By Bernard E. Harcourt

Let me begin with two epigraphs. The first, as promised in the introduction to Marx 8/13, is drawn from the concluding paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. As you know well, Marx is addressing the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on December 2, 1851, when, as president of the Second French Republic facing a term limit in 1852, Louis Napoleon seizes power and extends his presidency for another 10 years. He effectively granted himself another presidential term—and a year later, day for day, he is declared emperor of the French under the name Napoleon III. Describing Louis Napoleon, Marx writes:

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation and being at the same time, like a conjurer [a performer, an entertainer], under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s substitute, by springing constant surprises, that is to say, under the necessity of executing a coup d’état en miniature every day, Bonaparte throws the entire bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution, others desirous of revolution, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping its halo from the entire state machine, profanes it and makes it at once loathsome and ridiculous.[1]

This passage is eerily contemporary. It is hard to imagine a passage that fits our present moment more fittingly.

The second epigraph is from Herbert Marcuse’s book, Counterrevolution and Revolt, published in 1972 at the height of the Nixon administration’s repression of Vietnam protest and the Black Power movement, following the Kent State and Jackson State massacres of 1970. Marcuse is working within the framework of Marx and Engel’s discussion of revolutions and counterrevolutions in France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere during 1848. But he draws an important distinction—one that, again, seems eerily poignant today as well. Marcuse writes:

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad.^[2]

The counterrevolution [now] is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing.[3]

Marcuse’s insight is brilliant: there is an ongoing Counterrevolution in 1972, but there was no revolution to suppress.

These two epigraphs set the stage for our discussion at Marx 8/13 of two key writings by Marx and Engels: Marx’s seven articles published in Joseph Weydemeyer’s Die Revolution in New York in 1852 under the title “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon;” and Engels’ nineteen articles published in the New-York Daily Tribune between October 1851 and October 1852 under the title “Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution.” These two texts analyze, dissect, put out under the microscope both the revolutions that erupted in Paris in February and June of 1848 and in Vienna and the German states in March 1848, as well as the massive, overwhelming counterrevolutions that followed and, for a while, buried the revolutionary fervor of the Parisian and German workers.

Given our current political situation, we will be reading those texts in conversation not only with Marcuse’s Counterrevolution and Revolt published in 1972, but also in conversation with what is going on here and now, today, because they are so timely.

We are witnessing today a new and radical offensive in the American Counterrevolution. The Counterrevolution itself is not new—as Marcuse’s text shows well—but we face a new front. We are in the demolition phase of a new offensive of the Counterrevolution. President Trump is taking a bulldozer to the existing federal government, tearing down its foundations, in an effort to eradicate the liberal regulatory state and replace it with an oligarchic-theological, fealty-based, cult of the leader regime, with an authoritarian grip.

President Trump is carrying out the demolition phase under the banner of eradicating D.E.I., “gender ideology,” climate change consciousness, critical theory, and immigration. Trump is using a small set of scapegoats to justify and motivate this new offensive—including immigrants (whether undocumented or on present or future work visas), transgender women, indocile African American and other persons of color, critical theorists, and environmentalists.

It is a counter-offensive of revolutionary scale. And it has been made possible by an unexpected coalition of forces—of seemingly odd bedfellows—including tech billionaires, populist nationalists, evangelicals, rural voters, young “tech bros,” as well as, frittering away at traditionally Democratic constituencies, many union members, and now increasingly Black and Latino men.

Donald Trump is—like Louis Napoleon was—a source of fascination who constantly sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Trump—like Louis Napoleon did—knows how to get our attention every day. He is masterful at that. Like Louis Napoleon, he is “executing a coup d’état en miniature every day.” You will recall Trump’s statement to his aides back in 2017: “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”[4] That described well the first presidency. It describes even better the past three weeks.

But the Counterrevolution is not just a story about Trump, nor about Louis Napoleon.

As Marx emphasized in his preface to the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1869, the central thesis of his articles was to demonstrate that the rise of Napoleon III was the product of class struggles in France and not a “great man” story.

The famous sentence that encapsulates the argument is the one where Marx states that his objective in writing the articles was to “demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”^[5]

We tend to emphasize the humor in that sentence—the idea of a grotesque mediocrity—at the expense of the theoretical thrust of the sentence. But the important point is that the entire account in the Eighteenth Brumaire is a study of class struggles and how they played out, not about the rise of an individual, nor about Louis Napoleon himself. It is not a traditional “great man” story—not even the story of a grotesque mediocrity’s rise to power. The engine of history is entirely the social conflicts, not the individual.

Engels had done the same in his articles on Germany: to show that the revolutions, as well as counterrevolutions, “were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities, more or less clearly understood, but very distinctly felt by numerous classes in every country.”[6]

For Marx and Engels, the political project was to make people understand the larger forces at play—so as not to be blindsided.

None of this was intended to minimize his daily coups d’état of Louis Napoleon. But to emphasize that they need to be placed in a broader social context, historical framing, and international perspective.

Because the counterrevolutions of 1848-52 were international phenomena. It did not just occur in Paris or France with Napoleon III, but in Vienna, in Baden, in Berlin, in Hungary, and elsewhere on the Continent.

And the new offensive of the counterrevolution here and now is not only happening in the United States. Just last Saturday, in Madrid, February 8, 2025, the extreme-right leaders in Europe rallied in Madrid at an event organized by the “Patriots for Europe,” the European parliament’s far-right block. These included Marine Le Pen of France’s far-right National Rally; Santiago Abascal, the Spanish leader of the right-wing political party Vox; Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary; the leader of Italy’s League party, Matteo Salvini; Netherlands’ populist Geert Wilders; André Claro Amaral Ventura, the founder and President of the right-wing populist Portuguese political party Chega; as well as a host of others, such as Afroditi Latinopoulou, a lawmaker with the Greek far-right party Voice of Reason. They buoyed by a huge audience of extreme-right followers.

