It feels as if we have finally entered a new era. In the mere six-ish months that Donald Trump has been President, it is almost as if the commitment to social justice was immediately dropped in favor of kowtowing to the new, conservative paradigm.

Comedy is ‘legal again’ now that far-right dipshit Elon Musk has bought Twitter. We can now say retard. You can now humorously copy foreign accents on TikTok as a white person without being called racist again. You can decry the entire class of Black women as mentally deficient, and be beatified by the media and government as a Saint and ‘civil rights hero’. It is not unlikely that the next Congressional representative to be called out for doing blackface in college might just be promoted to the cabinet rather than cancelled.

What is characteristic of this period in politics? Unlike the immediately preceding one, which we might term broadly as the neoliberal technocratic consensus which reached its peak in Obama, there is a much lower degree of surety in our social institutions. This subjective lack of confidence translates into an objective situation where the new patterns of institutional functioning and the values around which they are organized are currently in the tumultuous process of being redefined. The chaos of this current period obscures the underlying fact that chaos is the only possible precedent for (a new) order. 

In this context, the narrative around certain recent controversies should be reexamined. The most recent phase of the Trump administration is marked by the shooting of fascist provocateur Charlie Kirk and the subsequent campaign of persecution by the far right of progressive and liberal intellectuals. The consensus among the liberal intelligentsia is that this phase is defined by a loss of respect for the right of “free speech,” caused by a general dissolution of ‘proper’ political norms since 2016 fundamentally driven by the left’s political practice.

Take, for example, Charlie Kirk, Jimmy Kimmel and the Future of Free Speech in America by David French for The New York Times, an article also shared positively by former President Barack Obama. In it, French begins by describing the far right’s recent campaign of persecution of political opposition: he points to Attorney-General Pam Bondi’s claims, for example, that she will persecute critics of Charlie Kirk as “hate speech” or Trump’s legal intimidation of ABC, resulting in the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s liberal talk show. In either case, French argues, the government is clearly violating the First Amendment along with “the rights of the speaker” and “every [...] person present and of every other person who may want to hear the speech.” He sees this as hypocritical and falls back to the classic free speech absolutist position of defending the right for all types of speech, including ‘uncivil’ speech:

Does anyone actually believe that Vance believes in civility? Much less Trump? Remember, Vance is the man who said in 2021, “I think our people hate the right people,” as if there is any “right” person to hate. Can anyone forget how he hyped the false stories of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio?

To this list of right-wing persecution we can add the recent attempt spearheaded by the Nazi-adjacent and Islamophobic Republican representative in Congress Nancy Mace to censure progressive representative Ilhan Omar for her political opinions. We can also add Trump’s declaration that he will designate ‘Antifa’ as a domestic terrorist organization, a clear attempt to hand the repressive arm of the state a blank check to persecute progressives using the myth of some left-terrorist organization that simply does not exist.

French, however, is uncomfortable with the idea that the right can have a meaningful role in the violation of his darling, free speech. While he is more than happy to list instances of the Trump administration persecuting progressives for their political opinions, he insists at the same time that the blame for the erosion of free speech lies with the critics of conservatism rather than the actual perpetrators. After summarizing the right’s campaign of legal intimidation, threats, and pressure against the media and political opposition, he explains that these can only be understood “against the backdrop of diminishing popular support for free speech” caused by the left. For him, the problem is not that the right wing is silencing any ideological opposition to their program but that progressives believe in “the conviction […] that freedom of speech is somehow an obstacle to diversity and inclusion.” This “grievous development” is the only given possible historical origin for the current attacks on free speech. French goes even further by condemning those who celebrated Kirk’s death—and the shooter himself—as actors that caused the erosion of free speech (and, therefore, presumably ‘caused’ Trump’s flouting of these norms). 

Of course, this isn’t anything new. Charlie Kirk was the quintessential ‘free speech’ provocateur ready to claim oppression whenever he was protested or otherwise excluded from propagandizing at universities. Even if we grant that these protests are against the spirit of free speech, there is a clear difference between those actions and the current campaign of censorship. As someone who, in college, participated exactly in the types of action that conservatives like French would condemn as inimical to free speech, it is obvious that the power dynamics and consequences of each activity are hardly comparable.

I participated, for example, in a ‘shouting down’ of Henry Kissinger during one of his speaking sessions at New York University. Whenever he would attempt to speak, one of us would stand up from the audience and interrupt him to yell about US imperialism and Kissinger’s warmongering track record. Did we interrupt Kissinger? Did we possibly ruin his lecture? Sure. But we were individuals expressing our disgust with a political ideology and a public figure, not legally empowered actors attempting to silence criticism through the weaponization of state power. It is absolutely abhorrent and nothing more than fascist apologia to compare protests or interruptions by students with government-directed campaigns against political opposition. 

