Jacobin Radio: Trumpism as Counterrevolution w/ Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Suzi speaks with historian Robert Brenner and sociologist Dylan Riley about the deeper meaning of Trump’s return to power.
Is Trump just a narcissistic strongman — or the carrier of a coherent counterrevolutionary project? Brenner and Riley argue that Trumpism is not a return to the past but an attempt to reorganize society for a future in which capitalism can no longer grow — only command, police, and exclude.
They trace the roots of Trump Two to decades of economic stagnation, the collapse of US hegemony, the failure of Bidenomics, and a deep class split between credentialed and non-credentialed workers.
They describe Trumpism as a reactionary social revolution from above, aimed at dismantling the social bases of liberal democracy. Its pillars include the attack on universities, the expansion of the security state as an ICE jobs program, AI as a form of class warfare undermining credentialed labor, and the dismantling of the international order.
It’s a wide-ranging conversation about empire without growth, class politics under stagnation, and the future of the left in what Brenner and Riley call the wilderness of contemporary capitalism.
Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Jack of an Radio. I'm Susie Wiseman. |
| 0:15.7 | On today's program, we're going to look at Trumpism with Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley. |
| 0:21.4 | Trump's actions in the last few weeks in the Americas and at Davos are nothing short than world shattering. |
| 0:27.7 | Superficially, it looks like Trumpism proposes a new world order. |
| 0:31.4 | Some would say an old world order. |
| 0:33.8 | A project that at its roots is a high-stakes protection racket, one that's transactional and |
| 0:40.1 | depends on dividends for so-called peace. But our guests are going to go deeper and argue that |
| 0:46.6 | Trumpism is not a return to the past, but an attempt to reorganize society for a future |
| 0:52.2 | in which capitalism can no longer grow, only command, police, |
| 0:56.8 | and exclude. So the simple but unsettling question is what exactly is going on with Trumpism |
| 1:02.9 | and how can it be understood. Is Trump just a chaotic personality on the world stage, |
| 1:07.9 | kidnapping Maduro, threatening to take Greenland, undermining NATO, reviving |
| 1:12.6 | the Munro doctrine in the crudest possible form? Or are we seeing the consolidation of something |
| 1:18.8 | much deeper? One way of reading this is chaos and narcissism, but another is that this is |
| 1:24.1 | seemingly a coherent project, however, reactionary. |
| 1:28.5 | My guests today argue that we're witnessing not just a crisis of liberal democracy, |
| 1:33.3 | but a coherent counter-revolutionary project emerging out of decades of economic stagnation, |
| 1:39.6 | class fragmentation, and the exhaustion of the post-war world order. Stay with us. Our program returns in just a moment. |
| 1:47.0 | And welcome back to the show. |
| 2:02.4 | Today we're in for a treat. |
| 2:03.9 | Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley return with an original analysis that sharpens our |
| 2:08.4 | understanding of the political meaning of Trump, too, as a counter-hegemonic project, |
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