I’ll admit it: Watching the news these past years has often felt like flipping channels between a Roman epic and a 1980s rerun. Trump struts across the stage, threatening tariffs, upending alliances, and making populist gestures that both thrill and horrify. And all around me, pundits can’t stop drawing comparisons—Trump as Caesar, as Caligula, as the next accidental emperor. But behind these tired analogies, a far deeper—and more unsettling—story is playing out. One in which Karl Marx, of all people, reads the American crisis more sharply than the historians or the cable news talking heads.
Let’s challenge three bold ideas before we dive deep. First, the idea that Trump’s rise is just an American fluke, disconnected from old European thinkers like Marx. Second, the notion that globalisation is unstoppable, immune to the tantrums of any single leader. Third, the cliché that history simply repeats itself, with today’s drama as mere farce. It’s time to cut through these myths, sharpen our perspective, and see what’s truly happening beneath the spectacle.
But let’s take this step by step, and—if you’ll let me—let’s do it honestly, with no mercy for empty rhetoric.
Trump, Populism, and the Echoes of Class Struggle
Let's start with something that might surprise you: Karl Marx has been influencing American politics for over 150 years, even though most Americans would rather not admit it.
Marx isn't just some dusty revolutionary from history books. His ideas continue to surface whenever capitalism encounters rough patches. Think about it—during the Great Depression, Americans turned to his analysis of the economic crisis. In the 1960s, civil rights leaders found his class struggle concepts helpful. After the 2008 financial crash, college students rediscovered his critique of inequality.
But here's what's really fascinating: Marx predicted that capitalism would create its own enemies. As companies replace workers with machines to cut costs, they'd create what he called a "reserve army of labor"—masses of unemployed, angry people looking for someone to blame.
Sound familiar? The American Rust Belt, once the heart of manufacturing, lost millions of jobs to automation (not just outsourcing, as many believe). These displaced workers—mostly white, working-class Americans without college degrees—became the backbone of Trump's political movement.
Key Insight: Marx didn't predict Trump the man, but he absolutely predicted the conditions that made Trump's rise possible.
The Seduction and Danger of Roman Analogies
It’s easy, almost lazy, to reach for the Roman playbook when American politics goes off the rails. The spectacle—the grandiose projects, the populist gestures, the emotional instability—seems to fit. Ancient Roman emperors, especially those like Claudius, were notorious for their impulsiveness, being manipulated by their inner circles, and for perceiving enemies around every corner. Suetonius describes Claudius as “capricious and like a lunatic,” prone to cruelty and utterly lacking in decorum. Sound familiar? That’s the point. The comparison is designed to make you nod in recognition, to see Trump as just another mad emperor, and America as an empire teetering on the edge .
But let’s get real. These comparisons are more than a little dubious. They’re not just about understanding the present—they’re about projecting our fears (and sometimes our hopes) onto the past. The American Founders knew their classics, sure, but that doesn’t mean we’re destined to follow Rome’s trajectory. When we dress up modern politics in togas, we’re playing a dangerous game. We risk reducing complex, living systems to the pathologies of a single individual—falling into what historians call the “Great Man theory.” It’s seductive, because it’s simple. But life, and history, are anything but simple.
Marx’s Ghost: Why His Ideas Won’t Die
Here’s where Marx returns—less as a prophet, more as the persistent ghost in the American machine. Most mainstream economists stopped reading Marx after the Cold War, dismissing his ideas as failed relics. Yet, as universities still assign The Communist Manifesto by the thousands, you have to ask: Why does Marx keep haunting us?
The answer is simple, if uncomfortable. Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s cycles—how technology and competition drive companies to replace workers with machines, creating waves of unemployment and a “reserve army of labour”—reads today like a script for the Rust Belt’s collapse. Studies now show that most factory job losses in the US weren’t due to “bad” trade deals, but to automation. Output is at all-time highs, but jobs have vanished. The people left behind—dispossessed, angry, searching for someone to blame—became the backbone of Trump’s populist surge. Trump didn’t invent their pain; he channelled it, promising a return to vanished glory.
