Three months before the presidential elections, many ordinary people are feeling a sense of relief.  They do not have to watch a showdown between two old men. One who has the deaths of over 40,000 Palestinians on his hands and one who is a billionaire landlord and recent felon ready to unleash a full reactionary program. 

After losing in 2020, Trump came back more dangerous than ever, and the basis for the popularity of his reactionary ideas will not just go away if he loses this year. We have seen how the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration have given them a perfect opportunity to fester. So the question we have to ask is: do Harris and the Democrats have what it takes to put up a real fight against the growth of Trumpism and the far-right?

Project 2025 & Agenda 47

The top two items on Trump’s “Agenda 47” come as no surprise after years of campaigning around “building the wall”: seal the border and stop the “migrant invasion”, and carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. Around the world, as imperialist wars, inflation, and climate crises are uprooting the most oppressed layers of society, the right is making anti-immigrant policies central to their campaign promises in the advanced capitalist countries that migrants are fleeing to. This of course comes on top of a host of anti-worker, anti-women, and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric of the Trump campaign that serve to whip up the far right and further divide and oppress workers.

Trump 2.0 is in a position to go much further than he was in 2016. He now has the backing of seasoned reactionaries ready to fill his cabinet and the state apparatus. Among these reactionaries are the 100 conservative groups behind the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” a 900-page policy book that lays out a right-wing makeover of the federal government. 

Plans include dismantling the US Education Department and Homeland Security, cutting Medicaid and Social Security, slashing money for renewable energy, and further restricting abortion access. Anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ policies are couched in language calling to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” While Trump has recently tried to distance himself from Project 2025 to save face, a peek behind the curtain reveals that several of the authors served in the previous Trump administration. Trump’s running mate JD Vance uses similar talking points to what is written in Project 2025.

The Same Old Strategy

The threat of Trump and Project 2025 evoke a real fear in ordinary people, particularly queer youth and immigrants. For the Democrats, it serves as the perfect fear-mongering bargaining chip. This, alongside empty calls to “save democracy”, make up the recipe to cover for their failures over the last four years. The Democrats rely on these fear tactics every election cycle while falling short when it comes to fighting on the offensive for what working people truly need.

Not only has the Biden administration failed to deliver on campaign promises such as eliminating student debt, raising the minimum wage, fighting for climate action, and fighting for healthcare reform – they have done the opposite. The Biden administration has continued many Trump-era policies around immigration, increased drilling projects, failed to address the cost-of-living crisis, and is at the helm for providing the arms, training, and strategy for the massacre in Gaza.

A Third Option?

The “uncommitted” movement through the Democratic primary elections, spearheaded primarily by Muslim Americans refusing to vote for Biden and his genocidal policies, expressed a real frustration at the pro-imperialist Democratic Party. Nearly three-quarters of a million voters checked “uncommitted” or mailed in a blank ballot. However, polls show Republicans are gaining momentum in majority-Muslim counties in Michigan as well.

The “uncommitted” movement needs to not only continue withholding votes from the Democrats but point a way forward, including taking a clear stand for genuine anti-war, Green Party candidate Jill Stein. While Stein won’t win, every vote against Harris and Trump is a vote for something new that concretizes the mood to break with the status quo. The result of the perpetual cycle of voting for the lesser of two evils pulls the Democrats rightward and aids the growth of the far right.

Defeating Trump Vs. Defeating Trumpism

While a strong vote against both the Democrats and Republicans in November can express a real mood to break from the two corporate parties, politics do not start or end at the ballot box. Even if Trump loses the presidential election, it will take much more than the Democrats operating on the defensive to defeat the far right and the growth of Trumpism globally. 

Only a coordinated mass movement of workers and young people around a common pro-worker political program can fight and defeat the far right. This is far from utopian – after the election of Trump in 2016 it was the masses taking to the streets in protest that inaugurated the resistance while the initial reaction by the Democratic Party was to congratulate Trump on his victory. 

It was gig drivers and protesters at airports who forced the reversal of Trump’s Islamophobic “Muslim ban”. It was the air traffic controllers staging a sick-out and the threat of the Association of Flight Attendants striking that forced Trump to end the longest government shutdown in history. And, it was a rally of 40,000 workers and youth in Boston that shut down a march of the far right after a white supremacist killed a protester in Charlottesville the week before.

These confrontations with the right are not unique to the US. This month, tens of thousands of protestors gathered in England and Northern Ireland to defend against the violent, racist attacks of the far right against local Muslim communities. Socialist Alternative’s sister organization in the UK energetically built this movement. The election of five independent candidates to Parliament shows the possibility of forming an independent coalition. These victories include Jeremy Corbyn, who was previously suspended by the Labour Party for his left-wing ideas, and others. All of these campaigns were organized around a pro-Palestine program – this could build enthusiasm for a new party needed to take the movement forward here.

New Party, New System

In the 2010s, Bernie Sanders’s call for a political revolution against the billionaire class rallied millions around him and created an enormous opening for a new independent workers’ party outside of the Democratic establishment. Today, the emergence of left labor leaders and union reform caucuses that name the bosses as the enemy express that potential. The major unions that endorsed ceasefire resolutions should break with the Democrats and begin organizing around putting a stop to Trump’s reactionary agenda. Linking labor struggles to social and anti-war struggles will be crucial in charting the path forward for the emergence of a new party that can fight on the side of workers.

Ultimately, building fighting unions and organizing a new party are only the first steps to winning what workers need. War, poverty, climate catastrophe, and oppression are deeply rooted in the system of capitalism itself, and the CEOs of major corporations are the real puppeteers of every election cycle. Working people do not just deserve, but urgently need, a new system based on need rather than profit. A socialist future is possible, but only if we start building the kind of left alternative that we need and start getting organized on a mass scale now.