forces and figureheads from Milei in Argentina to Modi in India, and a plethora of European mini-Trumps. It is expressed in a spectrum, from the rise of new formations and like the AfD in Germany, to the “Trumpification” of traditional right-wing parties like the Canadian and British Tories, to the growth of long-standing far and populist right forces and figureheads to new heights, like Rassemblement Nationale in France and Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Its political agenda is one of nationalism, militarism, and a generalised program of reactionary attacks on the working class – falsely packaged as a radical alternative to “woke” liberalism. This agenda expresses not the personal inclinations of leaders, but chiefly, the reactionary turn of the capitalist class itself internationally. As in other moments of acute crisis in capitalist history, such as the 1930s, the fundamental capitalist contradiction of the nation state – which is the contradiction between the national nature of capitalist classes and the international nature of the capitalist economy – is returning to the fore. The distilled reaction of Trump and co is the ruling class’ response to the manifold crises which are plaguing their system.
While it can seem at times as if this juggernaut is steamrolling inexorably forward, such a conclusion would represent historical myopia. Trump’s regime is already facing mass opposition and crisis. This will be an era not only of Trumpism but also one of anti-Trumpism, and the working class will meet capitalism’s reactionary turn with a turn of its own, into struggle. The Trumps of this world will not just have things their own way in the 2020s.
Capitalists Turn to “Strong Man” Rule
Rising authoritarianism is part and parcel of the bourgeois reactionary turn. This is because the crisis of the neoliberal establishment is not just a crisis of politicians and parties but also of political systems of rule. In short, capitalism needs a new way to exercise political domination.
During the neoliberal era, the ruling class in most countries largely ensured the application of their agenda through the political domination of parliamentary “democracy.” Largely sticking to the “rules” of the parliamentary game, power alternated between establishment parties – usually in the context of two-party systems – equally committed to the bourgeois agenda of the day. Thus, while the essence of neoliberalism (brutal anti-working-class policies) was never popular per se, its continuity was ensured by the lack of a viable political alternative. Also crucial to capitalism’s interests in this epoch was the quiescence of the leadership of most of the labor movement – which had suffered a historic defeat in the preceding period – and its policy of class collaboration and “social partnership.”
However, the storm of crises that began with the 2008 financial crash fatally undermined this form of rule, as well as the political forces that had promoted capitalist globalization. Reliable two-party systems crumbled. Social explosions shook the foundations of regimes, both in “advanced” capitalist countries and in waves of rebellion and revolution in the neocolonial world. In the 2020s, the Covid-19 pandemic and the sharpening of imperialist conflict, dominated by the global power struggle between U.S. and Chinese imperialism, shattered the already-undermined geopolitical regime of globalization (aka U.S. domination).
These factors have all combined to push ruling classes along a road of strengthening the capitalist state. This has come in the form of economic and political nationalism to defend their interests on the world stage, but also of the reassertion of “law and order” at home. To implement their agenda and maintain their profits amid a storm of disorder, the capitalists, with their traditional political representatives discredited, have increasingly turned to “strong men” figureheads who promise to “rule by the sword” in their interests. In the U.S., after the extreme social turbulence of the Black Lives Matter rebellion and with American imperialism locked in a brutal struggle to assert itself against its decline, Trump 2.0 increasingly emerged as an attractive “new” political tool available to serve capitalist interests.
The rise of authoritarianism has swept further across the planet in 2025. As we write these lines, the Turkish president, Erdogan, is locking up thousands for the crime of protesting against the incarceration of his main (capitalist) political opponent. The Serbian government is threatening to crush a historic mass movement by force. South Korea, often lauded for its political stability, was rocked by a desperate coup attempt by its President in December 2024.
Understanding the nature of Trumpism and its form of “strong man rule” is crucial to understanding current events and to preparing for those to come. This is vital to orient the working class struggle against capitalism for its overthrow, to which this journal is dedicated. This article tries to dig deeper into this aspect of Trumpism, which, in our opinion, is illuminated by examining the historic Marxist conception of Bonapartism.
