From New Lines Magazine.
A growing rift within the MAGA coalition between populists and techno-oligarchs may determine the future of the Republican Party
Over the last decade, the Republican Party has moved further to the right, becoming more authoritarian than most conservative parties across the Atlantic, according to a study conducted by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg. Even as the so-called “New Right” gains dominance in every branch of the U.S. government, however, it faces increasing internal tensions over its political direction.
Key factions in the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) coalition that defeated Kamala Harris last November feel disenfranchised and angry today. What some have called the “MAGA civil war” may not seem significant, but as the afterglow of victory fades and economic turmoil sets in, the rift indicates a vulnerability within Trump’s personality cult at the top of the Republican Party. Trumpism has shifted from populism to techno-oligarchy and back in convulsive maneuvers so dramatic that even the political theorist Corey Robin, author of “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump,” who called Trump “almost the complete opposite of fascism” in 2020, has recently pronounced himself “shaken out of my skepticism.”
The so-called “MAGA civil war” boils down to a rivalry between the populist and techno-oligarchic factions of Trump’s coalition, but is complicated by internal dissension within and against the New Right. Just as the Republican Party fought itself to a standstill during the 1960s in factional disputes between the “trads and rads” — traditionalists committed to virtue and libertarians committed to freedom — today’s GOP finds itself split between Elon Musk’s techno-oligarchs and Steve Bannon’s populist Traditionalists. The two factions overlap somewhat with their GOP predecessors. Musk’s side embraces unconventional lifestyles mixed with a cultish belief in capitalism; Bannon’s capital “T” Traditionalists make a more religious, populist appeal to values-based “middle-American radicals.” While some crossover exists between the two factions, what Bannon calls their “huge, almost unbridgeable differences” are such that compromise remains exceedingly difficult.
Such challenges are here already with Trump’s tariff regime and its discontents. The architect of MAGA protectionism, Peter Navarro, is a longtime ally of Steve Bannon. Among Navarro’s biggest detractors is Musk, who called the White House trade tsar a “moron” who is “dumber than a sack of bricks.” On a larger scale, members of the American Enterprise Institute, widely viewed as an “establishment conservative” think tank, lambasted the tariff schedule as “rigged” and amateurish, while Stephen Moore of the more-Trumpy, right-wing Heritage Foundation declared, “Don’t panic, investors! … Trumponomics drives growth.” According to an Ipsos poll, the tariffs risk alienating around a quarter of Republicans and are unpopular with independents.
But the expanding differences go far deeper than trade and immigration, extending to questions of sovereignty, executive theory and the will of the people.
Amid vigorous legal challenges and mass protests against the administration’s sudden and wide-ranging efforts, the competition between political cultures and their respective interests poses sharp challenges for MAGA’s uncertain future. Musk remains the most controversial figure amid the divisions and chaos of Trump’s first months. As seen during a much-publicized confrontation between Musk and Trump’s Cabinet on the morning of March 9, Musk’s ambiguous role heading up the task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) clashes with the jealously guarded roles of prominent Republicans like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Although Musk and Rubio have since arrived at an awkward public detente, the public backlash against the former suggests deeper problems for the Trump administration that may be tied to its own flagging popularity. Indeed, Musk’s odd auxiliary role in the federal government signifies a kind of “parallel state” operating between the lines of the constitutional superstructure — an interstitial, quasi-libertarian network of technologists developing their own elitist hierarchies, currencies like Musk’s favorite Dogecoin and paramilitary competencies within and outside of the federal government. One manifestation of this parallel state was the emergence and lionization of organized vigilante groups that targeted protesters during the unrest that followed the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. While a number of such vigilante groups originated, like Dogecoin, as tongue-in-cheek larks, their deadly serious portent became obvious in cases like the killings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by Kyle Rittenhouse during August of that year.
According to a Navigator Research poll, the most important stigma around Musk remains his role as a tech CEO. For many voters, the concept of the big tech CEO connotes economic and political power detached from public accountability. CEOs pulling down billions of dollars while avoiding taxes are sponsoring research into elitist visions of lifespan enhancement and, in Musk’s words, the possibility of “a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” Such desires seem far removed from the everyday struggles that define “kitchen table issues,” and conservatives typically view them as belonging to a world of jet-setting social engineers aligned with the “liberal elites” of the World Economic Forum. Musk’s unpopularity, and the perception that he was attempting to buy an election, did not help his $21 million effort to defeat Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate in the April 2 Wisconsin Supreme Court race. An Associated Press headline declared it a “big loss for Elon Musk.”
Enter Musk’s most determined opponents. Nobody has relished Musk’s tumbles more than Traditionalist chieftain Bannon, who gleefully commented on his “War Room” podcast that Musk “had his wings clipped” when Trump seemed to rein in DOGE. Asked at a “little tech” summit put on by the tech company Y Combinator whether Musk’s loss in Wisconsin would sideline him in Trump’s coalition, Bannon responded: “Are you assuming that someone who spent $20 million and wears a cheesehead on a stage and bounces around is humiliated?” Despite Bannon’s small victories, it remains difficult to ignore the declining power of the populist MAGA base that he helped build, which the Trump administration appears to have jettisoned like a rocket thruster on a doomed starcraft.
Alexander Reid Ross, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right and senior data analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute.