Patrimonial Bonapartism 

The stakes of a state theoretical category

Over the past decade, the American Left has often used the term “fascism” to describe the emerging regime in the United States, and this has been quite understandable. All around us there has been visible disdain for legal procedures, cultivation of a leadership cult, the use of paramilitary symbols in security forces, the escalation of the machinery of deportation, and a culture-war mentality. Still, equating these developments with fascism can do more harm than good by muddying understanding. In the Marxist-historical tradition—from Trotsky to Poulantzas to Paxton—fascism refers to a specific type of movement: a mass-mobilizing force of the petty bourgeoisie, organized outside of parliamentary politics, fused with parts of capital to suppress a working class facing a revolutionary or near-revolutionary crisis (Trotsky 1934; Poulantzas 1970; Paxton 2004).

The current American situation doesn’t meet those conditions. The working class isn’t organized for revolution; the petty bourgeoisie doesn’t have the necessary extra-parliamentary units; and capital is not suffering the profitability crisis that led German and Italian industries toward fascism in the interwar period.

Calling the current regime as fascist might be a misstep, and labeling it as populist authoritarianism might miss some important nuances. What we’re really looking at is a more specific category—one that reflects how the executive power has become more independent from different class factions within an exhausted hegemonic bloc while also becoming more personal and patrimonial in its approach to state administration. I refer to this as “patrimonial Bonapartism,” which combines insights from two major theories: the Marxist view of Bonapartism as a unique form of capitalist state rule and Weber’s analysis of patrimonialism as a special mode of governance. I believe that bringing these two ideas together helps us better understand what’s happening in the United States, compare it with other cases, and start thinking strategically about what the future might hold.

The origins of Bonapartism as a Marxist category

The category of Bonapartism comes into Marxist analysis through Marx’s influential pamphlets covering France from 1848 to 1851: “The Class Struggles in France,” “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” and later, “The Civil War in France” (Marx 1850; Marx 1852; Marx 1871). These writings primarily explore the idea of state autonomy. By the time Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte orchestrated his coup in December 1851 and was proclaimed emperor just a year later, the French bourgeoisie had largely overcome the proletarian uprising of June 1848. Instead of governing directly, the bourgeoisie ceded political power to a regime that suspended parliament, weakened the party system, and concentrated administrative control in an executive supported by a “society of December 10”—a group of displaced adventurers, financial speculators, and noble remnants that Marx vividly describes (Marx 1852, Ch. 5).

Marx’s analysis turns on a paradox. The Bonapartist state is, in its political form, autonomous from the bourgeoisie: it disciplines them, taxes them, and deals with them through the prefectural apparatus. However, in its social content, it is a state that serves the general interest of capital. Bonaparte protects property; he crushes the workers’ movement; he opens the way for the second industrial revolution under Haussmann and the Crédit Mobilier. The autonomy is real but conditional. It rests on a peculiar conjuncture: a working class strong enough to threaten the bourgeoisie but not strong enough to take power, and a bourgeoisie too divided to rule directly. Into that vacuum steps the executive, claiming to stand above class to represent the nation—most especially the parcelized peasantry, which Marx famously likens to a “sack of potatoes,” incapable of self-representation and therefore requiring a representative who lords over them (Marx 1852, Ch. 7).

This is the original sense of Bonapartism: a particular form of capitalist state in which the executive, surrounded by a personal apparatus, achieves real autonomy from the dominant class while serving its general interest. Hal Draper’s reconstruction of Marx’s state theory establishes that Marx and Engels treated this phenomenon not as an anomaly but as a recurring form of the bourgeois state under conditions of class equilibrium (Draper 1977). Engels generalized the category in his analysis of Bismarck’s Germany, where he saw a similar structural logic at work in a different historical setting (Engels 1884). The category was thus, from its first elaboration, intended as a portable analytical tool rather than a description of a single regime.

