(I include this piece because I agree with Foster's take on the class composition of MAGA, which agrees with my observations. I do not agree with his views concerning fascism in this regard. Call me old fashioned by I'm with Dimitrov. )
Deciphering the MAGA Ideology: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster
By John Bellamy Foster, Zhao Dingqi (Posted Aug 08, 2025)
This interview was conducted by Zhao Dingqi for the journal World Socialism Studies.
Zhao Dingqi: You once pointed out that the MAGA movement is essentially an alliance between the monopolistic capitalist right wing and the lower middle class. How do you understand the reasons behind the formation of this alliance, and how does it reflect the class contradictions in contemporary capitalism? Why are the demands of the “forgotten working class” being exploited by capital and right-wing forces?
John Bellamy Foster: Political movements that fall within the fascist genus are not all the same. However, they share certain common characteristics. The antonym of fascism is liberal democracy, not socialism. That is, fascism is a particular political movement/state form within capitalism opposed to liberal democracy. It arises when the capitalist class and its state are in structural crisis. The object of the fascist movement is to annihilate the liberal democratic state through a process of ensuring that the various institutions of the state and civil society fall into line with the requirements of the fascist/neofascist requirements. In Hitler’s Germany this synchronization process was called Gleichschaltung. Under fascism the ruling class has a more direct hold on the state, while the political/constitutional order is one of permanent emergency governed by a leadership (Führer) principle.
All of this is the product of specific class alliance. In Marxist theory, which formulated the classical analysis of fascism in the 1930s and ’40s, fascism is a class formation consisting of an alliance mainly between a section of monopoly capital and the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie, also encompassing some of the more privileged sectors of the working class. The lower middle class in capitalist society occupies a contradictory class relation in that it includes small business owners, low-level managers, small rural property owners, and exurban/rural populations. It is predominantly white and in the United States includes the most nationalist, revanchist, racist, misogynist sectors of the population, often connected to evangelical Christian fundamentalism. People in this sector of the population see themselves as a step below the professional managerial class or upper middle class above them, in terms of class, status, and power, and a step above the mass of the working class, a much more racially diverse population and less affluent population below. Consequently, they perceive both the upper middle class and the working class as their enemies. It is the lower middle class that historically has been the basis of all movements in the fascist genus. Fascism typically comes into being when elements at the very top of monopoly capital actively mobilize the lower middle class, the rearguard of the system, based on its own nationalist, revanchist, and racist ideology, thus achieving a mass base for a rightwing turn in the society. But this mobilization of the lower middle class is in some ways dangerous to big capital because these forces often oppose the international interests and even the accumulation interests of the capitalist class. Such mobilization of the lower middle class based on a revanchist ideology (such as Make America Great Again) only occurs when key sectors of the dominant capitalist interests perceive the situation as increasingly desperate, requiring desperate efforts and the recourse to fascist rule. Liberal theories generally obscure the class basis of fascism, trying to associate it simply with its ideological forms such as racism and militant nationalism.
In response to the latter part of your question, it is not a “forgotten working class” that is the basis of fascism but the lower middle class. This has been obscured by liberal media in the United States, which once the neofascist movement arose first in the Tea Party and then in relation to Trump, suddenly pronounced that its basis was the “white working class.” This, however, is a distortion of the class basis and ideology of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
ZD: What is the core logic of the MAGA ideology? Trumpism consolidates power by inciting racism, xenophobia, and sexism. How does this strategy serve capital accumulation?
