With MAGA capturing the working class, can the American left regain its footing?

Washington Post

19-03-2025

In 1970s Mexico City, membership in the cafe culture of the left required an uncomplicated understanding of right and wrong. Cuba, the local proxy for the Soviet Union, was inevitably right. The United States, which underwrote Latin America's murderous right-wing military dictatorships that sent people flocking into exile in my hometown, was evil.
The existential struggle was straightforward. It was the Proletariat against Capital. Profit, investment, trade — all these described modalities of exploitation. Environmental concerns were rarely mentioned. Sexual inequity were not central to the movement, and issues of gender were bourgeois distractions. You could be a member of the left of perfect standing and still casually refer to gay men with a slur. Trans meant cross-dressing and was funny.
Oddly for such an urbane milieu, the consensus seemed to be that a new world could be brought about only by the force of arms. I remember a teacher in high school advising against dropping a few pesos into the outstretched hand of an old woman at a bus stop. Charity could only delay the Revolution, she said, by tricking the dispossessed into believing they could survive in the capitalist order, ultimately obstructing their only reasonable choice: armed struggle.
Many things have happened since. Globalization reorganized the world economy, while computers and the internet reconfigured the very notion of reality. Critically, the Soviet model of governance failed. And people changed. Former stalwarts of the uncompromising left built prosperous lives from Mexico's capitalism, often struggling to fit these lives into the simpler, ideologically pure moral enclosure of their youth. I joined the gringo press.
What draws me to these thoughts is not just the incongruities of the left of my youth. What I find astonishing is how much of the standard bouquet of Brezhnev-era beliefs in much of what is now known as the Global South has become current again.
This time around, however, the mix of working-class solidarity and casual homophobia is not showing up in conversations at some university cafe in Mexico City. It is a staple of MAGA America.
The United States has always been different. (Americans like to say 'exceptional.') The material comforts brought about by its unparalleled prosperity deflated the urgency of the class struggle, while New Deal policies broadened access to prosperity. Then the 1960s spawned a bunch of competing causes — desegregation, environmentalism, pacifism, feminism — that complicated the moral analysis. Finally, the fall of the Soviet Union made Americans think their world order had won.
It hadn't. Today, American politics finds itself precariously perched on a disjointed tangle of propositions and beliefs. A coalition has emerged on the right that rejects globalization on the old left-coded grounds — that trade benefits global capital and keeps the working man down — while at the same time championing lopsided tax cuts skewed to benefit corporations and the wealthy, tax cuts financed by cutting programs for the poor like Medicaid.
While America's improbable alignment of priorities may not have been replicated anywhere else yet, it is likely to reverberate around the world.
The United States' unusual policy stance is not just about trade and taxes. Much of its political class has turned against the institutions underpinning the liberal democracy it long claimed to champion and coalesced around a rejection of the infrastructure underpinning the globalized order that followed the end of the Cold War. There is now a bipartisan plan to emasculate the World Trade Organization, built by the United States to organize trade and help anchor peace. But other institutions — NATO, the United Nations — are vulnerable too.
These realignments are not, by the way, simply the MAGA movement's doing. As the demand for equal rights and other causes impelled the left to embrace new struggles, it alienated a proletarian base that might like the pro-labor stuff but couldn't tolerate people of unorthodox sexual proclivities or gender identities. An environmental left that pushed for less beef, fewer children in poor countries, abandoning fossil fuels, and and living on organic vegetables grown on community farms would never be their home.
I remember how costly it was for the AFL-CIO to embrace the idea of granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants 25 years ago. The popularity of Trump's anti-immigrant screed among unionized workers confirms how the pro-immigrant coalition and organized labor were never happy bedfellows. This is forcing the left to reconsider. Denmark's example, we're told, suggests that the only way to sustain the social democratic welfare state is to keep immigrants out.
The Mexican left has changed, too, becoming perhaps a bit more American. Revolution has lost its place as the preferred path to justice. I celebrate that the people of the left no longer use slurs so casually to describe gay men and have given women's rights a more prominent place in Mexico's politics. Still, the struggles of the poor remain central to its cause.
The American left is in a more complicated spot. Having ceded much of its working-class agenda to the MAGA movement, it lost an important glue provided by its historical core. It is now ideologically adrift, herding a collection of disparate causes that often do not see eye to eye.
To counter the authoritarian populism taking hold of Trump's America, the left will have to find its way back to representing the oppressed, dispossessed and marginalized struggling to live in dignity. If it doesn't, both America and the world are in for a rough ride.