Donald Trump has humiliated Reza Pahlavi far more than he ever humiliated María Corina Machado, and that is saying quite something. Trump has also told Iranian monarchists that they were genetically different from, presumably, German-Hebrideans, which will have horrified them, since they are truly fanatical about how Aryan they are. Trump is now begging Britain to join a war in which he had previously said that we would not have been welcome since he had already won it; in point of fact, we have been in it from the start, and that is the problem from our point of view. Indeed, he is now begging everyone, including China, to send ships to assist in bringing about his definition of victory over Iran, namely the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz that his war had closed in the first place. And just as the Bush Administration had thought that al-Qaeda was 50 per cent Shia, so the Trump Administration cannot distinguish between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the so-called Islamic State. Such continuity is to be expected, as Michael Lind explains:
Donald Trump’s decision to launch all-out war against Iran has pleased the legacy GOP establishment and wide swathes of MAGA, while disillusioning independents and others who sincerely believed that he was a Republican of a new and different kind: less trigger-happy in foreign policy (and more pro-labour in domestic policy). To anyone who has been paying attention, however, it has long been obvious that Trump’s two presidencies mark a continuation of the Bush-era Republican mainstream.
Trump’s bizarre and abrasive style, to be sure, couldn’t be more different than that of the Bush dynasty. And his idiosyncratic tariff policy is a genuine break with what went before. But in most areas, Trumpism is simply Bushism gilded by a tacky coat of paint. In political terms, Donald Trump is the brother-by-a-different-mother of Dubya and Jeb!
Pop quiz: which of the three last Republican presidents has launched a major war of choice against a populous Persian Gulf country — George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, or Donald Trump? If you answered all three, you are right. Republican presidents began all three Gulf Wars: the First Gulf War of 1991, the Second Gulf War of 2003-2011, and the Third Gulf War of 2026-?.
Second question: which of the last three Republican presidents had, as his major legislative accomplishment, a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich and corporations? If you answered all three — the two Bushes and Trump — you are, again, correct.
Third question: which of the last three Republican presidents successfully promoted the expansion of legal guest-worker programs for cheap-labour industries like agriculture and hospitality? Once again, the answer is both Bushes and Trump.
Fourth and final question: which of the last three Republican presidents signed laws or authorised regulations to boost the number of rich foreigners who could buy green cards, as a ticket to American citizenship? You guessed it, both Bushes and Trump. In politics as well as policies, the Trump administration increasingly looks like a continuation of the post-2000 Republican norm: pro-war, pro-business.
To see why, it helps to examine the electorate. Over the past decade, much has been made of a supposed “realignment” between the two parties and Trump’s success in attracting a formerly Democratic-leaning working class into the Republican column. Yet this was always overstated. In reality, Trump didn’t create a party realignment, and he hasn’t significantly reshaped one. He has inherited the Bush Republican Party — a new American political party that coalesced in the Nineties and 2000s.
In 2024, the only two religious groups that viewed Trump favourably were white evangelical Protestants (67%) and white Catholics (51%). Trump won four-fifths of the white evangelical vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024. But his margin was only a slight improvement over Mitt Romney in 2012 (who won 78% of the same group), John McCain in 2008 (74%), and George W. Bush in 2004 (78%). History, then, shows a gradually expanding share of white-evangelical votes for any and all Republican presidential nominees, not a sudden surge under Trump in 2016.
With the white working class as a whole, Trump — who won 62% in 2016, 59% in 2020, and 66% in 2024 — did only marginally better than GOP nominees since 1980, from highs under Ronald Reagan (56% in 1984) and Romney (56%) to a low of 45% with McCain. That this reflects the evolution of the GOP, rather than the unique charisma of Trump, is evident from the fact that in the 2022 midterms, Republican congressional hopefuls won 66% of the working class, the same rate as Trump in 2024.