But Marx also warned that these moments are dangerous. When old certainties vanish and “all that is solid melts into air,” people don’t just get nostalgic—they look for strong leaders, scapegoats, and quick fixes. Marx thought revolution would follow. Instead, in our time, we get a new breed of populism: angry, nostalgic, and often self-defeating.
Economic Nationalism: Central Planning in Populist Camouflage
Now, the real twist: Trump’s economic policies, for all their anti-socialist branding, often look less like free-market capitalism and more like a strange embrace of state control. Tariffs, trade wars, “bring back jobs” rhetoric—these are the tools of economic nationalism, not market freedom. When Trump threatens Apple with tariffs unless it brings factories back, or doles out massive stimulus checks, he’s not shrinking government—he’s expanding its reach into every pocket of the market.
David McElroy captures the irony with a surgeon’s precision: Trump’s instincts are closer to Marxist central planning than the Soviets ever managed. He decides who wins, who loses, and how the economy should be shaped. The “invisible hand” is replaced by the president’s own hand, waving tariffs and threatening companies. If Obama had done the same, the cries of “socialism!” would have shaken the rafters. But when Trump does it, it’s called patriotism—proof, if you need it, that ideology is often just a mask for tribal loyalty.
The Real Danger: Fetishizing the Past, Missing the Present
So what do we do with all this? Marx himself warned about the weight of dead generations pressing on the brains of the living. He saw how people “conjure up the spirits of the past,” borrowing names and costumes to give their struggles a heroic sheen. The French Revolutionaries saw themselves as Roman Republicans; Napoleon dressed up as Caesar. But Marx also warned that when history becomes a parody of itself, it becomes a trap—a way of avoiding the real, messy work of understanding the present .
Analogies are powerful, but they’re also limiting. They can inspire, but they can also imprison us in stale categories. When we focus obsessively on the drama of the “emperor”—on Trump’s tweets, tantrums, and tariffs—we risk missing the deeper structural changes reshaping our world. We become spectators at a spectacle, fixated on the antics of the ruler, while the real dynamics—automation, globalisation, economic anxiety—slip by unnoticed .
Can Anyone Stop Globalisation? (Spoiler: No)
Let’s talk about the big word—globalisation. For decades, the US was its champion, pushing open markets and digital connections everywhere. Now, Trump’s movement rails against it, promising to “bring back” jobs, factories, and maybe even the illusion of a self-contained nation. But as Claudio Melchiorre explains, globalisation isn’t a policy—it’s a byproduct of basic human interaction. You can’t turn off the internet, stop people from wanting French cheese or Japanese anime, or erase the desire for cheaper goods. Globalisation is as natural as conversation, as inevitable as curiosity .
What Trump actually fights isn’t globalisation itself, but “delocalisation”—the loss of low-value manufacturing jobs to cheaper countries. High-tech, high-value production stays in the US, but everything else moves abroad, leaving behind economic and cultural wounds. The populist answer is tariffs, but tariffs just mean higher prices at home, a squeeze on the middle class, and—here’s the kicker—no real return of lost jobs, just a new set of losers and winners.
Final Reflection: What Now?
So where do we go from here? First, Marx’s enduring insight: economic dislocation breeds political upheaval. If we ignore the losers of automation and globalisation, we only sow more anger, more backlash, and more demagogues riding the wave. Second, the answer to our problems isn’t found in nostalgia or nationalism, but in new forms of solidarity and innovation—a way to ensure that technology and growth actually benefit the many, not just the few
And finally, let’s be wary of the cult of personality, the fixation on emperors and strongmen. As history reminds us, putting your faith in a man rather than in institutions or values is a shortcut to disappointment—and sometimes, to disaster .
I’ve written this as Gerd from FreeAstroScience because I believe the past is not a script, but a toolbox. Marx is present, along with the Roman ghosts and the American Dream. But the future—yours, mine, ours—won’t be built by recycling old costumes. It will be built by asking new questions, noticing who’s left out, and refusing easy answers.
So, what do you think? Are we repeating the past, or finally ready to break the cycle?
Written for you, by Gerd of FreeAstroScience. Where we make big, messy questions just a little clearer.
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