Three Things Trump is Doing Which Everyone on the Left Needs to Celebrate

A Dialectic in Three Acts

There’s a lot of pain to go around for the Left these days, something which anyone who takes the New York Times at their word—a foolish gambit, to say the least—knows too well. From trans rights to social welfare programs, from Palestinian Liberation to dreams of Greenlander sovereignty, the horror show of a Trump administration not yet a month into its tenure has unfolded with a grim sense of doom and gloom.

Yet, many of these issues are largely the prerogatives of the upwardly mobile liberal classes. Or, better put, these are problems which the Democratic Party and its bigtime donors believe can be solved by their lame strategies. This election terminates that belief and it does so conclusively no matter how many Pod Save America bros want to keep crowing about a close election. The issues are important to anyone on the left. But let the centrist, technocratic solutionism of the Democrats die, along with the Wilsonian consensus that birthed it all ages ago.

Yet, leftism must acknowledge the concerns of our liberal cousins to our right, only without pampering their hysteria. It is not a good time to be a liberal today, much better to be a leftist who rightly deserves the posture of “I told you so.” But we must also be compassionate if we wish our knowledge to be widely disseminated. We need liberals to come over to our side for this to happen. (Side note: This does not seem forthcoming, if the recent election of a Democratic party apparatchik to head the DNC is anything to go by. Sigh. How many beatdowns by rightwing populists is it going to take?)

I guess this compassion needs to include tough love.

Well, then.

Here I present to you three things every leftist needs to celebrate—that’s right, celebrate—about what Trump is doing these days. Hopefully liberals will also listen (though we shouldn’t hold our breaths):

1. A leap forward in Ukraine

Trump and Putin have the same thing in common that Clinton and Yeltsin had in common: they are both human occupations of roles delineated by a global system of power. Take away the human and the system naturally replaces him or her with another of the same type. Like the cavalcade of changing faces during an audition for a part in a movie, what never changes are the lines in the script. What remains is the role.

Therefore, leftists are skeptical about psychologizations and moralizations of world leaders. What matters is cleaning house on our side, not on policing the decisions of other world leaders on this or that socially desired outcome. Like Mearshimer’s realism dictates, each country is a black box of mystery, though each one obeys the fundamental law of an anarchic international regime guided only by interests. We have ours, they have theirs.

It then goes without saying that leftists are skeptical as well of multi-lateral, militarized institutions such as NATO. It’s obvious that at some point a bloated and hostile “peacekeeper” such as this relic from the post-WWII consensus—the same consensus which is in active, terminal decline—is going to run counter to the interests of any one of its member states, as it seems to be doing with regard to the United States. NATO’s expansionary idealism for the last thirty years since the fall of the USSR has certainly worked great for those wedded to a transatlantic partnership, one of whose net effects is the disempowering of the American working class, but a time should come when a leftist needs to rethink the utility of serving those very narrow interests, especially if they have wreaked havoc at home. The gargantuan Ukraine handout of the last three years is just one of the financial setbacks to the working class which this NATO expansionist ideal has created, all in the name of fighting a war that had a perfectly legitimate diplomatic prophylactic and one which everyone knew Ukraine was destined to lose.

Today it is reported that Pete Hesgeth, Trump’s new defense secretary, has stated over in Brussels an obvious something every leftist has been waiting to hear for the past three years, that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is unrealistic. We knew this was basically the case the moment the first Russian boot stepped over the border with Ukraine. Later on now, we are hearing that Trump is on the phone with Putin, presumably to carry out the first steps of this new policy. Hesgeth laid out a comprehensive plan to achieve a lasting peace in the region, certainly a first pass at a negotiation and therefore subject to alteration over the coming months. Nonetheless, given that this signals a crucial turning point in a long stalemate, and one which will institute a less multinational posture towards the Atlanticist consensus, Hesgeth’s remarks must be welcomed by the working class-led Left.

2. The demise of the neoliberal model

Free trade and global financialization have destroyed the American working class. This fact is about as transparent as any other position leftists have historically taken and, though it has been eclipsed by the centrist liberal vision, one of the left’s natural economic prerogatives. The laissez-faire doctrines about invisible hands over markets have always been skin deep and hypocritical and never more so in the guise of neoliberal economics, a belief that material flourishing and economic abundance come only from the enforcement by the government against its own regulatory power, an oxymoron to say the least.

The natural labor discipline effect of these kinds of policies have long been the cassus belli of an economic left at war with the ruling class, which explains why neoliberal economics have enjoyed bipartisan support by two corporate parties traditionally indifferent to labor rights.

Witness a sight we have now in the fallout of this system since the ‘08 crash come to know quite well, one Bernie Sanders raging against the NAFTA bill on the house floor, the passing of which was a decisive moment in the history of neoliberalism and perhaps the final nail on the coffin of the American working class. The empty Congressional hall in front of which Sanders delivers his ‘93 jeremiad is a bitter metaphor for the “empty hall” of Sanders’ two failed presidential runs.

Today the noted Marxist economist and coiner of the coming technofeudalist consensus, Yanis Varoufakis, published a profound meditation on the methodology of Trump’s tariff regime. Far from a mere cudgel of dealmaking, Trumpian tariffs, according to Varoufakis, will impose a network effect that is going to downscale the dollar in international markets. I did not know any of this before reading this sweeping piece, but apparently an upscaled dollar hoarded in foreign central banks has a deleterious effect on stateside industrial might, which in turn desiccates the American working class. By attempting to impose dollar devaluation through tariffs, Trump is hoping to add motivation to the American manufacturing sector and to diversify foreign export flows to other countries, which—fingers crossed—will help solve our trade deficit woes.