“Yesterday we were the heretics,” Orban said. “Now we are the mainstream.” And they were all united in attacking “wokeism,” “gender theory,” environmentalism, and immigration. According to a newspaper report by the New York Times, “They skewered the “liberal fascists” who they said had replaced Christian civilization with “a sick Satanic utopia,” the “creeps” who “want to turn our children into trans-freaks,” and the supposed ethnic replacement of native-born Europeans by immigrants.”

The lesson of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and of Engels’ Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany is to shift the focus from, as Marx said, “a grotesque mediocrity” to the larger economic and political forces at play—to the conflicts in society. Let’s begin, then, with our two texts.

Marx and Engels (1851-1852)

Marx and Engels were writing at the time of a counter-revolutionary consolidation across Europe, in the wake of revolutionary uprisings in Paris and France, in Vienna and the Austrian Empire, in Baden, Berlin, Dresden, and the German states, and in Italy. There had been barricades and violent battles, and tens of thousands of deaths. A monarch had been deposed in France, and the Republic proclaimed. There were bloody June days in Paris in which armed workers were decimated.

There had been a revolution. It is not by accident that the Tribune published Engels’ articles under the title: Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution. There, and elsewhere, the counterrevolution had quashed a veritable revolution.

What explained the success of the counterrevolution across Europe?

That was, of course, the main question that Marx and Engels were trying to address in their writings from 1851-52. That was the puzzle: What explains the counterrevolution? And what to make of the limping revolutionary impulse.

Marx and Engels sought answers to those questions precisely because the counterrevolution had triumphed and they were standing, in 1851-52, in a period of anticipation of a next revolutionary wave. They were sitting between the first and the second act, they believed—and so they had to understand what just happened:

If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations.[7]

So let us work with Marx and Engels to derive a framework for contemporary analysis. Their writings give us several hypotheses to work with.

First, the central place of class conflicts, nestled within modes of production

As mentioned already, this is the central thesis of both works: that class conflicts led to the counterrevolutions. Their argument rests on a detailed analysis of the classes and subgroupings within those classes. It is not just the bourgeoisie and the proletariat anymore. Marx dramatically refines and enriches the analysis of classes in the Eighteenth Brumaire, by contrast to the earlier Communist Manifesto. The bourgeois class itself was now divided and internally conflicted between the financial aristocracy, financiers, and bankers in one camp, the industrialist and manufacturing bourgeoisie in another, the large landholding property owners in another, all separate and at odds with the petty bourgeoisie consisting of shopkeepers and merchants. Marx developed a more nuanced analysis of the proletariat class as well—with the emergence of a lumpenprolateriat that the bourgeoisie would instrumentalize as a militia against the workers. In addition, the rural populations take on a far greater importance and are divided and dissected into the rural workers (the “peasants”), the small property owners, and the large farmers, who, together form what Marx qualifies as the vast majority of the French population.

Similarly, in his articles on Germany, Engels starts by identifying the different classes that are in conflict in society. These include, first, the feudal nobility, which by contrast to France and England, retained most of their ancient privileges still at mid-century. Second, the bourgeoisie associated with a somewhat backward manufacturing sector, that had nevertheless started to form a commercial or middle class struggling for power and unifying in a kind of liberal opposition. Third, the petty bourgeoisie, made up of the small trading and shopkeeping class—which, along with the workers and rural populations, formed the mass of the German states. Fourth, the working class, which was delayed because of the lack of industrialization, and who remained more like small tradesmen of the Middle Ages; they had not suffered the downward social mobility of the French workers. And then the rural populations, which Engels divides into four categories: the large and wealthy property owners, the small freeholders, the feudal tenants, and the agricultural laborers—the latter of which “lived and died poor, ill-fed, and the slaves of their employers.”[8]

All of these represent, Engels writes, “the most important of the classes.”[9] These will be the important classes for understanding the success of the counterrevolution. And what characterizes them all, or their setting, is the lack of urban centers like Paris or London that centralize the political battles, resulting instead in fragmented, unconnected struggles throughout the German states when the revolution breaks out.

From classes to class conflicts

Now, Engels reduces the central thesis to a “great law of the motion of history”–as he writes in his preface to the third edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire. We can be less dogmatic and scientific, but the general idea seems to track well the text: First, “the law according to which all historical struggles […] are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes.”^[10] The second point is that these class struggles “are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it.”^[11] So, second, that the classes and the relations between the classes are determined by modes of production and this applies to all historical struggles—Engels writes “political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain.”^[12]

Now, we can criticize Engels for trying to render scientific Marxist thought or rigid or too law based, but that is effectively the core of Marx’s contribution in the Eighteenth Brumaire. It is an analysis of how class struggles themselves, shaped by economic relations of production, serve as the law of motor of history. What it calls for is

• a close reading of social classes and class conflicts, and
• an understanding of the economic context and modes of production within which these conflicts play out.

