When considering the intellectual structure of MAGA, prepare for a light meal, says New Yorker writer Joshua Rothman. Its most famous proponent, President Donald Trump, is not the kind of thinker who sits on Air Force One, “gazing out at the passing clouds, then scribbling the word ‘nationalism’ on a notepad and underlining it,” said Rothman.
Right now, Trump is the center of the MAGA movement, but what are the solid ideas and bone structure that will support it when an aging Trump is out the door?
“If MAGA has good ideas, they might undergird its future. Alternatively, if it has bad or irrelevant ones, it may struggle to maintain its energy,” said Rothman.
But the MAGA movement is more based on feelings than ideas, says author Laura K. Field, who says she first began to grow disillusioned at the young Republican movement as a student while attending an opening dinner hosted by a conservative educational organization. She was seated next to one of the program’s senior staffers who claimed to have met Michelle Obama.
“She was truly statuesque,” the man told her. “Very tall, very impressive. I’d really like to f—— her.”
Shocked, Field excused herself from the table, went to the restroom, regarded herself in the mirror, and thought, “What on earth am I doing here?” She then slowly unwound herself from what she saw as “a newly supercharged misogyny” from people who were “obsessed with masculinity” in a way their predecessors were not.
For MAGA, it’s all about feelings, and incoherence could even be part of the point. This creates a “unique disconnect between thinking and reality” that opens the door to some horrific thinking. Take political theorist Yoram Hazony, a MAGA affiliate who is also somehow an Orthodox Jew and a Christian Nationalist. Hazony argues for a world of theocratic ethnostates with “a majority … whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile.”
The New Right, said Field, “asserts truths in eternal terms, without justification or argument,” and it takes “satisfaction … in doing so.”
“These supposed truths, once asserted, serve as justification for more assertions, creating a performance of certainty about what’s true that “quickly outpaces what’s actually self-evident.” said Field. It’s the kind of thinking that led to the rise of legal scholar, political theorist, and Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt, who successfully argued that a leader “can, and perhaps must, circumvent the constitutional order so that he can save the nation.”
Rothman argued that some on the New Right have merged this idea with the notion of ‘Caesarism,’ arguing that the country needs a ‘Red Caesar.’ Rothman said look no further than Project 2025 co-author Michael Anton, who said in 2016 “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be?”
“It turns out that it’s liberalism forces people to inquire into ideas, precisely because they’re uncertain, changeable, and contested,” Rothman said. “In the illiberal world created by Trumpism, you don’t have to ask — you can just proclaim. You can change on a dime, saying or thinking anything at all.”
Read the New Yorker report at this link.