JBF: MAGA ideology is aimed primarily at the lower middle class, which is Trump’s base. But it is a product of a number of key think tanks such as the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Renewing America, American Compass, the Marathon Institute, and others. These various think tanks are all funded by billionaires and are so structured as to promote an ideology and forms of propaganda designed to influence primarily the lower middle class and privileged elements of the working class. The ideology is directed at exploiting the extreme nationalism, militarism, racism (including of course hatred toward immigrants), patriarchal-misogynist views, and evangelism of this sector of the population. The MAGA ideology is particularly geared to promoting lower middle-class rage against the upper middle class and working-class elements of society (not the capitalist class). The professional managerial class/stratum is irrationally presented in this ideology as the “ruling class” (as if the capitalist class did not rule the society) because of their supposed influence within the “administrative state,” Hence, the professional-managerial class, which of course includes the bulk of the intelligentsia, is blamed for the economic effects of neoliberalism, which had a devastating effect on the lower middle class, along the working class. The working class is presented in MAGA propaganda as increasingly nonwhite, with low income and poverty, and full of those “undeserving” sectors of the population who live off the government largesse.
What we could call the more sophisticated aspects of MAGA ideology are designed to achieve certain instrumental ends, beneficial to key sectors of monopoly-finance capital. This includes providing the rationale for dismantling the liberal democratic state, already corrupted by neoliberalism, and converting not only the state in all of its branches, but also the entire ideological-state apparatus, encompassing the media, education, and the arts, to MAGA ends, while weakening the role of nongovernmental organizations, and encouraging corporations to remove all programs linked to the liberal democratic state. Privatization of all state functions is encouraged as well as the further concentration and centralization of capital.
The MAGA ideology thus is basically an attack-dog propaganda system somewhat reminiscent of 1950s McCarthyism in the United States. It presents as its main ideological enemies, employing a mixture of fact and fiction, entities such as so-called Cultural Marxism, Woke ideology (used as a derogatory term on the right and a racist dog whistle to refer to radical and humanistic views), Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, climate change activism, and the like. Most of this serves the goal of removing all resistance to the neofascist project, dismantling the main institutions of the state and civil society connected to liberal democracy, while further privatizing and corporatizing the entire society. This then leaves monopoly capital fully in charge, able to prevent any state action that interferes with financial interests and to organize, the New Cold War against China, in tandem with the Pentagon. The whole MAGA ideology/propaganda system is concocted in the think tanks by a relatively small number of MAGA intellectuals and then disseminated in books, by influencers in social media. blogs and podcasts and further disseminated to the general public through FOX News, Breitbart, and various other mass outlets. The MAGA ideology has now penetrated in one way or another into most of the formerly liberal media, which are in rapid retreat. Donald Trump himself, while not an originator of these ideas, is a major disseminator of the same main talking points, which he effectively parrots.
ZD: Why do you refer to the MAGA movement and Trumpism as neofascism? What are the differences between this neofascism and traditional fascism?
JBF: Fascism is generally perceived in terms of the classical fascism of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and to some extent Mussolini’s Italy. In the 1930s in these countries (even earlier in Italy) a considerable role was played initially by militarized stormtroopers: the brownshirts and the blackshirts. Millions of Jewish people, political radicals and dissenters were sent to concentration camps in the Holocaust. The remilitarization of society led to the Second World War. Obviously, we are in a different historical period. Not all the relations are the same. Rather than simply referring to fascism, then, as if it were a single entity frozen in time, it is useful to recognize that there are some historical differences, even with all the similarities, and to refer, then, to neofascism. Moreover, the term neofascism has often been used, particularly in Europe, by rightwing movements themselves to describe their orientation. Both classical fascism and neofascism are both forms of the fascist genus, evident particularly in terms of the type of class formation involved and its war on the liberal democratic state.
ZD: Why have tech oligarchs and the tech right-wing, represented by Musk, chosen to ally with Trump and the MAGA faction? What common interests and contradictions exist among them?
JBF: Here I think it is useful to look at how the MAGA movement came into being and why. Here we have to go back to the 2007-09 Great Financial Crisis. This crisis was so severe that it threatened the meltdown of the entire financial system. The financial meltdown didn’t happen, but was stopped short, because of the massive intervention of the Federal Reserve Board in the United States and other Central Banks in Europe and elsewhere. But the danger was real, and the financial crisis ushered in the Great Recession. The core capitalist economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan all experienced a considerable period of negative growth and a slow recovery afterwards. But in the China the economy went down momentarily and then shot right back up again. This signaled definitively for the first time that the Chinese economic growth was virtually unstoppable, making it clear that China represented a real threat to U.S. global economic hegemony in the near future in way that had not been perceived before.
