Fifty years ago, this summer, I was invited to make a presentation for the United States bicentennial celebration at the University of Minnesota where I’ve been employed since 1971—and for which I was compensated with the grand sum of $75 (not bad for someone with an annual salary of about $13,000). That I’m still able to reflect on that moment a half century later is not to be taken for granted.
The talk, in retrospect, was the Marxist public debut of a once committed logical positivist. Harry Frankel’s Marxist reading of American history, in preparation, was persuasive, particularly his claim that 1776 constituted a true revolution, the conquest of power by the incipient bourgeoisie. But 1787, however, the writing of the Constitution and its enactment confirmed its Thermidor—the counterrevolution.[1] The slave-owing class stood in the way of a genuine bourgeois project; a second revolution would be necessary. Nevertheless, the seeds for a capitalist America had been planted.
Frankel’s thesis, in combination with recently learned Marxist economics, provided an explanation, the main point of the talk, for the incessant liberal complaint about the bicentennial celebration—its “commercialisation”. The capitalist chicken, sarcastically, as I interpreted Frankel, had “come home to roost”—capitalism’s commodification of every facet of life, even its hallowed moments. “All that is sacred is profaned”, better put by the Communist Manifesto in 1848. This new convert, I now admit, took pleasure in pointing out to a mostly liberal audience, “you reap what you sow”—what comes with the capitalist mode of production, the fruit of 1776. (Better informed now about Marx’s project and, hence, a better appreciation for the human material that carried out 1776—unlike, for example, the New York Times’ 1619 Project—the same kind of perspective needed, I argue, for judging all revolutionary moments, both before and after 1776.)
Had I thought about the date of another history-making document—also celebrating its semiquincentennial—I could have made an even more compelling case about the roosting capitalist chicken. As the founding text for the new mode of production famously explained, it’s not other-regardingness that makes it possible for your baker, your brewer and your butcher to satisfy your needs but rather “self-interest” and the “invisible hand” of the marketplace. Subsequent defenders of capitalism who enthusiastically seized on and trumpeted Adam Smith’s pregnant insight in Wealth of Nations would also reap what they have sowed—self-interest run amok.
Utterly revealing, I contend, about liberal and conservative angst about the Donald Trump presidency, both editions, is its near silence about the least controversial thing about him—the most authentic capitalist to have ever occupied the post, a second-, in fact, if not third-generation capitalist. The Roosevelts descended from the landed Dutch aristocracy in New York state Hudson Valley—a “farmer” as FDR once described his occupation—while Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were self-made millionaires. Ruling-class reluctance to admit to what it is all so evident about Trump betrays, understandably, its class interest—those of its apologists also—in avoiding a discussion about the logic of the economic system that birthed him.
Yes, it’s true that not every capitalist behaves like Trump. Equally true, however, is that the first White House occupant to treat the post as if it was his own business happened to be, not coincidentally, a septuagenarian who had held no other job other than that of a capitalist boss. John Kelly, Trump’s first Chief of Staff, summed it up perfectly: “He’d love to be just like he was in business—he could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot.”[2] The same, even more so, for the second Trump presidency.
Contrary to Kelly, Trump wasn’t behaving like a fascist, but, rather, simply as a boss, what Marxists call the dictatorship of capital, its inherently authoritarian character, and sanctioned by the Constitution—again, the counterrevolution of 1776. That the framers of the document exempted the private sector from its most progressive feature, the Bill of Rights, and that the word “democracy” has never appeared in the document is neither mistake nor oversight.
The commercialisation of the bicentennial a half-century ago pales in comparison to what’s already underway for the Trump administration’s semiquincentennial celebration. Self-interest on steroids, unapologetically—embarrassingly, perhaps, for those who subscribe to capitalism’s dog-eat-dog/I-got-mine-you-get-your ethic. The capitalist chicken now roosting in the White House itself.
But how did it come to this?
When first encountering the Impeach Bush movement in 2007, I had to think about, as a Marxist, how not to sound stereotypically all-knowing but rather pedagogically and non-sectarian. “If we don’t,” I began to say, “impeach the system that gave us Bush, we’ll have someone in the White House who’ll make us long for Bush.”
