Really showing their bullshit left-bashing and ignorance of shallow fascist appeals.

It’s an image posted by the Trump administration, but it looks straight out of the Soviet Union: a square-jawed worker in a simple button-down shirt stands before a backdrop of factory smokestacks, beneath the slogan, “AMERICAN WORKERS FIRST!” The image appeared as the administration was taking stakes in Intel, US Steel and MP Materials, as well as entering revenue-sharing agreements with the chip companies Nvidia and AMD. To borrow from once-familiar jargon, the workers’ state is nationalising the means of production.

Obviously, I’m not arguing that Trumpism is communism. (It’s a family-first version of state capitalism.) Yet, the movement does have echoes of communism — not in its policies, but in Donald Trump’s rhetoric and, especially, his embrace of the notion of class struggle. Today’s populism is often compared with 1930s’ fascism, but it can also be understood as an emotional replacement for communism.

When communism dwindled around 1990, it left a vacuum. Though few missed its policies, many craved its story: a proud working class united against its oppressors. Social democratic parties had told a softer version of that story, but during the Blairite 1990s they abandoned that, too. “The workers themselves, their culture, their conditions of life, their aspirations . . . disappeared from political and intellectual discourse,” writes French sociologist Didier Eribon. When workers were mentioned, it was often with contempt. They were derided as “chavs” in the UK and “trailer trash” in the US.

Soon, far-right nativist parties realised they could meet the unfilled demand for pro-worker rhetoric. Eribon recounts in his memoir Returning to Reims how his white working-class family switched from the French Communist party to the far-right Front National. Working-class people, he writes, “turned to the party that seemed to be the only one to concern itself with them”.

Like the Communist party before it, the Front National claimed to speak for the “working class”. The class enemy was rebranded from “bourgeoisie” to “elite”, communist xenophobia about “international capital” was supplemented with xenophobia against immigrants, and the proletariat had to ally with former adversaries such as small business owners, but the essential claim of working-class dignity remained intact.

The relationship between communism and populism was less direct in the US. The country barely had a communist tradition, and its working class had gone almost unacknowledged by politicians since vice-president Henry Wallace invoked the “century of the common man” in 1942, but Trump spotted a missed opportunity.

Now populists recycle communist verities: the fetishisation of working-class culture, the vision of a good “people” fighting a bad elite, the belief that the state should control business and the dismissal of parliamentary democracy as a bourgeois sham. Both communists and populists are impatient with such “bourgeois liberties” as the right not to be snatched off the street and incarcerated without trial. Similarly, both groups think the media’s job is to produce propaganda for the ruling party. Poland’s slavish state TV under the populist PiS party curiously resembled Poland’s slavish state TV under communism.

Populist parties in Poland, France and Austria have wooed working-class voters by shifting economically to the left. Trump sometimes pretends to, for instance, when he mused about raising taxes on the rich (shortly before giving them a tax cut). Yet whereas communism was primarily an economic movement, populism is a cultural one. Instead of accusing the bourgeoisie of exploitation, populists accuse the elite of disrespect. Perhaps the most galvanising slogan of Trumpism was Hillary Clinton’s sneer at the “basket of deplorables”.

Trump’s policies won’t make the working class better off, but then nor did the Communist ones. The appeal is in the story of class struggle. Trump tells it better than Lenin, though his props are the same muscular white factory workers of yesteryear. The rhetorical similarity is obscured by populist rants against communism as if it were still alive, or, bafflingly, against “cultural Marxism”. Giorgia Meloni’s party recently posted a cartoon of her playing football against a team of red-shirted communists with hammers and sickles on their chests.

The lesson for Trump’s opponents is that there’s still a self-identified working class that wants political leaders to speak in its name. The left shouldn’t ditch the language of ethnicity and gender, but it must reclaim class. Perhaps new left leaders like Zohran Mamdani, Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, can find ways to do that.