Third, then, the historical conjuncture

Counterrevolutionary offensives also arise within specific historical conjunctures. One gets a clear sense of this in another contemporaneous text. At around the same time, Engels, who is in constant correspondence with Marx, writes an article titled “Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained Comparatively Inactive in December Last” (1852). There, he states:

We repeat: Louis Napoleon came to power because the open war carried on during the last four years between the different classes of French society had worn them out, had shattered their respective fighting armies, and because under such circumstances, for a time at least, the struggle of these classes can only be carried on in a peaceful and legal way, by competition, by trades’ organisations, and by all the different means of pacific struggle by which the opposition of class against class has now been carried on in England for above a century. Under these circumstances it is in a manner of speaking in the interest of all contending classes that a so-called strong government should exist which might repress and keep down all those minor, local and scattered outbreaks of open hostility, which, without leading to any result, trouble the development of the struggle in its new shape by retarding the recovery of strength for a new pitched battle.[13]

In other words, the workers were worn out. But also, they were dulled by a liberal hegemony: perhaps lulled into believing in the peaceful coexistence of all these contending parties and factions. Anesthetized, in a way, complacent, believing too much in the rule of law, we might say. They had lost focus of the stakes of the conflict.

Fourth, the place of culture and ideas

Stuart Hall reads the Eighteenth Brumaire as the most vivid illustration of a style of analysis that he developed in British cultural studies. Hall’s work focuses on the emergence of different kinds of cultural forms, for instance, among the youth in Great Britain, or among the Thatcherites at the turn of the 1980s. His approach builds on Marx’s philosophical writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Cultural studies engaged more the early humanistic Marx, the Marx writings that “gave a much wider reach to the elements of consciousness, to the question of human needs, etc.”^[14] Hall argues that the task is to push Marx’s analytic work from Capital towards the analysis of real social formations. He argues that Marx did that best and provided the best model in the Eighteenth Brumaire: “one of the best examples of how that kind of analysis would be done is precisely The Eighteenth Brumaire.”^[15]

So we need to pay more attention to the cultural and symbolic dimensions. For instance, how Louis Napoleon was able to play on the imagery and references associated with his uncle. And similarly, how the 1848 revolutionaries were harkening back to the French revolution of 1789. That is the famous opening of the Eighteenth Brumaire: “From 1848 to 1851 only the ghost of the old revolution walked about,” Marx writes.[16] “Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle.”[17]

Fifth, regarding the revolution

This is the more uplifting side of the account. Laced throughout these texts is the idea that the revolutionary impulse develops a life of its own in part in reaction to the repression of the counterrevolution. This is the silver lining of the counterrevolution. It reflects a form of optimism in Marx and Engels. There are several elements to this.

(a) The counterrevolutionary repression gives birth to the revolutionary forces (the proletariat, the working class). Marx argues in Class Struggles and the Eighteenth Brumaire that the revolutionary proletariat arises at a specific moment in history, during industrialization, and it becomes a revolutionary force as a result of being crushed during the bloody June days.

Two stages then: first, the birth through industrialization; second, the empowerment through repression. Regarding the first, which we have seen in the Manifesto and Class Struggles, one gets another good taste for it in Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, where Engels writes: “The working class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively proletarian character until all the different factions of the middle class, and particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have conquered political power, and remodelled the State according to their wants.”[18]

(b) The counterrevolution repression then turns the revolutionary forces into a permanent or long-lasting phenomena. This is the idea that the revolution lives on despite its demise. It is reflected in Class Struggles with the notion of the two bodies of the revolution. “The Revolution is dead! Long live the Revolution!”

In Eighteenth Brumaire, it is reflected in the comparison of the revolution to the old mole who burrows itself deep in its holes and tunnels, only to continue on its journey and reappear in the future. That is the famous passage in Eighteenth Brumaire where Marx predicts that the revolution will one day return from its “still journeying through purgatory” and “Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: Well grubbed, old mole!”[19]

(c) The counterrevolutionary repression only strengthens the revolt: “every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters,” as Engels writes.[20]

This is optimistic: it suggests that resistance can explode at points and seem absent at others, but it is just burrowing underground until it resurfaces with elan.

Conclusion on Marx and Engels

We have then 5 points to explore:

• classes and class conflicts
• economic context
• historical context
• ideological cultural context
• revolutionary responses

With those guideposts, let’s turn to the present.

Theories of Counterrevolution

Marx and Engels’ writings have given rise to several important contributions on counterrevolutions, in addition to Marcuse’s book, Counterrevolution and Revolt. For the most part, though, these theories have focused on counterrevolutions in the context of active, armed revolutions or situations of coups against autocrats. They have used as case studies, for instance, the Vendée counterrevolution to the French Revolution, the bloody counterrevolution in Indonesia in 1965-66, the Pinochet coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, or the counterrevolutionary situations in China, the Soviet Union, the Congo, or other liberated countries in Africa and South-East Asia.

Arno Mayer, for instance, the great historian of revolutions and counterrevolutions, provides an analytic framework in his book Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956, discussing the work of Marx and Engels of course.[21]Mayer sets out a typology of counterrevolutions, running the gamut from (1) pre-emptive counterrevolutions in the face of far-reaching reforms or governmental instability; (2) posterior counterrevolutions in response to an external threat or successful but contested revolution; (3) accessory counterrevolutions that aim at presumed or alleged revolutionaries; (4) disguised counterrevolutions that are internal cleavages within a revolutionary moment; (5) anticipatory counterrevolutions that those in government create as a way to crush and gain more power; or (6) externally licensed or externally imposed counterrevolutions in a satellite country.[22]

None of these categories fit perfectly the present moment, in large part because they describe more openly militaristic regimes, whereas we are dealing a counterrevolution that takes the appearance of a civil democratic government. But there are certainly the elements of the preventive—as Marcuse notes—and of the anticipatory. My sense is that there is not so much a fear of revolution, as there is a consolidation of power and a veiled threat—and real possibility—of pushing American democracy toward authoritarianism. (Without anticipating, this is reflected in President Trump’s repeated references to claiming a third presidential term and to the fact that there will be no need to vote in four years).

Walden Bello, in his more recent book Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right, published in 2019, draws on the work of Marx, Barrington Moore, Nicos Poulantzas, and Arno Mayer, to study the brutal counterrevolutions in fascist Italy, Indonesia, Chile, Thailand, India, the Philippines, and the ongoing far right breakthroughs in the North now.[23]

Based on those writings and case studies, Bello proposes a “dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution,” suggesting that they always need to be understood in their productive tensions.[24] So, for instance, in analyzing the rise of extreme-right parties in the North, Bello emphasizes the way in which they have positioned themselves as opposed to the globalization and neoliberalism of the center and left; championed an anti-EU strategy; and focused on the purported threat to the working class of non-white migrants.

What I find most useful in all this is Marx and Engels’ writings and so I propose to build on their five points: (1) classes and class conflicts; (2) the political economic context; (3) the historical context; (4) the ideological cultural context; and (5) the revolutionary responses.

The American Counterrevolution

The American Counterrevolution has a long history. It traces its most recent iteration and genealogy to the War on Terror after September 11 but goes further back to the Reagan offensive in the 1980s, to J. Edgar Hoover’s assault on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements before that, perhaps as far back as what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “counterrevolution of property” that dealt the death knell to Reconstruction.

In The Counterrevolution, I traced its recent history, since 9/11. I show how apparently disparate practices in the US—like paramilitary policing of protesters, indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, infiltration of American mosques—all fit neatly within a model of governing based on the paradigm of counterinsurgency warfare.

These new offensives of the American counterrevolution since 9/11 all flow from the central strategies of counterinsurgency – or what was called unconventional or, in the lexicon of the French commanders who perfected this in Algeria, “la guerre moderne.” Modern counterinsurgency warfare has, at its heart, a three-prong strategy: first, obtain total information on the population; second, eradicate, decimate the active minority resistance, the internal enemy; and third, win the hearts and minds of the passive majority.[25] As I wrote in The Counterrevolution:

far from exceptional or aberrant or isolated—or temporary—these measures exemplify a new way that we, in the United States, govern ourselves abroad and at home: a new model of government inspired by the theory and practice of counterinsurgency warfare. These episodes are not spasmodic moments of temporary excess. They are not brief departures from the rule of law. Rather, these measures fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in a far broader and more momentous historical and political transformation.[26]

This larger transformation involves the birth of a counterinsurgent paradigm of counterrevolution.

As I wrote then, at page 8, “Counterinsurgency warfare has become our new governing paradigm in the United States, both abroad and at home. It has come to dominate our political imagination. It drives our foreign affairs and now our domestic policy as well.”[27]

And, what was so remarkable about it, is that it arose without an antecedent revolution.

Just like the present counterrevolutionary offensive in the United States—as well as the ongoing offensives in France and Germany, with the rise of the extreme right parties Rassemblement national and the AfD—these counterrevolutionary fronts do not come on the heels of an active or virtual revolution. They come instead at the tail end of plodding liberal regimes.

Herbert Marcuse made this point early on in his book Counter-Revolution and Revolt in 1972—at a time, even, when there was much more Left social activism than there is now. Marcuse was writing at the time of the Black Power movement and Vietnam War protests, which were far more destabilizing than anything today—even the massive protests after the murder of George Floyd. And yet, even then, back in 1972, Marcuse emphasized that “The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing.”[28]

Since 9/11 as well, there has been no revolution to speak of—and there is none in the offing. At most, there has been a slowly eroding, tenuous, liberal, bare-majority consensus in favor of affirmative action programs for historically disadvantaged communities of color, mainstream gay rights modeled on heterosexual marriage, and recognition of climate change. In effect, nothing more than a centrist liberalism that never challenges capitalism, big business, or finance. Far from a revolution – which is what makes this moment, what I called, “The Counterrevolution,” with a capital C to stress that they are a revolution of their own, autonomous. What I wrote back then in 2018 applies even more today:

The result is radical. We are now witnessing the triumph of a counterinsurgency model of government on American soil in the absence of an insurgency, or uprising, or revolution. The perfected logic of counterinsurgency now applies regardless of whether there is a domestic insurrection. We now face a counterinsurgency without insurgency. A counterrevolution without revolution. The pure form of counterrevolution, without a revolution, as a simple modality of governing at home—what could be called “The Counterrevolution.”[29]

That is sharply different than in 1848-52 in France and Germany.

And yet what these moments share is a consolidation of the counterrevolution. Just as in 1851, when Louis Napoleon made his coup d’état, and when the revolutions in France, the German states, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere were crushed, the counterrevolutionary forces on the Continent were consolidating.

So despite some differences, we are in a similar position today: the new offensive of the American counterrevolution is consolidating, to say the least, if not triumphing. And in its wake, we need to study the causes of the counterrevolution’s success – exactly what Engels and Marx were doing. As Engels writes, what he was trying to achieve in Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution is the following: “we try to lay before the readers of The Tribune the causes which, while they necessitated the German Revolution of 1848, led quite as inevitably to its momentary repression in 1849 and 1850.”[30]

We can rephrase that: we need, collectively, in this seminar, to lay bare the forces which, while they did not trigger a Leftist revolution, nonetheless have led to the success of this counterrevolutionary offensive and the lack of an effective response.