Leon Trotsky decisively extended the category in the 1930s. Confronting the rise of fascism, Trotsky was concerned to distinguish Bonapartism, a form of normal bourgeois rule under crisis, from fascism proper, which involved the destruction of working-class organization by an extra-parliamentary mass movement (Trotsky 1934). For Trotsky, the regimes of Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher in late Weimar were Bonapartist preludes; Hitler’s regime, once consolidated, was something qualitatively different. The Bonapartist regime, Trotsky argued, was an emergency form of rule, inherently transitional, pointing either back toward parliamentary normality or forward into fascism. Trotsky also, controversially, stretched the category to characterize Stalin’s bureaucratic regime in The Revolution Betrayed, arguing that Stalinism represented a Bonapartism sui generis, the autonomization of a bureaucratic stratum from both classes in a workers’ state (Trotsky 1937). Whatever one makes of the Soviet application, the methodological move is important: Bonapartism became, for Trotsky and his successors, a tool for contemplating state autonomy in moments of class equilibrium and crisis.

The next major theoretical extension comes from Nicos Poulantzas. Across Political power and Social Classes, Fascism and Dictatorship, and State Power and Socialism, Poulantzas systematized Marxist state theory and gave Bonapartism a structural rather than purely conjunctural meaning (Poulantzas 1968; Poulantzas 1970; Poulantzas 1978). For Poulantzas, the bourgeois state always exhibits a relative autonomy from the dominant class, because it must organize the class as a whole against the centrifugal tendencies of its competing fractions. Bonapartism, then, refers to a period in which the relative autonomy of the state becomes intensified. During this time, the executive concentrates power, parliamentary mediation breaks down, and the state apparatus becomes the primary site of conflict among class fractions. In his late work, Poulantzas proposed that this had become the normal form of the developed capitalist state under late capitalism, a regime he called “authoritarian statism,” characterized by the decline of parliamentary institutions, the concentration of power in the executive, the fusion of party and state, and the decline of formal legal procedure (Poulantzas 1978). In this account, authoritarian statism is described as Bonapartism that has become permanent and pervasive, serving as the underlying tone of advanced capitalist rule rather than merely as an expression of a crisis episode.

Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational reconstruction of Poulantzas’s framework has advanced this analysis, insisting that the state must be understood not as a thing but as a social relation, more precisely, as the institutional materialization of a balance of class forces (Jessop 1990; Jessop 2016). On this account, Bonapartism, whether episodic or structural, is the institutional crystallization of a particular conjuncture of forces, and it has its contradictions, its conditions of reproduction, and its forms of crisis. This is the Marxist inheritance on which the present analysis builds.

The Weberian Inheritance and the Patrimonial Moment

To this Marxist tradition, I want to graft a category drawn from Max Weber, one that the Marxist literature has been slow to integrate: patrimonialism. In Economy and Society, Weber distinguishes three pure types of legitimate domination: legal-rational, traditional, and charismatic, and within traditional domination, he develops patrimonialism as the dominant form of pre-modern rule (Weber 1922). Patrimonial domination rests on the personal loyalty of officials to the ruler; the apparatus of administration is treated as the ruler’s personal household; offices are dispensed as favors and held at the ruler’s pleasure; there is no clear distinction between the private wealth of the ruler and the public revenue of the polity; and rule-bound, predictable, legal-rational procedure is subordinated to the personal will of the patron.

Weber developed the category to analyze pre-modern empires, sultanates, and feudal kingships. However, Weberian scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly that of Shmuel Eisenstadt, extended the concept to analyze post-colonial regimes in which a formally modern, legal-rational state apparatus operated alongside or beneath a system of personal rule, clientelism, and rent extraction (Eisenstadt 1973). Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle (1997) specifically developed the category of neopatrimonialism in the comparative politics literature on Africa. It was refined methodologically by Gero Erdmann and Ulf Engel (2007). This literature establishes that patrimonialism is not confined to pre-modern formations: It can be the dominant administrative principle within ostensibly modern states, hollowing out the formal apparatus from within while preserving its outer forms.

