The dictum that every fascism is a failed revolution is falling on deaf, dumb and blind ears. Or more exactly, most people have simply never heard or understood this dictum. The current spectacle of Donald Trump and his ring of criminal thugs going full Führer is certain to cause some tremors. In left quarters, the fact that the mask has come off the rules-based international order is notable only for the fact that the usual hypocrisy has been dispensed with. Among conservatives, there is a wait-and-see sense of expectancy, which simply betrays the fact that this sector does not know what it wants, beyond the thoroughly ambiguous aim of power and money. Liberal factions are the ones to watch now since the Trump sequel is entirely on them, from the centrist neoliberal sellouts to the corporatist business unions and the identitarians on the postmodern left.1
Responsibility for not pushing hard left has not only given the working masses no reason to pay any attention to liberals but is causing the liberal left to betray its fundamentally incoherent worldview. Playing down the seriousness of what is happening – even after the number one Jan 6 coup plotter has been given impunity as the first official post-president – this historically illiterate sector continues to denigrate the socialist left, dismissed recently by an otherwise serious thinker, Vivek Chibber, as the “jetsam and flotsam” of sectarian groups.2 In a discussion with the celebrity activist musician Roger Waters, the Canadian hosts of the Bad Hasbara podcast, Matt Lieb and Daniel Maté, referred glibly to the adherents of all variants of Trotskyism as “nerds,” and this, after Waters called on people to not think like Trotskyists and instead praise the “guy with the turban and the beard,” Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the New (Social) Democratic Party, for his mealy-mouthed statements on Gaza.3 The podcast advertises itself as “the world’s most moral podcast.” This makes Waters an appropriate guest insofar as he has presented his political advocacy in terms of human rights law and moralism. Both are no doubt commendable, especially in today’s context of neo-McCarthyism, but morality is also an ambivalent form of politics when what is required today, after the mucking about with new social movement horizontalism, is mass organizational capacity. As for all of the praising to the high heavens, these are externalities of the compromises that some leftists make when they agree to play ball with liberal institutions. The simplest way to do this is to steer clear of so-called sectarianism.
Calls for unity, equality and empathy are fine and well but none of this explains why we are in the mess we are in or how to get out of it. In practical terms, morality is a petty-bourgeois ratification of the existing reality, expressed in upside down terms. In the realm of aesthetics, this takes the form of social realism, which has certainly produced important art, and Waters is no doubt one of the most important artists of this moment, especially as he has stood up to state-level censorship, not to mention the type of pro-David Gilmour trolling that Steve Lukather recently spewed out on the tragically mainstream Rick Beato YouTube channel.4 Many political thinkers and pundits, however, simply quarantine the question of culture as they would COVID-19 or the measles.
The problem, as I see it, is that the civilized world has since the postwar era entered a universe of petty-bourgeois cultural hegemony. While the narcissistic counterculture thought that challenging everything was going to make the world a better place, it has been some time since the TV-engineered boomer generation has gone conservative and corporate. Since at least the 1980s, the idea of youthful rebellion has been tied to the political separation of the middle class from the plight of the working majority on a global scale. In short, what has happened in “the culture” is like what happened to most of the anti-colonial movements as revolutionary gains were handed over to bourgeois compradors. There are no doubt reserves of radicalism remaining in the said culture as there are in resistance movements and even in some state regimes. However, the postmodern condition and its end of history, end of the grand narrative of class struggle mentality remains ideologically dominant, and so someone like Waters comes across as more of a George Orwell than a Jean-Paul Sartre. To do anything more – one is perhaps asking such people to do less – is maybe asking too much from a stadium-size musician, but Waters himself does not hesitate to ask something of everyone by telling the Marxist left to give up. With few exceptions, this has always been the role of celebrity artists and musicians, who, more than most, are tuned in to the “post-Enlightenment schizo-cynicism” that is demanded by petty-bourgeois ideology. The difference between now and just a couple of decades ago is that the political right is now also tuned in. How else to explain the over-the-top embrace of outwardly fascist culture and politics in the highest echelons of the ruling class? Or should we be satisfied with comedian Bill Burr’s argument that Elon Musk has gone Mussolini because he couldn’t get laid in high school?5 You see how this kind of hip-and-square rubbish sticks around well after its due date.
