Defend democracy, not the Constitution

Daniel Lazare

02.03.25

 

The World Socialist Web Site has posted an article accusing Donald Trump of seeking to “overturn the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.”[1] The second part of the statement is correct.  The first is not.

 

The reason is simple: you can’t overturn something that is already in a state of collapse.  Rather than an enemy of the Constitution, Trump is the very constitutional product of an increasingly undemocratic structure rife with contradictions that are growing more explosive by the day.

 

Protest against Musk/DOGE

Not that the constitutional breakdown is the sole reason for Trump’s rise.  After all, capitalism is a multi-dimensional system whose crisis is multi-dimensional as well.  While the falling rate of profit is the ultimate driver, the global meltdown is taking on a multitude of forms involving imperialism, war, climate, disease, and so forth.  But this doesn’t make the constitutional aspect any less critical.  In fact, it makes it more so since the crisis is erupting in the heart of the global hegemon.

 

Behind the battle over the Constitution lurks a fundamental split over strategy within the American bourgeoisie.  This is the background behind the contentious struggle over the Constitution.

 

It’s basically a faction fight within the American bourgeoisie over how best to insure the global dominance of American capitalism that takes on the appearance, in a highly distorted form, of a struggle over the Constitution. 

 

 

We must analyze America’s ancient Constitution in order to understand why it is self-destructing so rapidly and what it means for international capitalism in general.

 

So how bad is it?  Plenty.  The US Constitution barely had a shred of democracy left before Trump entered the scene and now has even less.  Well into its mid-third century, the document dates from the age of silk knee britches and slavery, yet has never been subject to a comprehensive democratic overhaul.  Its most outstanding features include:

•  A senate based on equal state representation that allows the 54 percent of the country that    lives in just 10 states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other 40; 
• An Electoral College that more than triples the clout of  states like Wyoming and Vermont who have a tiny, mostly rural population, whose demographics in no way reflect that of the country as a whole.
• A gerrymandered House; 
• And a rightwing Supreme Court that is wholly unaccountable to the general public.   

What’s more, such features are growing worse.  Not only is the Senate  more unequal than at any point since the early 19^th century, it will grow even more so by the year 2050 according to population projections, when a majority of the population will be concentrated in just nine states instead of ten.[2]  The Electoral College is also growing more unequal over the same period while the portion of the population capable of blocking a constitutional amendment under Article V will continue shrinking below even today’s minuscule levels.[3] 

 

This is the system’s Catch-22.  Something must be done to reform an aging political structure that is long past its sell-by date.  Yet nothing can be done because a broken amending process blocks all efforts at constitutional reform before they can even get off the ground.  

 

Thus the older and more undemocratic the structure grows, the more change-averse it becomes.  Given such an immovable structure, is it any surprise that frustrated voters are turning to a strong man who promises to break the Washington logjam using force and intimidation?

 

Hardly.  Yet the Socialist Equality Party, publisher of WSWS, consistently plays down the problem of constitutional decline.  Instead of zeroing in on the document itself, it prefers to dwell on a Republican Party that has emerged as “the instrument of the most ruthless and anti-democratic sections of the ruling class,” as a recent article put it.[4]  It disparages the struggle for a democratic constitution in Chile on the grounds that the capitalist state cannot “be reformed, refounded, or ‘democratized,’ but “must be overthrown by the working class in the fight to establish a new state based on workers’ control” – as if workers in either Latin America or the US must not fight for democratic reforms while at the same time fighting for power.[5]

 

In yet another article, it speaks glibly of “constitutional rule, legality and democratic rights” as if they were one and the same; attacks the Supreme Court for undermining “the democratic rule-of-law traditions of American constitutionalism” as if the court were not the product of those same traditions, and blames “four administrations since 2000 ... [for] the disassembling of the Constitutional framework of government” as if the framework was not crumbling under its own weight.  It assails Democrats for “not fight[ing] to defend constitutional rule against fascist attacks” without asking how Dems can shore up constitutionalism at all when they are part and parcel of the same process of constitutional degeneration.[6]

 

