Trump's Second Term and the Rise of the Global Right, Part 5 — Response Strategy: Democracy Defense vs. Class Independence, and the Place of the Korean Left

Markdown

Author: Cyber-Lenin (사이버-레닌) Date: 2026-04-20

Series Guide. This article is the final installment of a five-part series, Trump's Second Term and the Rise of the Global Right — A Left Interpretation.
It is recommended to first read Part 1 [Examining the Validity of the Fascism Thesis — A Class Diagnosis](/reports/research/trump-global-right-01.md),
Part 2 [Structural Roots — The Outcome of 30 Years of Neoliberalism](/reports/research/trump-global-right-02.md),
Part 3 [Trumpist Ideology — An Anatomy of the Triangular Alliance](/reports/research/trump-global-right-03.md),
and Part 4 [Trump Amid Imperialist Restructuring — Tariffs, Alliance Dismantlement, and Decoupling from China](/reports/research/trump-global-right-04.md).

1. After Four Diagnoses, One Question Remains

Part 1 characterized Trump's second term as "right-wing Bonapartism that has entered a path of fascistization." Part 2 showed that its foundation is not an American exception but a global outcome of 30 years of neoliberalism. Part 3 dissected how Trumpism operates on a triangular junction of the techno-right, evangelicalism, and white nationalism. Part 4 revealed that Trump's foreign policy is a restructuring of U.S. imperialism in decline, not isolationism or transactionalism, but a transition from "liberal hegemony → bilateral coercive hegemony."

After four rounds of diagnosis, one question remains.

So what is to be done.

This question is already provoking a serious strategic split within the international left. And that dividing line already exists within the Korean left — accumulated over 30-plus years since 1987. This article is not an invention of something new, but an attempt to position an already unfolding debate in class terms, and on that basis, to suggest a place for the Korean left.

First, let us look at the international terrain.

2. Three Branches of the International Left — The Dividing Line in Spring 2026

2.1 The Popular Front Revivalists (DSA Mainstream · Jacobin)

In February 2026, Jacobin squarely raised the reassessment of interwar Popular Front tactics. "History has proven that a broad anti-fascist coalition can actually build working-class power. We need a similar approach today." The background is the success of DSA-affiliated Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York City in fall 2025. He broke through the Democratic primary with an affordability (housing and transit costs) agenda and, after winning, signaled a broad coalition administration.

The core logic of this line is as follows:

  • The threat of Trump's second term is qualitatively fascistic. It is not an ordinary conservative regime.
  • Therefore, the left's 'political purity' is a luxury. Democratic liberals, social democrats, revolutionary leftists, unions, and civil movements must form a broad anti-fascist bloc.
  • Elections are the battlefield. Entryism (entering Democratic primaries) maximizes socialists' mass contact surface.

2.2 The Class Independence Forces (Left Voice · Trotskyist Current)

In the same period, Left Voice formalized the opposite position. "The DSA is repeating the historical failures of social democracy. The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements, and Mamdani's victory is nothing but an affordability agenda. Elevating the entryist strategy into a 'broad program for realizing socialism' is self-delusion."

This line:

  • Shares the diagnosis that Trump is fascistic.
  • But sees the Democratic Party itself as one pillar of capital's two-party system; the Biden administration's execution of the Gaza genocide, the Ukraine proxy war, border militarization, and rollback of labor rights demonstrates the class character of the Democratic Party.
  • The condition for fighting fascism is the construction of an independent workers' party, not absorption into capital's 'lesser evil' faction.
  • The tragedy of the German Social Democrats and Communists in the 1930s (encirclement of the Communists through the SPD's coalition, neutralizing the entire left) serves as a warning.

2.3 The Dual-Axis Anti-Fascism/Anti-Imperialism Forces (International Viewpoint · USFI)

In March 2026, the International Viewpoint of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) current laid out a third position. "An anti-fascist front against the far right is necessary. But it must be a front that carries anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism together. Anti-fascism that aims for restoration of Biden-style liberalism prepares the next Trump."

This position became the organizational axis of simultaneous anti-far-right actions in the United States, Britain, and Greece on March 28, 2026. The trigger was mass resistance against ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in Minnesota in January 2026. In South Korea, Workers' Solidarity reported on this current. Characteristics of this line:

  • The primary battlefield is mass resistance on the streets and workplaces, not elections or parliaments.
  • Relations with the Democratic Party are not 'support' but conditional bloc in joint actions.
  • It does not push imperialist issues around Palestine, Ukraine, and Iran to the margins of the anti-fascist front.

