Trump’s crackdown on the LA riots was a last resort due to eroding hegemony (Photo: Alex Brittenham)
United States president Donald Trump is marching to the right, drawing on tactics straight from fascism’s playbook.
His most recent move is ordering the National Guard into Washington DC and taking control of the city’s police force by an executive order. He’s declared the city “lawless”. But the violent crime rate in Washington DC is at a 30 year low.
There is no shortage of signs of authoritarianism under the Trump administration. It has carried out a decimation of the federal government, tearing up employment protections to sack civil servants more easily, with the administration firing those it perceives as disloyal.
It has carried out round-ups of migrants, with immigration officers kidnapping people and deporting them to foreign prisons. Nobody is safe, as citizens are included in the mass deportation programme.
It has defied court orders, publicly attacked judges, arrested protesters without due process and intimidated universities, cultural institutions and news outlets that don’t bend to Trump’s will.
What Trump is doing is a symptom of the US experiencing a wider crisis—a crisis of hegemony. But what does this mean and why does it matter?
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci used the term hegemony to show how sections of society could direct, lead and control others.
A crisis of hegemony, therefore, is a crisis of ruling class authority.
Gramsci argued that this takes place when traditional, elected representatives are no longer recognised as legitimate by those they are supposed to represent. Or, in Gramsci’s words, a conflict between “represented and representatives”.
You can see it in public trust in the government as a whole being at near historic lows. There is a growing rift between working class people and politicians, as ordinary people no longer think traditional politicians have their interests at heart.
Or you can see it in the rejection of the mainstream conservative candidates during the 2024 Republican primaries. None came close to displacing Trump as the nominee, as huge swathes of the Republican party have turned to Trump’s far right politics.
Alienated people rejected the tired liberalism peddled by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. The result is a volatile one.
A space is opened up, Gramsci argued, “for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny’”. Trump is exactly this.
But what causes a crisis of hegemony?
One cause is a ruling class failing “in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses”. We do not have to look far in US politics to see such failures.
Think of the myth of the American Dream—the promise of secure jobs, home ownership and rising living standards. For a brief period in the post-war boom, this held true for mainly the white working class.
This explosion of prosperity meant the US ruling class retained its legitimacy.
But crisis after crisis has hollowed out the Dream, turning it into a nightmare. Working class people in the US have been hit by rising living costs, especially in recent years. Government assistance has faded, demand for food banks has surged, food insecurity sky-rocketed and homelessness is at a record high.
There are soaring housing prices, mortgage rates and high healthcare and insurance charges that form painful structural costs to US life.
Or think of the promise of US exceptionalism, where for decades politicians sold the story of US economic and political dominance of the world.
Instead, its economic strength is being challenged with the rise of China, as US foreign policy circles speak in scared whispers of a “peer competitor” that could overtake the US in the future.
While the limits of US military might have been shown up in the disastrous wars of Afghanistan and Iraq—long, protracted wars where the US left with little to show for itself.
And it remains bogged down in an imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, a war that many in the US now see as a costly expense.
Traditional, elected representatives are struggling to solve such crises within the parameters of the old dying order. They fail, Gramsci wrote, “to react against force of habit, against the tendency to become mummified”.
Mainstream politicians are running out of ideas and time. The more they fail to offer anything meaningful to working class people, the deeper the crisis of hegemony becomes.
In trying to push against such a crisis, Gramsci argued that a ruling class may “resort to all sorts of mystification”.
The rise of racism, in the US and elsewhere, should be seen through this lens. To shore up its support, a ruling class often constructs some apparent existential threat to try and bind working class people to its rule.
Trump does this most intensely with scapegoating against migrants and refugees, establishing a nostalgia for a time when immigration hadn’t supposedly ravaged white people’s lives. His appeal to nostalgia for the 1950s, for the time of the American Dream, is part of this.
Trump’s authoritarianism reflects another dynamic.
“The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony” in a capitalist democracy “is characterised by the combination of force and consent,” Gramsci argued. These “balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent”.
Force is used through institutions such as the police and the military, which protect the status quo and crush opposition to it.
Meanwhile, institutions such as Congress and the Senate extract consent, winning “buy in” from the working class.
Through the routines of democracy, everyday beliefs and ideas that become habits, the ruling class is provided with its authority. For example, believing that they exercise self-government in the democratic representative state or that economic growth is an all-important goal.
This enables the bosses and the rich to subordinate working class people to the idea that their interests align. But in a crisis of hegemony, the ideological, moral, intellectual and cultural leadership of the ruling class starts to weaken. The consensus deteriorates.
Old networks of influence start to wane. In the US, trust in mass media is at its lowest point in over five decades, as many no longer accept it as legitimate.
Yet a hasty collapse of the existing order does not necessarily follow. There is often an intermediary stage, where a ruling class grasps for a new consensus of how to govern.
As Gramsci writes, “If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This stage can last for decades—and is where we are at now.
There are certainly a great deal of “morbid symptoms” within the Trump administration. The balance of force and consent is shifting. As the ability of the US ruling class to extract consent from working class people weakens, it turns to rely more on force.
In response to a crisis of hegemony, Gramsci argued, a ruling class “changes men and programmes” to try and “reabsorb the control that was slipping from its grasp”.
One solution can be found in that of “the charismatic leader”. This happens when “no group, neither the conservatives nor the progressives, has the strength for victory, and that even the conservative group needs a master”.
This is the role that Trump fills, embracing more authoritarian and fascist tactics to fill the vacuum left open by the failure of mainstream politics.
Within this dangerous trajectory, a turn to fascism, while not inevitable, is a possibility.
When a ruling class is faced with a crisis, it can look towards extreme reactionary ideas. Desperation can make things that were previously considered unacceptable, acceptable.
But these moments do not just open spaces for the far right, but for resistance too. Sometimes, it takes a reformist expression, such as with the election of Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic Party candidate for New York mayor.
But other times, it can show the possibility of a real fightback. Recently in Los Angeles, militant protests erupted as Trump sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement in to carry out barbaric immigration raids.
We must ensure that resistance meets every ramping up of state violence. Revolutionaries must fight to seize the opportunity for ourselves and turn anger towards those at the top.
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