Trump 2.0 – Turbocharged Authoritarianism
Trump had already shown his authoritarian colours in his first administration. Whereas he lauded the “very fine people” among the torch-bearing fascists who marched in Charlottesville and murdered a leftwing counter-protester in 2019, his instincts in response to the historic BLM movement were entirely different. “Just shoot them” and “crack skulls”, he reportedly told his top general. He threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the U.S. military against protestors. Indeed, Trump ended his first term with a literal, albeit botched, attempted coup in his attempts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election.
He is a politician of a fundamentally different type from presidents who came before him. He has no sense of loyalty to the American republic, its institutions, or traditions, and is not motivated by any “bigger picture” strategic concern for their survival. His political philosophy is not Thomas Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (from the U.S. Declaration of Independence), but rather “me, myself, and I”.
Amid the chaos of January 6, 2021, his actions shocked even the Republican establishment, which (very temporarily) isolated him in response. But his takeover of the Republican Party in the preceding years, which was forced through via the building of a large social base using populist appeals against the neocons of the dying epoch, was simply too deeply rooted for them to banish him from the scene. Within weeks of the riot at the Capitol in Washington DC, he was already the presumptive Republican nominee for 2024.
A major thread which ran through Trump’s first term was that his ambitions – including his authoritarian ambitions – were effectively restrained by establishment forces, both within his administration and the “deep state” itself. This was not lost on Trump – in fact, it dominated his approach to preparing his second term. Today, this is the reality behind the composition of his cabinet of sycophants and re-born Trumpists, many of them largely devoid of actual political experience. Trump 2.0 is not a collective effort, but a regime of personal rule. The reason for his far-reaching attempts to purge the leadership of “deep state” branches, from the CIA to the army’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the same.
Trump 2.0 is therefore a regime of a more pronounced authoritarian character. In the first weeks of his term, he has militarized the Southern border and invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport shackled Latin American migrants without a shred of due process. He effectively “disappeared” Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and others for the crime of protesting Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and has begun a wide-ranging assault on universities across the country seeking to crush the incipient new wave of campus radicalism, which was shown in last year’s anti-war encampments.
Trump also entered office in 2025 with a conscious and far-reaching agenda to assert a degree of presidential power that is unprecedented in the history of U.S. bourgeois democracy. Armed with the hardline constitutional theory of a “unitary executive”, Trump 2.0 wants to carry out an executive power-grab to allow himself to rule effectively unhindered by the constitution’s “checks and balances.”
Of particular significance will be the administration’s seemingly inevitable confrontation with the courts, as judges seek to halt or reverse dozens of Trump’s executive decrees. Administration acolytes like Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have openly speculated about defying court rulings, with the latter protesting that judges “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” While the Trump-stacked Supreme Court may well rule in Trump’s favour on key questions anyway, it is also possible that Trump will relish a confrontation with the courts, or any other wing of the discredited U.S. establishment, and seek to mobilize his MAGA social base in defense of his power-grab.
Moreover, in continuity with his 2021 coup attempt, one of his first decisions in 2025 was to pardon all 1,500 far-right 6 January rioters, including a fascist leader sentenced to 18 years in prison. At the moment, Trump does not need to mobilize these ultra-reactionary forces for his agenda, but the pardon ensures their loyalty to his administration and represents a serious potential threat for the future.
Bonapartism
“Long live the king,” Trump posted on social media in mid-February. A few days earlier, he repeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s statement, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
In the World Perspectives document adopted by ISA’s World Congress in November 2024, Trump 2.0 is characterized as “a regime with significant authoritarian features which can be accurately described as parliamentary Bonapartism.” This differs from some, on the left and also among liberals, who have described Trump’s regime as fascist, and from others who downplay Trump’s significance, arguing that he represents “basically more of the same” or merely a bad variant of his Democrat or Republican predecessors.
The Marxist term Bonapartism got its name from Napoleon Bonaparte, who ruled France from 1799-1815, and his nephew, Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III), who became president in 1848 and then emperor from 1852-1870, following a coup in 1851. Both were personal rulers of crisis regimes, attempting to manage sharp class contradictions and defend capitalist interests through military power and nationalist propaganda claiming to represent the “entire nation.” They relied on the failure of the hated regimes they replaced, as well as the lack of an organized working class armed with a revolutionary program.