The Republican share of the white working class is boosted by ultra-Republican white evangelicals. As the University of Pennsylvania’s John J. Diulio points out, “in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024.” White, working-class Americans who were not evangelical Protestants preferred Harris to Trump by a margin of 52 to 45.
Add regional dynamics, and it becomes even clearer that the Trump party is simply the Bush party, only with vulgar rhetoric. The Bush GOP is based in the former territory of New Deal and Jacksonian Democrats — the Confederacy and Appalachia. Its constituents, like small-business owners and working-class evangelicals, are those who formed the base of the Democratic Party for most of its history.
Eight out of 10 white Southerners were Democrats in 1950s, and as recently as 1992, Republicans had only a two-point advantage in the white South. By 2020, two-in-three white Southerners identified with the Republican Party.
Opposition to the civil-rights movement was a factor, but if racism were the only one then white Southerners should have completely abandoned the Democrats by 1968 or 1972. Instead, cultural conservatism with respect to religion, sex, and censorship, along with a distinctively martial version of Southern patriotism, combined with the increasing progressivism of national Democrats, gradually drove many white Southern Democrats into the Republican Party between the Seventies and the 2000s.
Today Republicans from the South hold more than 50% of the seats of the Republican House majority. In the Senate, the Republican majority leader and the Republican majority whip are from South Dakota and Wyoming, respectively, while the Republican conference chair is from Arkansas, the Republican policy boss is from West Virginia, and the Republican senatorial committee chair is from South Carolina.
In hindsight, John McCain’s 2008 candidacy was a link in the soft transition of the party of Bush into the party of Trump. Having co-sponsored a bill providing amnesty for illegal immigrants with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy in 2005, in 2008 McCain opposed any amnesty. And to bolster his pseudo-populist bona fides, McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
In foreign policy, McCain — a Vietnam veteran and former POW and the descendant of military officers whose extended family owned a Mississippi plantation until after World War II — was one of the most consistently bellicose members of the hawkish wing of the GOP. During his presidential campaign, to the tune of the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann”, McCain sang “Bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Had McCain been elected president, America might have waged all-out war against Iran a decade and a half ago.
Constituent interests, not the theories of Curtis Yarvin or Patrick Deneen, explain the policies of the post-Nineties GOP, under Trump and the Bushes alike. In terms of counties rather than states, the American red-county economy is predominantly exurban and rural and dominated by three kinds of industries: extractive resource industries like oil and gas and coal; the federally funded defence industries and the local businesses and jobs that military spending supports; and low-wage industries, most notably agriculture and services. Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of employers and investors in red counties across America.
In 2019, 55% of all primary energy — chiefly oil, natural gas, and coal — was produced in the United States came from six mostly red states: Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and North Dakota, with the Lone Star State accounting for 41% of all US crude production. Naturally, the Republican Party supports the mantra “drill, baby, drill” (and “mine, baby, mine”) and opposes the Green New Deal, with its goal of phasing out all fossil-fuel use in the United States and the world in favour of renewables.
By far the most important social base of the Bush-to-Trump Republican Party, and the greatest influence on Republican economic policy, is made up of small-business owners who, according to the Stanford Business Review, “represent a distinct, Republican-leaning constituency.”
Business owners are a minority of Republican voters; the majority of voters in both parties are mostly wage earners. But they are overrepresented among GOP primary voters, lobbyists, staffers, and politicians. Apart from professional and technical services, small businesses are concentrated in construction, natural resources and mining, trade, transportation and utilities, manufacturing, and leisure and hospitality. Republican-leaning billionaires and mega-corporations draw the ire of progressives and some conservative populists, but the party’s centre of gravity is found among provincial Republican millionaires. Small and regional capital, not big business, forms the social power base of the Trump party and that of the Bushes before him.
You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that mainstream Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of this sector of capital. Compliance with federal, state, and local regulations is a bigger challenge for small-business owners than for large, managerial corporations, so it isn’t surprising that Trump 2.0 would hire Elon Musk and Russell Vought to theatrically cut regulations, fire federal bureaucrats, and dismantle government agencies.