Situating ourselves in the present

I hardly need to recount the events since January 20, 2025. In the three weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency—yes, it has only been three weeks—President Trump has signed radically expansive executive orders (multiple-times more than any recent president including himself during the first term), engaged in wide-ranging midnight purges, threatened and harassed federal employees and agents, and shuttered whole agencies, in a concerted battle plan to dismantle the federal government.[31]

Trump has set his sights on a set of targets or scapegoats that include “D.E.I.” and racial minorities, “gender ideology” and transgender and disabled persons, “the Green New Deal” and climate change activists, and perhaps most draconianly, undocumented immigrants.

D.E.I. (or simply “diversity”)

At the top of the list is “D.E.I.” In his executive order freezing all federal government transfers and grants to states and non-profits, Trump declared that the freeze was intended to allow his administration to review whether recipients were complying with the new ban on D.E.I. In his first press conference following the tragic collision between an airplane landing at Reagan International Airport and a Blackhawk military helicopter, Trump blamed “D.E.I.” for the tragic accident.

In contemporary public discourse, the term “D.E.I.” is a proxy for race. The primary association with D.E.I. is affirmative action programs for racial minorities. It also signals, secondarily, LGBTQ and disabled persons.

D.E.I. is the successor or heir to Critical Race Theory as the new target for conservatives.[32] Conservatives started by attacking CRT in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. This attack gradually came to include the AP African American History curriculum. Beginning in about 2022, and increasingly during the campaign of Kamala Harris, this range of attacks took on D.E.I. Trump and his allies accused Harris of being a “D.E.I. candidate,” a “D.E.I. hire,” and “our D.E.I. vice president,” and of being “dumb.”[33]

“Gender ideology”

Another main target of Trump’s executive order freezing federal funding is “gender ideology.” This aims especially at transgender women, who are portrayed as a threat to other women in the bathroom and on the sports fields.

In another executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” and signed on inauguration day, January 20, 2025, Trump assailed what he calls “gender ideology” and sets out a number of measures to combat it.[34] The order defines “gender ideology” as “the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.” It critiques “gender ideology” for replacing “the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.” It argues that “gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.”

But this has a long history and is international in dimension. As the New York Times reports in its Magazine, Trump is joining a global war on “gender ideology” that attacks not just trans rights, but feminism itself.[35]  In Russian, for example, the Putin government has long been passing anti-LGBTQ legislation, as journalist Masha Gessen has exposed at length.[36] In Poland, the right wing has “demonized L.G.B.T.Q. individuals as aggressors and corrupters of “the nation,” and municipal governments have declared “‘L.G.B.T.-free’ zones in homes, workplaces, and schools.”[37] Giorgia Meloni in Italy has made calls for protecting the heterosexual, nuclear family in 2019, saying “Why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening? There is a single answer to all these questions. Because it defines us. Because it defines our identity. Because everything that defines us is now an enemy.” Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban, inspired by Putin, held a referendum in 2022 aimed at “stopping gender insanity” and restoring our “common sense.”[38] Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil had also been virulently homophobic, and a couple of years prior to his presidency, Judith Butler had been hung in effigy by protesters in Brazil who shouted “Take your ideology to hell!”[39] Poland has styled its struggle against abortion as a matter of “gender ideology” as well, as Guillaume Rouleau has observed for some time.

“The Green New Deal” and Climate change activism

Another target is climate change awareness and activism. In many of the executive orders, it follows consistently as the third note in the resounding chord of “D.E.I., gender ideology, and the Green New Deal.”[40] On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that froze funding for the two landmark environmental protections legislation passed during the Biden administration through the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Although a federal judge blocked the executive order from taking effect in the end of January, the funding for the two bills remain in legal limbo.[41]

Immigrants

Some of the most immediate harms inflicted by the Trump administration has been felt by non-citizens in the United States, especially by those who have been justice involved. Tapping into the threatening connotations of Guantanamo Bay to fulfill his campaign promises, Trump has ordered the construction of detention space for 30,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records on the base. Venezuelan immigrants are now transported daily to Guantanamo from a military facility in El Paso, Texas.[42] ICE sweeps have also been occurring across the country as part of Trump’s mass deportation plan, and federal agencies have been granted expanded detention powers.[43] ICE officials have been told that the administration is imposing a quota of 75 arrests per day per field office, which would total to about 12,000 to 15,000 daily arrests.[44]

5 Factors to Analyze Today

First: Classes and Class Conflict

What are the classes and conflicts?

If one were to use the schematics of Marx and Engels, we would have—starting with those who support the president, the following classes:

1. The tech-billionaires: They represent the pinnacle of the feudal class. Their presence at the inauguration was emblematic of their embrace of Trump’s second administration. They distanced themselves from Trump during the first presidency and often supported the Democrats, but have now torn into the Trump inner circle.
2. A cadre of billionaire donors and benefactors, such as Timothy Mellon, Miriam Adelson, Linda McMahon, and others.[45]
3. The older, wealthier, established GOP – which resisted Trump at first, but has fallen in line. These are the Brahman GOP.
4. Increasingly, young men in the tech and start-up industries, who view themselves as anti-regulatory and entrepreneurial.
5. The MAGA base – from petty bourgeoisie to more economically marginalized persons. These are the people who are represented by Steve Bannon, who advocates a form of populism and nationalism. The populism: representing the interests of middle-class Americans, the people, the ordinary Americans. This is when Bannon talks about wanting to “soak the rich” – anti-elite and anti-wealth discourse. In fact, Bannon has called the new Musk and Zuckerberg crowd “techno-feudalists.”[46] The nationalism: opposed to globalism – opposed to idea of integrating the American economy into the global economy; opposed to capitalist hiring foreign labor, immigrants.
6. Rural populations who voted overwhelmingly for Trump and view themselves as the antithesis to urban elites and urban dwellers; and view themselves as the protectors of family values.
7. Evangelicals and the moral majority
8. White nationalists, for instance those who conducted the United the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
9. New growing segments of Black and Latino men, who have been pulled away from the Democratic party.

