The American Political Regime in a Post-neoliberal Moment – Peace Campus

June 26, 2025 / leftvoice / Daniel Kóvacs

Crisis from above and class struggle from below are reshaping a fraying bipartisan regime in a post-neoliberal moment, opening paths toward authoritarianism and increased activity by the working class and oppressed. These tensions come to the fore as the remnants of the old political order brush against the emerging traits of a new moment.

A New Moment in the Bipartisan Regime

The crisis of neoliberalism has undermined political regimes all over the world, giving way to organic crises of varying degrees.¹ The American bipartisan regime has been particularly affected. After all, the United States was at the center of the 2008 economic crisis, and a myriad of far-reaching political phenomena followed, both within and outside the boundaries of the regime: the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, the 2014 Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising, Sanders and Trump’s primaries, Trump’s 2016 victory, and the 2020 BLM uprising, to name the main ones.

Several scholars and pundits, from all political backgrounds, have analyzed the country’s heightened levels of (asymmetric) polarization. A few have gone further, in an effort to unravel the deeper roots of the current political moment. Two of the most compelling examples are Illiberal America, by Steve Hahn, and The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, by Gary Gerstle. Hahn threads the path of his argument by exploring the deeply interwoven nature of liberalism and illiberalism, which questions a facile view of an ongoing, albeit problematic, march towards a more just America.² Gerstle adopts a more targeted view of the neoliberal order. He mobilizes the concept of “political order,” developed in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, to dive into the erosion of the main traits of neoliberalism, mainly free trade, limited government, and privatization — elements that were given new depth with the capitalist restoration of the former Soviet Union.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblat, who became national bestsellers with How Democracies Die, explore in Tyranny of the Minority the relationship between the Constitution and democratic backsliding in the last period. Their scope is much more limited than Hahn’s and Gerstle’s, and in typical fashion for mainstream political science, they focus their attention and prescriptions on the institutional mechanisms of the bipartisan regime. However, they bring to light the pro-fascist riot that took place in Paris on February 6, 1934, followed by the limited response offered by the French regime and the consequences it had for the end of the Third Republic. They do so to stress the importance of “semi-loyal democrats” and their acquiescence to the Far Right in the erosion of French democracy, in reference to January 6.³ Raising the 1934 events in Paris to discuss the current political scenario in the United States is in line with an interpretation that focuses unilaterally on the political institutions themselves, and overemphasizes the fascist-like elements of the current political moment. As I will discuss below, at that time Italy and Germany were already fascist and Nazi regimes, and “political polarization” was expressed by forces of revolution and counter-revolution.

I build on this comparison from a different point of view, since contrary to the authors’ thesis, it was not the perniciousness of semi-loyal democrats that eroded the Third Republic, but the advance of fascism in Europe, made possible by the treacherous politics and open class collaboration of the Communist Party and social-democracy in Europe, which in turn kept the working class and the oppressed tied to the program of the bourgeoisie.

In dialogue with the works noted above, this piece discusses important features of how neoliberalism shaped the bipartisan regime, paving the way for even higher levels of degradation of the regime as the organic crisis progresses. I use Gerstle’s definition of the end of the neoliberal order and Hahn’s grasp of the inherent illiberal vein in American politics to track the dynamics leading to January 6, 2021; and I challenge Levitsky and Ziblat’s analogy to February 6, 1934 as useful but missing key political dynamics of that period and thereby misreading their relevance today. In the final section, I engage with the challenges faced by the bipartisan regime in light of the decay of American imperialism. With the tensions brought forth by the current Trump administration — combining populist rhetoric with an austerity program and frontal attacks on immigrants — in addition to overall class struggle and increasing militarization around the world, the stage is set for a period prone to sudden shifts in the political situation. In other words, the organic crisis has become more intense, and a more Bonapartist Trump administration is both cause and consequence.

In the United States, class struggle has not yet been the predominant factor provoking the organic crisis. However, key phenomena have emerged from below. Over the last several years, the youth have become more sympathetic to socialism, and the labor movement has shifted to take a more active position in national politics. Strikes and unionization drives have increased in number, although overall unionization rates have continued to decline. Analyzing the tenets of the current crisis of the bipartisan regime is key to grasping the potential for more acute class struggle to emerge and how it might take paths towards class independence.