What about the shooter himself? The sheer flagrancy with which the right embraces the most nonsensical claims, and with which our liberal political pundits massage this hateful ideology, is boggling. The shooter was an individual who acted without coordination with a political center or organization. Further, the shooter has been apprehended and is currently being prosecuted. In other words, it is already illegal to kill someone with a rifle. It is unclear what exactly liberals or progressives are supposed to do about this—make it more illegal? Any sort of preventative measures, such as gun control, are policies basically exclusively advocated for by liberalism and the left anyway, and combated at every turn by the right. The left has absolutely nothing to be held accountable for with regard to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and we should resolutely reject any attempt to sell the assassination as an expression of left ‘terrorism’ or ‘extremism’ in a society that is currently being viciously brutalized by right-wing extremism. 

Meanwhile, the right’s persecution is not only a partisan movement on the part of the far-right—one that has been meticulously planned and organized for over a decade by Charlie Kirk and people exactly like him—but it is, literally, a state-backed persecution. The American political intelligentsia has twisted itself so thoroughly in doing apologia for the straightforwardly barbaric and fascistic far-right administration that they have to resort to absurdities like treating as equal the actions of an individual against another individual already being prosecuted with an expressly ideological state campaign of political censorship. For Tyler Robinson’s ‘violation of free speech’, he is facing life in prison. If Donald Trump and the rest of the far-right intelligentsia were on equal footing, they should receive the same sentence. If they are not, then French is doing nothing more than trying to minimize the actions of the Trump administration in a pathetic attempt to ‘both-sides’ the increasing fascistization of American society. 

The ‘free speech’ paradigm does not actually explain anything about the current political conflict. It only figures, like it does in French’s article, as a means to intellectually distance oneself from the actions of the administration and the clearly culpable role in political censorship of the extreme right. It is completely meaningless to condemn Trump on the basis that his actions reflect a general failure of free speech norms, which is clear when we reframe the state’s actions away from an abstract violation of free speech and treat it as an episode in an essentially ideological conflict. Free speech, its ‘erosion’, etc., has nothing to do with what’s going on: politics does. 

Trump is engaging in what is practically Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony and class war; he is not only excluding from political discourse as much progressive or even simply critical thinking as possible, but is doing so as part of an official government program to completely eliminate the presence of progressivism from the body politic. In this light, this is not only contiguous with Trump’s previous actions and rhetoric, such as Project 2025, which promised to replace the government bureaucracy with flunkeys chosen for ideological reasons, but is a real fulfillment of his campaign promises to ‘Make America Great Again.’ For the America that he and his followers seek to return to is an idyllic picture, a halcyon age of an America without progressivism (and without progressive ‘identities,’ such as gayness or Blackness). 

The continued persecution of an ever-wider swathe of progressive political intelligentsia, beginning with more acceptable ‘fringe’ radical targets such as the students protesting on campuses against the Zionist occupation of Palestine, is aimed at completely reshaping the country of America in the image of a classic MAGA groyper. It is not just ‘immoral’ in the sense of an unfair persecution of political opponents, but is really dangerous as a project of constructing a conservative working class political subject that has totally embraced reactionary thought. In such a hypothetical, political conflict will continue to exist, but will take the form of conflict between different flavors of conservatism. The pressing question will not be whether abortion should be legal or illegal, but whether abortion in exceptional cases such as rape or incest should be legal, and then whether it should be legal at all. As long as the Trump administration continues to exclude and marginalize progressive ideology in the body politic, the continued attempts of liberalism to ideologically compromise can only result in the gradual acceptance of the validity of conservatism as a hegemonic political ideology. 

Neither rational argumentation nor effective policy plays any role in this process. In fact, it is more clear than ever that the right-wing obsession with ‘facts’, ‘reason,’ and so on is nothing more than an emotional affect to unite the conservative intelligentsia against the previously dominant liberal ideology. Now that those same conservatives are given the responsibility of power and the mission to fulfill their views, they, of course, have instead opted to attempt instead to control the discourse through executive means and fall back on an obscurantist and essentially non-rational ideology based on a fusion of the emotive power of purported traditional American and Christian values coupled with weaponization and stoking of resentment towards the left. 

This means that, to French’s great relief, free speech is likely to ‘return’ sooner or later. For us, the struggle over free speech is a form that the struggle between classes and political ideologies takes: it is how classes and ideologies express the interests for political organization of a particular class in a universalist language. This means that, unlike French’s assessment, problems of free speech do not occur when faith in free speech as a value is undermined, but when political conflict reaches a fever pitch where one or both sides employ the silencing of dissent as a weapon. Conversely, this means also that at the cessation of conflict, there is no more need to ‘attack’ free speech.

In other words, the Trump administration does not have a problem with free speech: it has a problem with progressivism. If the far right succeeds in achieving a conservative consensus through the silencing of oppositional views and their larger plan of reshaping the American state and society using the government, the result will be a political environment where opposition is marginalized anyway. I am not very old, but I am old enough to remember a distinct period before 2016 when ‘socialism’ (let alone ‘communism’!) was basically a slur in the eyes of the public. In such a world, there is no need to limit free speech. No one was listening to us anyway. Now that we have turned into a social force, it is only natural that, qua social force, our opponents will try to eliminate us. 

