Trump and the Crisis: System Change from the Right?
By Joe Guinan
May 2, 2025
TDC President Joe Guinan gave brief opening remarks to the Resist & Build Summit in Atlanta, Georgia, May 2-5. The Democracy Collaborative co-sponsored the event, the program for which can be found here.
I’ve been asked to give a brief overview of the Trump Administration and its actions in the context of the political-economic crisis in America, to which it is both a contributor and a reaction.
We are just past Trump’s First Hundred Days, and so are in a position to draw some firm conclusions about the nature of this second Trump Administration – and the challenges and dangers we are now facing.
I want to say three important things about our new Trumpian moment.
A radical right Administration
The first is that it is clear that this is a government of the radical right.
This is not an insult, but a matter of strategic analysis – important to consider as we develop our own strategy.
In this regard, the Trump Administration represents a mixture of homegrown old-fashioned American reaction – neo-Confederate politics plus plutocratic economics – with new elements of a tried-and-tested playbook that has been honed by the radical right in a number of countries where they have taken power around the world (including lessons his people learned from Trump’s own first presidential term).
We can therefore look at and learn from these examples, even if we must then translate any lessons back into our own context.
The global far right
These are models upon which Trump is building and seeking to extend, whether it’s Berlusconi in Italy at the turn of the century – who in many ways represents the prototype for this current wave of strongmen – or Orbán in Hungary, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Netanyahu in Israel, Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy today, and on and on – right down to a Trumpian “mini-me” like Bukele in El Salvador (who is affording Trump direct assistance and extra-territorial options in his cat-and-mouse assault upon the U.S. constitution).
There is a useful recent book called World of the Right: Radical Conservatism in the Global Order, which makes a dispassionate study of this global right-wing movement.
It details how the new right-populism has been able to make significant political inroads into sections of the working class, in particular through conjuring up a common enemy in the form of “the New Class of international ‘managerial elites’” – and to define “woke-ism” and DEI as the pernicious agenda of these elites perpetrated against “the people.”
“The Trump Administration represents a mixture of homegrown old-fashioned American reaction – neo-Confederate politics plus plutocratic economics – with new elements of a tried-and-tested playbook that has been honed by the radical right in a number of countries where they have taken power around the world.”
I mention this because there is a huge danger in responding to this move by allowing ourselves to be backed into mounting a species of rearguard defense of the status quo, which fatally positions us on the wrong side of the powerful system/anti-system and change/status quo dynamics that define the politics of our age.
For us to fall into this trap allows the radical right to present as changemakers in a broken system, rather than what they actually are, agents of a decaying capitalist order, seeking to protect and advance a very particular set of material interests.
I also mention it because it is essential that we study the radical right, analytically and not moralistically, because it is becoming ever-clearer that they have been studying us on the left and our movements – in some cases, for decades.
Their strategy is at least in part informed by their close reading of Lenin and of Gramsci (albeit stood on their heads!) as part of their crafting of what is a genuine assault upon the administrative state.
The fascist turn
There has been a lot of discussion about whether Trump is a fascist or not.
We could have that conversation, not to parse terminology but because a lot hinges on a correct analysis and answer.
For me, the most illuminating argument I’ve heard in that debate comes from David Renton, a left scholar of fascism, who ends up saying that what matters is that the distance between Trump and fascism has now narrowed such that it would take very little to cross it:
“What you need for a fascist outcome,” he argues, “may not be a large group of committed fascists, but a moment of right-wing advance and innovation, and a willingness to use the state in new ways so that the previous limits on authoritarian power no longer apply.”
Most chillingly, Renton points out that Trump has his own militia supportive of him personally: “No one else on the U.S. or European right has anything like Trump’s relationship to a violent street movement.”
Getty Images
System Change from the Right?
Which brings us to the Trump agenda.
The second point I want to make is that they do have a well-defined agenda which they are pursuing ruthlessly (though to mixed effect).
It is not always a coherent agenda – the chaos of Trump’s tariff policies are the obvious example of that.
But it is at least a clear attempt to find a way, by their own lights, to break out of a system that, at least in Washington, has been largely stalemated for decades.
They are seeking to chart a new course in response to the crisis.
At TDC, we have long argued that the crisis we are facing is systemic in nature, and that a decaying system incapable of being reformed but unlikely to collapse outright would force the issue of political-economic system change onto the American agenda.
The outcome of the last presidential election, and the refusal of Democrats to embrace and offer any kind of serious economic alternatives, means that the first major attempt at a rupture with business-as-usual in Washington now comes from the political right.
Shrinking the state, of course, has long been a dream of the right and their business backers, going all the way back through the Reagan Administration to Barry Goldwater and before that to the neoliberals’ reaction against the New Deal.
“Shrinking the state, of course, has long been a dream of the right and their business backers, going all the way back through the Reagan Administration to Barry Goldwater and before that to the neoliberals’ reaction against the New Deal.”
Despite four decades of neoliberal hegemony, they have signally failed to shrink government as a share of GDP (even as they have succeeded in repurposing much of the apparatus of government for capitalist ends).
Now, in the face of the crisis, they are trying once again. It’s all there in Project 2025, and in Musk’s DOGE.
We are witnessing the wholesale attempt to turn the American people against the administrative state by stripping it of all capacity to govern in their favor, whether through the management of forests and parks and wetlands or the effective stewarding of public data and payments systems, and everything in between.
This is the meaning of Trump’s Shock-and-Awe assault on the federal government, a form of what has been termed “ungoverning.”
It’s not too much of a stretch to think of it as an attempt at system change, but from the right.
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
The last thing I want to say concerns our strategic orientation towards the moment we’re in.
It is vitally important that we do not give in to defeatism or succumb to the deliberate disorientation strategy of the radical right, what Steve Bannon has termed “flooding the zone.”
It is hard to see or hear right now, through all the pain and immigration raids and executive overreach, but there will be opportunities in all this for us, for the actual left, if we play our cards right.
As Milton Friedman and the neoliberals urged, we should never let a serious crisis go to waste.
While we lament the loss of park rangers and oceanographers and financial regulators, the net effect of the U.S. state on many people’s lives has not been positive for a long time now.
The assault on America’s painfully antique constitution and dismantling and wrecking of the capitalist administrative state is, for Trump’s movement, a Schumpeterian act of “creative destruction.”
There are no guarantees, but as a lot of the old is being unceremoniously swept away (including a lot of illusions), there may yet open up possibilities for other futures, if only we can bring them into contention — openings for a more democratic polity and economy, for a solidarity economy.
That’s one of the things I’m looking for from our conversations this weekend.
Thank you.
