On Trump and Trumpism: Inventory versus state form
Paul Le Blanc’s “Defining Trumpism, defeating Trump” is a significant contribution from a committed comrade, and I want to start by outlining our substantial areas of agreement. Le Blanc and I agree that Trump is a symptom rather than a disease, that Trumpism will outlast the man, and that the regime is not yet a fascist one in any rigorous sense. We agree the Democratic Party helped bring Trump into being through its decades-long abandonment of the working-class base to which it stakes a claim and that liberal co-belligerents in the anti-Trump resistance become, at a certain point, part of the problem rather than the solution. We agree that the radicalizing layer is a precarious and expanding working class and that the “mandate” Trump claims to have is a razor-thin fiction. On the conjuncture, Le Blanc and I are largely on the same side of the barricade.
My disagreement is not with his conclusions. The focus is on the method he uses to reach them, and on its limitations. My argument is simple: because Le Blanc works at the level of inventory rather than state form, he can gesture toward the right answers without fully grounding his diagnosis of the regime or his account of how it might be defeated. He poses the decisive question of our moment — what kind of regime is this? — and then answers it by enumeration. He gives us a list: the January 6 paramilitaries, Christian nationalism, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and the captured Republican Party. “Several essential elements help define Trumpism,” he writes, and proceeds to name them. But a list of elements is not a definition. It is an inventory. And an inventory, however accurate, operates at the wrong level of abstraction to answer the question Le Blanc himself has raised.
The hole where the state should be
I have argued elsewhere that the Trump regime is best grasped as patrimonial Bonapartism: a personalist executive that has acquired relative autonomy from the class it nonetheless serves, ruling through loyalty rather than legality, balancing fractions of capital against one another and commanding a mass movement it cannot fully discipline. The point of the concept is not terminological elegance. It is to identify the regime’s concrete vulnerabilities: the brittleness of a personalist rule, the instability of a mass base that cannot be fully commanded, and the conditional character of elite support. I will not rehearse that argument in full here. I raise it because Le Blanc’s own essay assembles, almost despite itself, the raw materials the concept is built from and then leaves them lying unassembled on the floor.
Consider his own account. One section of the ruling class has concluded that Trump’s authoritarianism can stabilize a system whose instability threatens profits. At the same time, the MAGA movement is, by Le Blanc’s own description, only loosely under Trump’s control; “as a whole,” he writes, it “cannot be understood as being under his control.” These are the defining features of a Bonapartist configuration: an executive that serves capital without directly expressing the rule of any single faction, and a mass base mobilized from above that retains an autonomy its sponsor cannot fully command. Marx described this relation in 1852, when he showed how Louis Bonaparte could represent a class precisely by seeming to stand above all classes.
Le Blanc has the data. What he lacks is a clear concept of how the state should be structured to organize the data into a coherent explanation. And so the analysis, having gestured at structure, slides back into the register it claimed to be leaving behind: the psychology of the man. We are told at length that Trump is arrogant, bigoted, dishonest, a bully, a braggart and an ignorant self-promoter who glorifies his ignorance. All true, no doubt. But Le Blanc opened by insisting we look past the headlines to “the underlying ideology and social forces.” The catalog of Trump’s vices is the headline. It is precisely the level of abstraction at which liberal commentary has been stranded for a decade and which a Marxist account exists to transcend.
Why ‘not yet fascism’ is a right answer reached the wrong way
Le Blanc’s treatment of the question of fascism illustrates the cost. His conclusion is accurate: this is not a consolidated fascist regime, there is still room for protest and organization, and the apparatus has yet to be seized in the manner that fascism typically necessitates. I hold the same position. But look at how he arrives there. He writes that “we are dealing with something that is not yet a fascist regime.” The work in that sentence is done by the word “yet.” It is a temporal hedge, not a structural determination. It tells us where we are on a timeline without telling us what kind of thing is moving along it.
This matters strategically, not merely terminologically. If the reason Trumpism is considered “not yet” fascism is that it has not progressed far enough, then the implied politics suggest a need for vigilance against a critical threshold: monitor the moment of crossing and intensify resistance as it approaches. But if the regime has a determinate present form — a patrimonial Bonapartism with its laws of motion and its own characteristic instabilities — then the strategic question changes. We are not waiting at a gate. We are confronting a specific structure with specific vulnerabilities, as previously stated: the brittleness of a personalistic rule, the fractiousness of a base that cannot be commanded, and the conditional and revocable character of the capital fraction’s support. Naming the form tells us where to push. The timeline metaphor only tells us to brace.
Nicos Poulantzas understood that the authoritarian restructuring of the capitalist state was not a rest stop on the road to fascism but a distinct configuration of the state form under conditions of crisis. In other words, the question is not simply how far a regime has advanced along a single continuum but what kind of structure it presently is. To collapse that distinction into a question of degree, of how close we are to Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler, is to lose exactly what is analytically and strategically usable. Le Blanc raises the comparison to Mussolini and Hitler and then sensibly declines it. But declining a bad comparison is not the same as offering a good concept.