In the Obama administration the reacted in 2011 with a Pivot to Asia, meant to somehow contain China. Yet, there was a degree of uncertainty due to China’s change in leadership. For some time, it was believed that Xi Jinping as the emerging new leader would be a Chinese Gorbachev, who would dismantle “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and introduce full neoliberalism in China, allowing the United States and the entire “triad” of the United States, Europe, and Japan, to reassert their global dominance, bringing China to heel. However, by 2015, it became clear to the U.S. ruling class that Xi’s ascendance meant the renewal of China’s socialist-directed path, led by the Communist Party of China (CPC). The result was that when Trump came into office in 2017, a New Cold War with China was aggressively launched by the United States. This meant among other things a big buildup in military spending.
Crucial to the New Cold War is what is now sometimes referred to the AI War with China over dominance within the realm of artificial intelligence. The entire tech sector, particularly that part centered in Silicon Valley, is fully integrated with the big digital, AI push taking place, in which the crucial funding, and the whole legal-political framing of the development of AI is based in the state, primarily via the Pentagon. The digital monopolists therefore needed more direct control of the state to secure their operations. Musk’s SpaceX is one of the biggest Pentagon contractors. In general, both financial capital and tech capital perceived a greater need to secure governmental control, and control of civil society. Fossil fuel capital too is a big backer of Trump wanting the elimination of the subsidies to alternative energy, and governmental retreat from all efforts to combat climate change. Finally, private equity, that is, private capital that is not publicly traded and thus less subject to regulation, often controlled by particular billionaires has heavily backed the Trump-MAGA neofascist movement. All of these interests wanted a dismantlement of liberal democracy. A large part of the justification was the necessity of the New Cold War with China, and a new kind of digital war economy pervading the entire society.
]The other big development resulting from the Great Financial Crisis was the rise almost immediately of the rightwing Tea Party, based in the lower middle class, which showed for the first time that the mobilization of this sector of society under the hegemony of monopoly capital was possible in the present historical conjuncture, eventually leading to the Trump phenomenon and the hegemony of neofascism, or at least of a neofascist-neoliberal alliance.
ZD: Since Trump’s second term in office, who constitutes Trump’s current administration team? What domestic policies has he implemented in the United States? How do these policies reflect the interests of monopolistic capital?
JBF: It is somewhat more difficult to say who constitutes the main team of the Trump administration than in earlier administrations because Trump operates like a Caesar, outside normal rules and relying heavily on ad hoc advisors who have no clear official designation and operate behind the scenes. It is important to recognize that the second Trump administration when he came into office included thirteen billionaires, having a combined net worth of $460 billion, signaling more direct oligarchic rule. In comparison, the net worth of Biden’s cabinet was $118 million.
The most important figures associated with the new regime, I would say, are multi-billionaire Elon Musk, previously head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), though he has now largely cut his ties with the administration; Vice President J. D. Vance, who is very closely tied, much more than Trump himself, to the main MAGA neofascist think tanks; Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is a dedicated anti-Communist ideologue; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who sees himself as a modern Crusader warrior; Steve Miller, who now operates as Trump’s main anti-immigration planner; Peter Navarro, Trump’s big promoter of the tariff war on China; Stephen Miran, Trump’s chief economist, who developed the economic strategy behind Trump’s tariffs (known as the prospective Mar-a-Lago Accord); Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and the Budget and a key figure in both the Heritage Foundation and the Center for the American Way, who it is believed wrote many of Trump’s initial executive orders. In terms of the State Department, the real thinker determining policy is Michael Anton, is the director of policy planning, a major MAGA ideologue connected to the Claremont Institute. The big thinker behind U.S. defense planning and the New Cold War on China, including plans for limited nuclear war, is the undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby. Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and founder of Palantir is there behind the scenes, with six members of the National Security Council directly beholden to him. The combination of billionaires and MAGA figures emerging from think tanks funded by billionaires is key to the new hypernationalist corporate agenda.