Unfortunately, in these dangerous times, the usual moral concern, which is the bread and butter of the executive petty bourgeoisie in the cultural, academic and media sectors, simply doesn’t pass muster. The social democratic middle is now showing its confusion by advocating a return to bourgeois liberalism, on the one hand, or some version of anti-elite or patriotic populism, as is now the case in Canada with hockey audiences, after Trump threats to annex the Great White North, hollering down the U.S. national anthem, or with the continued lionization of Mr 3D six-pack Luigi Mangione.6 With a left like this who needs woke Hollywood films with supernaturally black substitutes for historically white characters.
While economist Richard Wolff thinks that Trump is more of a performance artist than a real political threat, more a fool than a cynic, Michael Hudson makes the important rebuttal that we are going to see performance on both sides, with Congressional bipartisanship ratifying the Republicans’ monkeywrenching of public policy.7 We have thus seen so-called labour leaders in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere corroborate the criminality of American foreign policy. A recent interview by Canadian journalist Yves Engler with former Canadian Auto Workers economist Sam Gindin reveals some of the limitations of keeping with business unionism.8 Instead of talking about an increase in NATO military spending to 2 percent of GDP, elites in the U.K. are now accepting Trump’s 3 percent as a done deal and tabling the newest indignity of a 5 percent military spending threshold – all of this of course in the interest of “out-competing” the Second and Thirds worlds, as they were once known. This is the art of the Trump deal in action, spewing the vitriol and doublespeak that allow the technocrats everywhere to save face. In the case of Canada, the futurists in the media have for months been making a far-right Pierre Poilievre government seem like fate. But with enough time for Canadian voters to take stock of the disgusting spectacle unfolding to the South, which comprises imperialist overtures to make Canada the 51st state – how quickly the Americans have forgotten their condemnations of Russian chauvinism – the Liberals have snapped back with a far-right (Freeland) option of their own, just to keep up with the fascists in Germany, France and Italy.
As for Roger Waters’ hero of the moment, the centre-left technocrat and Liberal Party lapdog Jagmeet Singh responded to the Trump tariff threat by calling for national unity through a tripartite roundtable of political, corporate and trade union leaders. The NDP leadership is relatively clear that it does not like to witness genocide in Gaza, but when it came to Ukraine, Singh signed in March 2022 a “supply and confidence” agreement with the Liberals, allowing them to stay in power and continue with gunboat diplomacy, only to break this agreement in time for some electioneering. Singh is about as much an alternative to the Liberals as Biden was to the Republicans. The NDP under Singh colluded with the Liberal government’s use of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to vote in favour of the CUPW enforcement of the Liberals’ illegal strikebreaking order. Is Canada Post destined to become an Amazon-style workforce, with much of its urban mail carried by private contractors? This is what billionaires want from the federal government. The NDP does not call for labour solidarity domestically and internationally, but assists austerity and imperialism through U.S., E.U., G7, WTO and NATO intrigues. As for the tactical use of nuclear weapons in the looming World War III, Unifor and the Canadian Labour Congress stand behind the armament drive, much like their American allies in the UAW, the Teamsters and the AFT. Singh has also said that he would work with Trump by spending $1 billion and hiring thousands of border police to help with the Teddy Roosevelt chest-thumping, further militarizing the relatively peaceful US-Canada border. NDP leaders Wab Kinew, David Eby and Singh are agreed about exceeding the NATO spending target of 2 percent and making NORAD more compliant with war aims against Russia and China. All of this means war on workers. So please, Sir Roger, do better than stick a pacifier in the mouths of people who are bereft of an alternative to the neoliberal and neoconservative tag team.
Although one can appreciate that some in the middle class are schizzy when it comes to the far-right programme of war and austerity, the billionaire agenda works only for those who can manufacture the chaos that keeps citizen movements on the back foot, all of which justifies “emergency” and “security” measures against the slightest opposition – basically, the billionaires. Nationalist culture war reaction to Trumpism is about as useful to the socialist left as cancel culture has been to the Palestinian cause. How then can we de-link from the billionaire agenda when the liberal left is adamant that we not get rid of this parasitic class? Rather than razing Gaza and giving the land to Stephen Schwartzman and Jared Kushner, why not requisition Mar-a-Lago and repurpose it as a museum of contemporary barbarism? Does no one understand that the people who destroyed homes, hospitals and universities in Gaza are the same who attack your homes, hospitals and schools?
On the so-called left, union bureaucrats are happy to leave left politics to citizen outrage and the activist performance art department. One can see how self-defeating this strategy is when instead of a general strike and victory to the end (of Trump, for starters), activists against anti-immigration raids organized a 50 states and 50 capitols event for only one day, even though some have nobly tried to keep it going. One need not be reminded that in comparison to 2016, the number of protesters who turned out for Trump’s second inauguration was negligible. One reason for this is because in 2025 it became more difficult to blame the fascist presidency on white blue-collar workers. The liberals have lost their preferred scapegoat. Much of the supposedly socialist youths that didn’t even bother to vote for Sanders in 2020 are oblivious to the fact that the parent culture is more than happy to outsource to them the responsibility for a just polity. While this sector came out in large numbers against the Gaza genocide, it has barely raised an eyebrow about the more than 1.5 million dead in Ukraine, not to mention the takeover of Syria.
This is the price you pay when global solidarity is defined in moral rather than political terms. For Marxists at least, the choice is not between neoliberals and neoconservatives but between socialism and capitalism. It is because they are part of the middle class that most academics, journalists and celebrity commentators have no investment in socialism. They are not to blame for the policies designed by and for the 1 to 10 percent, but they are to blame for working to keep all of humanity shackled to a system of exploitation that they wrongly think can be reformed. This liberal class appreciates socialism – the way Roger Waters likes to talk about his mother’s communism – because it adds a radical chic veneer to middle-class careers in government, business, media and the liberal professions. Since the 1960s and 1970s, the middle class has ceased to think of itself as an organic component of the working class. It was easy for this to happen as consumerism made the culture of the wealthy as well as the working class more middlebrow all around. This is also how the establishment succeeded in cultivating a portion of women and race leaders whose task it has been to diversify political domination. As Gindin put it somewhat ambitiously, the liberal class soft peddles system change. It will win nothing for the majority when the climate emergency by itself is enough to turn red. The mark of a liberal is that they need the support of the masses to justify their special status but reject the politics of the masses as a class in itself. Either the people are not ready for socialism or socialism is undesirable. This is not an objective fact but is rather the liberal perspective of the middle class. We do not need the working class to be won over to liberal democracy, but for the majority to be won over to socialist democracy. With the oligarchy now taking on the characteristics of a new monarchy of sorts, the middle class wants to reinvent the bourgeois revolution. However, as much as they twist and shout, they do everything to preserve the system we have and present socialism as beyond the pale. Even if they are educated enough to know better, they are satisfied with the spectacle of grief and anguish, which, to reverse the Guy Debord formula, is measured in terms of capital.
Notes
1. In a rather sad display, one YouTube podcaster has called for the revival of wokism [sic]. See Alice Cappelle, “in defense of wokism,” YouTube (February 4, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0G1_L5qxCo.
2. Editors, “Confronting Capitalism: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century,” Jacobin (December 29, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/12/confronting-capitalism-socialism-in-the-twenty-first-century.
3. BadHasbara, “Bad Hasbara 82: Not Alone, with Roger Waters,” YouTube (February 6, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSgtSrJfadk.
4. Rick Beato, “Steve Lukather Unfiltered: Outrageous Stories, Riffs & Surprises,” YouTube (January 31, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulC5G5f7ZH8.
5. Izzy SoDope, “Bill Burr | Elon Musk Salute,” YouTube (February 4, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg2iPL8ZTo0.
6. Chris Cutrone, “The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland,” Compact (January 9, 2025), https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-future-belongs-to-america-so-should-greenland/; Paul Schofield, “The Case for a Liberal Socialism,” Jacobin (February 4, 2025), https://jacobin.com/2025/02/liberal-socialism-mcmanus-review-mill; CBC News, “Canadian hockey fans boo U.S. anthem during Ottawa Senators, Minnesota Wild Game,” YouTube (February 2, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXkRNnvs2S8.
7. Dialogue Works, “Economic Roundtable w/ Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson – Trump & Gaza – USAID,” YouTube (February 6, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w--fsqQQQa0.
8. Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, “Ugly American turns on Canada,” YouTube (February 3, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArwIlYkE1Ww&lc=UgwFoSVfqCe8EZRh8SB4AaABAg.AE5mtA4q-X0AE8R-A95Fsp.