It is worth distinguishing patrimonialism in this sense from Weber’s other category of personal rule, charismatic domination, since contemporary analyses of Trumpism frequently conflate the two. Charismatic domination, in Weber’s account, rests on the personal devotion of followers to a leader whose authority derives from his perceived extraordinary qualities; it is inherently unstable, episodic, and prone to be “routinized” into one of the other forms over time (Weber 1922). The American regime exhibits charismatic elements in its legitimation: the cult of personality, the rally form, and the perceived extraordinary qualities of the leader. But its administrative substance is patrimonial. The two layers must be kept analytically distinct: Charisma is the legitimating idiom by which a patrimonial-Bonapartist regime addresses its mass base, while patrimonialism is the actual principle on which the administrative apparatus is being remade. The conflation matters strategically. If one mistakes the regime for a purely charismatic phenomenon, one expects its collapse to follow the personal political fortunes of the leader. If one understands the patrimonial substance, one recognizes that an architecture of personal-loyalty administration is being built that may survive, in altered form, even through significant changes in personnel at the top.

Patrimonialism, in this synthesis, names a mode of administration: the principle on which the personnel, budgets, rule-following, and loyalty relations of the state apparatus are organized. Bonapartism, by contrast, names a political form: the relationship between the executive and the contending class fractions of the dominant bloc. The two operate at different levels of abstraction, and that is precisely why they can be fused. To say that the United States today is undergoing a patrimonial-Bonapartist transformation is to say two things simultaneously: that the executive has acquired real autonomy from the established class-fractional coalitions of the neoliberal order and that the administrative apparatus is being remade on patrimonial principles, with personal loyalty replacing rule-bound office-holding as the central administrative criterion.

Historical examples and the comparative register

Before turning to the American case, it is worth running through several historical and contemporary examples that fall within the synthetic category, since the comparative register is what makes the framework analytically productive.

The original case, Louis Bonaparte’s France from 1851 to 1870, already exhibits both moments. Marx’s society of December 10, Bonaparte’s personal retinue, is patrimonial in its essence: a household of personal clients, financiers, military adventurers, and political opportunists who depend on the ruler for their position and whose function is to staff the state apparatus on principles of personal loyalty rather than meritocratic competence (Marx 1852). The Second Empire’s economic policy, concessions to favored financiers, contracts dispensed through personal channels, and the rebuilding of Paris organized through Bonapartist patronage are patrimonial in their concrete operation, even as the political form is Bonapartist in Marx’s strict sense. The Second Empire, then, is not merely Bonapartism; it is already patrimonial Bonapartism, though the Marxist tradition has tended to read only the Bonapartist moment.

The Latin American caudillo tradition supplies a register but a distinct one. From Rosas in Argentina to Vargas in Brazil to Perón again in his second turn, Latin American politics has known many regimes in which executive concentration, personal rule, and patrimonial administration coexisted with formally republican institutions. These cases differ from European Bonapartism in their relation to the world economy. They were, for the most part, semi-peripheral or peripheral states, often dependent on commodity exports, and the autonomy of their executives was conditioned by that dependency in ways with no direct American analog.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia exemplifies the cleanest contemporary case of developed-capitalist patrimonial Bonapartism, but we must handle the comparison with care. Putin’s regime exhibits, with textbook clarity, the autonomization of the executive from the contending oligarchic fractions of the 1990s; the personalization of administration around a network of siloviki and personal clients; the fusion of family wealth with state office; the use of state resources as personal levers; and the relative subordination of capital to political access. The Russian case differs from any prospective American case in its semi-peripheral position in the world system and in its specific path of regime formation out of the Soviet collapse, but the structural logic is recognizably similar.

Silvio Berlusconi’s three turns as Italian prime minister between 1994 and 2011 constitute a more telling rehearsal of the form within a Western liberal democracy. Berlusconi entered politics from the private media-industrial complex he had built; his governments used state office to defend his personal business interests; he packed the administration with personal clients; and his legal-political combat against the magistracy prefigured many of the conflicts that have since recurred in the United States. The Italian case is instructive because it shows the form arising not from regime breakdown but from the exhaustion of an established party system: the collapse of the Christian Democrats and Socialists in the Mani Pulite crisis created the vacuum into which Berlusconi stepped, just as the exhaustion of the post-1980 American party-political order has created the vacuum into which Trumpism has expanded.

Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey supplies an intermediate case between the personalistic but episodically institutional Italian variant and the more deeply institutionalized Hungarian variant. Since his initial accession through the AKP in 2003, through the constitutional referendum of 2017, through the consolidation of presidential rule, and through the wholesale remaking of the judicial and educational apparatus, Erdoğan has built a patrimonial-Bonapartist regime in a NATO member state that retains formal elections and a residual opposition (Esen and Gumuscu 2016). The Turkish case is instructive because it exemplifies a state that, like the United States, is an important regional power with significant military assets, is entangled in international institutional architectures, and has a politically active capital fraction (the so-called Anatolian tigers) that has developed as a political-economically of the ruling party, serving as a clear analogue to certain American capital fractions whose growth has been politically mediated.

Narendra Modi’s India, similarly, has entailed the patrimonial reorganization of a major capitalist democracy whose institutional architecture is far more complex than that of the small post-communist states most often studied in the comparative literature. Modi’s regime has bound itself to specific capital fractions, the Adani and Ambani groups of family-dynastic conglomerates, in a way that recalls Bonaparte’s society of December 10 in its essentials: the use of state office to favor a personal-political coalition of capital, with the public revenue and regulatory apparatus serving as instruments of personal-political accumulation (Crabtree 2018). The Indian case, similar to the Turkish case, is enlightening for Americans because it demonstrates how the form arises not from regime breakdown but from the patrimonial transformation of a large, complex capitalist democracy during an organic crisis.

Viktor Orbán’s Hungary represented the most institutionalized variant. Orbán’s regime did not merely concentrate executive power; it rebuilt the administrative state, the judiciary, the universities, and the media on principles of personal and partisan loyalty (Scheppele 2018). Where Berlusconi remained primarily a personal-dynastic political entrepreneur whose regime did not survive his political eclipse, Orbán built an institutional architecture intended to outlast him. The Hungarian case is the model toward which American patrimonial Bonapartism may evolve if its early phase consolidates, and it is the case most closely studied by the American right intelligentsia associated with the current administration.

The American conjuncture

What conjunctural conditions have produced the American variant of this form?

The first is the exhaustion of the neoliberal order that has organized American politics since roughly 1980. The bipartisan coalition that produced NAFTA, financial deregulation, the welfare reforms of the 1990s, and the long wars of the post-2001 period began coming apart in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and has not been reconstituted. Neither party has been able to assemble a stable governing program responsive to the conditions of low growth, declining real wages for the working majority, capital’s drift toward rentierism and political access, and the secular decline of American hegemony abroad. This is what Gramsci called an “organic crisis,” a crisis of the relationship between rulers and ruled in which the inherited political forms can no longer organize consent. However, no new form has yet stabilized (Gramsci 1971, 275–6). Trumpism is best understood as the political form that has arisen within this organic crisis: not its resolution but its prolongation under new auspices.

The second is the long-run hollowing of American state capacity. Wolfgang Streeck’s work on the consolidation state describes the secular transformation of advanced-capitalist states under the discipline of bond markets. However, the underlying logic has also been at work in the American case, converting states from “tax states” that respond to citizen-democratic demands into “debt states” that respond to creditor demands (Streeck 2014; Streeck 2016). The American administrative state in 2026 is the product of forty years of cumulative privatization, contracting out, hiring freezes, the politicization of senior career positions, and the substitution of consultancy networks for permanent civil service capacity. This environment is the soil into which patrimonial principles have penetrated. The civil-service density that could resist personal-loyalty administration is significantly lower than it was even in the 1970s, not to mention the New Deal apparatus established by Roosevelt and the long Cold War security state that consolidated around it.

The third condition is the transformation of the Republican Party from an organized party of capital, with its own internal discipline and class-fractional coalitions, into something closer to a personal vehicle for the leader. The conservative legal movement, the corporate donor network, the evangelical organizational infrastructure, and the talk-radio and cable-news complex have not disappeared. However, the party’s relationship with these constituencies has been reversed. Where the party’s leadership once disciplined these constituencies into a coalition, the leader now disciplines the party against them, retaining their support by delivering on selected priorities while subordinating their organizational autonomy to his personal political vehicle. This is the patrimonialization of a major bourgeois party, a development with no real precedent in modern American political history.

The fourth condition is the specific accumulation regime within which all of this is occurring. I have argued elsewhere that this is best called “political capitalism”: an accumulation regime in which appropriation through political access, tariffs, sanctions, regulatory favor, subsidized contracts, and public-private deals becomes a primary route for the rentier fractions of capital, displacing competitive accumulation as the dominant mode. (Riley and Brenner 2022 develop a closely related argument under a slightly different label.) Patrimonial rule is functional for this regime in a way it could not be for a competitive-industrial accumulation regime. When access to the executive becomes a prime means of appropriation, the executive’s autonomy and personalization become valuable to the fractions of capital that benefit. This is the class content of the American form.

The fifth condition is strategic-imperial. The American imperial state is undergoing a transition from rules-based multilateral hegemony—the form constructed after 1945 and renovated after 1991—to a hub-and-spoke bilateralism in which the United States maintains its power through personal deals with subordinate strongmen—transactional rather than rules-based, with the leader himself as the central interlocutor. This shift is consistent with the domestic state form: patrimonial rule at home and patrimonial empire abroad are the same political logic operating at different scales. Whether this is the political form of a hegemon managing its own decline—a cheaper, more transactional imperial economy of force—or a contingent political form that happens to fit a moment is, in my view, the central question of Marxist analysis of American empire. Arrighi’s framework of hegemonic transition supplies the materialist version of the first reading (Arrighi 1994; Arrighi 2007). In this interpretation, the patrimonial-Bonapartist form serves as the political-administrative framework for the United States’ transition from a hegemonic to a multipolar world economy.

What does the American case look like in its concrete operation? It is worth being specific. We see the appointment of senior administrators based on personal loyalty rather than expertise; the use of pardons as commodities for personal allies; the dissolution of the conventional boundary between family business and state office; the assault on the civil service via the elimination of career protections and the reclassification of senior positions as political appointments; the use of tariffs not as instruments of industrial strategy but as personal levers for extracting concessions from foreign governments and domestic firms; the cultivation of personal loyalty within the security apparatus and the displacement of professional military and intelligence leadership; and the open use of the Department of Justice as an instrument of personal vendetta. These are not isolated abuses, but the systematic features of a regime being remade on patrimonial principles.

The assault on the federal civil service is the most consequential institutional dimension of this transformation. The Schedule F executive order, originally promulgated in 2020 and revived in 2025, reclassifies tens of thousands of senior career positions as political appointments removable at the president’s discretion. This is an administrative measure that converts an ostensibly merit-based bureaucracy into a patrimonial household in a single stroke. Combined with the reorganization of agencies along loyalty-political lines, the systematic dismissal of inspectors general, the politicization of military and intelligence commands, and the use of executive orders to bypass legislative authorization on questions of staffing and policy, the cumulative effect has been the most rapid transformation of the federal administrative apparatus since the New Deal, but in the opposite direction. Where the New Deal built a permanent administrative state on legal-rational principles, the present transformation dissolves that state into a network of personal-political appointments responsive to executive will. This represents the literal patrimonialization of the administrative apparatus.

The class beneficiaries are not the bourgeoisie as a whole but a determinate fraction: the politically connected rentiers; the family-capitalist and dynastic-firm fractions; and the new-tech and crypto fractions whose accumulation has been most dependent on political-regulatory favor; and the energy and military-industrial fractions whose interests align with the imperial reorientation. By contrast, the regime’s principal capitalist opponents have been the fractions of capital most disciplined by the bond markets and most exposed to global supply chains. However, their opposition has been sporadic and limited, as they lack a political vehicle to defect to.