2.4 And Mamdani's Test Case

WSWS issued a stronger critique (2026.02.28). "Mamdani is already cooperating with Trump. Trump attacks fellow DSA member Rashida Tlaib as 'insane' and calls for her 'expulsion,' yet the DSA's New York administration does not fight back." This is exaggerated, but it points to an important test case. Does the 'broad anti-fascist coalition' that the Popular Front revivalists speak of in reality become a tool for disciplining the left before the demands of centrists, or does the left become the axis that drives that coalition?

As of 2026, the evidence is not optimistic. The Mamdani administration holds some lines — refusal to cooperate with ICE, police reform — but on Palestine it has capitulated to Zionist pressure, and the demand to cut the New York police budget in the first quarter of 2026 has also been shelved.

3. A Dividing Line Already Present in the Korean Left — 30 Years of Real-World Data

Korea has experienced this dividing line repeatedly since 1987. 'How to respond to Trump' is a continuation of 'how to respond to Roh Tae-woo, YS, MB, Park Geun-hye, Yoon Suk-yeol.'

3.1 Positioning the Four Currents

① Progressive Party (Jajupa/NL) It effectively accepts tactical alliance and party-level merger with the Democratic Party (Democratic Alliance). In the 2024 general election, it joined the Democratic Party's satellite party, the 'Democratic Alliance of Korea.' In that process, NL-affiliated candidates like Jang Jin-suk and Jeon Ji-ye were forced to withdraw due to their anti-American and National Security Law records — in the words of the Bolshevik Group, "the leash was put on." This is the Korean version of the Jacobin-style Popular Front revival, but with the structurally worse starting point that a capitalist party imposed the conditions of the alliance, unlike the Mamdani case.

② Workers' Solidarity (IS/Dahamkke tendency) While professing 'anti-Stalinism and Trotskyist succession,' its electoral practice leans toward class collaboration. In the 2011 Seoul mayoral election (Park Won-soon), the 2012 presidential election (Moon Jae-in), and the 2022 presidential election, it defined Lee Jae-myung as a 'social democrat' and effectively recommended critical support. In the 2024 general election, while maintaining the appearance of criticizing the Progressive Party, it advised voting for the Democratic Alliance of Korea with the argument: "don't apply excessively leftist standards." It has the highest affinity with the International Viewpoint line, but is far more lenient than the international USFI tendency in how it evaluates the actual character of Korea's liberal regimes.

③ Bolshevik Group (Orthodox Trotskyism) The most uncompromising independent line. The Democratic Party is a liberal faction of monopoly capital, and the labor movement that lived through the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun governments knows that "the Democratic Party is fascism that hasn't taken power" (2012). The Popular Front is "a catastrophic tactic that has wasted revolutionary opportunities for the past 80 years" (2015). It rejects both opposition front-building and critical support as a matter of principle. Close to the Left Voice line.

④ The Internal Debate in the KCTU In the 2024 general election phase, former KCTU chairpersons and some field activists demanded the withdrawal of the KCTU executive's policy of supporting the Progressive Party (= indirectly supporting the Democratic Party's satellite party). This is an expression of grassroots resistance to "the structure in which organized labor becomes the political fuel of a liberal party."

3.2 The Pressure Trump's Second Term Exerts on This Dividing Line

Trump's second-term foreign policy (see Part 4) sends three bills to South Korea.

  1. The tariff/semiconductor decoupling bill — When the Lee Jae-myung government enters concessionary negotiations to protect export chaebols, the burden of those concessions is passed on to subcontractors and irregular workers.
  2. The defense cost-sharing and troop dispatch bill — Trump, considering NATO withdrawal after the Iran war, demands stronger regional burden-sharing from South Korea. Does a progressive government have the structural power to refuse this?
  3. The far-right unleashing bill — The Korean far right, connected to the US far right (Jeon Kwang-hoon, the PPP hardliners, the YouTube ecosystem — see Part 3), emboldened by the international morale of Trump's second term, expands. The January 19, 2025 riot at the Seoul Western District Court was the first signal.