Bonapartism is one-person rule, using the state apparatus to rule by the sword, “representing the people” as a whole. In reality, it is another form of bourgeois class rule, defending the interests of the dominant class. The ruling class might first hesitate, but then draw the conclusion to bet on the “strong man,” even if it means losing direct power over the government or bourgeois political parties. Bonapartism arises when the ruling class has lost confidence in political representatives of their class, whose policies have led to deep crises or provoked mass revolts from below. The capitalist class then lines up behind the Bonapartist. Of course, they often live to regret it.
Bonapartist regimes and rulers acquire much more independence, including from the ruling class, than is the case with “normal” capitalist regimes. They can even strike blows against sections of the capitalists, as Putin has done in consolidating his rule in Russia. Trotsky often cited the example of Chiang Kai-shek, who massacred the Chinese workers led by the Communist Party in 1927 and then promptly jailed the Shanghai bankers, demanding they pay him a ransom of one million dollars. However, the fact that such regimes “balance” between different classes for support should not be misunderstood to mean that Bonapartist rulers can offer real gains to the working class. They are our political enemies.
Fascism is the most extreme form of reaction, with the aim of totally destroying all workers’ organizations. For this, an armed mass movement of the desperate middle class, the lumpenproletariat, and ex-workers is needed. Bonapartism, on the other hand, aims to suppress and control the workers’ movement through state repression, including laws against unions and opposition parties, but also at times co-opting some of their leaders. Napoleon III, with his mass base among the peasantry, had no mass armed movement behind him but did use proto-fascist organisations to conduct violent acts in his interests and to threaten his enemies. Temporary reactionary movements of a mass character have existed since World War II, but not fascist mass organizations like in the 1920s and 30s. Instead, severe impasses in society have since then been responded to with Bonapartist regimes of various types.
Parliamentary Bonapartism
Bonapartism can take the form of a brutal military dictatorship, using state terror similar to fascism, but it can also be a regime established by an elected president or prime minister, using repression while attempting to remain within a formal “parliamentary democratic” framework. That is what Marxists call parliamentary Bonapartism.
Parliamentary Bonapartism also has national and historic features. Today’s regimes led by Putin, Erdogan, and Orban have, over a period, used different levels of repression and maneuvered between different international allies. None of them are stable regimes, rather, they stumble from crisis to crisis. However, they have a penchant for maneuvering, using decrees, rules, laws, and counter-reforms. Authoritarian drifts begin, which at a certain point can take a qualitative step, effectively a coup, to strengthen their power.
Parliamentary Bonapartists often start by inviting generals or other military figures into their administrations, like Bolsonaro did in Brazil. For Trump, however, the experience of generals and judges not obeying him is one of the reasons he is determined to purge the state apparatus. In carrying out this purge, he unfurls the cynical banner of struggle against a bureaucratic elite which is hostile to the will of the people, another typical Bonapartist trait.
Proletarian Bonapartism
The concept of Bonapartism was also used by Trotsky to characterize Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union. Stalin clearly represented counter-revolution, abolishing all workers’ democracy and turning sharply away from the revolutionary socialist change and liberation from oppression pursued in the first years after the 1917 Russian Revolution. As Stalinism consolidated, not even the slightest opposition was allowed. The tradition of Bolshevism was drowned in blood.
However, the social basis of society was not changed by Stalin – capitalism was still abolished and not restored. Here is where Trotsky found the parallel with Napoleon, who established himself as an absolute “monarch” and abolished all democratic reforms, but still maintained the capitalist system established after the great French Revolution, even extending it beyond French borders via wars of conquest. Feudalism was not restored by Napoleon and capitalism was not restored by Stalin. Stalin’s regime in the final analysis defended the proletarian base of the Soviet Union’s economy – state ownership of its key industries and economic levers – but eliminated any aspect of workers’ control and carried out brutal anti-working-class measures. Trotsky thus characterized Stalinism as “proletarian Bonapartism.”
Stalin’s regime was a one (terrible) person dictatorship. No party or individuals controlled him. Strong nationalist and conservative propaganda constantly referred to the threat of war to rally the population to the flag, and a huge repressive state apparatus was built up. Contrary to its own claims, this regime had no really consistent policies or program, since its only aim was its own power, prestige, and privileges. This meant a policy of zig-zags, including 180-degree turns. In other words, Stalinism included all traits of a Bonapartist regime, only this time in defense of a different social system.
Lessons from France
Ted Grant, a Marxist who played a leading role in the founding of ISA’s political tradition, closely followed French politics and the establishment of General De Gaulle’s parliamentary Bonapartist regime in the 1950s. In his writings, he shows how De Gaulle’s coming to power was not inevitable, but a result of class struggle and the policies of the leaders of the working class, in particular the Communist Party. Directly after World War II, in October 1945, the Communist Party won the elections and together with the Socialist Party held a majority in the National Assembly. De Gaulle had no chance of coming to power.
In this period, the Communist Party (PCF) took its directives from Moscow, where the Stalinist regime was focused on maintaining its position at home and had long ago abandoned any perspective of world revolution. The deep crisis of French imperialism, having lost its colonies in Indochina and at war in Algeria, was not used by the PCF to mobilize resistance and point a revolutionary way forward. Then, in 1958, an attempted coup by generals and warnings of civil war paved the way for De Gaulle to finally come to power. A new constitution was adopted (still in place today), establishing far-reaching powers for the president with seven-year terms in office. The National Assembly then voted for De Gaulle to serve as president.
France in the 1950s was, of course, different from 1848-51 when Napoleon III reigned. The working class had not suffered a defeat on the scale of that which crushed its movement after the failed revolution of 1848. De Gaulle could not illegalize trade unions or the Communist Party. His method of controlling the workers’ movement was instead to attack the most radical unions while praising and working together with the “moderate” ones.
Not So Strong Men
Bonapartist regimes are not as stable as they pretend to be – their bombast and brutality in fact ultimately express fragility rather than strength. Over the course of their regimes, Orban, Modi, etc, have all reached limits in how far they can go and have been faced by moments of protests and resistance, which pushed them back. The same was the case in Trump’s first administration, when working-class resistance, including the threat of strike action, forced him to cancel key reactionary plans. Though his new administration is a more aggressive one, it still lacks the ability to establish an outright dictatorship in the U.S., despite Trump’s wildest fantasies.
This does not mean that the Bonapartist “strong men” of the 2020s should be underestimated. They are extremely dangerous and damaging to the lives and struggles of workers and oppressed people. However, the traits of Bonapartism also instill in such a regime a hubris and tendency to overreach, which can backfire on it. Trumpism will beget mass anti-Trumpism, which will be expressed politically but also on the streets and in workplace struggle, potentially taking on revolutionary dimensions. We should remember that in France, Napoleon III’s regime was followed by the first working-class revolution in the Paris Commune, and De Gaulle’s regime by the greatest general strike in history in 1968.
Where Will the Resistance to Trumpism Come From?
History demonstrates consistently that few capitalists dare to, or even want to, challenge a Bonapartist regime, even a parliamentary Bonapartist one. Especially in its early days, they would rather give it their full support despite the cost. The regime still represents their class against, from their point of view, greater dangers, including both potential revolts from below and international challenges. Those who are uncomfortable with the regime’s policy or aspects of it tend to bow down and adapt rather than mount serious opposition.
Today, we can see how even European capitalist governments – whose core interests have been attacked by Trump’s policies – generally limit themselves to pathetic grovelling, lacking any viable short-term alternative to U.S. domination. When slapped in the face by Trump on an almost daily basis, they have turned the other cheek and kept their heads down, hoping to avoid more bullying treatment.
In the U.S. itself, the official bourgeois “opposition” to Trump, the Democratic Party, spent the first weeks of Trump 2.0 in a state of demoralization and servility. This was perhaps best expressed in Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer’s jaw-dropping support for Trump’s finance bill in Congress, surrendering what little formal leverage the party possessed in the face of the Trumpist juggernaut in the blink of an eye.
Indeed, the Financial Times, one of the primary mouthpieces of the liberal capitalist commentariat, despaired at the quiescence of the capitalists on March 19, in an article titled “The U.S. establishment is scared of its own shadow”. Its author, Edward Luce, says of U.S. elites, “Many who in fair weather routinely cite the heroism that launched the U.S. republic have held their tongues since the storm clouds arrived. When a government fears the people, there is liberty, goes the saying, but when a people fear their government, there is tyranny. The U.S. establishment lives in dread.” Extending his gaze beyond the U.S., he goes on to lament, “their counterparts in other backsliding democracies have been just as timid. Where were India’s captains of industry or Turkey’s profiles in courage when Narendra Modi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were suppressing their civil societies? Which Hungarian can you name as having successfully resisted Viktor Orbán’s takeover of the country’s institutions?”