ZD: You have warned that Trumpism is a “gradual dismantling of the democratic system.” How does the MAGA movement conceal its undermining of democratic procedures behind the facade of “anti-establishment”?
JBF: In MAGA ideology, as constructed particularly within the Claremont Institute, the enemy is the “administrative state” plus the media and education institutions, which are all said to be dominated by a “ruling class”—referring not to monopoly-finance capital, but rather to the professional managerial class/stratum—which is said to be Cultural Marxist and “Woke” in its ideology and to rule over not only the administrative state, but also the media and educational institutions and even partly infecting corporations through diversity, equity, and inclusion provisions. The Pentagon itself is accused of being influenced by Woke ideology, and affected by Critical Race Theory, and LGBTQ+ ideology. These “ruling class” elements, that is, the professional-managerial class/intelligentsia need to be cleared out or taught to succumb to the new order, including in higher education institutions. It is important to understand that in these terms an anti-establishment perspective is not an anti-capitalist perspective. It means rather eliminating all radical elements while getting mainstream liberals to fall into line with neofascism through the Gleichschaltung process characteristic of political movements in the fascist genus. What is not criticized in all of this is the main capitalist interests in the society, which are not considered to be part of the “ruling class” but somehow suppressed by the administrative state. Such an irrationalist ideology has long been characteristic of fascist-type movements as Georg Lukács explained in The Destruction of Reason.
ZD: What contradictions exist within the current MAGA movement? How does it handle the relationships between monopolistic capital and the lower middle class and the white working class? How does it manage the relationships among industrial capital, military industrial capital, and tech capital?
JBF: There are plenty of contradictions within the MAGA movement, the principal one being between the billionaire class of monopoly-finance capital and the lower middle class. The lower middle class, though seeing the administrative state and so-called cultural Marxism as their chief ideological enemies, and thus the professional managerial class and the working class, find themselves objectively in many ways opposed to the capitalist class itself, which is concerned primarily with the accumulation of capital, and thus global in interests, seeking to concentrate all power and wealth around itself, and more than willing to impoverish the lower middle class itself. Thus, the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” which slashes Medicaid, and its cut in social services across the board will have devastating effects on the lower middle class, although there are attempts to insulate this sector of society from the worst effects. Thus, the cuts will hurt the working class more than the lower middle class and the latter will benefit to some extent from Trump’s tax cuts, even though the main beneficiaries will be the very rich and the super-rich. In past fascist movements, the lower middle class is always betrayed by the fascist state apparatus, once it comes into power, while owes its real allegiance to the oligarchy. However, the means to power initially may not be the same as the means to maintaining power once there, and there will be efforts to overcome this class contradiction through the regimentation of society.
The lower middle class is predominantly white and is often referred to the corporate media, since the emergence of the Trump phenomenon, as the “white working class,” which is a deliberate misreading of the base of the neofascist movement—although there are elements of what could be called the privileged white working class that support the Trump movement. The working class in the United States is multiracial and multiethnic. White workers have a progressive role to play as long as they oppose racial oppression and do not organize as white workers but as part of a multi-ethnic working class. The greatest enemy of Trumpist white supremacy is the existence of a multi-ethnic consciousness based on solidarity and substantive equality.
In terms of the relations between industrial capital, military-industrial capital, and tech capital the main contradictions are evident in the effects of the Trump tariffs and also with bringing in high-tech labor from abroad. The first of these contradictions, represented by the tariffs, created immediate problems for multinational capital, given that all production is now based on global supply chains, which makes high tariffs absurd; even Musk had problems with this. The second contradiction was evident in a conflict between the MAGA grassroots, represented by figures like Steve Bannon, who saw this as conflicting with America First priorities, which meant Americans First.