Liberal Problems, Illiberal Solutions

Hahn covers vast ground, from the first years of the British Empire to Trump’s first term. With a compelling command of American historiography, Illiberal America sheds light on America’s repressive, authoritarian, and coercive traits that were baked into its fibers from the outset. Specifically, Hahn shows that these components were present at the start of colonization, challenging a teleological view of history toward liberty and freedom based on private property and political rights.

Closer to contemporary events, Hahn argues that “fascist pulses” ran deep within civil society and in sectors of the regime in the 1920s and 1930s. As an example, the American Legion — a society of U.S. combat veterans that arose to squash the workers movement — was “subsidized by large corporations and the National Association of Manufacturers, and deployed vigilantes to break strikes and attack union organizers, especially as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began to expand.”⁴ Hahn then brings to light the ideological and political rearrangement of the Far Right in post-World War II America. The threats of the Soviet Union and basic political rights for Black people heightened a sense of unwanted change for large swaths of Americans. However, illiberal tendencies did not come only via McCarthyism, George Wallace, or “law and order” Nixon; they continued to gain steam in subsequent decades. Building on Elizabeth Hinton’s From The War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Hahn pinpoints the intensifying state repression against Black communities and the militarization of the police as markers of neoliberalism in America. In this light, the Trump presidency emerged as a result of a mainstream politics that had already strengthened corporations; attacked labor, democratic rights, and minorities; and hollowed out remnants of the welfare state.⁵ Its nature and politics conform to an acute iteration of the deep dynamic at play, which Hahn grasps with precision: in America, “illiberal solutions always seem the resort for liberal detected problems.”⁶

The particular vein of “illiberal solution” at play in today’s America is traced by Gerstle, who argues that the neoliberal order ended in the 2010s, although important features of neoliberalism still linger. A political order, a concept that builds upon his previous work on the New Deal with Steve Fraser, refers to a period where the economy, politics, and overall ideology move within the boundaries framed by it, in a mutually reinforcing dynamic.⁷ Within it, differences among political and ideological elites are not insignificant but tend toward an overall agreement. The neoliberal order was established as a response to the decay of the previous New Deal order. For decades, the neoliberal order “persuaded a large majority of Americans that free markets would unleash capitalism from unnecessary state controls and spread prosperity and personal freedom throughout the ranks of Americans and then throughout the world.”⁸ This contrasted with the New Deal order, which was informed by the acceptance of the state as an actor in shaping society, mitigating corporate power, and expanding the federal government, among other attributes.

Gerstle emphasizes that the economic crisis of the 1970s was fundamental to the emergence of neoliberalism. At center stage in a convoluted 1960s and 1970s lay the tensions between classes, filled with opportunities for the working class. Neoliberalism was long in the making, but its implementation was an arduous process resulting from class struggle and steeped in its contingencies. If the United States came out of the war as the strongest capitalist country, it was forced to share the world with the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union bureaucracy kept playing the role of class conciliator at every opportunity, its existence still posed a direct challenge to the United States.

Acute class struggle emerged in the immediate aftermath of WWII and the following decades. More decisive conflicts took shape in the “periphery” of the world right after the war, as was the case with Greece. In imperialist countries, the 1960s and 1970s were decades of massive anti-war movements (including the vibrant fight in the United States against the war in Vietnam), radical civil rights, and the alliance of students and workers. Neoliberalism coalesced due to this particular relation of forces that relied on the defeat of significant struggles worldwide. It is essential to grasp how these political clashes and tensions shaped the changing order; otherwise, neoliberalism (or any other “order” per Gerstle’s definition) may appear as a phenomenon with a life of its own, detached from deeper tensions between classes.⁹

The Political Cost of Neoliberalism

No new major political parties arose in the United States during the New Deal and Neoliberal orders, and the regime retained its features. However, the relationship between the working class and the bipartisan regime changed substantially. The New Deal order brought the working class into the Democratic Party’s electorate, as well as Black people and other minority groups. The former was won over by the Roosevelt administration’s close relationship with unions, to quell more radical expressions of class struggle and fold the emerging mass unionization into the bipartisan regime. The latter were consolidated into the Democratic Party constituency as a result of the civil rights legislation.