No, I didn’t have a crystal ball that predicted Donald Trump, only the perspective of thinking systemically, structurally, to wit, as a Marxist. And the experience of at least two decades of knowing through personal political work or that of others how turned off the US working class was to politics as usual.[3] The abstention rate when it came to the vote, especially—despite the nonchalance of my colleagues in the American politics subfield about that characteristic feature of US liberal democracy. The hyper-commodification of the electoral process itself in capital’s world headquarters, along with concomitant contempt for the intelligence of voters largely explained, in my estimation, voter apathy. “Dawg food”, is how one leading ruling-class operative for US bourgeois politics cynically described the talking points he and his staff had put together for candidates.[4]
Particularly informative were the lessons of the 1992 Patrick Buchanan run for the presidency; a figure from within bourgeois politics with an incipient fascist message that appealed to some layers of the working class. The Buchanan campaign and the hearing it got revealed a new stage in US politics, the appeal of resentment owing largely to the end of the “American Dream”—the fallout from the 1974-1975 and 1980-1981 recessions, the end to the post-WW2 economic boom. The best that capitalism had to offer the US proletariat was now behind us.
Bourgeois politics as usual were uniquely on display in 2000, Bush v. Gore. Most telling was the decision of the leading liberal members in Congress, in the Democratic Party, to not permit even a discussion in the House, allowed by the Constitution, of the Supreme Court 5 to 4 decision. Effectively, one person, unelected for a lifetime job, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, decided who would be president. No significant mainstream politician was willing to question that historic and profoundly undemocratic decision, all done by the book; testimony, again, to the counterrevolutionary character of the Constitution. Neither Paul Wellstone nor Russ Feingold in the Senate, nor Bernie Sanders in the House—the Left in bourgeois politics—stepped forward. Ruling-class representatives circled the wagons to protect the system—in anticipation of Sanders’ subsequent course. A decision not made in some secluded corner of the state but done publicly; it could all be seen on the public television channel C-SPAN.
Then the Great Recession of 2008, what self-interest-run-amok occasionally but consequentially bequeaths—the best proximate explanation for the Trump moment. As, arguably, Adam Smith’s most influential student confessed: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”[5] Thus spoke Alan Greenspan, the recently retired chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, before a Congressional committee in October 2008 as Wall Street convulsed. The revenge of self-interest faith-based economics.
History teaches that, in a capitalist economic crisis, the working class will be open to an alternative to politics as usual, not only on the Left but the Right as well—what the 2016 presidential campaign instantiated. The end of the American Dream, confirmed now by sobering data, explains why two figures outside of mainstream bourgeois politics got a serious hearing amongst working class layers—Sanders and Trump, a “socialist” and a capitalist who had never held a public office.[6] Exactly because they were seen as outsiders is why the two appealed to increasingly alienated layers of American toilers, workers and farmers.
For the ruling class, however, the “socialist” was a non-starter, a greater evil than the huckster businessman. Thus, the decision of Democratic Party elites to make sure Sanders would not get the party’s nomination and run rather a candidate who had considerably less appeal to working-class voters. A candidate who once said that should she become president she’d “put”, in the name of green energy, “a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—a comment that haunted her throughout the campaign. Trump owed, in other words, his victory to the ruling-class decision to run a seriously flawed candidate, Hillary Clinton, against him, someone who epitomised bourgeois politics as usual. And Sanders, as he’d done once before, not rock the boat, dutifully accepted that decision.[7] Ruling-class willingness to risk a Trump White House, the lesser evil to the “socialist” Sanders, has, I argue, long historical roots.
The two big political takeaways of modernity originate in two key moments in the nineteenth century, the 1848-1849 Revolutions, the European Spring, and the US Civil War and its aftermath. The first is that liberals were no longer to be depended on—in fact, to be looked at with suspicion—for realising the bourgeois-democratic revolution owing to their fear of the toilers. The second is that big political questions cannot be settled in the electoral, parliamentary and judicial arenas but only on the barricades or battlefields.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America, exemplifies best the limitations of liberalism—modernity’s prototype for the Democratic Party’s leadership stance toward Sanders. Tocqueville, on the other side of the barricades from Marx and Engels during the European Spring, did all he could, like his liberal counterparts in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, to make sure there would be no socialist revolution in France. He admitted in his memoirs about that moment, Souvenirs – only made public in 1910 (fifty years after his death) – that as a governmental minister he was willing to hold his nose and enable Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état that overthrew the Second Republic in 1851 to prevent the Bernie Sanders wing of the revolution from coming to power, the pink socialists. Uncanny is how well Marx’s 1869 descriptor of Bonaparte, a “grotesque mediocrity”, works for the current White House occupant.
