A working class approach that doesn’t include at its core the necessity and urgency of strategic alliances of the working class with other sectors of the popular movement (people of color, women, Immigrants, and other opponents of the Trump regime) is no class approach at all. It may seem like one, feel like one, read like one, but it isn’t one. It’s no more than “revolutionary rhetoric” that soothe one’s revolutionary disposition, but fails to understand the dialectics of class politics at the level of theory and practice.

Or, to come at it differently, working class mobilization pure and simple will not only fail to activate key allies of the working class, but also the working class itself. It’s a recipe at the end of the day for failure, for defeat.

Trumpism easily falls outside of the “bourgeois democratic” boundaries that governed U.S. politics for the past century and more. It is a reaction not only to the decline and crisis of the neoliberal order and the contradictions of the U.S. constructed global order, but also to the expansion of democracy since the 60s and the pressures to further expand it going forward. Led by an unstable, demagogic strongman sitting in the White House, Trump demonstrates every day by his words and actions his contempt (and MAGA’s) for existing democratic institutions and rights paired with an unconcealed ambition to construct an authoritarian, anti-democratic, revanchist, billionaire friendly order to replace it.

Will he be successful? It’s too early to tell. To no small degree, it will depend on what a diverse coalition of class and social forces do to resist this authoritarian takeover now in progress. With no time to spare, each of us has to become an author of our collective future.

The coalition opposing Trump’s power grab is still in formation and finding its legs. That isn’t surprising, given the novelty and nature of the challenge. In these circumstances, the overarching task is to rapidly scale up its actions and organizational capacity commensurate to the existential danger that Trump and MAGA present. While in every great movement there is a spontaneous element, one would make a mistake to turn that element of mass politics into a substitute for political organization and coordination. The latter is necessary to turn a spontaneous surge into a powerful mass movement with the capacity to win.

The traditional wisdom that capitalists prefer democratic government to autocracy and fascism contains some truth, but it doesn’t mean that under certain conditions they won’t gravitate to the strongman leader who has the temerity to attack the working class and democratic movements while establishing an anti-democratic, authoritarian regime of heightened exploitation and systematic oppression.

Trump dangerously rewards Russian aggression in his embrace of Putin, while at the same time, blaming Zelensky in a reversal of facts for the outbreak of war in Ukraine. Observing Trump’s posture, nerves are likely frayed in the capitals of the former Soviet Republics who fear Putin’s desire to restore the old Russian empire, not to mention capitals throughout Europe.