And then on the other side of the political spectrum:

10. College educated, urban, liberals, who are upper- and middle-class.
11. Black women, who form the most solid and loyal backbone of the Democratic Party, by election tallies.

And in order to understand the consolidation of the counterrevolution, we need to analyze the conflicts between and within these classes, among others.

An example of class conflicts fueling counterrevolution

One contemporary example of internal conflicts that fuel the counterrevolution is in the defund the police context. There, a social movement developed after the George Floyd murder that encompassed a lot of different interests and classes, and there emerged an abolitionist movement that included black activists, members of the Black Lives Matter movement, and liberal white people and progressives. The movement gained a lot of momentum, and many of the slogans and ideas that had once been radical became somewhat mainstream and commonplace. There was a broad coalition on the Left—from the African American community, Latino community, and white progressives—that began to favor defunding the police. There were more and more posters in New York about defunding the NYPD. In fact, the polling at the national level showed that there was about a third of American respondents were in favor of defunding the police, and in some cities, there was legislation passed to defund the police, if I’m no mistaken.

Once that movement began to be taken seriously, there was an enormous backlash by the Right, by the police and its supporters, who started countering with Blue Lives Matter. Blue Lives Matter flags and stickers and signs started to crop up in conservative and reactionary quarters.

Pretty soon, the centrist liberals and progressives broke off from the abolitionists and joined the assault on the defund the police discourse. Former President Barack Obama in particular assailed the movement, saying that it lost credibility when it embraced the theme of defunding the police. President Biden followed, and so a large segment of the educated white centrist and middle class broke with the predominantly Black abolitionists and protesters in a clearly demarcated way. The establishment centrists delegitimized the abolitionists in an effort to protect the Democratic Party from the counterrevolutionary forces.

But those Democrats were playing into the hands of the conservatives in beating up on the abolitionists as they deepened the split within their base.

On the other hand, the radical right was doing strange things that were inconsistent, in a self-serving way. For instance, in the wake of FBI sweeps of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, Marjorie Taylor Green called for the defunding the FBI, and began a discourse about defunding federal law enforcement agencies. And then, of course, as one of his first acts in office, Trump pardoned the January 6^th rioters, many of whom had attacked Capitol police.

The terrain itself is fractured and fragmented. But what’s clear is that, once the abolition movement started to gain steam with a coalition of Black activists and white progressives, there developed sharp conflicts within the coalition over the relationship to the police, and that played right into the hands of the Right.

Today, the terrain is fluid. Police unions and law enforcement are overwhelmingly conservative and located on the Right politically. More generally, order is synonymous with the counterrevolution, as we saw earlier in the passage from Class Conflicts referring to order being the essence of the counterrevolution. There are these simple associations, but these broad strokes are complicated by Trump pardoning people who assaulted police officers, or Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about defunding the FBI, or Trump’s current attacks against federal law enforcement. Then it becomes clear that there was always more room to maneuver, that a hard-line position in favor of law-enforcement is not always politically necessary. But instead, Obama and Biden went after the abolitionists in order to please or assuage centrist voters, and that played right into the hands of the counterrevolution.

Second: The Economic Context

Here, we need a robust analysis of globalization, of neoliberalism, of finance capitalism, and of the rise of artificial intelligence—and what it is going to do to the economy—since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Marx’s writings are, naturally, outdated, which is understandable. But the emphasis on political economy is not.

In the US context, overall, the major force is the widespread perception that the middle class has been losing to the 1%. At least, that is what is fueling the Bannon MAGA movement.

At the global level, there is debate over the “elephant graph” – which many people, including Paul Krugman, interpret as evidence of the detrimental effect of globalization on the lower and middle classes in Western countries.

But even if you set that aside and look only at the USA numbers, there is ample evidence to support the perception that the middle class is falling behind—and is in a worse position than it was before the Great Recession of 2008.

Here I am relying on PEW Research findings, but Thomas Piketty’s work and others confirm this.

First graph: “a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling.

Second graph: “The wealth gap among upper-income families and middle- and lower-income families is sharper than the income gap and is growing more rapidly.”

Third graph: “The wealthiest families are also the only ones to have experienced gains in wealth in the years after the start of the Great Recession in 2007. … The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016.”

Fourth graph: At the aggregate level, median wealth is down since Great Recession of 2007-08 – so just imagine how bad it is for middle and lower class, given the increasing inequality.

And for the last 16 years, 12 of them have been under Democratic administrations: 8 years of Obama and 4 years of Biden.

What are those economic forces?

There is a sense among the MAGA base that their lives are stagnating. That they are suffering from inflation and the sense of higher costs at the gas pump and grocery. This is fueling a set of hateful ideas:

1. “Replacement theory” – the idea that white people are going to be replaced by immigrants and oversees workers (because of globalization). As American society becomes more diverse, the white majority feels threatened.
2. “Criminal invasion” – fueling the idea that immigrants are criminals and need to be sent to Guantanamo.
3. Attacks on diversity and transgender people – with blatantly racist and prejudiced language and cat whistles.