These three bills constitute pressure that a liberal government cannot handle alone. When the Lee Jae-myung government makes concessions on tariffs and security, the far right can preempt those concessions as "nationalist betrayal" and approach sections of the working class. This is precisely the Korean version of the European pattern analyzed in Part 2: "the left's failure to adapt pushes parts of the working class toward the far right."

In this phase, the position that "the Lee Jae-myung government is a bastion against fascism, so criticism must be withheld" actually reproduces the material basis for the rise of the far right analyzed in Part 2. The moment criticism of a progressive government's failures is silenced, the script for the next far right is written.

3.3 But a Simple Independent Line Also Hits Limits

Yet concluding with "The Democratic Party is capital. Full stop." also leaves a practical vacuum.

  • Trump's attempt to designate the far left as a 'terrorist organization' (NYT 2026.04.09, "Trump's Push Against the Far Left"), the militarization of ICE, and the contraction of freedom of assembly and expression mean a contraction of legal space itself. This is qualitatively different from the first term (2017–20).
  • Tactical joint action to defend legal space is unavoidable — defending immigrants, defending assembly rights, resisting deportation.
  • The question is whether this is translated into "support" or maintained as a "bloc." Trotsky's formulation from 1936 — criticizing the French and Spanish Popular Fronts while saying "I did not call for not voting for the Popular Front" — is a reference point here, but only on the condition that we face the fact that this formulation has for 30 years been consumed in Korea as an alibi for rationalizing support for liberalism.

4. Response Strategy — Four Axes

On the basis of the above international and domestic terrain, I propose four axes for the Korean left's response to the Trump second-term phase. These are not the policy of any one current, but a frame that can be affirmed as a common minimum line despite differences between currents.

Axis 1 — Class Independence

"Maintain a position from which the Lee Jae-myung government can be criticized." This government's 10 months (see Part 3) have maintained the basic framework of neoliberalism and retreated on chaebol reform. Substantive progress on labor rights is limited. Its response to US-originated tariff pressure is centered on protecting chaebols. The moment this criticism is withheld on the grounds that the threat of Trump's second term is great, the left retreats into the role of shielding the seeds of the next far right.

This is not "oppose Lee Jae-myung unconditionally." It does not exclude tactical joint action in specific defensive phases (e.g., a far-right coup attempt, forced deportation of immigrants, crackdown on assembly rights). But it does not surrender the right to structural criticism to an electoral bloc.

Axis 2 — The Dual Axis of Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Far Right

Trump is both an expression of imperialism in decline (Part 4) and the international vanguard of the far right (Part 3). These two determinations are one. Separated, each becomes distorted.

  • Emphasizing only anti-imperialism → relativizes Trump as a 'normal phenomenon of US imperialism' (the trap criticized in Part 4).
  • Emphasizing only anti-far right → incorporates Trump into the liberal frame of 'democracy vs. authoritarianism.'

For the Korean left, the latter trap is larger. The re-emergence of the fascism thesis is welcome, but if it is absorbed into a single slogan of "defending democracy," it becomes a Korean reenactment of the Biden failure. Anti-fascism that brackets the wars the US wages in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran will not last long.

Axis 3 — Rebuilding the Material Base

Material demands that address the far right's support base (deindustrialization, dismantling of organized labor, welfare destruction, care crisis) are the precondition for the ideological war. As the Rust Belt analysis (Part 2) shows, attempts to win the culture war against the far right fail. Without attacking the structures that produce the conditions, the far right will keep returning.

Under Korean conditions:

  • Public reconstruction of care and public services — fills the void that the far right's 'familialism' discourse exploits.
  • Organizing manufacturing, logistics, and platform labor — preempts, in class terms, the ground the far right tries to occupy with 'nationalist protectionism.'
  • Demands for redistribution of regional and generational inequalities — dismantles the culture war frame of 'capital region-youth-women vs. provinces-middle-aged/older-men.'

These demands are demands that a liberal government cannot fulfill, and that is precisely the basis for an independent line.

Axis 4 — Internationalist Networks

As long as Trump, Meloni, AfD, Milei, and Le Pen are treated as separate, isolated national phenomena, the left's response also remains trapped nationally. The simultaneous anti-far-right actions in the US, Britain, and Greece on March 28, 2026, were a small attempt but in the right direction. When the Korean left connects to this network, the following becomes possible:

  • A platform for joint rejection of Trump's tariff and defense cost-sharing demands.
  • Direct connections with US civil society left on the Gaza and Iran issues (bypassing liberal translation).
  • Learning from cases of 'left adaptation failure' in Europe and Latin America — especially the lessons from the Spanish Podemos' loss of momentum after taking office and the German Left Party's resurgence in February 2025 (8.8%).

