Donald Trump och Richard Nixon

Jämförelser mellan Donald Trumps maktövertagande 2025, och Adolf Hitlers 1933,  har nu blivit allt vanligare. I denna artikel från den engelska vänstertidningen "Socialist Worker" jämförs istället Trump med Richard Nixon. 

Alltså en betydlig mer försiktig analys. Jämförelsen med Hitler avvisas också explicit. 

Jag vet inte om jag är riktigt lika försiktig, men artikeln är definitivt intressant.

Alex Callinicos: The capitalist state is watching Trump

As Musk and his tech bros influence the state, Trump is trying to cut "Big Government" and refashion his presidency around Nixon—but it was mass protest that took Nixon down.

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Trump is refashioning the capitalist state after Nixon

As Elon Musk and his gang of techies run amok in Washington, I’ve been thinking of something Frederick Engels wrote in 1879.

“The modern state is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists,” he wrote.

“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital.”

Engels was saying that the state isn’t the tool of individual capitalists. It acts in the general interest of the capitalist class as a whole. So it taxes the bosses, regulates their activities, and sometimes even takes their assets over. Under the pressure of organised labour, it has developed extensive welfare services that maintain working class families as efficient and relatively compliant objects of exploitation.

­Now one very big capitalist with the support of new president Donald Trump is seeking to reverse this process, and drastically to shrink the state. The New York Times newspaper points out that Musk is using the methods he adopted to get rid of workers at Twitter.

He’s fulfilling plans set out in Project 2025, devised by the ultra-neoliberal Heritage Foundation. Russ Vought, the scheme’s architect, has just been confirmed as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.

But more is involved than attacking “Big Government”. Edward Luce argues in the Financial Times newspaper that Trump wants “to recreate the imperial presidency that was buried in the mid-1970s after Richard Nixon’s resignation”.  This is a very shrewd point, much more accurate than all the overheated commentary comparing Trump’s second presidency to Hitler’s seizure of power.

Trump as a young man had as his mentor the sinister and corrupt right wing Republican lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn had been senator Joe McCarthy’s accomplice during his anti Communist witch hunt early in the Cold War. Nixon himself owed his political rise to his role in this witch hunt.

As US president between 1969 and 1974, Nixon sought to bypass the limits that the constitution put on his power. For example, faced with a Democrat-controlled Congress, he claimed the power to “impound” money that it voted for purposes he disapproved of. He also built up a vast secret apparatus of surveillance, repression, and dirty tricks to crush the anti-Vietnam War movement and secure re-election in 1972.

The gradual exposure of this apparatus in the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. New restrictions on presidential powers were afterwards imposed by Congress. Now Trump, politically formed in the milieu that produced Nixon, wants to get rid of them. For example, Musk and his gang, in taking control of the US Treasury and cutting off spending they dislike, are reasserting the presidential power to impound money.

Trump is greatly aided by the fact that, unlike Nixon, his supporters control both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. He also has, for the time being at least, the enthusiastic backing of Big Tech and Wall Street. If he succeeds, the result will not be outright fascism, but a much more authoritarian and racist version of capitalist “democracy”. Political power will be concentrated in the White House.

What could stop Trump? So far the Musk hit-squad has steered clear of the core of the US welfare state—Medicare, Medicaid and social security. The attempts to purge parts of the repressive apparatus, notably the FBI, have bypassed the core of the national security state, the Pentagon and the CIA. It was when McCarthy tried to investigate the US army that he was brought down. And other bosses may tire of “the ideal personification of the total national capital” becoming the playground of one erratic and highly-subsidised tech bro.

But there’s no substitute for mass mobilisation. It was the giant anti-war movement that was responsible for Nixon’s downfall. People, initially stunned by the speed and brutality of the assault, are beginning to organise and protest.

Determined and courageous resistance can eventually rid us of this noxious bunch of crooks and fanatics.