Flexibility was never an attribute of the American political regime; however, it stiffened over the decades, after the end of racial segregation and throughout neoliberalism. A double shift occurred: the long process of Dixiecrats going to the Republican Party and more liberal-leaning Republicans moving to the Democratic Party. This was accompanied by a decrease in bipartisan collaboration and the brewing of more profound differences around desirable paths for the United States that took shape within the scope of neoliberalism. It is important to frame this process as the result of a programmatic shift in both parties. The GOP consolidated its conservatism, while the Democrats aimed to fold into its ranks the expanding voting bloc of minorities. The rearrangement of both parties strained the existing bipartisan regime, leading it to the current rigidity of conventional legislative activity. In other words, the current ossified regime can be understood as a “political cost” of neoliberalism. The enduring effects of this latent dynamic were dimmed as long as neoliberalism remained a political order: the differences between parties, however stark, stood upon a shared interest in maintaining the basis of neoliberalism.

The 2008 economic crisis struck a blow at the core of that order. The United States was its epicenter, and its reverberations created aftershocks from below, including Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, as well as the Trump and Sanders campaigns in 2016. While neoliberalism was dissolving, the political regime worked under the same overall features. In general terms, this was the case until January 6, 2021. By then, Trump had already upended the Republican party, but his administration more or less continued operating within the existing boundaries, although it foreshadowed changes that could come, given the opportunity. An attempt at a bipartisan position on January 6 was set in motion on that day, and while it showed a certain level of “reserves” of the bipartisan regime and was crucial in stopping a more profound crisis, these measures had a short life. Ultimately they laid bare the political establishment’s limitations developed throughout neoliberalism.

The changes shifting within the GOP with Trump at its helm set forth an accommodation to the challenges posed by a post-neoliberal moment. In that sense, January 6 was a watershed event, and its repercussions have given constitutional latitude to the Executive Office via Trump v. United States, strengthening the current Trump administration. At the same time, it is impossible to understand Trump’s rise within the GOP and his 2024 victory without analyzing the role played by the Democratic Party’s acquiescence: Clinging to the defense of the status quo, without the political strength to pass the bulk of “Bidenomics,” and holding on to “anti-Trumpism” as a testament to the paucity of ideas in its ranks.

Paris 1934 and January 6

January 6, 2021 was the highest point of the organic crisis in the United States. The attack on the Capitol by MAGA members, cheered on by a defeated president who had been trying to subvert the election, showcased to the entire world the depth of the challenges the bipartisan regime was facing. In The Tyranny of the Minority, Levitsky and Ziblat engage with January 6 and the challenges to democracy facing the United States today through the historical example of the pro-fascist riots in Paris on February 6, 1934. In both instances of authoritarian turns, the authors highlight the centrality of actors they term “semi-loyal democrats,” or those who capitulate to threats to democracy due to political expediency.

In France, the initial years after the 1929 crash were less harsh than those of other European countries. Its political institutions came out unscathed compared to Italy and Germany, for example. But by 1934, the situation had changed: economic crisis had hit hard, bringing about social and political polarization. Several pro-fascist leagues had been forming in previous years. They came together on February 6 on Place de La Concorde in Paris to launch an assault on France’s Third Republic to repudiate the coalitional government of the French Socialist Party and the Radical Party. While a coup did not materialize, thousands of fascist protesters, led by fascist militias, marched to the Chamber of Deputies and tried to occupy the premises. The melee ended the same day, but not before 17 casualties ensued from the clash between antifascist forces and the police. It foreshadowed the horrors of things to come, but more importantly, it showed fascism was a possible path for France in its interwar years. Badly shaken by the 1930s recession and feeling the social and political consequences of the First World War, France was in turmoil, with both the reactionary forces and the working class and oppressed taking the initiative.

For Levitsky and Ziblat, “semi-loyal democrats” in the form of the Republican Federation played a decisive role in the collapse of parliamentary democracy in France. The conservatives were too lenient in their response to the fascist riots and left the committee that was created to investigate the events of February 6. In Levitsky and Ziblat’s words: “The resulting committee report was virtually toothless. In the absence of accountability for the events of February 6, French democracy was badly weakened. Within six years, it would be dead.” In liberal fashion, the authors analyzed events by focusing on political institutions, as if their relative autonomy was closer to an absolute. During those six years, however, the political situation shifted, and the decisive fight was happening elsewhere. At center stage were neither semi-loyal nor loyal democrats but workers, workers’ organizations, and the socialist and Communist parties, albeit with different perspectives. France in these decisive years was the stage for one of the first popular front experiences. In May 1935, the French Foreign Minister, Pierre Naval, and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Maxim Litvinov, signed the Treaty of Mutual Aid. This treaty marked an abrupt shift from the ultra-left politics of the Third Period to open class collaboration; as one of the consequences of the treaty, the Soviet Union approved France’s military rearmament. The popular front (People’s Front in France) was rationalized rhetorically by the Communist Party as an example of the “united front” tactic elaborated by the Third International in 1921 and 1922.

