During the 2016 election campaign, Trump sought to make an appeal to sections of the working class "left behind" by the supposed economic recovery under the Obama administration. While this appeal was entirely insincere and demagogic, it won a certain response and provided Trump the margin for his Electoral College victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The Democrats make no such appeal to the millions of workers who have seen no benefit from the supposed economic boom Trump claims to have generated by his policies of cutting taxes for the wealthy and business, slashing health, safety and environmental regulations on business, and implementing protectionist trade policies. That is because Wall Street -- which calls the shots in the Democratic no less than the Republican Party -- is largely satisfied with these policies, which are pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the coffers of the banks and giant corporations.
The same danger faces American workers that confronts workers across Europe: because the official organizations of the "left," the trade unions and social democratic parties, support austerity and the slashing of jobs and living standards, the nationalistic and neo-fascist right benefits from the mounting social discontent and seeks to divert it in a reactionary direction, scapegoating immigrants and minorities. Trump is pursuing the same strategy and making the same appeals as the National Front in France, the Alternative for Germany and similar formations in Britain, Italy and across Eastern Europe.
In this political situation, the greatest danger is that the working class is not organized as an independent political force. As demonstrated by the teachers' strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona -- all states that Trump won easily in the 2016 election -- the working class is moving to the left, not the right.
The urgent political task in the unfolding political crisis is for the working class to intervene with its own, revolutionary socialist program. This requires the fight to build in every section of the working class a political leadership, the Socialist Equality Party, to unite workers in a common struggle against war, inequality, chauvinism, authoritarianism and their source -- the capitalist profit system.
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