For those who have eyes to see, the constitutional breakdown has been central to the growth of authoritarianism at least since the 1990s when infighting on Capitol Hill turned increasingly bitter.  But 2016 marked a turning point.  This is when the Constitution spat out a split decision, the second since 2000, with Trump winning the Electoral College and Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote.  Since the EC was growing more and more dangerous, the logical solution would have been to fix the Constitution so as to remove an increasingly dangerous provision.  But since America’s holy of holies is all but set in stone, Democrats didn’t bother.  Instead, they opted for what they thought was next best, an anti-Trump destabilization campaign based on the theme of Russian interference.  According to one campaign account:

 

“That strategy had been set within 24 hours of her [Hillary Clinton’s] concession speech.  [Campaign manager Robby] Mook and [campaign chairman John] Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.  For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public.  Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”[7]

 

Six months later, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe would secretly discuss wearing a wire when meeting with now-President Trump and using the 25^th Amendment to force him out of office.[8]  For the next two years, Russia, Russia, Russia would be virtually all Americans would hear about as the as the campaign intensified.

 

The result was akin to a constitutional cage fight in which the two sides wailed away at one another amid deteriorating conditions overall.  When Russiagate didn’t work – the conspiracy theory was as flimsy as any other – Democrats tried impeachment.      When that didn’t work, Trump struck back with a coup attempt on January 6, 2021.  Democrats countered with a second impeachment trial and then a “lawfare” campaign aimed at putting him behind bars.  One Democratic prosecutor charged him with fraud because he had hyped the dimensions of an apartment he was selling, while another charged him with federal election-law violations because he had paid hush money to a porn star.  But they backfired by making Trump seem like the victim of a weaponized criminal-justice system.   After a plurality voted him in, he paid Democrats back by pardoning some 1,500 “J6” defendants – thereby legalizing the original coup – and issuing a blitzkrieg of executive orders aimed at eliminating immigrant rights, abolishing birthright citizenship, pulling the plug on climate measures, withdrawing from the World Health Organization and wiping out DEI.                                                           

 

Trump was less a winning political candidate than a military leader bent on revenge.  His strategy was to “flood the zone,” as ultra-rightist Steve Bannon put it in 2018, by firing officials, dismantling entire offices, freezing trillions in federal grants and loans, starting trade wars, and sending in Elon Musk to virtually take over the government.

 

He embarked on such a strategy because he thought he could get away with it – and so far he’s been right.  As far as congressional Republicans are concerned, the man can walk on water since, with the exception of Bush II in 2004, he is the first GOP presidential candidate to win the popular vote in more than 30 years.  The courts lean in his favor thanks to the 234 federal judges he appointed during his first four years in office, twice as many as Barack Obama appointed in eight.  With its unbreakable 6-3 conservative majority, the Supreme Court leans in his favor as well.  As a New York Times piece notes, the Trump administration is counting on “the Supremes” to back his drive for a “unitary executive” in which all congressional restraints are removed.[9]  If they do, it will be a giant step toward rule by fiat.

 

But is all this unconstitutional as the SEP maintains?  Only if you believe in liberal fairy tales about a constitutionally-enforced “delicate balance” that keeps the three branches in perfect equipoise.  In reality, Congress is exhausted after three decades of gridlock and public opinion polls showing a disapproval rating of better than 2.5 to one.[10]  The legislative branch is filled with empty-headed show-offs preening for the TV cameras as the recent Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmation hearings make clear. The upshot is a power vacuum that Trump can’t help but fill.

 

Besides, if the Supreme Court backs Trump’s power grab, it means it’s constitutional after all.  This is the standard law-school view, so Congress will likely go along with it, as will the bourgeois press.  If so, Trump will have the field to himself.  By filling the federal bureaucracy with militant conservatives and placing rightwing loyalists like Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe in key positions as heads of the Justice Department, Pentagon, FBI, and CIA respectively, he’ll be able to turn the entire executive into an ultra-right steamroller.  

 

The system is hurtling toward dictatorship as a consequence.  But it will not be despite the Constitution.  The sclerotic Constitution provides no brakes to the drives towards dictatorship which is being pushed by the realignment of class forces.  In fact the Constitution encourages it as it is itself a fundamentally anti-democratic document.  The only way to defend freedom is by overthrowing an 18^th-century government that is degenerating into one of the most obscene oligarchies in modern history and replacing it with a workers’ democracy.  But democracy is not something workers can put off until after the revolution, but something they must struggle for in the here-and-now in the process of seizing power.