Tocqueville, unlike the Democratic Party elite, was at least honest about his politics as he once confessed: “My mind is attracted by democratic institutions, but I am instinctively aristocratic because I despise and fear mobs … the disordered actions of the masses, their violent and unenlightened intervention in public affairs.”[8] Better, again – the consensus of the party leadership in 2016 – to risk Trump than the “unenlightened intervention in public affairs” of the “the masses”. That fateful decision, in hindsight, paved the way for the second coming of Trump—the path-dependent character of bourgeois politics—potentially more consequential than the first.
(Tocqueville’s admission about the mob, it’s worth noting, echoed early modern’s progenitor of liberalism, Martin Luther. Having once advocated for freedom of belief, the Augustinian monk lambasted in the most vile and sanguinary language Central Europe’s peasantry when it revolted—its quincentennial this year—to exercise that right.)
Liberal fear of the toilers tragically displayed itself again, two decades later, on the other side of the Atlantic—another counterrevolution. It followed a successful and world-history making revolution, the unfinished business of 1776. The defeat of the slavocracy in 1865 constituted modernity’s most significant breakthrough after the French Revolution of 1789 in the millennial-old democratic quest. And therein lay the other big political lesson of the 19th century, the way in which the abominable institution of chattel slavery came to an end. Not by an infamous Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott in 1857, or a presidential election, Lincoln’s in 1860, or a futile congressional action at the end of 1860, to amend the Constitution to keep the slave owners in the Union, but, rather, on the battlefield—Appomattox, 1865.
Also noteworthy is that, on the eve of the Civil War, the slavocracy rejected the 1776 project—Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephen’s 1860 “Cornerstone” speech—because of five words in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal”, the document’s revolutionary credentials. But the slave oligarchs continued to embrace the Constitution and thus the Confederate’s founding constitution, except for minor changes, resembled so much the original document—more evidence for the latter’s counterrevolutionary character.
When it appeared that the formerly enslaved, however, might unite with plebeian whites to go beyond a bourgeois-democratic revolution, to a “revolution in permanence”—to employ Marx’s and Engels’s term about the possible outcome of the 1848-1849 upheaval in Germany—liberal elites got cold feet on what came to be known as Radical Reconstruction. Within a decade after Appomattox, the brief experiment in racial equality came to a bloody end. Liberals were willing to hold their noses and accept white supremacy rather than risk proletarian ascent.
The lessons of 1848-1849 and 1857-1865 had a big impact on Lenin. Liberals were never to be looked to for realizing social equality and neither could the electoral/parliamentary/judicial arenas be utilised for doing the same. “Extremely important political matters,” as he later posited, “could never be settled by voting. Such problems are actually solved by civil war.”[9] There is no doubt which “civil war” served as his inspiration. Bolshevik ascent in 1917 has, I contend, its origins in those two history-making conclusions.
Whither the Trump Phenomenon
The Trump presidencies have been a godsend for Marxist education—the authentic capitalist who treats politics solely as transactional and deal-making unmoored in principles other than profit-making. Trump is the very embodiment of capitalism’s inherently narcissistic/solipsistic character. The challenge our Marxist side has often faced with prior presidents was making a convincing case they are not disinterested, as they pretended to be, when it came to class realities. His predecessor, for example, the first Black president, was particularly adept at cosplaying, someone for everyone. What Trump is naturally unable to do and one of the reasons, I suspect, for his envy of Obama. “What you see,” when it comes to Trump, to employ a popular lyric circa the bicentennial, “is what you get!”
Trump’s shameless nakedness about who he represents is singular—what his first chief of staff, John Kelly, knew firsthand. Hence, the reason why his class from the outset has needed smart ideologues like Adam Smith to explain their collective rather than individual interests. The need, in other words, for the capitalist state and all the functionaries and meritocratic apologists that come with it. What prevented the first edition of Trump from being the catastrophe that many in the capitalist ruling class, both domestically and internationally, feared and, thus, their hope that he would be a one-term president. But that was not to be.
Shortly after the second election of Trump, I wrote:
Donald Trump’s victory on November 5, 2024, is the price the US working class pays for not having its own political party. Nevertheless, it came with two silver linings—potentially.
A drowning person, Karl Marx once wrote, will grab hold of a twig in the hope that it will save them. Therein why millions of workers voted again for Donald Trump. In a crisis, workers, history reveals, will be open not only to left but also rightist solutions. There is, hence, no shortcut to political clarity. Only through trial and error—the laboratory of the class struggle as some of us call it—is that possible.
Trump’s no fascist—he’s just a run-of-the-mill authoritarian.
We can be confident that Trump 2.0 will not fulfill the hopes of millions of workers who voted for him owing to the profundity of the crisis in which capitalism now finds itself. Only through experience can those workers learn that fact about the other boss party.
Compared to the truly costly trial-and-error experiment that workers in Europe and elsewhere in the thirties had to bear, Trump redux promises to be a relatively low-cost experience.[10]
(The other silver lining was Kamala Harris’ defeat. Had she been victorious, the long-needed day of reckoning for the Democratic Party—now just beginning—would have been delayed.)
In hindsight, I was perhaps too sanguine about the costs of a second Trump administration. The world today is a more dangerous place largely because of Trump, one that increasingly resembles the leadup to the Great War. Marxist credentials weren’t required to understand why the conflagration began. “Economic rivalries … territorial and commercial greed” served as explanation enough for Woodrow Wilson.[11] Capitalist “greed”, as Lenin explained two years into the war in his theoretical masterpiece Imperialism. The logic of the capitalist mode of production in its mature phase and given its inherently predatory character was determinant. Competition over natural resources, markets, spheres of influence and tariff wars—what’s come with the second edition of a Trump presidency—made the conflagration virtually inevitable. In addition to Lenin’s analysis and never to be forgotten, the role of that ancient scourge used by modern elites in all their skin colours and other identities to deflect attention from their own nefarious actions by scapegoating a people—Jew-hatred.
That it is a dyed in the wool and authentic capitalist, unlike the monarchs in 1914, who is leading the war drive this time couldn’t be more enlightening. His transparency and inability to be other than who he is, in pursuit of economic interests, especially his own, makes Trump, again, and everything that comes with him, Exhibit A for Marxist education. “All that is solid melts into air; all that is sacred,” again, “is profaned”, in that truly prescient insight in the 1848 Manifesto.
The danger this time, however, is that, unlike 1914, the lethality of weaponry today makes the third “Great War” an existential threat to our species. A quarter century before the Guns of August, Frederick Engels, who closely followed arms developments, predicted that in the next European war “fifteen to twenty million armed men would slaughter one another and devastate Europe as it has never been devastated before”—a forecast tragically confirmed.[12] Just twenty-five years after the end of WWI, nuclear arms were employed. A deep dive into WWI and its chief protagonists left the chilling but undeniable conclusion that, had those weapons been available, they would have also been employed, resulting in a body count far exceeding anything that Engels could have imagined.[13]
But Engels also said that war was not inevitable if the toilers in Russia overthrew Czar Nicholas, who initiated the war, and took state power. Alas, that didn’t happen, though it’s of utmost importance to realise that only when the Bolsheviks led Russia’s workers and peasants to power in October 1917 did the beginning to the end of the slaughter a year later commence. And, therein, an indispensable lesson for Lenin and his students. Capitalist wars are not inevitable, if the working class takes power. There is only one force on the planet that can prevent the world’s most lethal weapons of mass destruction, located on US soil, submarines and, maybe, satellites, from being used to begin WW3 and, hence, the end to humanity as we know it—the US proletariat.