In fact it was anything but a united front. The united front is a tactic geared towards uniting the forces of the working class against the bourgeoisie. It involves forcing the different leaderships of the working class, such as unions, union federations, socialist (the SFIO in France at this point) and Communist parties, and other organizations to “strike together” around a specific goal. Complete political independence, including the freedom of those involved to criticize the politics of other parties or groups, is of vital importance. Through a common political experience in class struggle that unites the ranks of the working class, and a correct orientation of revolutionary groups, the united front may accelerate the development of a revolutionary party with massive reach and pose the necessity of a workers’ government, in this context, to avoid fascism and war.¹⁰

The popular front, by contrast, is a bloc of the leadership of the working class with bourgeois parties. When the Communist Party joined the popular front, it supposedly represented national interests. But in fact the goal of the popular front is to subordinate the interests and the politics of the working class to their class enemies. Before the end of the French Third Republic by the invasion of the German army, there was a massive wave of working-class activity, with factories being taken over (which inspired the UAW strikes in Detroit), and clashes between antifascist and fascist forces in the streets. Expanding this wave into a hegemonic working-class politics was the only path to prevent the catastrophe of fascism and World War II. However, adopting the popular front approach in France, Spain, and several other countries, including the United States, systematically foreclosed this possibility.

Trump 2.0 Amid an Ossified Regime

The tensions in the U.S. political regime are intrinsically tied to class struggle. Looking to France in 1934, the treacherous politics of Stalinism, veering from ultra-leftism to the Popular Front, played a crucial role in impeding a response from the working class. The political regime, the structure of the mainstream parties, and the absence of a strong Communist party are among the differences between 1934 France and the United States today. France’s presence in international politics at the time and that of the United States now are also miles apart. However, the 1934 episode and its aftermath illuminate overall trends relevant for the United States currently — and not for the reasons Levitsky and Ziblat highlight.

Trump 2.0 is directly linked to January 6. The assault on the Capitol stands as the weakest point of the American political regime after World War II. The committee to investigate January 6 was not as pro-forma as the French committee: it served as the basis for the second (defeated) impeachment trial of Trump. The FBI, already under tension and divided, arrested over 900 people, and the Far Right was put on the defensive. However, the GOP quickly chose to embrace Trump again. The “semi-loyal democrats” took the path of appeasement, reversing their previous repudiation of Trump for January 6.¹¹ The Supreme Court’s decision concerning January 6 found that presidents cannot be indicted for crimes committed during their administration, a landmark ruling that paved the way for a stronger Executive. The consequences of January 6 are also the responsibility of the Democrats, who had done their best to channel Black Lives Matter to the ballot box, and later to contain and “administer” the challenges that arose out of labor and the Palestine Movement.

Trump’s victory relied on a coalition of different blocs of capital and a MAGA base composed of middle-class, rural, and working-class sectors. Trump’s convoluted agenda contrasts with what little the Democratic Party has to offer. Based on Project 2025 and its vast think tank network, Trump 2.0 is an attempt to combine a stronger Executive, to the detriment of Congress; the acquiescence of the Supreme Court to the Executive; and a “classic” austerity program. A fiercely anti-immigrant populist ideology tentatively welds these unwieldy components together, justifying and articulating Trump’s agenda through a xenophobic and nationalist program; however, recent developments in Los Angeles have shown the important limits of this rhetoric to bind the coalition together. The ineptitude of the Democratic Party has pushed a part of Big Tech towards Trump, with the promise of fiscal incentives, deregulation, and a promise to refrain from using the levers of the state against their companies.