The patrimonial moment Le Blanc names but does not theorize
One more thing in Le Blanc’s inventory deserves to be highlighted, as his method underuses it the most. He quotes ex-Republican operative Tim Miller on a party that advanced arguments its own apparatus did not believe in, and Stuart Stevens on Trump as “the logical conclusion” of fifty years of Republican degeneration. This is excellent material. But Le Blanc reads it mainly as a story about cynicism and racism, moral categories, when it is also, and more usefully, a story about the hollowing-out of legal-rational party structures and their replacement by relations of personal fealty.
That replacement has a name in the Weberian vocabulary: it is the displacement of bureaucratic-legal authority by patrimonial authority, a rule organized around the household and the loyalty of retainers rather than around office and rule. The purges of the disloyal, the elevation of family and courtiers, and the treatment of the state apparatus as a personal possession to be staffed by clients: these are not merely the vices of a “mediocrity,” as Le Blanc has it. They are the operating principles of a determinate mode of rule. Calling Trump a mediocrity is satisfying and accurate, but this judgment focuses on the individual rather than providing an analysis of the system. The patrimonial logic does not depend on Trump being clever. It depends on the prior decay of the institutions Trumpism colonizes, which is precisely what Miller and Stevens, read structurally, describe.
This theoretical issue matters because it bears directly on strategy. If we misidentify the form of rule, we also misidentify where its weak points lie and what kind of political organization is required to exploit them.
From resistance to breakthrough: The missing vehicle
The essay’s strategic section is where Le Blanc’s enumerative method exacts its highest price. Le Blanc walks us through the mass mobilizations (“Hands Off,” May Day, the “No Kings” demonstrations) and the electoral expressions of the socialist revival: Bernie Sanders, the Squad, and, most dramatically, Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York. He rightly concedes that these figures define socialism vaguely and compromise too far with the establishment and capitalist system. He then closes by saying a “revolutionary breakthrough becomes possible,” but “will depend… on the ability of left-wing and socialist forces to grow and mature in ways that help make this happen.”
That sentence should be the beginning of an argument, not the end of one. The maturation of socialist forces is cited as the key factor for a breakthrough to happen, but there is no consideration of the organizational structure that transforms scattered protests into lasting power. This is the mirror image of a tendency I have criticized at length on the contemporary left: the habit of naming a party into existence, of mistaking the declaration of an organization for its construction. Le Blanc does the inverse. Rather than prematurely declaring the vehicle, he defers it to a future “maturation” whose mechanism remains unspecified. Both moves avoid the hard part, which is the actual problem of organization: what relation between mass struggle, electoral intervention, and a disciplined political nucleus could convert the energy of “No Kings” into something that survives the next demobilization.
And here the evasion has a precise location. Le Blanc tells us the organized left was “absorbed into the Democratic Party.” Yet, in the same essay, he celebrates Mamdani’s victory, won on the Democratic ballot line, inside the party he has just diagnosed as the graveyard of the left. That tension does not invalidate his point, but it does create a strategic problem the essay leaves unaddressed. The question of the ballot line, of the clean break, the dirty break and the dirty stay, of whether socialists can use the Democratic ballot without being used by it, is the central strategic question that the Mamdani campaign poses. An essay that raises Mamdani as its most dramatic evidence and then leaves the ballot-line question untouched stops short of the decisive problem.
What is at stake in the level of abstraction?
None of this is a charge of bad faith or bad politics. Le Blanc’s instincts are sound, and his broad strokes of conjunctural reading align with mine. The argument I am making is narrower and, I think, more useful for that. The method of enumeration, which involves listing the elements of Trumpism and the moments of resistance, cannot adequately address either question. Le Blanc himself highlights the type of regime that confronts us and the means by which it can be defeated. An inventory of features will never yield a concept of form, and an inventory of protests will never yield a theory of organization.
We agree the regime is not fascist, but we disagree that you can establish this without a theory of the state form; the enumerative method guarantees this is necessary. We do not disagree that the Democrats are part of the problem; we disagree with celebrating Mamdani while leaving the ballot-line question untouched. We agree that a revolutionary breakthrough depends on the maturation of socialist forces, but we disagree that “maturation” means anything until the organizational problem is posed concretely.
Defining Trumpism and defeating Trump (Le Blanc’s own program, a beneficial one) requires raising the analysis a level: from the elements to the form, from the moments to the vehicle. Patrimonial Bonapartism is my proposal for a definition of Trumpism. The party’s unresolved problem is the name with which I would frame the problem of defeating Trump. I offer both as the work his essay leaves undone — and that the moment will not let us defer — rather than as a rebuke to a comrade whose conclusions I largely share. Socialist analysis must identify both the structure it faces and the organization capable of acting on that knowledge; otherwise, it will merely register dangers and applaud resistance.