Within the context of broader global economic shifts, we would then need to explore long-term growth in wealth disparity connected to, for instance in the United States, with the repeal of inheritance taxes and the passage of other tax laws favoring the rich, huge increases in higher education tuition, etc.; and in the short term, connected to inflation and price gouging during the COVID pandemic—all of which make people feel that they are worse off than before. We would also need to explore technological and AI changes that are transforming advanced Western countries from service-oriented into gig economies.[47]

Third: The Historical Context

Recall the earlier passage by Engels about the workers being worn out from the years of compromise after 1848. Here too, we would need to explore whether the Left was worn out in 2024 by the years of unsuccessful attempts at impeachments, criminal prosecutions, and other forms of sanction against Trump. There were constellations of events in 2023-2024: an elderly president Biden; the anointment of Kamala Harris without democratic input; disbelief at the possibility of a second Trump term.

But we have to go higher up, more abstract, because this is not just happening in the USA. We talk about contagion, that Trump is fueling Le Pen, Meloni, the AfD. But there were precursors to Trump, like Berlusconi for instance in Italy. So, again, we need to focus on the broader, world historical context—not singular leaders or cult personalities.

Fourth: Culture and Ideas

Here, we may need to reread our Stuart Hall and retool our cultural studies.

It feels as if material class interests are not as determinative of political allegiances as they were before. Somehow culture and ideology have taken on a bigger role. Maybe it is because of the way in which information is disseminated today.

Fox News is an enormous player here. It is shaping the way people think about things, as are the social media, including Truth Social and X which is now in the hands of the extreme-right.

It is dramatically different than the way that information traveled in 1848. There are forms of globalization of political propaganda that we have to pay attention to as information dissemination has become exponentially easier and uncontainable.

How is it that Fox News has become a political platform, effectively a political action committee, and has become so dominant in the news, in the transmission of information?

Plus, at the cultural level, there is, in the USA, a general hatred of the government and of the establishment. Not so in France. But here there is an anti-establishment strain that runs deep.

Paradoxically, there has also always been an attraction to charismatic authoritarian figures in the USA, like elsewhere (Napoleon in France; the Roman emperors, etc.) Recall that the United States almost veered toward fascism in the 1930s. There was a strong pull. FDR was tempted. He flirted with Italian fascism. Ira Katznelson has written about this at length.

There is also boredom in this country, surprisingly. People like to see a car crash… and this is only amplified by social media. There is entertainment value to the daily reality TV show.

The Audacity of the Counterrevolution

Engels remarks that a revolution requires audacity—or, “in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known, de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace!”[48]

That applies, as well, to counterrevolutions. And the leaders of these counterrevolutions sweeping the world stage have audacity. Far more, it seems, than those who are trying to stop it. Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” pales in comparison to what Trump has been doing with executive orders in the first three weeks of his presidency.

And one can only imagine how far this audacity might lead. In his commercial real estate dealings, Trump has used bankruptcy to avoid debt obligations, and start again. Might he be thinking about bankrupting the USA to wipe out our massive $36 trillion debt and start from scratch again? Is that even conceivable? Has it crossed his mind? That is, after all, how he built his commercial real estate fortune, by using bankruptcy laws so effectively….

A Preliminary Assessment

The place to start, with Marx and Engels, is to understand that President Trump is a reality-TV star, with a talent for creating daily episodes that draws the entire world’s attention. He is immensely talented at that. But he is only a symptom of much larger forces.

Steve Bannon tells a story that he identified Donald Trump as the perfect spokesperson for his populist, nationalist views—the views he developed at Breitbart—at a political rally in Hanover, New Hampshire in May of 2014. It’s a fascinating account. Bannon was there with Breitbart radio, listening to Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich—the cattle call is what he called it, and then he hears “this guy” called Donald Trump:

Trump came up and just starts. It was like Mort Sahl. He’s just taking today’s headlines and just riffing on it. But in riffing on it and talking about the border and jobs in China, people were leaning forward in their seats. And I called later and told Miller and Sessions and others. I said: This is our guy. I said: If this guy is serious about this, we can do this. This guy — this guy is the personification of what we need. He’s a hammer, he’s a man’s man, and if he’s serious — which at the time, there’s a big question. I always thought he was serious. Big, big question, just doing this to negotiate a better deal for “The Apprentice,” and the people like Roger Ailes would tell me: Bannon, you’re a [expletive] moron. This is all — this is a negotiating strategy. You look like an idiot.[49]

Bannon was channeling the Tea Party populism at the time and would throw his entire weight behind Trump. And of course, Trump reciprocated with his own populism and nationalism—bringing with him elements of white nationalism.

This nationalist populism would cannibalize the white working class, union members, and traditional working class Democratic voters—the exact populations that Bernie Sanders would have been able to attract had he not been crushed by the neoliberal Left.

Bannon talks a lot about wanting to soak the rich, but Trump was able to form an alliance with the wealthiest billionaires at the time, and now with the tech billionaires.

These extremely wealthy people—we call them oligarchs when they are in Russia—understand well that it is in their financial interest to dismantle the federal regulatory state. They understand well that the term “deregulation”—a euphemism for “reregulation”—generally works to their financial benefit.

The resulting social conflicts pit the extremely wealthy and national populists, as well as the rural populations and extremists (like white nationalists and militias) against the urban dwellers and minorities.

And all of this is taking place within the broader context of macro-economic shifts like globalization, AI developments, etc.

Insofar as the most resolute block of Democratic party voters are Black and Latina women, and secondarily Black and Latino men, the class conflicts take on a racial dimension—which is in part what explains the attack on D.E.I. and Critical Race Theory.

There had been a centrist Democratic-Republican consensus—a form of peaceful cohabitation and alternation—that benefited the old elites in the United States. This was manifested by the neoliberal or the Washington consensus that prevailed in the 1990s and 2000s. It was an Ivy League consensus among old family dynasties like the Kennedy’s and the Bush’s—one that has been completely upended by a new set of billionaires. The wild card, Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr., is a reflection of that tectonic shift.