Contrary to some interpretations, the Trump administration is not acting to reduce the size of government in and of itself; rather he is politicizing the state apparatus that has been in place since after WWII. After the war, the American state expanded dramatically. An imposition of its newfound standing in the international order, a stronger Executive, and a more centralized state led to the creation of a myriad of federal agencies, offices, and programs. The New Deal “order” augmented the powers of the federal government, but it stood on the grounds of state rights and racial segregation. After WWII, mainly via civil rights legislation, the federal government took over the “police powers” of the states, challenging the “supremacy” of the latter. Trump seeks to selectively dismantle and rearrange the bureaucratic apparatus to concentrate power in the Executive under the guise of “draining the swamp.”

As a result, a stronger Bonapartism is emerging compared to the first term.¹² The incredibly undemocratic nature of the political regime (maintained by both parties) disproportionately favors the GOP in Congress. Combined with Trump’s ability to use the state machine against enemies and reward friends, the GOP is actively ceding Congress’ traditional authority. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority favors Trump and his presidential ambitions. This does not equate with unqualified support, however; as has been the case on several issues, the Supreme Court will not fully relinquish its institutional independence.

The resistance against abductions and ICE operations in Los Angeles has reintroduced open class struggle onto the chessboard of the organic crisis. The mobilizations in LA have been composed of workers, youth, and popular sectors that escape the reach of unions; their current lukewarm response to the outrageous attacks on immigrants indicates their adaptation both to the bipartisan regime and to the more conservative layers of their ranks. For the last several years, with important exceptions such as BLM in 2020, the organic crisis had been most intense within the boundaries of the bipartisan regime. The exigencies of the new moment have been clashing with the ossified regime, in a dynamic where the Democratic Party, the party of the status quo, has been paying the price by focusing its energies on keeping the crisis from overflowing the boundaries of the regime. The price is steep, for thus far the defense of the regime has come at the party’s expense. The union leaderships have been a decisive collaborator; the Biden administration can be understood as the grafting of leaders of the progressive left onto the political projects of the administration, combined with a legislative semi-paralysis imposed by its more vocally conservative wing, in a constant effort to keep the affairs of the working class and the oppressed separated from politics.

The administration is focused on many complex goals — some that are interconnected and others that conflict with each other. To the few mentioned before, we should add the repositioning of the United States on the world stage. The “nationalist” turn attests to the steep decline of U.S. hegemony after 2008; Trump’s tariffs can also be seen as a chaotic method of pursuing this retrenchment from a position of initiative. “Trump Always Chickens Out” derives from a clash between the ambition of this project and the challenges of a decaying global power. Europe has responded with a sizable increase in military spending. This alone would require the full focus of the administration, which finds itself fighting in other arenas.

In this political scenario, the administration is forced to overextend itself, increasing the tensions between Trump and his political adversaries, whether domestic or international. It also injects increased volatility into the situation, which in turn forces a reaction from his targets. The entry of class struggle onto the scene — such as the struggle against the immigration raids in LA — shapes and reshapes these reactions, toward exacerbating them further. There have been different efforts toward de-escalation by circumventing Trump, from the operation to cool tensions with the federal government in California to wings of finance capital lobbying against such high tariffs; nevertheless these movements consume the actors involved, increase tensions, and have unpredictable outcomes. Unpredictable results are also prone to take place as a result of the administration’s take on international politics — which in turn affects its own coalition, and the regime to a degree. At the time of this writing, Trump has claimed that the United States’ attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure effectively imposed a cease-fire between Iran and Israel, after the latter attacked Iranian military bases and the former retaliated with strikes in Israel. Trump’s attack on Iran has invited strong criticism from MAGA public figures, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson being the most prominent examples. The situation is far from over.