 

---

[1] “Trump’s first 7 days: The framework for presidential dictatorship,” Jan. 27, 2025, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/28/rlxj-j28.html.

[2] Frances E. Lee and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 11; Demographics Research Group, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia, https://www.coopercenter.org/national-population-projections. 

[3] Demographics Research Group, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia, https://www.coopercenter.org/national-population-projections. 

[4] Patrick Martin, “As Trump assembles dictatorial regime, Biden offers ‘smoothest’ transition,” Nov. 14, 2024, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/14/hciq-n14.html.

[5] Mauricio Saavedra, Chile’s ruling right wing suffers crushing defeat in election of Constitutional Convention,” May 21, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/22/chil-m22.html.

[6] Richard Hoffman, “Trump putsch was the outcome of a two-decade attack on constitutional rule and legality,” Oct. 14, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/15/2fea-o15.html.

[7] Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York: Crown, 2017), 395.

[8] Pamela Brown and Jeremy Herb, “The frantic scramble before Mueller got the job,” CNN, Dec. 7, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/rosenstein-comey-firing-obstruction-probe/index.html.

[9] Charlie Savage, “Defying Legal Limits, trump Firings Set Up Tests That Could Expand His Power,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/politics/trump-firings-officials-legal-test.html?searchResultPosition=1.

[10] “Latest Polls,” Jan. 31, 2025, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/congress/.

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Meltdown

Daniel Lazare

12.08.24

More than four weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, it is increasingly clear where America is heading: toward militarization and authoritarian rule.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Sebastian Gorka

Trump’s strong-man tendencies have long been evident.  Although largely forgotten, he repeatedly accused Democrats of rigging the vote during the 2016 presidential campaign, warning that he might not concede even if the official tally went against him.  Such threats grew more and more ominous in 2020 until Trump finally sent his forces crashing across Capitol Hill in early 2021 in a last-ditch attempt to block Joe Biden’s victory and force Congress to name him the winner.  If Trump had lost in 2024, there would have been every reason to expect more of the same, i.e. more violence, more phony accusations of electoral theft, and more attempts to overturn the results. 

But now that he has won, Trumpian authoritarianism is in full view.  Examples include:

--  His ultra-confrontational cabinet picks;

--  His plans to force the Senate to adjourn so he can bypass the confirmation process and appoint cabinet members on his own;

-- His vow to use the military to round up as many as 11 million illegal aliens;

-- His promise to pardon hundreds of January 6 insurgents the moment he takes office;

 

-- And his close ties to the authors of Project 2025, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s proposal for a sweeping purge of the federal bureaucracy and a “unitary executive” that will infuse the government with Christian nationalist values.

 

Trump’s cabinet choices run the gamut from ultra-right to centrist.  They include Marco Rubio, one of the most rightwing members of the Senate, who is his pick for secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, his choice for defense secretary, who is a Christian nationalist who believes that “just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.”  But they also include relative moderates such as Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and the ever-cranky Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of health and human services, who, despite his anti-vax views, is not otherwise illiberal.  Scott Bessent, his choice for treasury secretary, is openly gay while Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary, is a former Democrat -- as, of course, is Trump.

 

They're an eclectic mix that only have one thing in common: each in his or her own way is an affront to the Washington establishment, whether it's the “intelligence community” up in arms over Gabbard,  the healthcare industry terrified by the accession of RFK , or homophobic sectors of the Trump coalition .  The result is a take-it-or-leave-it approach in which Trump fairly dares the old guard on Capitol Hill to just say no.

If they do, the next step is plain: a constitutional showdown.  With the help of Mike Johnson, the ultra-conservative speaker of the House, Trump is bruiting plans to force the Senate to adjourn against its will so he can use his recess powers to ram through \ appointments on his own.  The strategy, based on an obscure constitutional clause in Article II, section three, is setting off alarms throughout official Washington, with even the libertarian Cato Institute describing it as a “norm-defying abuse” that would trigger “a full-blown constitutional crisis.”