From an opposing class and political standpoint, Luce echoes the understanding of Marxists: the capitalist establishment will not save us from authoritarian or Bonapartist regimes. Throughout history, vain hopes which are inevitably resurrected by short-sighted liberals and reformists that capitalist politicians, or courts, or congresses would block the march of reaction, have always been crushed. Indeed, when cracks do start to appear among the ruling elite – as they inevitably will – these are often triggered by and reflect protests from below, especially from the working class.
Working Class Resistance
How then can Bonapartist or other authoritarian regimes be resisted and defeated? The above-mentioned Ted Grant summed up a Marxist approach succinctly in the following lines:
“It is useless, worse than useless, for the workers to put their trust in some parliamentary clown, some tumbler who will perform nothing but crazy somersaults before the General, his ringmaster!
“The struggle against Bonapartism is, in the main, an extra-parliamentary struggle: force must be met with force!
“Warn the workers over and over again: rely only on your own unity, your own organisations, your own strength… But for this action, the workers must be prepared ideologically, no less than materially.”
In other words, the independent organization, mobilization, and political struggle of the working class is the only way to effectively fight and defeat reaction. Already in the 2020s, the masses have shown that it is their action that really undermines the Trumps of this world. It is the millions in Turkey and the hundreds of thousands in Serbia who have thrown once mighty regimes into serious crisis. In South Korea, Yoon Suk Youl’s attempted coup was defeated within a few hours by mass mobilization, including mass strike action.
It is crucial that mass movements in the age of Trumpism wield the most powerful weapons available to them, which are all based on harnessing the unrivalled power of the working class. Strike action, up to and including political general strikes to overthrow rulers, must be placed on the order of the day. Pursuing such a strategy also means waging an uncompromising struggle within the labor movement against any hint of adaptation to Trumpism. The criminal foolishness of those like Sean O Brien, leader of the U.S. Teamsters’ union, who have cozied up to an utterly reactionary anti-working-class political phenomenon, represents a grave danger for the working class. Such a policy will be paid for by working-class people in bitter defeats.
Working-class struggles against Trumpism must also assert their independence from the “centrist” bourgeois political establishment, which is ultimately responsible for the rise of the right today. Far from putting a brake on the rise of Trumpism, centrist governments are still fuelling its march forward. In Britain, the “Labour” government’s turn to brutal austerity measures has seen British Trump, Nigel Farage, race to the lead of opinion polls with his Reform UK party. Other European governments are set to follow suit, with new surges in arms spending which will be paid for by working class people. In Brazil, the Lula government’s pro-capitalist policy risks the return of a still-potent Bolsonarist movement to power.
In the U.S. today, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) are bringing tens of thousands onto the streets to their “Fight Oligarchy” rallies, getting a mass response to powerful, if basic, class politics in opposition to the billionaire class, which Trump represents. However, the potential of a movement in defense of such politics will be fatally undermined by any strategy – such as that peddled by Bernie and AOC – which attempts to channel it through the billionaires’ own Democratic Party.
The current global scenario makes the formation of new working-class parties, based on struggle and forged in opposition to both Trumpism and the discredited neoliberal establishment, an exceptionally urgent need.
Such parties must avoid the pitfalls of reformism, whose fundamental weaknesses have been exposed time after time, including in the struggle against the authoritarian right. 2020s capitalism is rotten, ripe for overthrow, and its ugly face is coming into full view. The experiences of young and working-class people in this period will be a school of revolution, with deep-seated conclusions about the bankruptcy of this system already beginning to be drawn. The ideas of Marxism exist in order to guide a way forward in historical moments such as this. If effectively and sharply argued for by determined revolutionary forces united in an international organization, these ideas can become a powerful material force in the era of Trumpism and anti-Trumpism. This journal is intended as a tool to assist in building just such a struggle.