The repercussions of class struggle in part determine and reshape a regime frayed by the end of the neoliberal world order. It is in response to this shifting terrain, both from above by the state and its institutions, and from below in the response of the working class, that the old political order and the emerging traits of this new moment brush up against each other, coexisting in mutual tension both domestically and internationally. This creates the conditions for sharp shifts in the political situation, both to the right — in the form of deepening Bonapartism and authoritarian measures — and to the left — with a higher degree of activity of the working class and oppressed.The possibility of “de-escalation,” however costly and unpredictable, is an essential asset of the regime. While the labor movement in the United States has been in an uptick for several years, pushed by BLM and Generation U, and the movement for Palestine has revived the student movement, the overall level of class struggle in the United States does not warrant an all-out assault on the regime by fascist forces to preserve the interests of American imperialism. We are not under fascism in America, as the financial bourgeoisie has not thrown its last card on the table; and there is no massive armament of the petty bourgeoisie with the goal of destroying institutions of the working class and capitalist democracy. Neither is the political situation devoid of fascistic tendencies, inasmuch as Bonapartism carries them within. In 1934 Trotsky argued against the French Communist Party and those who based their political orientation on a clear-cut differentiation between capitalist democracy and fascism: “between parliamentary democracy and the fascist regime, a series of transitional forms, one after another, inevitably interposes itself, now ‘peaceably,’ now by civil war.” The tensions towards a relatively provisional stabilization of the bipartisan regime or the further development of Bonapartist features — or even the increase of the activity of the working class and oppressed — will not be decided only on the national stage. Initiatives of the working class and the oppressed all over the world, from Palestine, to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America will shape the responses of the imperialist bourgeoisie. In this interregnum, only the decided actions of the working class and the oppressed can combat the advance of the Far Right, and in doing so, defend their historic interests.

Source: https://www.leftvoice.org/the-american-political-regime-in-a-post-neoliberal-moment/

Notes

As I have explored in previous articles, “The Gramscian concept of organic crisis interweaves three components: 1) the antagonisms between the ‘representatives’ and the ‘represented’; 2) the questioning of the ruling class as being able to lead the nation; and 3) a crisis of state authority. The emergence of the organic crisis in the United States was the result of the crisis of neoliberalism, and it propelled different sectors of society into action in the context of this crisis of hegemony.”
Hahn reminds the reader of the full content of the John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill”…
According to the authors, “Semi-loyal democrats, by contrast [to loyal democrats], deny or downplay their allies’ violent or antidemocratic acts. They may blame violence on ‘false flag’ operations. They may minimize the importance of anti-democratic behavior, deflect criticism by drawing attention to similar (or worse) behavior by the other side, or otherwise justify or condone the acts. Semi-loyalists frequently try to have it both ways: expressing disapproval of the perpetrators’ methods while sympathizing with their goals. Or they may simply remain silent in the face of violent attacks on democracy.” Levitsky and Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority, pp. 43-44.
Hahn continues “Indeed, the Legion was part of an extensive latticework of newer groups and well-established organizations through which fascist ideas could circulate and find receptive audiences”. Hahn, Illiberal America, p. 239.
Ibid., 342–43.
Ibid., 173.
Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle, eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, p. 297.
As Emilio Albamonte summarizes: “Neoliberalism was a reactionary solution to the indeterminate relation of forces resulting from the contradictory outcome of the Second World War, which had been deferred by the Yalta order, hence its historical significance. It was imposed by dictatorships in Latin America — in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, etc. — that were used as an ‘example.’ They defeated very powerful strikes like those of the British miners, the strikes in Italy, and the air traffic controllers’ strike under the Reagan government that had paralyzed the U.S. economy. They defeated these and many other processes, and then spread to China, achieving an important period of relative stability that was called ‘neoliberalism.’ And they imposed that ideology that would become ‘the most successful in history,’ as Perry Anderson said. This is what became exhausted in 2008.”
In 1921 and 1922, when the tactic was formulated, it relied upon the Communist Parties, at that moment without a hegemonic influence among the working class, to expand their reach to lead vast swaths of the working class and the oppressed. With the Thermidorian politics of Stalinism, the Left Opposition, and then the movement for a Fourth International, carried on the revolutionary character of the tactic.
Levitsky and Ziblat elaborate, “The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, followed the semi-loyalist’s playbook to a T. They engaged in appeasement throughout Trump’s presidency, acquiescing to Trump’s antidemocratic behavior and protecting him from impeachment and removal. Both McConnell and McCarthy knew that Biden won the 2020 election and were troubled by Trump’s refusal to accept defeat. Both men were appalled by the January 6 insurrection, blamed Trump for it, and privately told colleagues he should be removed. […] When it became clear that most Republican voters remained loyal to Trump, however, GOP leaders reversed to appeasement”. Levitsky and Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority, 126,127.
Bonapartism refers to a form of government that arises out of the inability of the bourgeoisie to rule as before. It relies more directly on the state apparatus, bureaucracy, the Executive and armed forces to the detriment of Congress. Its aim is to defend private property and impose order, while avoiding decisive confrontations.

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