ZD: Trump’s foreign policies, such as launching a new Cold War against China and promoting the “America First” strategy, reflect extreme nationalist and imperialist tendencies. In your opinion, what far reaching impacts will these policies have on the global order and international relations?
JBF: Trump’s foreign and military policy is laser-focused on China as its singular enemy. It is not isolationist as some have mistakenly thought due to its rejection of liberal internationalism, but rather hypernationalist, in line with previous movements in the fascist genus. The Trump Doctrine, as articulated by Anton, has its four pillars: (1) national populism, (2) recognition of the nationalism of all nation states, (3) opposition to liberal internationalism, and (4) an ethnicity-based definition of nationalism, including opposition to all multi-ethnic empires, both with respect to the United States. This amounts to a racial definition of the world and U.S. imperialism, with the United States envisioned as a white power. “America First” was the name adopted by the fascist movement in the United States in the 1930s allied with Nazi Germany. It was not anti-militarist or anti-imperialist but saw these in terms of a hypernationalist, racist definition of geopolitics.
ZD: The MAGA movement and Trumpism are also referred to as “right-wing populism” by some. How do you understand the concept of “populism”? What do you think are the main differences between right wing populism and fascism?
JBF: It is true that the term “right-wing populism” is often used as a euphemism for neofascism. The MAGA movement itself often refers to itself as “national populist” with the same propagandizing intent that we saw in the German Nazi movement of the 1930s, which called itself “national socialist.” If by populism is meant a movement based on the lower middle class, then national populist makes a certain kind of sense. But populism in U.S. history was a broader linking of workers and farmers and has nothing to do with neofascist “national populism.” Moreover, to suggest that there is a leftwing populism with socialist tendencies as opposed to a right-wing populism with fascist tendencies is merely a way of confusing the essential class and ideological dynamics at work. Right-wing populism as a term is often used even on the left to avoid the issue of the resurgence of fascist movements and its class basis.
ZD: How do you think the global socialist movement should respond to the challenges posed by neofascism?
JBF: It should fight. There are two major possibilities: a Popular Front between socialists and liberals. This does not appear to be possible in the United States at present, given that liberalism has turned into neoliberalism and there is a kind of neofascist-neoliberal alliance, with the neofascists increasingly in the driving seat and the neoliberal largely acquiescing. The other possibility is modeled on the Resistance in the Second World War that was led by communists and socialists who understood, as figures like Bertolt Brecht argued, that you could not effectively oppose fascism without opposing capitalism. Socialists have to be the sharp point in any collective resistance on behalf of humanity as a whole.
https://mronline.org/2025/08/08/deciphe ... my-foster/
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Trump’s trade tantrums and bullying hit a wall of solid BRICS
August 8, 2025
U.S. power has become increasingly redundant and indeed something to repudiate.
President Donald Trump’s estimation of American power, like that of his own abilities, is increasingly seen to be badly overblown. This week, he threatened some 90 nations with tough trade penalties in the form of double-digit tariffs on their exports to the United States. It remains to be seen if he will actually implement the measures. Trump already cancelled a plan to impose worldwide tariffs back in April – his so-called Liberation Day – after no doubt realizing, or his more informed advisors realizing, that the U.S. cannot win a global trade war.
If there’s one thing about Trump, it is that he is as quick to reverse threats as he is to issue them. The erratic behavior speaks of the muddled thinking and lack of coherent analysis in his so-called policies. Trump’s reversals also speak of the limits to U.S. power as the world shifts to different realities in geopolitics and geoeconomics. The American power that Trump thinks exists is no longer.