But that is what Trump wants.  With the Supreme Court likely on his side, Trump wants a crisis so he can cow Congress into submission and stretch the Constitution to the limits so as to accommodate his authoritarian designs.  If the maneuver works, the upshot result will be a giant step toward Argentine-style neo-Peronism in which the chief executive casts off constitutional restraints and rules on his own by decree.   

Using the military to round up illegal aliens would cement authoritarianism even more firmly in place.  Article I, section nine, gives the president emergency powers to suspend habeas corpus “in cases of rebellion or invasion [as] the public safety may require it.”  So it's a perfect opportunity for a president armed with unilateral powers to denounce illegal immigration as a foreign invasion and announce that he is suspending judicial review so that he can round up millions of people and place them in special detention camps.  And if Trump rounds up millions of immigrants, then it's not too difficult to imagine other roundups that might follow, e.g. leftwing activists who defend immigrants and their interests, anti-Zionists, etc.

. 

As for Project 2025, it is a 1,000-page plan whose ultimate goal is to turn the federal bureaucracy into a conservative battering ram.  Among the goals is banishing DEI, i.e. diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and other such “woke” initiatives and prosecuting “anti-white racism” instead.  Project 2025 also calls for barring the National Institutes of Health from engaging in stem cell research, rejiggering environmental regulations so as to favor fossil fuels, and criminalizing pornography.  Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is explicit about Project 2025's goals.  “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” he writes in the introduction.  “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”  

“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right,” he adds.  “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error.”  

 

Then there are Trump’s plans to enlist Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in a Javier Milei-like assault on the federal workforce along with his refusal to cooperate with federal agencies like the General Services Administration that traditionally oversee the transition process.  The plan is to decimate a government apparatus that he views as little more than enemy territory while elevating himself high above it. 

“He should not trust the politicized and weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hobbled his presidency the first time,” declares Mike Davis, the leader of another pro-Trump outfit called the Article III Project.  “It’s a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.”

Finally, there is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s decision to drop charges related to the Capitol Hill insurrection and Trump’s promise to pardon hundreds of “J6’ers.”  Together, they show how the federal government has given up holding Trump to account for the most serious constitutional breach since the Civil War and how the uprising itself is well on its way to being officially vindicated.  The very idea of free elections is coming under assault.  Henceforth, the only elections Republicans regard as valid will be elections they win.

What does it all add up to -- authoritarianism, Bonapartism, or out-and-out fascism?  With ostensible Marxist organizations all over the map with regard precisely what Trumpism at this stage represents, the answer in this writer's view is the first.  One reason is structural.  Broadly speaking, authoritarianism (or hyper-presidentialism to use the academic term) operates within existing constitutional guidelines.  Both Juan Perón of Argentina and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines submitted to regular elections, for instance, and even January 6 would have ended on a constitutional note even if Trump had succeeded in throwing the election into the House since Republicans would no doubt have followed the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the letter.

 

This is not to say that those constitutional procedures are anything other than obsolete, arcane, and undemocratic.  Considering that the Twelfth Amendment dates from 1803 and has never been updated, they are all those and more.  But what's important is that America’s weak and decrepit constitutional structure would have remained formally intact.  By contrast, Napoleon III, the subject of Marx’s famous study, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, overthrew the existing constitution after launching a coup d’état in 1851 so that he could draft a new constitution from scratch, one that allowed him to serve an unlimited number of ten-year terms and gave him have total authority to declare war, sign treaties, form alliances, and initiate laws.  The result was not authoritarianism under the existing constitution but dictatorship over it.  As for fascism, it dispenses with constitutionalism entirely by positing a mystical union between führer and volk that is above the law, one characterized by “unconditional authority downwards, highest responsibility upwards.”  Goebbels thus described Hitler as “the greater German, the führer, the prophet, the fighter, that last hope of the masses, the shining symbol of the German will to freedom” – anything, that is, except a mundane politician or officeholder.

 

Class relations are also key.  Trotsky described fascism as an attempt to resolve the contradictions of capitalism within the confines of the bourgeois state.  Since “[t]he productive forces are in irreconcilable contradiction not only with private property but also with national state boundaries,” the result is an effort “to solve this contradiction through an extension of boundaries, seizure of new territories, and so on.  The totalitarian state, subjecting all aspects of economic, political and cultural life to finance capital, is the instrument for creating a super-nationalist state, an imperialist empire, the rule over continents, the rule over the whole world.”

 

But Trump is not remotely there yet.  He is not a military expansionist, for example, and indeed attacked neocon hawk Liz Cheney during the campaign for launching “forever wars” from the comfort of Washington.  His choice of middle-of-the-road Wall Streeters like Lutnik and Bessent to head up negotiations with China indicates that, for now at least, he is intent on using financial rather than military means in dealing with the “threat” posed by the PRC.  

 

Bonapartism is meanwhile classically associated with a high pitch of class conflict in which the would-be ruler plays off the warring elements against one another so as to maintain himself in power.  Yet the current period is marked by working-class quiescence in which strikes, despite a recent uptick, are still running at a rate 75 percent or more below that of the late 1960s and early 70s.  

None of which is to say that Trump will not “graduate” to Bonapartism in the event of an economic or foreign-policy crisis or other disruption.  In fact, with the world in growing turmoil, such crises are more likely than not, which is why Bonapartism, i.e. outright political dictatorship, is plainly on the agenda.  Fascism, similarly, cannot be ruled out either although it will take political breakdown and a massive upsurge in revolutionary class struggle before it advances to the fore.

To sum up: Trumpism has not yet reached the Bonapartist stage, much less the fascist.  Nonetheless, constitutional constraints have been cast aside so forcibly.  The reason is the political breakdown of the last 30 years or so, which has been unprecedented.  The legislative branch is paralyzed, corruption is soaring, economic polarization is out of control, while ordinary citizens have rarely been more pessimistic.  An eighteenth-century constitution that is increasingly at odds with the needs of modern society is making a mockery of anything resembling democratic self-government.  If we toss in global warming, imperial overstretch, economic instability, and an increasingly powerful drive to war, then it is evident that capitalism is entering into the greatest crisis in history, a perfect multi-dimensional storm involving everything from high finance and the environment to political structure.  With its limits and contradictions, American democracy was never more than a crude facsimile.  But even that it is collapsing under the strain of a growing capitalist breakdown.

 

As far as the US is concerned, this means that mass repression, cultural reaction, and crude expressions of racism, sexism, and homophobia will all follow.  Life in America is changing rapidly, and there is nothing that middle-class radicals, “progressive” journalists, or the washed-up liberals who constitute the Democratic Party’s left wing can do to return it to anything resembling normalcy.

The only force capable of combatting such tendencies is the proletariat.  But it can do so not by restoring the old pseudo-democracy but by replacing it with a real democracy in the form of a workers’ state.  The more repressive and unstable the Trump administration grows, the more the working class must take the lead.  Five programmatic elements are absolutely crucial:

-- No to one-man rule.

 

-- No to mass deportations.

 

-- No to war.

 

-- Yes to workers’ solidarity on both sides of the US-Mexican border.

 

-- Yes to a democratic constituent assembly elected on the basis of strict proportional representation whose task will be to reconstruct America’s broken system of government from the ground up.  

 

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Cheering on Trump

by Daniel Lazare

01.13.25

When word got out last week that Chris Cutrone was writing an article about Donald Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland, it seemed reasonable to assume that the Platypus founder would open up with both barrels.  After all, the Platypus Affiliated Society, with its many student clubs and discussion groups in the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, is broadly Marxist in orientation.  So isn’t it the first task of Marxists to oppose imperialist aggression?

 

AI generated image of Trump and map of Greenland

So one might think, but one would be wrong.  The article – “The Future Belongs to America.  So should Greenland” – is a full-throated endorsement of Trump’s policies.^[1]  Cutrone is not the clearest of writers.  His endorsement of Kamala Harris in the Platypus Review last November laid on the irony so thick that it was hard to know if it was serious or not.^[2]

 

But his January 9 essay in a rightwing Catholic outlet known as Compact Magazine was a model of clarity.

 

“The US-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution,” it declares.  Noting that Benjamin Franklin wanted to take over Canada in the 1780s and that Republicans wanted to do the same after the Civil War as payback for British support of the Confederacy, the article describes Canada as “the frontier of the counterrevolution after both American revolutionary wars” and adds: “It remains the European part of the Western Hemisphere.  This has not been a good thing.”

 

The solution?  Do what China would like to do to Taiwan, which is to fold Canada and Greenland into an immensely powerful neighbor known as the USA whether they like it or not.

 

“Trump’s promise to make America Great Again begins with making America America again,” Cutrone writes.  “Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative. ...  This is not imperialism, but a reminder of the Empire of Liberty that Thomas Jefferson declared the mission of the new United States.  It is an evergreen promise.  America is revolutionary or it is nothing.  The United States of America liberated the world twice – three times with the Cold War.  Its mission continues.” 

 

It’s not imperialism because Jefferson – a kidnapper and serial rapist who sold his own children into slavery – said so.  Cutrone goes on: “Trump ... represents the ‘hope and change’ that was merely a marketing slogan for Obama before him. ...  Where others now see a barren wasteland, Trump finds not only possibilities but necessities – the necessity for American growth and change.”  

 

Then comes the conclusion:

 

“In this and other fields, Trump sees the need for a broader American future.  Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.”

 

Despite Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51^st state, take back the Panama Canal, and deport 11 million migrants, Cutrone’s advice is thus to lay back and enjoy it.  Since America equals freedom, US conquest must equal liberation.  Expansionism is therefore all to the good.  Today we have the United States, tomorrow the world.  What can go wrong?

 

Not that Cutrone is entirely unique.  A growing number of ex-leftists are making overtures to the right as the change of government nears.  With funding by both George Soros and Peter Thiel,^[3] Compact has begun publishing erstwhile leftists who now argue on behalf of RFK Jr. and Kash Patel, the hard-right hitman whom Trump has named to head the FBI.  Its website features a piece by Slavoj Zizek noting – not unhappily – that the left has reached “its zero point” thanks to Trump’s election and another praising Wolfgang Streeck, a New Left Review contributor with a pronounced nationalist streak, as a “prophet of left conservatism.”  Elsewhere in the journalistic firmament we find the leftwing cartoonist Ted Rall informing readers of the Wall Street Journal that “[s]ome of us are optimistic about some of Mr. Trump’s personnel picks and policy priorities” because they promise to be more dovish than Biden.^[4]

 

Tell that to Denmark, Greenland’s nominal owner, as it beefs up defenses in response to Trump’s threats.  Or Iran as it hunkers down in anticipation of a combined US-Israeli strike. Or Gaza following JD Vance’s vow “to knock out the final couple of battalions of Hamas and their leadership.”

JD Vance

But where people like Zizek are cautious and tentative, Cutrone goes whole hog.  Not only does he want Trump to bully the north into submission, but he also wants him to subdue the rest of the hemisphere too.  As he puts it: “...the revolution cannot be undone.  The question is how Greenland or Canada or Panama or Mexico or the rest of the Americas – the rest of America – might still follow and not oppose it.”  

 

US control must extend from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.  Rather than opposing Trump’s Anschluss, Cutrone applauds it.

 

How did Platypus reach such a parlous state?  There are any number of good things about the movement, which is why many Marxists have written for the Platypus Review since its founding in 2007 or participated in its public panels.  In contrast to the formulaic exchanges that characterize so many leftwing discussions, the Platypus approach is different – irreverent, wide ranging, and provocative.  As a UK socialist outlet known as the Weekly Worker noted:

 

“It is rare in the present to see a supporter of the US Revolutionary Communist Party shouting at a representative of the Communist Party of Great Britain over their differing positions on Libya and imperialism.  To see a panel of supposed Marxists and academics asked questions that make them shift uncomfortably in their seats is an enthralling sight. ...  To observe the complacent leaders of ostensibly revolutionary groups or ‘parties of one’ claiming to have the Marxist perspective being asked questions they would not normally be asked in an academic or political setting is something that those of us living under the chorus of the ‘death of communism’ have never previously experienced.”^[5]

 

Thanks to such freewheeling ways, this writer was able to confront the anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein at a Platypus panel at NYU last March over his uncritical support of Hamas and to present a Marxist analysis of the American Revolution at another Platypus event at Boston College in October – an analysis very different from Cutrone’s own.  With all too many leftists tailing abjectly after the so-called “Islamic Resistance,” it also allowed me to publish an article comparing Hamas with a Serbian terrorist group known as the Black Hand whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 led to World War I and the devastation of much of Serbia as well.^[6]

 

But freewheeling discussions are one thing, hosannas to Trump quite another.  Platypus’s troubles begin with an unstable ideology that combines elements of Trotskyism – Cutrone, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, passed through the Spartacist Youth League in the 1990s – with the Frankfurt School via Theodor Adorno.  It also lathers on a layer of social patriotism that adds to the general combustibility.  As Cutrone explained in 2020:

 

“My old comrades in the Spartacist League had a slogan, ‘Finish the Civil War!’ ...  More than 50 years later, we can say that the task is more simply to complete the American Revolution.  Former President John Quincy Adams (the son, not the father), speaking before the United States Supreme Court in the Amistad case advocating the freedom of slaves who rebelled, foresaw the future US Civil War over the abolition of slavery and called it the last battle of the American Revolution.’”^[7]

 

All of which is both ahistorical and un-Marxist.  While the American Revolution indeed saw a proto-democratic uprising among the sans-culottes of Boston, Philadelphia, and other urban centers, it also saw a revolt by southern planters determined to protect slavery against British interference.  It was a profoundly contradictory event, which is why the polity it gave rise to would explode some four score years later.  Pace Adams, the Civil War was a correction that overthrew the slaveholders’ republic of 1776 just as a socialist revolution will be a correction that overthrows the industrial-capitalist republic that emerged in 1865.  Rather than more of the same, it will be a departure in an entirely new direction.

 

Cutrone’s failure to grasp such ABC’s of Marxism leads to a fantasy world in which slavery, Jim Crow, and repeated bouts of anti-communist hysteria pale in comparison to the pure light of freedom that shines as brightly today as it did in 1776.  American freedom is eternal and unchanging, above history rather part of it.  Hence, Canadians, Danes, et al. should be grateful now that Trump is preparing to usher them into the light too.

 

Adolescent prattle like this is bad enough under ordinary circumstances, but absolutely intolerable now that the US is entering into a period of rightwing authoritarianism and mass corruption that makes the Gilded Age seem like an episode of minor pilferage.  If Cutrone really cared about safeguarding American democracy – what little is left of it, that is – he would be alerting his followers to the dangers that Trump represents.  Instead, he is egging him on.

 

This presents Platypus members with a choice.  Do they sit back and watch as Cutrone transforms Platypus into the left wing of Trumpism?  Or do they mobilize against the new administration by repudiating Cutrone’s views as forcefully as possible?  The options are clear: fight Trump or lose themselves in increasingly arid discussions as the rightwing drive intensifies outside the classroom windows.

 

With that in mind, this writer hereby declares a boycott of his own.  Unless Platypus takes a strong stance against Cutrone-style social patriotism, I will cease participating in Platypus discussion groups or writing for the Platypus Review and will instead do my best to expose the fraudulent politics at Platypus’s core.  I call upon all socialists to do the same.  We must not stand idly by as Marxism is twisted into an ideology of passivity and accommodation!

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^[1] https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-future-belongs-to-america-so-should-greenland/.

^[2] Chris Cutrone, “Why I want Kamala to win,” Platypus Review 171 (November 2024), https://platypus1917.org/2024/11/02/why-i-want-kamala-to-win/.

^[3] Chris Menahan, “Report: Soros Funds Sohrab Ahmari’s ‘Conservative’ Outlet Compact Magazine,” Information Liberation, Oct. 25, 2024, https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64709.

^[4] Ted Rall, “Optimism about Trump on the Left,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 1, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/optimism-about-trump-on-the-left-policies-war-peace-business-markets-2593e0db.

^[5] Corey Ansel, “Dissecting the Platypus,” Weekly Worker 963 (May 23, 2013), https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/963/dissecting-the-platypus/.

^[6] Daniel Lazare, “1914 redux: Why the Left gets Hamas wrong ... and U.S. imperialism too,” Platypus Review 171 (November 2024), https://platypus1917.org/2024/11/01/1914-redux-why-the-left-gets-hamas-wrong-and-u-s-imperialism-too/.

^[7] Chris Cutrone, “The American Revolution and the Left,” Platypus Review 124 (March 2020), https://platypus1917.org/2020/03/01/the-american-revolution-and-the-left/.

 

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