A YOUGOV poll last week found that 45 per cent of adults in the US disapprove of Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard following the Ice snatch raids into Latino communities. Thirty-eight per cent approve and 17 per cent remain unsure of the move. Even more disapprove of the deployment of the Marine Corps.

In ordering the deployment of the military, Trump defended his decision to override the prerogatives of the California state governor, arguing that Los Angeles would have been “completely obliterated” and would be “burning to the ground right now.”

Actually, while anger was widespread in a city that is just part of the enormous tracts of 19th century Mexico that US imperialism appropriated, “rioting” was more the product of police tactics.

The south-western states of the US may be separated from present-day Mexico by Trump’s wall, but — as evidenced by the Mexican national flags on display across Los Angeles — much of its population feels alienated from the US as it is presently constituted.

The US state’s deployment of lethal armed force in dealing with civilian dissent is routine and is a useful reminder that in every state, whether ruled in the interests of capital or labour, ruling class hegemony rests on the always contested ideology of the ruling class and, in periods of transition, on the equally contested state monopoly of coercive power.

Bourgeois democracy in the US is still a work in progress in the sense that, despite the economic advantage conferred by the global dominance of the dollar, the US is a capitalist superpower with a Third World struggling within it. Millions are without health cover, are paid poverty wages, endure high levels of drug and alcohol dependency, are homeless and confined to temporary work, dead-end jobs or unemployment.

Social tensions within the US are increasingly escaping the logic of the two-party political system in ways that are replicated in other developed capitalist countries, Britain included. Trump’s election itself is a sign that the old ways of ruling are no longer guaranteed to work.

Trump’s appeal to a largely proletarian population who felt alienated from the political Establishment conferred upon him a base that enables him to conduct politics in ways that disrupt the consensus upon which bourgeois rule everywhere prefers over the costs of repression.

But he is discovering, as did Liz Truss, that ruling-class power is exercised directly and decisively independent of electorally constituted office.

The bond markets put Trump back in his box as surely as they did to Truss — now reduced to making a living in the delusional world that is the US far-right lecture circuit.

And it is Rachel Reeves’s devotion to the “fiscal responsibility” that the banks, big business and the bond markets compel that has gifted her a popularity rating as bad as that of Kwasi Kwarteng.

The flip side to this is that the inchoate and contradictory mass of discontented voters who make up Trump’s electoral base have expectations of their own that do not necessarily align with his.

Where both he and our own Nigel Farage have a problem is in the ways in which the people who vote for them do so with their own reasons and in pursuit of objectives which they do not share.

Preventing a radical challenge from the left is the default setting for the bourgeoisie everywhere, and where the system of consensus politics breaks down, these populist movements of the right naturally emerge.

It is inevitable that, in addition to the damage Reform UK is doing to the Labour vote, some kind of challenge to Labour from the left will appear during the life of this present government and how successful it might be is dependent a range of factors that is already the subject of scrutiny in the Morning Star and elsewhere.

A fair measure of experience has accumulated in devising an electoral programme that might appeal to a decisive political majority of working people. The alternative economic strategy devised by the left in the later years of the last century emerged in the 2017 Corbyn manifesto, and its power in mobilising masses resulted in the 20-point surge to Labour, which torpedoed Theresa May’s parliamentary majority.

John McDonnell speculated at the time that a few more weeks would have seen Jeremy Corbyn in No 10 (and him in No 11).

As we look at a shrunken, vastly discredited Labour Party upon which sits its bloated and vastly unrepresentative parliamentary cohort, it is at least worth speculating what might have ensued if Corbyn had become prime minister.

It is probable that the campaign to “destroy Corbyn as a man” would have combined character assassination with a destabilising campaign against his government.

It would be interesting to hear from McDonnell how he might deal with the usual bourgeois tactic when faced with a government departing from custom and practice and threatening to shift power and wealth from the rich to working people. 

How would a left-wing government deal with capital flight and a capital strike, a run on the currency, problems in raising money on the bond markets, a manufactured surge in unemployment and rent rises matched by a bid by the “independent” Bank of England to raise interest rates “to defend the pound?”

What would be the working-class response to the mobilisation of middle-class elements, petty traders, independent lorry driver owners, farmers and the Countryside Alliance, etc, to create distribution blockages and artificial food shortages, disrupt traffic? There was an example of this when, in the autumn of 2000, Britain’s oil refineries were blockaded by lorry owner-drivers and farmers.

The third response of the rich is exemplified by the 1974 CIA-sponsored coup in Chile. This was preceded by a lorry owner-drivers’ strike, which paralysed distribution and caused food shortages and massive economic dislocation.

This was accompanied by a highly charged media campaign, open and hidden pressure from the military and intelligence sectors, interventions by reactionary religious authorities and all manner of ultra-left provocations, some the result of political immaturity and others state-sponsored.

Similarly, when the Italian Communist Party came to exercise political leadership over the decisive sectors of the working people and achieved an accommodation with sectors of Catholic and lay opinion, the Italian bourgeoisie went on the offensive.

In direct collaboration with Italian intelligence organisations, Nato’s “stay-behind” armed Gladio underground, criminal elements and ultra-left provocateurs, staged a “strategy of tension” with continual disruption, terror bombings and constant media speculation about a coup. 

At the height of this process, the prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by an armed Red Brigade while negotiations to release him were sabotaged by reactionary sectors of Christian Democracy, the US intelligence apparatus and the mysterious operations of the Italian “deep state.”

To counter this type of tactic, a progressive working-class government has to both win the war of words and ideas on the ground heavily biased in favour of the ruling class and call into being the human resources and organisational heft to mobilise a countervailing power against its hidden and open adversaries.

We are in the early stages of a reordering of working-class politics in which the best chances of achieving profound political change will most likely entail an electoral challenge from the left of Labour, which will inevitably deepen the crisis within Labour.

How this plays out electorally is one question. But, as our ruling class understands better than does the working class, politics and power are not exclusively electoral.

It is inconceivable that this be achieved without a decisive change in the mood of the working class and without a vast expansion of its organisational and political power, the potential of which we saw in the recent strike movement and in the vast demonstrations against austerity and war this century.

For this activity to go beyond winning concessions requires the strengthening within the working class and — embedded in its communities and organisations — a body of women and men clear-sighted about what needs to be done and practically organised to make it happen.

But it also requires a profound ideological challenge to the individualist, delusional, consumerist and parasitical belief systems that justify war, exploitation and discrimination.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.