This disconnect was evinced this week as Trump threatened tariffs on Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The so-called secondary levies were supposed to be related to Trump’s deadline for Russia to reach a peace deal with Ukraine. Countries buying Russian oil are “fueling the war machine,” he claimed. India hit back at what it called ridiculous hypocrisy, pointing out that the European Union purchased more Russian oil last year than India. The U.S. also buys billions of dollars-worth of Russian agricultural fertilizer, uranium, and other minerals.
In any case, the four countries targeted by Trump for secondary tariffs firmly rebuffed his threats. They dismissed Trump’s intimidation and vowed to continue exercising their sovereign right to do business as they deem necessary for their national interests.
It is not clear what the White House will do next in the aftermath of such defiance. Trump’s habit of extending deadlines for tariffs may postpone action.
The surprise announcement that Russian President Vladimir Putin is to meet Trump in person sometime next week, perhaps in the United Arab Emirates, may also persuade the American side to drop the secondary tariffs plan. Trump’s egotistical craving to be seen as a peacemaker in Ukraine is such that a summit with Putin may be enough to appease his desire for headlines and a shot at winning the Nobel Peace Prize. His overblown claims about mediating peace between India and Pakistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and between Israel and Hamas show him to be driven by superficial success.
The defiance of the BRICS nations this week in the face of Trump’s bullying was remarkable for several reasons. It demonstrated that the BRICS are emerging as a powerful, cohesive economic and geopolitical force. After 16 years since the international organization’s founding, its leverage is no longer abstract or theoretical. It’s becoming a concrete reality.
Brazil’s President Lula da Silva mockingly stated that Trump was “not the emperor of the world,” and he called for a special BRICS summit to galvanize a joint response to U.S. trade threats. China condemned Washington’s bullying and said that the unilateral imposition of tariffs was a violation of the United Nations Charter. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent his top national security adviser to meet with Putin in the Kremlin. It was also reported this week that Modi is to travel to China later this month to attend the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These developments suggest that the BRICS are solidifying their commitment to advancing a multilateral global order in response to Trump’s belligerence.
As with so much of Trump’s capricious conduct and attitude, he is rallying international forces that are hastening the demise of American standing and power, ironically for a president who boasts about “making America great again.” An article by renowned international economist Michael Hudson illustrates how ill-conceived Trump’s trade war with the planet is. Hudson contends that the tariffs will fuel consumer inflation in the U.S. as Americans pay more for expensive imports. Republican Senator Rand Paul agrees with this assessment. He claims that the tariffs will add $2 trillion in taxes on U.S. consumers.
Another impact that Team Trump seems unaware of is that the world economy is sufficiently diversified that countries will be able to find alternative markets for their exports. That will result in more countries being less dependent on the dollar for trade settlements, which, in turn, will weaken the greenback and the U.S.’s ability to keep piling up its astronomical national debt. The system is, therefore, liable to crash the more Trump imposes trade penalties on other nations.
It is also becoming clear that the BRICS represent a historic challenge to the U.S.-led Western order. The more Trump tries to undermine the emerging multipolar order, the more strongly it emerges. Earlier this year, Trump claimed that the BRICS were dead after he threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on what he labelled an anti-American bloc. His rumors of BRICS’ death are greatly exaggerated. The international forum keeps steadily growing, gaining a significant new member, Indonesia, this year – the fourth most populous country in the world. BRICS represent over 50 percent of the world’s GDP and about 40 percent of its population. It has surpassed the Western-dominated G7 group in terms of economic power.
Trump’s tariff tantrums have little to do with bringing peace to Ukraine and a lot more to do with trying to break up the BRICS, which is a growing challenge to U.S. hegemony. This week shows that the BRICS have acquired a new sense of their own confidence and purpose in creating an alternative to the U.S.-dominated system. Trump’s arrogance and lack of understanding of the new realities of the global economy and the world’s resolve for long-overdue justice and peace, particularly for the Global South, are precipitating the demise of the U.S.-run neocolonialist order.