The real results are already before us, and somewhat discussed at the beginning of this article. It is cool to be conservative again. ‘Vibes-wise’, things have shifted. Supporting the right of trans people to be part of public spaces as equals is being increasingly pushed to the outer fringes of acceptable progressive politics. Socialism is being deemed anti-American, and political candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Ilhan Omar are being painted not only as agonistic politicians with different beliefs but as dangers to the American state that must be destroyed. The radical left has increasingly abandoned attempts to articulate consistent political programs that speak to worldviews and social issues in favor of narrow activistic paradigms that rebuff the task of self-articulation as a party except as instrumental means to bolster the strength of apolitical ‘interest groups’, such as organized labor. Programs are centered around mechanisms of organizational activity rather than expressions of political conflict. 

What is to be done? Communists are beyond liberals and conservatives in that they see history not merely as a collection of good and bad decisions but as a living historical practice. That means that the question at stake for us is not whether the values of free speech are being attacked and whether they are worth defending, but what conflict characterizes American politics and what the direction and results of the conflict are comprised of. In this case, the conflict is clearly an ideological one. What is to be done is certainly not predefinable by theory, but it does allow us to gain a clearer picture of what our tasks are.

This brings me (as it always does) to the pre-eminent politician of Marxism, V. I. Lenin. Lenin understood the struggle of the working class as not solely an economic struggle, but as a political and moral one that comprised a statement on the overall direction of society and its ultimate values. This put him in opposition to the Mensheviks, the side of the Russian communist movement that considered union work and agitation to be the starting-point of class consciousness. 

Against this, Lenin asserts in texts such as What is to be Done? that political and social issues play a much larger role than economic ones in building the communist movement and organizing the proletariat. In the historical context, what may be surprising is that Lenin stands as the consistent opponent of economism and the Marxist tendency to reduce politics to strictly economic and class terms. Rather, politics is the real activity of classes. He writes in What is to be Done? against the Menshevik faction, which demanded a focus on workplace agitation and economic issues:

Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less “widely applicable” as a means of “drawing in” the masses [here we see an immediate parallel to the factions of the left who treat anti-racism and police brutality as ‘cultural’ or ‘bourgeois’ issues external to the ‘primary’ class struggle conceived narrowly as workplace antagonism — PKG]. The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the “common people” in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals — do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the “economic” struggle, represent, in general, less “widely applicable” means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle? The very opposite is true [note also the relevant point that Lenin explicitly identifies the defense of “students and liberal intellectuals” from state persecution as an example of a proletarian political issue]. Of the sum total of cases in which the workers suffer (either on their own account or on account of those closely connected with them) from tyranny, violence, and the lack of rights,  undoubtedly only a small minority represent cases of police tyranny in the trade union struggle as such [N.B.! — PKG]. Why then should we, beforehand, restrict the scope of political agitation by declaring only one of the means to be “the most widely applicable”, when Social-Democrats must have, in addition, other, generally speaking, no less “widely applicable” means?

What Lenin is saying is clear: a refusal to fight for the social injustices that exist today at every level of American politics is nothing more than an abrogation of the duty of a political Communist. Now more than ever, we cannot retreat into accepting the conservative narrative that, e.g., the public presence of trans people over the last decade was ‘going too far.’ We must not fall into the illusion that a conservative can be won over without any mention of social and political issues and merely by means of appeal to economic conditions or the structure of capitalism. As larger and larger numbers of progressive intellectuals are either ejected from the public sphere or otherwise quietly surrender their progressive convictions to continue living comfortably under the Trumpian paradigm, the Communists cannot follow suit. We must stand on business. We must affirm with more and more vigor the possibility of a free and collective society and the reality that there is a progressive working class that can and will fight for it.

We cannot drop a single principle or policy. We cannot sacrifice a single ally. We must stand with Palestine. We must stand for democracy, and we must stand for LGBTQ+ rights and anti-racism. We must be willing to take the radical position without qualification if the radical position is genuinely the position of the vanguard, the section of society that leads the fight against capitalism both politically and socially—even when—especially when—that vanguard is a dissembled and vague group united more by a progressive vibe than a properly communist social base. We must stand for the total liberation of the Palestinian people from Zionist occupation. We must stand for the unqualified support and presence of racial and sexual minorities—and demand not only that they be allowed, but that our society accept them and teach children in public schools to accept them. We must stand for the total communization of society, and see reforms as nothing more than steps on the way. We must condemn misogyny and racism at every place it exists. We must stand for workers and the public as a group defined in antagonism to capitalists, even if those workers refuse to see it that way.

Most importantly, we must lead with this. Building a political subject is not just about organizing people at the workplace, but organizing people ideologically. When these issues are the pressing ones in the minds of everyone today, how can we dare attempt to circumvent them?

We must remain radical not only in words but in our thinking. We cannot acquiesce to conservative hegemony, and, in fact, even as the right escalates its persecution of left thinking we must repeat Marx and insist that “When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror”: we will completely and thoroughly eliminate every trace of conservatism and conservative thinking through any possible legal and social means possible if given the opportunity, and we must promise to do so. 

We hate their America, and it is good for them to hate ours. Our children will not mourn Charlie Kirk. Neither will they revile him. When we are done with our work, he will merely have been forgotten. 

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