The question of why the American proletariat, that vast army of wage slaves, should find itself marching under the banner of a billionaire whose every breath is a testament to the most vulgar forms of capitalism, is one that demands the most rigorous materialist analysis. It is not a question of “why” in the abstract, but of how the specific contradictions of American capitalism have produced this grotesque political phenomenon.
The working class in the United States has been subjected to a century and a half of systematic ideological battering. The American Dream—those seductive promises of upward mobility, of becoming a “middle class” through hard work and thrift—has served as the most effective opiate of the masses. It has taught the worker to see himself as a potential capitalist, to measure his worth by the size of his house and the make of his car, rather than by his relationship to the means of production. This is the essence of false consciousness: the worker identifies with the interests of his exploiters, believing that his fate is tied to the success of the system that devours him.
The Trump phenomenon is not an aberration but the logical outcome of this ideological conditioning. When a man like Trump—whose wealth is built on the very exploitation he now pretends to oppose—appears on the scene, the worker sees not a capitalist but a “strongman” who will “take back” what has been stolen from him. This is the classic demagogic technique: to channel the legitimate grievances of the oppressed into a reactionary channel, to turn their anger against the wrong target. The worker is told that his problems stem from immigrants, from “elites,” from “political correctness,” rather than from the fundamental structure of capitalist production.
But let us not be naive. The material conditions that produce this support are undeniable. The American working class has been battered by decades of deindustrialization, by the export of jobs to cheaper labor markets, by the erosion of unions, by the stagnation of wages even as productivity has soared. The “American Century” has become a hollow shell, and the worker feels the bite of insecurity more sharply than ever. In this context, Trump’s promises of protectionism, of “America First,” of bringing back jobs, resonate with a desperate population that has been abandoned by both major parties.
Yet this is precisely the tragedy. The worker’s legitimate demand for economic security and dignity is being co-opted by a movement that serves the interests of the very forces that have destroyed those conditions. Protectionism is not the answer; it is a dead end that only deepens the contradictions of world capitalism. The solution lies not in turning inward, in erecting barriers and scapegoating others, but in international solidarity, in the struggle against the capitalist system that knows no borders.
The fact that the working class supports Trump is a testament to the power of ideology and the depth of its crisis. It is a call to the revolutionary vanguard to penetrate this false consciousness, to expose the real sources of the worker’s misery, and to offer a genuine alternative. The task is not to condemn the worker for his error, but to help him see through it, to transform his class-in-itself into a class-for-itself, and to march together toward the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society.