Here is not the place to discuss the prudence of this strategy, something which Varoufakis, who has famously laid out what he calls a “New Bretton Woods” economic model as his preferred ideal, admits towards the end of his piece is shaky at best. It could very well be the case that the Trumpian tariff regime ends up failing and failing bad at that.

What’s important for the left in contemplating this tariff regime is the extent to which it constitutes a rupture with an orthodoxy which both corporate parties have upheld for decades. The hostility to the most important and most basic components of the left worldview which the preceding era of neoliberal economics has enforced has turned the left into a weak, rudderless cabal of internecine strife and collaborationist tangents. The fact that now it appears that a fundamental break with this hostile regime is afoot, even if it come from a rightwing populist, is a truly grand organizational opportunity for the left who has always decried the erosion of labor rights and union density in America. It must be supported by the left if the left is to have any purchase when the inevitable reformism contra Trumpian excess comes into view in the midterms and beyond.

3. Cringe technocracy meets muscular humanism

One would be forgiven for having missed a brief though very important showdown over the role that hate speech should play in public spaces, what with the seemingly interminable all-caps cascade of absurd vitriol and antisemitic bile which one Kanye West, sorry, Ye, treated the world to over the weekend.

Perhaps it’s a sign of health that his tirade failed to gain what would have not so long ago been days of breathless chyrons on CNN/MSNBC about the meltdown, since now it appears that the likes of Michelle Goldberg, the gold standard for all things pearl-clutchy, decided to deride in her NY Times column, not Ye’s clearly unmedicated screed, but the brouhaha that ensued over a DOGE staffer’s reinstatement after the discovery and subsequent firing over his recent anti-South Asian tweet calling for the normalization of “Indian hate.”

Enter the thunderclap rained down on Rep. Ro Khanna by the Vice President of the United States, an exchange which I had to capture with a screenshot of their tweets:

You can practically hear a whiny voice upon reading Khanna’s words, preferably in “that’s my stapler” from Office Space tones.

What’s remarkable about this exchange is Vance’s “grow up” statement, for it indicates the new consensus we have entered, that it is now the technocrats, with their obsession over the policing of the minutiae of language by unelected bureaucrats, who are the children, a noteworthy flip on the usual Democrat belief that with Trump in office there are “no adults in the room.”

Yet, even more important than this imperative towards maturity, is the ideological clash these two tweets present for discussion.

On the one side you have Ro Khanna and the technocrats who are more willing to assign powers to the bourgeois state to organize care for children according to racialized metrics than to intervene personally on the behalf of his own children, should those children tick a certain racial box. In other words, Khanna seems to believe that the common denominator between his children and Vance’s, their racial category of “Indian-American” or “South Asian-American” (Vance is married to an Indian-American and has biracial children), supersedes the category of his own children to such an extent that only the State can truly intervene in order to protect them from hate speech.

Vance had none of this. His statement clearly demonstrates that he believes racial categories play second fiddle to familial categories, that his children are first and foremost his children and only secondarily biracial children, a fact which Khanna seems unwilling to grant.

In Christopher Lasch’s seminal and famous book The Culture of Narcissism, he lays out the case for pause on what to the author in 1979 already looked like a done deal, the encroachment of the administrative state into the sphere of domestic care. Too many of the traditional educational duties of parents were being ceded to the discretion of anonymous state bureaucrats with shaky mandates and politicized motivations, so the Laschian critique runs.

Vance seems to be undertaking a similar position: in calling for congressmen to “grow up” and stop acting “like whiny children,” it may seem that he is deferring to the crude bicep flexing of the manosphere, but there is a more sophisticated ideological framework here: Vance is proposing a new way for us to understand the complicated duties of parentage and separating out what progressives and technocrats have long considered fused together, the role of social justice and childcare.

For Vance, Khanna was making an illegitimate leap in trying to scold him for his failures as a father. Khanna was saying that Vance’s children’s vulnerability as biracial children effectively requires him to cede control over their care in this regard to the State. But this would only make sense to someone who believes that a child’s race is more important than the fact that that child belongs to you and only you.

What should excite any real Leftist in this discourse is the extent to which it presents the clear demise of an odious consensus that has long muddied the waters in leftist discourse. Marx was famously agnostic towards the State and there is not much consensus amongst Marxists as to the proper role of the State in a socialist paradigm. One thing, however, is clear: as the chief securer of bourgeois right, the capitalist state should always be regarded with absolute suspicion in any approach it makes towards governance models that have traditionally been overseen domestically by parents and the local community. To that extent, the enlargement of the administrative state which began with Wilson in the early 20th Century and its encroachment into the sphere of parentage, must be understood within the framework of suspicion, not encouragement, a posture which the technocratic progressives and their centrist Democrat peers have largely been unwilling to adopt.

Now with Trump’s rightwing populist sledgehammer, though there is much to be concerned about in its heedless path of destruction, there is nonetheless room for opportunity for those of us on the economic left who wish for material conditions, not administrative intervention, to instill domestic flourishing and protection for our children. Vance’s tweet takedown is an important instance of this new opportunistic playing field.