With the 2026 US primary elections under way, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party – also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP) – are gearing up for a fight to win the congressional majority in November. The cracks in the two-party system are becoming more pronounced as the imperialist crisis deepens and the Trump administration consolidates its power wherever possible.
The fabric of US bourgeois democracy has been fraying under Trump’s belligerent ‘America First’ approach, and both parties are at cross-roads over how to win the backing of the ruling class and manipulate enough of the electorate to secure their seats. Against a background of unending imperialist war abroad against Iran, Cuba and Palestine, the US working class is facing skyrocketing living costs, attacks on healthcare, reproductive rights and trans rights, ever-more frequent environmental disasters, ongoing terror from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), racist attacks on voting rights, and McCarthy-esque crackdowns on the left.
Racist redistricting
Trump promoted an aggressive discriminatory gerrymandering campaign ahead of the 2024 elections, which has reignited amid this year’s midterm primaries. Gerrymandering – the intentional manipulation of electoral districts to gain a political advantage – has been a tried-and-true method of enforcing state racism in the US, along with other strategies to disenfranchise non-white voters and stack election results. On 29 April the US Supreme Court voted to weaken the Voting Rights Act by ruling that state governments could not use race as a consideration in redistricting – a significant rollback on protecting minority voting rights. The implications of this ruling were immediate. Mississippi, Florida and Tennessee moved quickly to sign new districts ahead of November midterms to maintain the Republican’s House of Representatives majority. Within days of the Supreme Court ruling, Tennessee eliminated the only black-majority voting district, carving it up and distributing the pieces to make black people the minority vote across three districts. Louisiana did the same, going so far as to cancel and postpone its primary elections to give it time to redraw the maps. These measures are blatantly evocative of Jim Crow era policies and are clearly aimed to weaken any form of political opposition to the ruling class’s further attacks on black and migrant working-class communities in the US.
This renewed drive toward political suppression further reveals the precarity of the democratic rights won from the Civil Rights struggle. As soon as the ruling class determines it is necessary, ‘voting rights’ are ripped away and the façade of ‘American democracy’ crumbles.
MAGA slush fund
While Republican-led state legislatures see to the MAGA agenda on a state level, the Trump administration is preparing to rally its reactionary foot soldiers in another unprecedented use of federal infrastructure. On 18 May, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the creation of a $1.776bn fund that would be used to ‘compensate’ (read: reward) the right-wing rioters involved in the 2021 January 6 insurrection in Washington DC, nearly 1,500 of whom Trump pardoned immediately after taking office. Since the announcement of this fund, which would be immune to congressional oversight, the DOJ has purged its website of the press releases related to the riot. This move is another dangerous escalation, opening the door for direct material support for domestic mercenary-style auxiliaries who are prepared to defend US imperialism by any means necessary.
The beginnings of a new McCarthyism
On 2 May, the Trump administration formalised its renewed ideological warfare when it released its new ‘United States Counterterrorism Strategy’. The 16-page document is an utterly reactionary declaration of ideological attacks aimed, as the White House claims, at ‘Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs’, ‘Legacy Islamist Terrorists’, and ‘Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists’. The document states that ‘counterterrorism operations will be executed apolitically and founded upon reality-based threat assessments’, and then, blatantly contradicting itself, goes on to say, ‘national CT activities will also prioritise the rapid identification and neutralisation of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist’.
The threat of federal subpoenas has already begun. In May, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control reportedly issued ‘Requests for Information’ to at least 40 people who participated in the Nuestra America Convoy to Cuba in March, including CodePink cofounder Medea Benjamin and leftist online personality Hasan Piker. This is not the first time CodePink and related groups such as the People’s Forum have come under attack by the MAGA-adjacent groups who claim that their funding is linked to the Communist Party of China and they pose a threat to US national interests. The witch hunt against organised groups who openly oppose the US’s imperialist interests will only intensify as election time approaches and conditions worsen for the working class.
The working class is being wrung dry
These ‘counterterrorism’ aims are also a pretext for the ruling class’s war on the most oppressed sections of the working class, who are getting hit from all angles. Life is becoming increasingly unaffordable, with gas prices skyrocketing to $5 and in some states over $6 per gallon as the US barrels ahead with its imperialist campaigns abroad. Basic healthcare remains unobtainable for the poorest sections of the working class, with basic medications such as asthma inhalers standing at $150 for patients without health insurance or sufficient coverage. Further, the government continues to obliterate trans health care outright, with the DOJ rolling out the first criminal subpoenas to at least four major hospitals who have provided gender-affirming care. All the while, ICE continues to terrorise the country (see below).
The Democrats have no solution apart from empty electoralism while Trump’s GOP utilises every mechanism at its disposal to consolidate power and protect its ruling class interests. These attacks on the working class and the erosion of nominal democratic rights must be opposed by progressive forces in the US. But without an organised movement independent of the grasps of the Democratic Party or toothless social democrats, there is no way to put up a real fight against the rabid US ruling class.
Reagan Gray
