How Can The U.S. Left Resist Trump And DOGE?

MAGA’s fast-moving coup is upending the longstanding arrangements that have undergirded domestic politics and the US role in the world. What does this mean for the resistance, and how can the US Left maximize our impact?

No wonder all our heads are spinning. The foundations of the world and the domestic order that everyone under 80 years old has grown up in have been under strain for two decades. Now they are being cracked wide open. A MAGA bloc that has meshed white Christian nationalists, right-wing populists, and a Musk-led “broligarchy” (now MAGA’s dominant faction) has captured the citadel of global power. And it is conducting a Constitution-scrapping coup to consolidate authoritarian rule and implement its take-over-everything-everywhere agenda.

It is urgent to get caught up with the breadth of the changes underway. Doing so requires the broad Left to sustain a difficult, deep-going analytic conversation even as we intensify our practical efforts to put roadblocks in MAGA’s path and build mass traction for a vision of a post-MAGA future that centers multiracial democracy.

In that spirit, I offer four initial theses as one potential entryway into the urgent political and strategic exploration this moment demands.

1. There is no going back.

The takeover of the US government that is currently underway aims to change the US political and economic system and shift the map of global politics in fundamental ways.

This moment of epochal change has not come out of the blue. The US-led neoliberal order–with its forever wars, growing gap between the wealth of a few and the poverty of the many, and pathological inaction on climate change–has lost its capacity to undergird social stability or political legitimacy. An exit from that order in one direction or another has been on the horizon since the 2008 financial crisis.

The acceleration of the system’s “polycrisis” intersects with a new phase of the 60-year backlash against the gains of the “long ‘60s” upsurge, driven first and foremost by the Black-led Civil Rights Movement. The political bloc organized around this full-spectrum counter-offensive had gathered enough power by 2020 to prevent any accountability for its first attempt at a political coup. MAGA spent the years after January 6, 2021 building out their disinformation-demagogy infrastructure and making detailed plans for coup number two, which was to be activated whatever the vote count in the 2024 election, and which is now fully underway.