For most small businesses, wages plus benefits and payroll taxes are the greatest cost. Mainstream Republican policies toward American workers under Trump and the two Bushes form a consistent policy designed to minimise the bargaining power of workers in wage negotiations and to make workers so economically desperate they will be compelled to take jobs with poor pay and bad working conditions.
Some of these policies — such as unremitting hostility to organised labour — have obvious benefits for cheap-labour small businesses. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pretended to show respect for unionised workers by inviting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention. Less than a month later, in a social media conversation with Elon Musk, Trump told Musk: “You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’ ”
Trump was evidently unaware that federal law prohibits the firing of striking workers. The United Auto Workers union immediately filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-created agency that Musk is suing on the specious claim that it has been unconstitutional from the beginning. In January 2025, having returned to the White House, Trump crippled the NLRB by illegally firing a board member, removing the board’s quorum.
Crushing unions and dismantling the NLRB are only two of the strategies used by mainstream Republicans, including Trump, to shift the balance of power in wage negotiations from workers to employers. Tight labour markets that result from low immigration and low workforce participation by mothers of young children can create a seller’s market in labour that strengthens the power of workers, male and female, to demand higher wages. To this end, employer lobbies dominated by Republican-leaning small-business owners for decades have supported mass low-wage immigration and promoted the employment of mothers of young children.
The US Chamber of Commerce, the National Small Business Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business all support expanding guest worker programs, whose workers, unlike green card holders (legal permanent residents), don’t qualify for a path to citizenship and voting. According to an NFIB spokesperson, “our members support an enforceable guest worker program and expanding H-2B visas for economic need.”
The US Chamber of Commerce advocates doubling the number of immigrants. According to the NSBA, meanwhile, more than a third of small businesses employ workers who belong to one of three categories: green-card holders, temporary foreign workers, or visa holders. The NSBA advocates lifting country caps on employment-related visas, allowing unlimited numbers of non-citizen foreigners to work in the homeland.
This is one of the surprising and little-noticed threads that tie the Bushes to Trump. As United Farm Workers comms director Antonio de Loera-Brust has noted in these pages, the Trump II administration has moved to increase the number of agricultural guest workers. This, notwithstanding its showy enforcement actions in blue cities. Far from being a radical break with Bush-era Republican immigration policy, Trump’s actual immigration policy has been a continuation of employer-first policies in substance, though not in rhetoric.
In a cabinet meeting on 11 April, 2025, Trump said that “we have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to NEED people.” The second Trump administration has used a variety of methods, including extreme vetting of applications and travel bans, to reduce legal immigration to the United States by an estimated 35% and 50%, if the present rate continues over four years.
While blockading legal immigration overall, the Trump administration has exempted the low-wage H-2 visa categories from obstructionist delays. And the administration has doubled the number of H-2 visas for low-wage workers for 2026.
All of this shows that Trumpism is merely the higher stage of Bushism. It was George Herbert Walker Bush who signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which in hindsight was the foundation for the mass immigration of the last half century. The 1990 Act simultaneously created the EB-5 visa selling green cards to the foreign bourgeoisie, created the H1-B guest-worker visa, expanded existing guest-worker programs, and created new guest-worker categories. It also created the Temporary Protected Status programme, under which President Joe Biden granted legal status to nearly a million otherwise ineligible foreign nationals.
Republican foreign policy, like tax and labour policy, can be explained in terms of Republican voters and donors. Republican policy towards the Middle East is influenced but not wholly determined by support for Israel’s annexationist hard Right among evangelical Christian Zionists and Right-wing Jews, who, however, are a minority of America’s mostly Democratic Jewish voters. In 2020, after moving the US embassy, Trump declared, “and we moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.”
