There are moments in history where standing on the sidelines of the political struggle is not an option. This is one of them.

The Trump presidency is transforming politics in the US and around the world. The first weeks of his rule have made it clear that this will be an administration without precedent in US history. The proto-fascist pronouncements that peppered his campaign speeches are now being translated into executive orders issued by the most powerful office on the planet.

Building a wall on the Mexican border; banning Muslims from entering the US; mass deportations; ripping up regulations in the finance industry; abolishing environmental controls; dramatically increasing military spending and threatening war with China and Iran; slashing corporate tax rates; giving police free rein to wage war on Black communities: Trump is trying to do it all.

But it is not just that the Trump administration is pursuing a hard right wing policy agenda. The manner in which he is doing so is just as alarming.

Trump and his key advisors are making it clear that they consider any check on their power – whether from the courts or the media or the millions that have taken to the streets – to be completely illegitimate.

After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s attempt to have the stay on the Muslim ban overturned, Trump sent unhinged advisor Stephen Miller onto the Sunday morning talk shows. In a terrifying display of the fascist id, Miller described the judge’s decision as a “judicial usurpation of power” and declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned”.

After another week of turmoil centred on the forced resignation of national security advisor Michael Flynn, Trump called a press conference in which he wildly berated journalists for an hour and a half, and declared that a new executive order would be issued within days to circumvent the court ruling against the Muslim ban. The next day he held a mass rally of his supporters in Florida, in which he reasserted his determination to carry out his agenda in full.

The whole logic of the Trump administration is crash through or crash. The hope that he would moderate his approach once in office is a distant memory. Trump has already laid the groundwork to blame his opponents for terror attacks, tweeting: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system”. As the crisis surrounding his administration escalates, the potential for such an attack being turned into an excuse for widespread repression grows more apparent.

But even short of that, the trajectory of his presidency is one of escalating confrontation, increasingly belligerent right wing policies and the assertion of arbitrary power.

Resistance

The only thing that will stop the US careering down this path is mass resistance – ordinary people putting their feet on the streets to oppose the president and his whole agenda.

Fortunately, that is precisely what we are seeing. The tame-cat response of the Democrats to the election outcome in November, which initially threatened to dampen opposition to Trump, has given way in the face of surging anger and a determination to fight back, which is drawing millions of people into political action and resistance. The enormous women’s march in Washington and around the country the day after the inauguration was the biggest national protest in US history. But that was just the beginning.

From the thousands who descended on airports to defy the travel ban and students walking out of high schools in protest at Trump’s incoming education secretary Betsy DeVos, to organising to defend immigrants and abortion rights in cities across the country – Americans are protesting like they haven’t since the Vietnam years. Large numbers of people are starting to understand the power they have when they organise together and fight back.

It is not only protesters on the streets who are defying the president. The weeks-long spectacle of Trump unplugged, now with his finger on the nuclear codes as well as his twitter feed, has also pushed much of the Washington establishment to take a harder stance.

The New York Times and the Washington Post are running a relentless campaign to discredit Trump. The CIA and the NSA are leaking against him – it was they who brought down Michael Flynn.

Republican senator John McCain – the same guy who ran for president with Sarah Palin on his ticket – now says the White House is in “disarray” and said of Trump’s assault on the press: “That’s how dictators get started”.

The divisions at the top of US society are of no small importance. They constrain Trump’s ability to impose his agenda, add to a sense of crisis around his administration and help lend legitimacy to those demonstrating in the streets. But the ruling elite – the newspaper editors, the government bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies and Democratic politicians – cannot for one minute be relied upon to solve the political crisis the Trump presidency has created.

Product of a rotten system

It is impossible to successfully take on Trump without confronting the conditions that created him. And while Trump undeniably represents a radical rupture with the status quo of US politics, he is also very much a product of the bi-partisan policies carried out by the US ruling class for the last 30 years.

While it was the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath that brought the issue of financial inequality and the disintegrating living standards of US workers to the fore of politics, the truth is that, since the Reagan era, the US ruling class has waged a one-sided class war that has resulted in an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the bulk of the population to the rich.

The political result of these policies was widespread disillusionment – with politicians, with institutions, and with the ideological framework on which they rest.

On the right, Republicans have long convinced their poorer supporters to support a party that rules for the super-rich by whipping up racism and galvanising the base around an increasingly unhinged anti-liberal social agenda.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx likened capitalist society to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”. This is precisely what happened to the Republican Party, whose dog-whistle racist rhetoric, which began as a highly cynical strategy to win over poor white Southern voters, got completely out of the control of the party establishment. First came the Tea Party, and after that Trump.

Trump takes the not-so-subtly implied views espoused by a generation of Republican politicians to their logical conclusion, and strips away the façade. The racism is now out in the open – completely unabashed.

But while Trump has upended the pillars on which decades of Republican politics rested, the Democrats have fared no better. The inability of Hillary Clinton to beat Trump – who should have been easily demolished – also demonstrated the complete failure of the Democrats. Since Bill Clinton took office in 1992, Democrats have combined neoliberal economics, which served the rich while demolishing the living standards of their base, with warmongering abroad and increasingly reactionary social policies at home. The result was to identify liberalism with an establishment that served no one but the Wall Street elite, demoralising the Democratic base and leaving the field open for the right.

The truth is that the political establishment agrees with many of Trump’s policies. Bashing Muslims; warmongering abroad; cutting taxes for the rich; bailing out the bankers; victimising immigrants; attacking unions; letting the police get away with murder on American streets: there are disagreements around the edges, but these are the bipartisan views of the US ruling class.

Time for a reset

Around the world, politics is entering a new era. On the right, mainstream conservative politicians are giving way to a vicious far-right populism: racist and militaristically nationalist, but attempting to gain wider support by appealing to hostility to the elites and opposing the free trade policies that have destroyed so many lives.

An opposition to Trump and Trumpism that supports neoliberal policies, that defends the corrupt institutions and political system that Trump denounces, will never succeed. The moment Clinton lost the election was when she adopted the slogan “America is already great”. America is not great. The world is not great. It is a maelstrom of inequality, oppression and corruption, ruled over by a class of billionaires who are rich only because the rest of us are poor.

To resist Trump, we need to resist that system. We need an alternative that is dedicated to taking power from the rich and giving it to the people. An alternative that fights racism by uniting workers and the poor of all races and religions against those parasites at the top who whip up fear and prejudice to keep us divided and weak.

There is one thing Trump does that helps us in that task. He makes the truth about the world we live in plain as day. Racism has always been a tool designed to divide and distract – Trump does it in such a way that anyone can see it. His open worship of power makes it clear how the world really works and how the rich see politics.

In a recent interview with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, Trump responded to the assertion that “Putin’s a killer” by saying, “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” In seven words, Trump exposed the vile hypocrisy of US politicians who lecture the world about democracy and human rights while presiding over the most bloodthirsty killing machine in the history of human civilisation.

The brutal reality of the world we live in – a world of dog eat dog in which those at the top hold onto their power by whatever means necessary – is usually hidden behind a vast wall of ideology and institutions, from the idea of US imperial benevolence to the illusory democracy of our political systems. Trump either doesn’t understand why that wall is there or he doesn’t care. Either way, he is ripping it down – it’s up to us to rip down the system it protects.