The defeat that the US ruling class has now suffered in its war with Iran—according to its key mouthpieces (as this is being written)—is also educational. What the capitalist commentariat cannot bring itself to say but only hint at, if true, is the real reason for the “debacle”, as some of them put it. Owing mainly to their “never-ending wars” that Trump promised not to repeat—only through trial and error, again, does the working class learn—the US proletariat is more anti-war today than it’s ever been since the end of the Second Gulf War. That’s the sentiment which has prevented Trump from coming even close to “putting boots on the ground”, the only possible way that Wall Street/Washington could clearly emerge victorious from the quagmire it has apparently walked into. The end of the “American Dream”—the best that capitalism has to offer the working class, to repeat, is behind us—makes proletarian embrace of capital’s inherent drive to war less likely, especially when championed by an obviously self-serving grifter.
Cause for celebration?
Is there anything redeemable about 1776? Emphatically, yes. As well as for the chicken now roosting in the White House, the plebeian rebels of 1776 also planted the seeds for the modern US proletariat, the first social layer in the millennial-old history of class society that not only has an interest in its eradication but also has the actual capacity to do so—what distinguishes it from prior subject classes such as slaves and serfs. Only with the capitalist mode of production comes the modern proletariat—the gravediggers of capitalism. The main reason, nota bene, that Radical Reconstruction went down to bloody defeat. The US proletariat, still in swaddling clothes, was, therefore, unable to offer effective assistance to the formerly enslaved fighting to defend the country’s first experiment in racial equality.
For about three-quarters of a century a hereditary proletariat in many skin colours, genders and nationalities now exists in the citadel of world capitalism with all the revolutionary potential that implies. “Potential” is the operative word. Never to be forgotten or forever to be remembered, the word “inevitable”, unvermeidlich in the original text, appears only once in the Communist Manifesto, followed immediately by instructions for proletarian hegemony. If working-class ascent was inevitable, there would have been no need for—what the two authors of the document understood—the Manifesto and its instructions about how to do so. All that the document assures is the class struggle, not the winners and losers. Conditions, I argue, have never been better for achieving working-class victory in the land that gave us the Declaration of Independence.[14]
Indisputable now is the evidence that there is no other capitalist alternative on the planet to what exists on US soil—no other contender to knock it off its perch.[15] As a world-history phenomenon, the American edition of the capitalist mode of production is as good as it gets. And, therefore, fortuitously, it will be on US soil where the fate of our species will be decided. The only force on the planet, to repeat, that can prevent capital’s inevitable march to World War Three and, thus, the likely end to humanity as we know it, is the American proletariat—what was also bequeathed two hundred fifty years ago. A new appreciation for the 1776 Project, I confess, I did not have a half century ago.
[1] George Novack, ed., America’s Revolutionary Heritage: Marxist Essays (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2013), pp. 141-66. Frankel’s thesis, originally penned in 1946, is now mainstream wisdom. Exhibit A, Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford U. P., 2016).
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/us/politics/john-kelly-trump-fitness-character.html.
[3] August H. Nimtz, “A black socialist in Trump country,” Minnesota Star Tribune, July 29, 2016 (https://www.startribune.com/a-black-socialist-in-trump-country/388716201)
[4] https://time.com/4101184/peggy-noonan/
[5] “Alan Greenspan Was Wrong About One Thing. It Was a Big One.” New York Times, New York Times, June 22, 2026 (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/alan-greenspan-federal-reserve.html)
[6] “America’s Economic Anxiety Is Rising Up the Income Ladder,” Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2026 (https://www.wsj.com/economy/americas-economic-anxiety-is-rising-up-the-income-ladder-d77b97d4)
[7] Regarding Sanders’s politics, see August H. Nimtz, “Bernie Sanders and the Two ‘Diseases’ of Bourgeois Politics: ‘Parliamentary Cretinism’ and ‘Voting Fetishism’” Science & Society, Oct. 2026
[8] August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-Time Political Analysis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 21.
[9] V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), vol. 30, pp. 265-66.
[10] August H. Nimtz, “Trump Redux: A Silver Lining?” Legal Form (https://legalform.blog/2024/12/06/trump-redux-august-nimtz/).
[11] Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism, pp. 193-94.
[12] Ibid, p. 183.
[13] Nimtz, “The October Revolution and End of the ‘Great War’,” Marxism versus Liberalism, chapter five.
[14] August H. Nimtz, Black Marxism: A Marxist Critique (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026), chapter five.
[15] “Special Report: The envy of the world: The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” The Economist, Oct. 14, 2024.