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, among many other nations, are showing a resilience and defiance to U.S. imperialist bullying that would have been thought unlikely only a few years ago. Their commitment to mutual development and a fairer world order is making the U.S.-dominated elite Western capitalist system less relevant and less viable. The enormous trade deficits that the U.S. has accumulated over decades, in line with its monstrous national debt of $37 trillion, mean that it needs the rest of the world to keep its essentially parasitic position intact. The integration of the multipolar global economy under the leadership of the BRICS is showing that U.S. power has become increasingly redundant and indeed something to repudiate. It is hitting a wall of solid BRICS.
On the ominous side, however, that is why the U.S. rulers are becoming so insanely warmongering. Will they try to blow up a dead-end?
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... lid-brics/
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Anatomy of the US Economic (and Tariff) Disaster
Aug 7, 2025 , 12:20 pm .
A protester burns a counterfeit dollar bill with Donald Trump's face on it at an anti-tariff protest in Brazil (Photo: Reuters)
The US economy, according to the mainstream financial media and the proclamations of President Donald Trump, is experiencing one of its best moments. The tech giants—the so-called Magnificent Seven—have released results that have sent stock market indicators soaring, and headlines accompany the enthusiasm with celebrations of a supposed golden age of innovation, jobs, and unprecedented growth.
Trump, true to form, is quick to take credit: "The United States is the most attractive country in the world," he repeats endlessly. The stock market figures seem to prove him right. Meta shares rose more than 11% in a single day, and artificial intelligence fever reached euphoric levels, as if the future had already been determined by an algorithm.
Behind the glitter of the charts and the applause of Wall Street, a much murkier reality lurks. The triumphalist narrative attempting to reestablish itself at the heart of global capitalism doesn't stand up to an honest examination of the economic data.
As economist Michael Roberts warns in his article " Tariffs and the American Economy ," the U.S. economy is moving forward on shaky foundations: artificial investment, manipulated figures, rising unemployment, and a productive apparatus increasingly dependent on debt. Added to this is the aggressive reactivation of an incoherent tariff policy that plunges the economy into a dangerous combination of inflation, stagnation, and trade conflict.
Profits without a productive base
The US tech economy has found its main source of oxygen in Big Tech. Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tesla now account for a third of the S&P 500's total profits . For the media and Wall Street analysts, this fact alone is enough to declare the system healthy. Michael Roberts writes that this enthusiasm is an illusion sustained by expectations, not by solid economic results or a real recovery in productive activity.
A closer look at their balance sheets reveals that these giants' profits do not yet come from their multi-million-dollar investments in artificial intelligence, but rather from services already established since the previous boom: social media, digital advertising, and cloud services.
Meta, for example, gained over $150 billion in market value after announcing significant growth in advertising revenue. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, insists that the future lies in "superintelligence," but its own CFO, Susan Li, admits that they don't expect significant AI revenue in either 2025 or 2026. In fact, Meta's planned investment in AI infrastructure (between $66 billion and $72 billion by 2025) and the increased spending through 2026 are part of a speculative race to position itself.
Microsoft is repeating the formula: record profits in its cloud division, while projecting a dizzying increase in data center spending—up to $120 billion in 2026—almost four times more than in 2023. But the return is marginal: although its Copilot apps and Google's Gemini AI have hundreds of millions of users, only 3% pay for these services. The model, for now, does not generate revenue proportional to the investment.
In aggregate terms, Meta and Microsoft's AI infrastructure capital spending now exceeds a third of their total sales . Furthermore, investment in artificial intelligence has contributed more to US GDP growth in the last two quarters than all domestic consumption, a fact that exposes the extent to which the recovery narrative is based on technological enthusiasm rather than the actual purchasing power of the population.
Roberts warns that all this enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has driven stocks higher, but it doesn't really have much to do with the country's economy, as neither employment nor the real economy is improving. On the contrary, companies are spending huge amounts without seeing results, borrowing more and more.