The tensions of the form

Patrimonial Bonapartism is not a stable equilibrium. It carries within it real tensions that bear on its future.

The first is theoretical and points to a possible misreading. Classical Bonapartism presupposes a modernizing, rationalizing state apparatus—the prefectoral system in France and the imperial bureaucracy in Germany. The autonomy of the executive was, in classical Bonapartism, made possible by the existence of a developed legal-rational administration. Patrimonialism is, by contrast, the dissolution of that administration into personal-loyalty networks. So, when we describe a single regime as both Bonapartist and patrimonial, we are either describing a stable hybrid in which the autonomous executive captures and patrimonializes a still-functioning apparatus or a transitional form in which the political moment of Bonapartist concentration is the prelude to a deeper hollowing of the rational-legal state. The second reading is, I believe, closer to the truth of the American case, and it implies that we are not yet at the equilibrium point of the form but in its phase of active state destruction.

The second is the class-content tension. Bonapartism is supposed to be relatively autonomous yet ultimately functional for capital in general. Patrimonial rule, by contrast, is functional for a specific fraction. There are moments at which significant fractions of capital have opposed the regime’s policies, with the bond market’s intermittent disciplining of tariff policy as the clearest example. The repeated testing of limits and the regime’s retreat from its most extreme positions during bond market revolts indicate that capital generally retains a structural veto power. However, the fact that the limits keep being tested indicates that the regime is willing to push the relationship further than any postwar American regime has. Whether this represents capital reorganizing itself, building a state form adequate to the new political-capitalist accumulation regime, or a fractional capture of the state at the longer-term expense of total social capital is the central question of class analysis.

The third is the succession problem. Patrimonial regimes are notoriously brittle at the death or political eclipse of the patrimon. The personal-loyalty structure of the apparatus, the absence of institutionalized rules for succession, the family-dynastic ambitions of the ruler’s circle, and the rivalry of subordinate lieutenants all conspire to produce succession crises. The literature on neopatrimonialism in Africa documents this with grim clarity (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). The American case will face this problem within a determinate political horizon: the constitutional limit on presidential terms, however contested; the leader’s age and health; and the absence of an obvious successor who commands the same personal authority. How the regime will manage this transition, whether through a designated dynastic successor, a partial restoration of party-political mediation, or a deeper authoritarian institutionalization on the Hungarian model, is among the most important open questions of American politics.

The fourth is the comparative-conjunctural question. The Hungarian model of institutionalization through judicial and constitutional reconstruction has been studied by American conservative intellectuals associated with the regime, and elements of it have been imported into the United States. However, the American context is different in important respects: the federal structure, the relative independence of state-level political systems, the continuing institutional weight of capital fractions opposed to the regime, the residual organizational density of the labor movement and the social movements, and the simple fact that the United States is a hegemonic state with imperial responsibilities and not a small open economy. These factors may make full Hungarian-style consolidation more difficult, or they may produce a distinctively American variant of the form whose features are not yet fully visible.

The fifth is legitimation. Postwar American politics has rested on a specific form of legal-rational legitimation: the claim that authority is exercised through rule-bound, constitutionally constrained, professionally administered procedures. Patrimonial Bonapartism cannot continue to claim that form of legitimation, since its administrative substance contradicts it. The regime has been visibly groping for alternative legitimizing idioms: the charismatic-populist register addressed to its mass base, the civilizational-nationalist register addressed to elements of the right intelligentsia, the transactional-deal-making register addressed to the business class, and the providential-religious register addressed to evangelical constituencies. None of these has the unifying capacity of the legal-rational legitimacy it is displacing. This deficiency is a structural weakness of the form, and it is one of the conditions on which a counter-hegemonic project might be built.

Futures

What, then, are the plausible trajectories?

The first is intensification toward institutionalized authoritarianism on the Hungarian model: a consolidated patrimonial Bonapartism. This requires that the regime succeed in remaking the federal judiciary, universities, civil service, and federal apparatus to a degree that endures political transition. The regime must successfully delegitimate the opposition party or politically constrain it from full alternation. Moreover, it requires that the major factions of capital that have not endorsed the regime nevertheless accommodate themselves to it. This trajectory is possible but not guaranteed; the federal structure and the residual political density of the opposition both work against it.