The billionaires today, and the MAGA base, want to dismantle the federal regulatory state, to reduce it to its barest bones—which means military and police spending primarily, and federal enforcement of the traditional family.

Fifth and Last: The Revolutionary Response

Marx and Engels were adamant that the counterrevolution only fuels a revolution. That the old mole is perhaps burrowed, but will come to the surface again.

Just this afternoon I got wind of a TikTok video by Anonymous. I hadn’t heard or thought of them for years—not since Occupy Wall Street. I am not surprised to see them resurface now.

I have no doubt that Marx and Engels were right. I am confident the old mole will resurface soon, very soon. The question is, in what guise?

To watch the seminar and read more, click here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/8-13/

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 197.

[2] Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), at p. 1.

[3] Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 1-2.

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/us/politics/donald-trump-president.html

[5] Marx, “Preface to Second Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire (International Publishers, 1964/2024), at p. 6.

[6] Frederick Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 6.

[7] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 6.

[8] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 11; for these classes, see generally, pages 7-12.

[9] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 12.

[10] Engels, “Preface to Third German Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 14.

[11] Engels, “Preface to Third German Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 14.

[12] Engels, “Preface to Third German Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 14.

[13] Frederick Engels, “Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained Comparatively Inactive in December Last,” in MECW Vol. 11, p. 218.

[14] Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016), at p. 23.

[15] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 93.

[16] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 105.

[17] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 103.

[18] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 10.

[19] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire (International Publishers, 2024), at p. 121.

[20] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 6.

[21] Arno J. Mayer, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956: An Analytic Framework (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), at p. 39 et seq.

[22] Mayer, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956, at pp. 86-116.

[23] Walden Bello, Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2019).

[24] Bello, Counterrevolution, at p. 8.

[25] Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution (New York: Basic Books, 2018), at p. 8.

[26] Harcourt, The Counterrevolution, at p. 6.

[27] Harcourt, The Counterrevolution, at p. 8.

[28] Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, p. 1-2.

[29] Harcourt, The Counterrevolution, at p. 8.

[30] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 7.

[31] See Astead W. Herndon,  “Trump’s Plan to Remake the Federal Work,” New York Times, February 12, 2025,https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000009975407/trumps-plan-to-remake-the-federal-work-force.html.

[32] It is telling that DEI is taking the place of CRT as the target for conservatives, since it is a much tamer project, and a liberal as opposed to a critical project. It is in some ways at odds with CRT. In fact, it is a target of critique from CRT. The only way in which both of these can become targets is, essentially, from a white supremacist point of view.

[33] Amanda Terkel, “’Dumb’ and a ‘DEI’ candidate: Trump and allies attack Kamala Harris based on her race, gender,”NBC News, July 24, 2024, available at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/republican-attacks-kamala-harris-center-race-gender-dumb-dei-candidate-rcna162570.

[34] The White House, Executive Order __, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” January 20, 2025, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/.

[35] Elisabeth Zerofsky, “Trump Joins a Global War on ‘Gender Ideology’. He’s allying with a movement that stretches to Hungary and Poland — one that looks with skepticism not just on trans rights but on feminism itself,” New York Times Magazine, February 8, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/magazine/gender-ideology-trump-orban.html.

[36] See, e.g., Masha Gessen, Gay Propaganda (New York: Orbooks, 2014).

[37] Zerofky, “Trump Joins a Global War on ‘Gender Ideology’.”

[38] Zerofky, “Trump Joins a Global War on ‘Gender Ideology’.”

[39] Jessica Bennett, “Judith Butler Thinks You’re Overreacting,” New York Times, March 24, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/24/books/booksupdate/judith-butler-thinks-youre-overreacting.html.

[40] See “White House Orders Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Financial Assistance Programs,” Buchanan, January 28, 2025, https://www.bipc.com/white-house-orders-pause-of-agency-grant,-loan,-and-financial-assistance-programs.

[41] Jake Bittle, “Trump is freezing climate funds. Can he do that?,” Grist, February 13, 2025, https://grist.org/politics/trump-climate-funding-freeze-ira-bil-biden/.

[42] “US shifts deportation route to Venezuela after judge blocks Guantanamo Bay transfer,” FirstPost, February 15, 2025, https://www.firstpost.com/world/us-shifts-deportation-route-to-venezuela-after-judge-blocks-guantanamo-bay-transfer-13863492.html.

[43] Ana Faguy, “Mass arrests in nationwide US immigration crackdown,” BBC, January 27, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6434dq7p1o.

[44] Hayes Brown, “Trump’s new deportation quotas are going to hurt a lot of people,” MSNBC, February 11, 2025, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/opinion/trump-ice-deportation-quota-rcna191499.

[45] Leo Kamin, “Here are Trump’s Top Billionaire Donors,” Forbes, August 14, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/leokamin/2024/08/14/here-are-trumps-top-billionaire-donors/.

[46] Dominick Mastrangelo, “Bannon on Musk, Zuckerberg: ‘We’ll break these guys eventually,’” January 20, 2025, https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5095165-bannon-attacks-musk-zuckerberg/.

[47] See https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothypapandreou/2024/10/03/ai-and-the-gig-economy-is-reshaping-the-workforce-heres-how/;https://afeusa.org/articles/the-role-of-artificial-intelligence-in-the-gig-economy/

[48] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 86.

[49] “Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism,” New York Times, January 31, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/opinion/steve-bannon-on-broligarchs-vs-populism.html.