Many of these loans don't come from traditional banks and bonds, but from private funds that aren't regulated like banks, but that lend large sums of money in exchange for high interest rates. In other words, Big Tech is betting the future of the US economy with expensive, opaque, borrowed money.
Between propaganda and stagnation
While tech giants fuel the stock market bubble, the Trump administration is finding another way to sustain its success story: tariffs. Under the "America First" logic, it has promoted an aggressive trade policy, applying new barriers to imported products under the guise of protecting domestic industry and reviving the domestic economy. The strategy, however, merely masks a stagnation that is already clearly evident in official figures, Roberts points out.
The latest US GDP data showed growth of 0.7% in the second quarter of 2025, which translates to an annualized rate of 3%. Trump was quick to celebrate the figure as irrefutable proof of the economic success of his trade policy. But the figure is misleading. The supposed growth is primarily due to a collapse in imports, down 30% , as a result of the rise in the price of foreign products due to tariffs. This artificially improved the trade balance (exports minus imports), adding points to GDP. But if this factor is excluded, what remains is a much weaker economy: real growth in domestic consumption and private investment was just 1.2%, well below the previous quarter.
Even worse is the outlook for investment in new infrastructure, which fell more than 10% in the second quarter and had already been declining since the first. Investment in machinery also slowed dramatically. Roberts concludes that, without the artificial effects of tariffs, the US economy would be growing at a rate below 2% and on a downward trend .
The labor market also contradicts the official propaganda. The latest employment reports showed a minimal increase of just 73,000 new positions in July, and the data for May and June were revised downward. In total, only 106,000 jobs were added in three months, compared to 380,000 in the previous quarter. This is the worst record since the COVID crisis. Job losses in key sectors such as manufacturing, transportation, and electronics have already exceeded 100,000 so far this year. Even the technology sector, which presents itself as immune, is beginning to cut staff.
Inflation is also on the rise. Despite the slowing economy, prices continue to rise at a pace close to 3% annually, below the 2% target the Federal Reserve. Since the pandemic, the purchasing power of American workers has eroded by 20%, and real wages have barely returned to the level they were five years ago.
This mismatch between prices and wages reveals a deeper phenomenon: the US economy is sliding into a state of stagflation, where growth slows, but prices remain high and employment weakens.
The dilemma shifts to the Federal Reserve, which is keeping its interest rate at 4.25% for the fifth consecutive meeting. Trump is demanding an urgent reduction—and has threatened to dismiss Jerome Powell if he doesn't—but the central bank is resisting. Lowering rates would stimulate consumption and investment, but could worsen inflation. Maintaining them, on the other hand, further cools the economy, makes credit more expensive, and curbs private investment. Any move entails costs.
Roberts sums it up this way: the Federal Reserve can't solve this crisis because it's not a problem of rates, but of structure. Large corporations continue to invest in sectors that don't produce immediate profits, while the domestic economy, dependent on consumption and debt, is suffocating.
An economy teetering at the heart of the system
The paradox is that this combination of policies doesn't occur in just any country. The United States remains the core of the global financial system. The dollar, despite its imperial decline, functions as the global reserve currency, a means of payment in most international trade, and a reference unit for debt, energy, and food markets. Any shock at the center has immediate repercussions in the periphery.
Every time the Federal Reserve raises or lowers its interest rate, the currencies and domestic prices of entire countries are affected. The fragility of this supposed recovery is deeply destabilizing for the international economic order.
What Michael Roberts highlights is not only the deterioration of an economy trapped between speculation and protectionism, but also the fact that the United States has lost the ability to lead without destabilizing.
From its central position in the global financial system, its disorderly and reactive internal decisions radiate powerfully to the rest of the world, amplified by the structural weight of the dollar. They contaminate the economic fabric from within, destabilizing it with every move.
In this context, tariffs, unregulated credit expansion, and technological illusion are desperate reactions to an order that is crumbling at its core.
https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/an ... io-de-eeuu
