Both Parties in America Serve the Dictatorship of Capital

By Roqayah Chamseddine | June 27, 2025 | 1:22pm

Photo by The White House

Economy Capitalism

Both Parties in America Serve the Dictatorship of Capital

The current trajectory of US politics under the contemporary Republican Party is not a deviation from historical norms, but rather a culmination and intensification of a long-developing reactionary project. From the neoliberal offenses of Reaganomics to the right-wing populism of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), the American right wing has consistently operated as the political instrument of capital. What is arguably more insidious than Republican extremism is the liberal establishment’s role as a buffer, redirecting dissent into dead-end reforms and electoral theater. Rather than challenging the reactionary onslaught they claim to oppose, Democrats, namely since the Clinton era, have served as faithful stewards of the American empire. The bipartisan consensus aimed at undermining the left has hollowed out public institutions, plunged millions into economic precarity, expanded the machinery of imperial violence, and foreclosed on the political imagination of the American working class.

To understand the present, it is necessary to revisit the postwar consolidation of American capitalism and its political overseers. During the height of McCarthyism, the US ruling class annihilated radical labor, purged leftists from public institutions, and began to set the ideological boundaries of what would be deemed acceptable political discourse, all in the name of anti-communism. The damage of the McCarthy era resulted in the chilling of dissent and, as argued by historian Ellen Schrecker, “restructured the political field to exclude socialism, class analysis, and critiques of empire.”

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This ideological project laid the foundation for the ascendency of neoliberalism and functioned as a purification ritual for American political life. Ronald Reagan’s presidency did not merely introduce economic policies of deregulation and tax cuts, it signified the full fusion of capitalist discipline and Cold War militarism. Reagan would launch a moral crusade against unions (notoriously breaking the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike in 1981), accelerated mass incarceration through the “War on Drugs,” and deregulated industries while gutting the public sector, resulting in the upwards redistribution of wealth and the destruction of working-class institutions. As David Harvey notes in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” Reaganism represented a “class project” that harnessed state power in order to restore capitalist class dominance following the crisis of the 1970s.

Trumpism, often presented as an anti-establishment rupture, is the logical evolution of Reaganism—a continuation of capitalist class rule through more openly nationalist means. Donald Trump’s administration has deepened the ideological role of the state as an instrument of repression and has mobilized the politics of spectacle and grievance to mask the material violence of capital beneath culture ware theatrics. Trump has weaponized state power, not to meet social needs but to discipline and criminalize the working class, especially its most vulnerable demographics, thereby revealing the naked function of the capitalist state as a coercive apparatus for maintaining class domination. Trumpism is the ideological veneer of a decaying system that can no longer maintain hegemony through so-called liberal-democratic norms alone.

As capital faces declining rates of profit, ecological collapse, and increasing worker unrest, the ruling class turns toward more brutal and direct methods of suppression. The Gramscian concept of “passive revolution” also applies here, as the state reconstitutes itself not through genuine transformation, but through the reactionary incorporation of just enough populist rhetoric to defuse mass discontent, all while continuing to impose the structural violence of capitalist accumulation. The rise of Trump isn’t simply a cultural phenomenon, but the dictatorship of capital adapting to survive a self-made legitimacy crisis.

While the Republican Party has led the charge in advancing an openly reactionary, anti-worker agenda, the Democratic establishment has played an essential supporting role by legitimizing and managing this system from a more rhetorically progressive position. Under the guise of pragmatism and “bipartisanship,” Democratic Party elites have acted as the smiling administrators of empire and capital, absorbing popular discontent while protecting the material interests of the ruling class. From Bill Clinton’s dismantling of welfare and his escalation of the carceral state to Barack Obama’s expansion of drone warfare, the Democratic Party has consistently raised the banner of neoliberalism, privatization, and imperial hegemony—working not to challenge class domination but to obscure and reproduce it.

The Democrats, far from offering a meaningful opposition to the Republican right, act as a stabilizing mechanism that functions to absorb and then diffuse revolutionary energy, co-opting movements, and maintaining the illusion of choice while the machinery of exploitation and repression grinds on. The role of the liberal establishment is not to resist fascism, but to make it palatable, softened by inclusionary rhetoric, and enforced through the same apparatuses of state violence.

Since the Clinton era, the Democratic Party has shifted decisively rightward, openly embracing neoliberal ideology and abandoning the working class to the mercy of austerity. The Clinton administration’s North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), and Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994) marked historic betrayals of organized labor, the marginalization of the poor, and accelerated deindustrialization. Barack Obama, hailed as a progressive reformer, expanded the US drone assassination program, cloaked in the sanitized language of “humanitarian intervention.” Under the Obama administration, the spectacle of liberalism masked a brutal, systemic policy of extrajudicial killings, and the normalization of permanent war.

As Adolph Reed Jr. incisively argues, liberal elites prioritize symbolic representation and performative condemnations of injustice over material transformation, ensuring that the material foundations of exploitation remain firmly intact. The result is a bipartisan consensus that maintains the brutal machinery of empire, austerity, and expands the surveillance state. Even today, in the face of far-right ascendancy, the Democratic Party invokes procedural norms, funds police expansion, and passes record-breaking military budgets. The liberal establishment and its supporters, rather than opposing fascism, co-manage it.

At the root of both Republican revanchism and liberal collaboration is the enduring imperial character of the American empire. Both parties fund a merciless war machine, which maintains over 750 military bases worldwide, and enforce a global economic system engineered to secure the supremacy of US capital—by force when necessary. The costs of this empire are not only borne abroad—in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond—but also domestically, where militarized police forces are routinely deployed, and their violence is turned inwards. The American state, whether draped in liberal civility or right-wing demagoguery, serves a single mandate: to preserve capital’s dominance at home and abroad through violence and coercion. Any meaningful alternative must begin by rejecting the legitimacy of the current bipartisan arrangement. Breaking from this order will not come through appeals to institutional conscience, but through organized struggle and direct confrontation rooted in class solidarity and uncompromising internationalism. Anything less is complicity.