And Republican policy towards Latin America is influenced by anti-communist Cuban-Americans, a crucial Florida voting bloc, who nurtured Marco Rubio. In Trump’s second term, the former senator from the Sunshine State, long associated with the hawkish wing of the GOP, has magnified his influence by holding multiple foreign policy jobs simultaneously at times — Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and acting administrator of USAID.
The underlying divide in GOP foreign policy is among three schools of thought: global hegemonists who favour American military hegemony in every major region; balance-of-power realists or “prioritisers” who want to focus America’s limited military resources on the Chinese challenge in Asia; and neo-isolationist “restrainers.” The global-hegemony strategy’s major supporters since the end of the Cold War have disproportionately been Southern conservative hawks like South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsay Graham and Arkansas’s Senator Tom Cotton. The armed-services committees in the Senate and House are led by two Republican Southern hawks — Mississippi’s Senator Roger Wicker and Alabama’s Representative Mike D. Rogers.
Their militarism is unusual by national standards but typical of the martial tradition of the American South. Nearly half of new military recruits are from the South, even though it contains only about a third of young adult Americans.
The hawks whom Southern voters send to Congress ensure that the region profits from defence spending. The list of states that derive more than 3.5% of their GDP from defence contracts is dominated by states in the South and Southwest: Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Maryland, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri (Connecticut and Maine make the list because of their Navy bases and shipyards). Meanwhile, the importance of defence spending to California’s economy has declined, as military investment in Florida has increased.
Under the two Bushes and Trump, congressional Republicans in Washington, among other things, have been subsidising the folks back home by increasing defence spending while further ballooning deficits enlarged by their tax cuts for the rich and business.
Under Trump as under the Bushes, the Republican Party, based in the former Confederate states, is the party of unnecessary wars, tax cuts for the rich, and anti-worker, low-wage labour-market policy. Anti-interventionist realists and restrainers and economic populists on the Right who dreamed that Trump would favour their causes may not want to hear the truth. And the truth will be resisted as well by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans who idealised the two Bushes while demonising Trump. But the fact is that, apart from his colourful personality, Trump has been a relatively conventional post-Cold War Republican president.
The Third Gulf War is the latest reminder that there is no Trump party and never has been, only the Bush party under new management.
But the other side is still here, and this time everyone knows that we were right every other time, as well as being the only people whose politics had no link to the Epstein Files (a lone anarcho-syndicalist libertarian socialist is neither here nor there, since which political leader is one of those?), so that Yanis Varoufakis writes:
Once again, I find myself caught in the conundrum of opposing an illegal war unleashed by the United States and its allies on a country whose regime I vehemently oppose. It is a thankless burden but one that Western Leftists have a duty to shoulder, lest we legitimise the regimes we oppose, both in the country being bombed and in the West.
In 1999, having previously campaigned against Slobodan Milošević’s rule, I denounced Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia. In 2003, after two decades of campaigning against Saddam Hussein, I demonstrated against the US coalition’s invasion of Iraq. In 2011, while critical of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, I opposed the US-led bombings of Libya that turned it into a failed state. Last year, while aghast at Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless reign, I lamented the US-Israeli machinations that turned Syria over to a former Al Qaeda operative. And now, having celebrated the “Woman, Life, Freedom” rebellion after Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, and for many years railed against the Islamic Republic’s theocracy, crony capitalism, brutality to women and minorities, I am writing these lines to condemn, with all my strength, the US-Israeli plan to devastate Iran.
This is not neutrality. This is not “both sides-ism”. This is the duty of the Western Left. When the gang ruling our neighbourhood launches an unprovoked attack on a faraway gang that we also don’t approve of, killing innocent bystanders, we refuse to stay neutral or to pick a side. We call out both, but we recognise a special, overriding duty to stop our gang: because it is our taxes funding their bombs, it is our silence that grants consent, it is our governments that are doing the killing, in our name.