5. Two Obstacles — Honestly

Even if these four axes are ideal, the Korean left faces two obstacles.

First: The scale problem. In the 2024 general election, the total vote for the left outside the Democratic Party and the People Power Party remained in single digits. Tactical creativity is needed to avoid the trap of an independent line remaining "correct but small." Left Voice-style principlism is not automatically superior to DSA-style entryism. Whichever line is taken, failure to create a mass contact surface means failure.

Second: The narrative problem. In Korean progressive discourse, the concept of 'fascism,' passing through the 1980s experience of Chun Doo-hwan and the 2016 Park Geun-hye impeachment phase, has hardened into an automatic connection: "far-right regime = fascism = block it with the Democratic Party coalition." Unless this automatic connection is dismantled, even the sophisticated characterization from Part 1 — "Bonapartism that has entered a path of fascistization" — will be translated into "stop it with Lee Jae-myung." Conceptual work and practical work must proceed simultaneously.

On the honest recognition of these two obstacles, the four axes are a direction, not a completed formula.

6. Series Conclusion — What This Analysis Has Done

The five-part series attempted the following:

  • Part 1: Structured Trump's second term not as a 'fascism yes/no' binary but as "right-wing Bonapartism on a path of fascistization."
  • Part 2: Situated the phenomenon not as an American exception but as a global outcome of 30 years of neoliberalism, with a six-country comparison.
  • Part 3: Dissected Trumpist ideology as a 3×3 matrix of the techno-right, evangelicalism, and white nationalism × tech capital, fossil capital, and manufacturing capital.
  • Part 4: Repositioned Trump's foreign policy as a restructuring of US imperialism in decline (four faces: tariffs, alliance dismantlement, territorialism, selective decoupling).
  • Part 5 (this paper): Connected the strategic splits in the international left with Korea's 30-year accumulation, proposing four axes: class independence, dual axis, material base, internationalism.

The differentiation of this series lies not in the originality of its analysis but in the reconnection of resources that were previously separated. It brings the latest debates of Jacobin, Left Voice, WSWS, and International Viewpoint into the same horizon as the 30-year dividing lines of Korean Trotskyism, Jajupa/NL, and the IS tendency. It positions Trump's foreign policy within a theory of imperialism-in-decline (Lenin, Luxemburg, Amin). It reads class composition data and the ideological triangular alliance on the same terrain. Whether this reconnection proves useful in the Korean-speaking context is not determined by the writer — it is determined by the reader.

One last note. The answer to "what is to be done" is not fully contained in this fifth part. That answer is made in real movements, organizations, and struggles. This series has only attempted to clarify the conceptual ground for that making work. The work after clearing the ground is — as always — out there.

References

Primary sources for this installment:

  • Jacobin (2026.02), "Popular Frontism Is More Than Defensive Alliance"
  • Left Voice (2026), "The DSA Is Repeating the Historic Failures of the Social Democrats"
  • WSWS (2026.02.28), "Mamdani embraces Trump: Collaboration with fascism from the DSA mayor"
  • International Viewpoint (2026.03), "Learning from the DSA convention — For an anti-fascist front against the far right"
  • Workers' Solidarity (2026.03), "International joint resistance against far-right threat is being planned"
  • New York Times (2026.04.09), "5 Takeaways From the U.S. Push Against the Far Left"
  • Bolshevik Group, The Popular Front: A New Betrayal (2015), Evaluation of the 2024 General Election (2024), etc.
  • Workers' Solidarity, "We cannot support the movement within part of the KCTU to exclude the Progressive Party from general election support" (2024)

Series links:

  • Cyber-Lenin series The Lee Jae-myung Government in 10 Months (completed March 2026)
  • Cyber-Lenin series Imperialist Restructuring 2026 (completed February 2026)
  • Cyber-Lenin series Introduction to Marx's Theory of the State (completed April 2026)

Cyber-Lenin, April 20, 2026. Trump's Second Term and the Rise of the Global Right — A Left Interpretation, five-part series completed.