The Coming MAGA Crack-Up
On the island of misfit boys
To paraphrase Whitman, Does the Republican Party contradict itself? It does, for it contains multitudes. Trump, during the 2024 campaign, was all things to all people (which contributed greatly to the unwieldy coalition he assembled). He was the go-to mass deportations guy to the bigots; defender of the H-1B visa program for the tech moguls; broker to an end of the Ukraine war for peaceniks; destroyer of woke, breaker of DEI to the anti-Me Toos; eliminator of taxes on tips and moonlighting Pennsylvania McDonald’s fry-guy for the working man. During the campaign, Trump promised anything and everything and now that he is about to be inaugurated, the ticket has exploded.
We just did not expect the MAGA fractures to become evident so early in the game. The transformation of the modern Republican Party into the party of Trump has not occurred without a few hiccoughs along the way. And — trust me on this — there will be more crack-ups in the coming years. The “No drama” Obama administration prided itself in being scandal-free and relatively efficient. But that political mode of being has possibly become obsolete by the changes that social media hath wrought on our devolving collective neurology.
Unsurprisingly, at present, the laissez-faire wing of the Republican party is feuding with the protectionists. Talk about strange bedfellows! These two political philosophies should be utterly at odds with one another and never the twain shall meet. But Trump’s has pulled them into his gravitational orbit by the force of his cult of personality. But how long can they hold fast? When do the centrifugal forces collapse?
The Republican Party crack-up we are witnessing is not fatal, no matter how much we would wish it to be. Let’s be clear on that straight away. At least not now, days before Trump regains power for a second time and the anticipatory obedience has not yet reached its zenith. Why would the Bannonites of the War Room, who owe everything of their present political relevance to Trump, break the coalition before reaching the promised land of a second reality show season pickup? That having been said, the vicious and public infighting is a sign of a serious lack of cohesive message discipline. And it could be no other than Bannon — without an official portfolio in Trump, 2.0 — that stirs the pot. Only he could have enough moxy to challenge the racial tolerance of a rival. Further, these instances of coalition fraying call to mind the historical problem of the conservative movement in America.
The American right before Reagan was a riot of incommensurable political philosophies — monarchists and Goldwater libertarians; Ayn Randians and McCarthyites; Chamber of Commerce-types and Jim Crow bigots. American conservatism has always been something of a pudding without a theme. It claims everyone from James Fenimore Cooper to Joan Didion. American conservatism has always been in search of a “Daddy figure,” like Ronald “Dutch” Reagan, or a “Daddy Warbucks,” like a Trump, who is one part Pat Buchanan populist, one-part Ross Perot take charge businessman and one part PT Barnum. This Daddy figure would bring together the disparate elements of the American right — from George Wallace enthusiasts to stone-cold Club for Growth obsessives — with nostalgic appeals to the era of military and industrial expansion at the onset of the 20th century and again in the years after World War II. Basically, the “Again” part of MAGA. (“Those were the days”)
But as photogenic as Reagan was (Averted Gaze) in the yesteryear of Brylcream, it was anti-Communism that actually unified the right under his watch, or at least unified them for a time. The libertarians and the evangelicals could work through their differences together by presenting a unified front against the Commies. The Old Right was — and is — suffused with anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny and the sour anger of disappointment that things aren’t still as great as they were when our boys came back from Dubya-dubya two. Then Communism fell — or rather was phased out by Gorbachev — and the political reverberations are still being worked through in Russia and in middle America. From John Ganz in The Baffler, who zeros in to the end of the Cold War, when the brain of the right got broke:
The sudden end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union made everything worse. Militant anticommunism long provided the great fixative that bound the factions of the right together. The loss of the USSR was so traumatic that the John Birch Society went into full-blown denial: Birch officials insisted the breakup of the Soviet Union was a K.G.B. ploy to get the West to drop its guard.
Who was the main enemy now? On the right, the answer increasingly was one another. In the 1980s, the conservative movement split into two warring factions—neoconservatives and paleo conservatives. The two sects fought over ideas, but also resources: comfortable think tank positions and administrative posts; grant money and the allegiance of the idle army of increasingly ideologically restive conservative activists who could scare up campaign contributions and votes.
Which reminds me of the old line delivered by deceased, achievement-oriented war criminal Henry Kissinger on academic politics. “The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small,” the former Harvard Government Professor said, presumably before being swept up into the Nixon administration as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Ganz in his brilliant book The Year the Clock Broke (based on the Baffler article) outlines the petty infighting in the 80s and 90s as various irrelevant factions of the right — does anyone really care about the Mount Pelerin Society? — battled, shamelessly, over the pocket change of the wealthy.
In the classic American stop-motion holiday special “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” we are introduced to an island of highly implausible, largely defective toys in search of children to be their owners. On this fanciful island is a boat that can’t stay afloat, a train with square wheels and a water pistol that shoots jelly. Medium writer Ben Bowman goes so far as to rank the toys in order of their misfitedness. He notes, acidly:
The 1964 Rankin-Bass production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is required holiday viewing for American children. It teaches a valuable lesson: freaks must be forcibly removed from our society.
Rudolph (himself a hideous freak) eventually finds himself on the Island of Misfit Toys, where poorly conceptualized merchandise goes to die.
This is a spectacularly cynical take, of course, but not without some on-the-nose psychological observations about the water-heads populating the American right then and now. Calling someone like Seb Gorka or Kash Patel a C-Lister is elitist and counterproductive. And, I suspect, the era of Cabinet officials from Harvard and Yale Law is effectively over, so there’s that as well. But I bring up this American holiday classic because, quite frankly, again it reminds me vividly of the current state that the GOP. There is something just … not quite right about them.
It also sort of goes without saying that the party that happens to have violence baked into its recipe and is not averse to a spot of rough-and tumble now and again is probably going to experience turbulent internal winds at some point. I mean, for godsakes, Kevin Roberts bragged to liberal academic colleagues that he bashed a neighborhood dog’s head in with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family. This is what I mean by the “not quite right” of MAGA — the disdain of norms and civility as indicative of something even more sinister. And who can forget Trump’s increasingly menacing threats to journalists covering his 2016 Presidential campaign, which are for historians of the future looking backwards to decipher more fully.
The Republican Party ran candidates in the three cycles where he led the party that can only be properly construed under the category of freakshow. Minus the charm, to be sure, of the Island of Misfit Toys. Because this is a children’s classic with a happy ending, the toys are never entirely malevolent. They are actually quite sympathetic; broken at the outset. Who among us is not sympathetic to the plight of a boat that cannot stay afloat?
Not so much with the MAGA candidates, however. Trump’s list of phenomenally bad picks, over the years, are worth noting. In his zeal to find some Republican dark chocolate, Trump went with Herschel Walker for the Georgia Senate, as close as you can get to a stereotype out of a Little Rascals episode. And Kari Lake, perennial candidate in Arizona, Trump’s choice to lead Voice of America, also seems … not quite right. In 2017, he backed Alabama’s Roy Moore for the Senate, despite credible allegations that he was sexually attracted to children. Fast forward to November, when Trump nominated for Attorney General Matt Gaetz — another winner with a predilection for sex with kids.
The historians of the future may find that Trump’s “I am your retribution” speech, made during CPAC in 2023 to be the turning point of the 2024 election. It distilled perfectly Trump’s message, something neither President Biden nor Vice President Harris seemed capable of doing effectively as communicators. It encapsulated the totality of his message in the form of a single sentence. When Trump said “I am your retribution,” he channeled so much of the concentrated anger and resentment at unaddressed American inequality. It was perhaps the beginning of the realignment of the Republican Party as the party of people making under $50,000 a year. But it also set up the fault lines of the Republican crack-up that we are witnessing now and will continue to witness as a narrative arc on the second season of the Trump reality show.
Because the Republican Party cannot in earnest make the argument that it is the party of the working class while simultaneously making permanent tax cuts for the wealthy that exacerbate inequality as well as pushing for tariffs that raise the prices of groceries. The aspirational wealth of the working class notwithstanding, it is an untenable strategy in the long term. Those are the obvious, economic contradictions of MAGA. Further, there is the matter of the ragtag coalition of angry, highly unstable Old Right entities, like the Tea Party, white supremacist groups and conspiracists like QAnon that will be vying for power and influence among the other vipers once Trump is installed. Steve Bannon, as always, is the canary in the right-wing coal mine. His “thumotic excess” is a precursor of arguments yet to come, resentments left to hatch out in public and ideological purity to virtue signal over.
Bannon versus Musk is more than just a battle over H-1B visas, although that is certainly a part of it. Bannon versus Musk is a precursor to a much larger and far older fight among entities of the far-right that have never learned to play well together and would probably argue that learning to play well together is “woke.” Can you imagine Ayn Rand compromising on the necessity of Social Security? Or Charles Murray actually observing scholarly integrity and not masking his personal prejudices in jargon? Or, Murray Rothbard acknowledging that lighthouses are indeed a collective good? Hardly. When Trump gave his “I am your retribution” speech, he spoke to this angry, resentful crowd. The President-elect in less than one week is going to have to navigate this sour and prickly coalition competing for power and influence in real time and for the next four years. And he brought it entirely on himself.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
“With Biden stepping down in a matter of months, there is no way that U.N. members will work out a reform deal on his watch. If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the November election, she might take the initiative forward, though given political and legal hurdles it would be a steeply uphill climb. If Trump returns to office, the whole idea is likely to go nowhere, and the U.S. will go back to the sort of confrontational U.N. diplomacy that was the hallmark of Trump’s first term. Nonetheless, the Biden administration deserves some credit for being willing to envisage changes to the U.N. architecture, rather than clinging to the status quo. The administration has not been as keen to promote reforms in some other areas. Washington has resisted calls from Global South countries and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to give the organization a role in reshaping the governance of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It has also opposed proposals by Guterres for a new international agency with the power to regulate AI. This has led some U.N. officials and foreign diplomats to grumble that the U.S. is still pursuing a ‘pick and choose’ approach to multilateralism, only intermittently paying heed to other states’ interests. But for most U.N. members, the administration’s greatest sin has been its repeated refusal to back Security Council and General Assembly calls for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in late 2023 and early 2024. Biden’s staunch line against giving the U.N. a political role in resolving the war in Gaza alienated even many U.S. allies and made it harder for Western powers to secure support for Ukraine in the General Assembly.” (Richard Gowan/WPR)
“The FBI's 2023 crime report, which the agency releases annually, uses crime statistics from law enforcement agencies and partners throughout the country to outline the crime landscape nationwide. In 2023, the data was submitted by more than 16,000 agencies. This year's report comes just weeks ahead of the presidential election, where crime has become a key issue on the campaign trail. Violent crime — which includes murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault and robbery — decreased by around 3% from 2022 to 2023 nationwide, the report found. Among the findings, murder and non-negligent manslaughter saw a decrease of 11.6% from the previous year, along with a 9.4% decrease in rape, a 0.3% decrease in robberies and a 2.8% decrease in aggravated assault. The declining violent crime rates come after a spike in violent crime during the COVID-19 pandemic. Violent crime also waned in 2022, falling by 1.7%. Overall, more than 1.2 million violent crimes were committed in 2023, the report estimated. The decrease in the murder rate between 2022 and 2023 represents the ‘largest drop’ in the rate in the last 20 years, an FBI official said.” (Kaia Hubbard/CBSNews)