So, let’s take a look at our gang. The Western claim that the US and Europe, let alone Israel, want democracy, stability and normality in Iran is a fabrication. The origins of Iran’s postwar tragedy lie in the 1953 Anglo-American coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, for his audacity to want Iranian oil for the Iranian people. It was then that the US and the UK lost any moral claim as supporters of Iranian democracy by restoring absolute power to the Shah — a venal, autocratic monarch who ran Iran as a feudal fiefdom for Western corporations. To keep him on his peacock throne, the CIA helped to establish and train the Savak, a secret police force so brutal it became a byword for torture. For 26 years, US and UK governments did what they could to deny Iranians any semblance of democracy. A long trajectory of authoritarianism triggered the 1979 revolution which toppled the Shah.
It was a broad, popular revolution that, initially, mobilised not only Islamists but also liberals, socialists, and communists. However, the secular movements which supported Ayatollah Khomeini and cheered his return from exile in Paris were unaware that Washington had aligned with the most reactionary Islamist factions once it realised the revolutionaries would win. One of the new regime’s first barbarous acts? The rounding up and summary execution of the leadership of Tudeh, the large communist party which had supported Khomeini. This mutual backscratching between Washington and the Islamic regime, during the Cold War, should give pause to Leftists today who labour under the delusion that the Islamic Republic is close to the Left’s anti-imperialist agenda and values.
There is, of course, a reason why it was fairly easy for Western Leftists to be taken in by the anti-imperialist, more populist elements of the Islamic Republic. Contradictions, in which the Left ought to luxuriate, do not come more intense than in the case of the Islamic Republic — a regime that, on the one hand, adopted anti-imperialist language as part of its overarching project to resurrect a fictitious Islamic golden age while, on the other hand, crushing the Left and its emancipatory agenda.
The confusion deepened in light of the Islamic Republic’s greatest strength. In sharp contrast to the Sunni plutocracies, the Shiite movement led by Khomeini demonstrated a certain commitment to the poor and devastated masses of the Muslim world that included not only income redistribution and, at least initially, anti-corruption drives but also genuine support for the Palestinians whom almost all Arab regimes had abandoned by then. All that offered a rare source of emancipatory hope.
It also predictably led to a head-on confrontation with the Islamic Republic’s Sunni rivals. In 1980, incited by Washington and funded by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. If in doubt that Saddam was America’s stooge, recall what happened when, in 1987, an Iraqi fighter plane fired Exocet missiles at the USS Stark, killing 37 American sailors and wounding 21: President Reagan stated “The villain of the piece is Iran” while US diplomats flew to Baghdad to give Saddam absolution. In 1988, Saddam used chemical weapons on Iraq’s Kurdish villages, attacks the US had known about and were complicit in. Years later, after the US invasion of Iraq, a joke circulated in Washington: “How do you know that Saddam had chemical weapons?”, the White House spokesman was asked. “We kept the receipts,” he answered.
Tehran’s anti-imperialist credentials were also bolstered by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which gave birth to a resistance and social movement funded by Iran: Hezbollah. This allowed the Iranian regime to present itself, with some justification, as the only regional power willing and able to protect from Israeli violence against Palestinians in particular and Arabs more generally — while also providing some basic social services for the poor. Moreover, as inequality reached unprecedented heights in the region, especially after the massive increase in surplus labour globally, Iran’s appeal among the masses burgeoned. Naturally, Iran’s neighbouring Gulf states were worried and thus joined forces with the United States to “contain” Iran.
By 1991, a Western family feud had led the US to invade Iraq. Saddam was incensed that Kuwait, which at the behest of Washington and the Gulf plutocracies had loaned him much of the money to wage the eight-year war against Iran, was asking for its money back — and increasing its oil output so much that Iraq’s own revenues faltered. Saddam, either misled by the Americans or, because he misunderstood them, thought he had their blessing to deal with Kuwait by invading it. Once American boots hit sacred ground in Saudi Arabia, Sunni fundamentalism led to the formation of Al Qaeda, the tragedy of the Twin Towers, and Bush the Younger’s calamitous invasion of Iraq which, in turn, begat ISIS, another Sunni terrorist movement. All these developments made the Islamic Republic look moderate and relatively progressive: a country that, while glad to support local popular resistance movements that engaged Iran’s regional enemies (in Palestine, Yemen etc.), never directly invaded any other country and which proved pivotal in the fight against Al Qaeda and, more impressively, in the elimination of ISIS.