The second is a succession crisis and regime instability: patrimonial Bonapartism in collapse. This trajectory follows if the regime fails to manage its succession, if the personal-loyalty networks fragment in factional conflict, or if the leader’s eclipse produces a vacuum that no designated successor can fill. The historical record of this trajectory is well documented in the neopatrimonialism literature: Eegimes built on personal rule tend to undergo turbulent transitions (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). The American outcome of such a transition is impossible to predict in detail. However, it is likely to involve a partial restoration of party-political mediation under conditions of significantly weakened administrative capacity and democratic legitimacy.

The third, and to my mind, the most probable, medium-term scenario is a prolonged organic crisis without resolution. Neither the consolidation of the regime into a stable authoritarian institutional architecture nor the restoration of the antecedent neoliberal-democratic order is fully achievable in the medium term, given the underlying conditions of secular American decline, capital’s fractured strategic orientation, and the weakness of organized political alternatives to the regime’s right. We will likely see, in this scenario, a continuing oscillation between phases of intensified patrimonial rule and phases of partial institutional restoration, with the underlying state apparatus becoming progressively less capacitated and the political form becoming progressively less recognizable as the postwar American republic.

The fourth, which is the strategic terrain on which the socialist left must operate, is the possibility of an organized political alternative built out of the working class, the social movements, and the residual democratic-republican forces. This alternative takes the regime’s patrimonial-Bonapartist character seriously. It frames its political project as a defense and renovation of democratic-republican institutions in the service of a working-class program. This is not the same as a popular front of “democracy against authoritarianism,” which dissolves class content into a constitutional defense. It is also different from a third-camp abstentionism that treats the conflict between patrimonial Bonapartism and the residual democratic order as a quarrel of bourgeois fractions in which the workers’ movement has no stake. It is, rather, a political project that recognizes the regime as a determinate enemy of the working class, since its assault on the civil service, on labor enforcement, and on the public goods that working-class life depends on is not collateral but central, while refusing to subordinate the workers’ movement to the political vehicles of the displaced neoliberal order.

A serious socialist political project in this conjuncture must operate on several fronts simultaneously. It must defend the legal-rational institutions of the residual American republic—the civil service, the courts, the universities, and the regulatory state—not because these institutions, in their existing form, fully serve working-class interests, but because their destruction strengthens patrimonial rule and weakens the working class’s capacity to compel reform. The destruction of the National Labor Relations Board’s enforcement capacity, the gutting of OSHA, and the politicization of immigration enforcement against workers and their families: these are not collateral consequences of a regime focused elsewhere. They are central elements of a regime whose class character, in its everyday operation, is anti-working class.

It must, at the same time, refuse the political subordination that the “defense of democracy” framing demands. The neoliberal-democratic order that the regime has displaced was itself in deep crisis, and its restoration on its old terms is neither possible nor desirable. The political project of subordinating the workers’ movement to the Democratic Party’s restorationist agenda, one that has organized much of the institutional Left over the past decade, is a strategic dead end. It can neither defeat the regime decisively nor offer the working class a political instrument adequate to the conditions of organic crisis.

The third front is the slow, difficult work of building, within and against the existing parties, an independent political vehicle of the working class, a vehicle that takes seriously the patrimonial-Bonapartist character of the regime, that organizes for the defense and renovation of democratic-republican institutions in the service of a working-class program, and that begins, gradually, to compete for political authority based on a different resolution of the organic crisis. The conditions for such a project are unfavorable; they were unfavorable for most of the great party-building efforts of the past two centuries. The category of patrimonial Bonapartism does not, by itself, deliver such a project. However, it specifies the regime we are confronting, and a clear specification of the enemy is the first condition of strategic clarity. The category is, in the end, a Marxist contribution to that clarity, and the use we put it to will determine whether the next phase of American politics is one in which the working class is a strategic subject or merely a spectator at its own defeat.

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