In view of this rich, tragic history, the Islamic Republic must be understood as a powerful system born out of a decades-long crisis caused by the US and encouraged by Israel. But it is equally important to grasp its political economy which is at odds with its external anti-imperialist stance and hostile to everything the Left stands for. Since the Nineties, privatisation in Iran has been in full swing, with the reformist faction envisioning foreign investment and integration into the world market (essentially the European Union and the UK) as the only vehicle for containing its crisis. At the same time, the conservative coalition under the Revolutionary Guards’ dominance established and controlled privatised enterprises, aimed at expansion into regional markets.
After Trump 1.0 ended Obama’s plan to reintegrate Iran into the Western circuits of trade and finance, the conservative faction opportunistically aligned themselves with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. However, throughout, they have been implementing deregulation and ending subsidies for the poor, provoking spontaneous popular uprisings which demand social justice. Then, the crash of 2008, which saw China emerge as a stabilising force at a global scale, motivated the conservative faction to turn even more toward China and Russia in the hope of circumventing US sanctions and ameliorating the tensions their own crony capitalism had caused.
Fast forward to 2022 when the killing of 17-year-old Mahsa Amini, a Sunni Kurd, ignited the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. Western commentators, suffering once more from a case of wishful thinking, imagined that uprising to be pro-Western. It was no such thing. Rather, it combined discontent caused, on the one hand, by rising inequality after Iran’s economy drifted toward a neoliberalism with conservative Islamic characteristics and, on the other, ethnic tensions — especially among Kurds.
That rebellion was defeated not merely by brutal suppression but, more importantly, by invoking the fear of the country’s disintegration — the prospect of Iran becoming a new Syria, or a new Libya, which Benjamin Netanyahu craves and has been trying for years to co-opt the US to bring about. That’s why the regime still enjoys continued support from a large segment of the population, including those otherwise opposed ideologically to the regime: they may hope and pray for the end of the Islamic Republic, but they also consider the disintegration of Iran a worse evil than the current regime. Fully cognisant that Trump and Netanyahu can’t and won’t bring on a stable, democratic Iran, the US-Israeli bombs that are now falling upon them result in greater toleration of the current regime — even by its opponents.
And so, here we are today: Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ali Khamenei, is now Iran’s new supreme leader. The US and Israel killed his father, his mother, his wife, his sister, and most probably one of his sons. The regime is brutal, unpopular with vast swathes of its own youth, and economically sclerotic. It is also a product of 70 years of Western arrogance and aggression. It is not going to be bombed away. It will not be sanctioned into moderation. What is the Left to do and say in this context?
We must, I suggest, begin by answering the liberal imperialists who ask us: “But what about the women? What about freedom?” To them I say this: the women of Iran do not need F-35 bombs dropped on them by Washington or Tel Aviv. The path to “Woman, Life, Freedom” does not run through the smoking ruins of Tehran. It runs through the defeat of the very powers that have spent 70 years ensuring Iran can never know peace or democracy. The people of Iran must first be liberated from the clasps of the hideous choice between the current regime and a fate worse than Iraq, Libya, and Syria combined.
Our job, as Western Leftists, is to act upon our governments to stop the bombing. To end the sanctions that starve the poor and enrich the regime’s smugglers. To dismantle the propaganda machine that tells us war is peace and occupation is freedom. Then, and only then, can the Iranian people, exercising their own immense power, reclaim their future from both the theocrats and their imperial enablers.
