MAGA’s Lust for Fascism : Trump’s ideologues want a smaller, meaner, whiter America.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Spirit of Fascism
by William Kristol
MAGA is a vulgar, cartoonish, cultish, and incoherent movement.
So, a century ago, was fascism.
And as today’s MAGA more openly and explicitly embraces the spirit of yesteryear’s fascism, it’s perhaps worth noting that it is the era of the rise of fascism to which MAGA looks back with nostalgia and yearning.
In her most recent newsletter , the historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us of this 2009 statement by Peter Thiel, who as much as anyone could be considered the theorist of Trumpism as an intellectual movement.
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women . . . have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
The first sentence is a bit startling. But there is, to be fair, a long tradition of worrying about various tensions between freedom and democracy. Thiel, one could say, has simply adopted the radically pessimistic view that those tensions can no longer be managed or resolved.
Far more striking is the rest of Thiel’s statement, his yearning for the pre-welfare-state and pre-women’s-franchise 1920s, “the last decade during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.”
Thiel’s history is not striking just because it is wrong—the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in the summer of 1920, making the general election that fall the first to feature the mass participation of women, though some states had granted women full suffrage even earlier.
It’s striking because we do now know, after all, what followed the decade of the 1920s: A 1930s that featured a worldwide Great Depression, and the rise of fascism—which, while unsuccessful in America, came closer here than we often remember, and was dominant overseas. All of that culminated in the horrors of World War II. The terrible events from 1929 to 1945 followed on—followed from—the economic and foreign policies of the decade for which Thiel is so nostalgic.
Thiel is an intelligent man. Yet his hatred of the modern world—a world characterized by the welfare state and the emancipation of women—is so great that it overwhelms all sensible political judgment.
If Peter Thiel is a MAGA theoretician, Stephen Miller is MAGA’s chief propagandist. On Sunday, in the wake of Trump’s Venezuelan intervention, Miller posted :
Not long after World War II the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories (despite have [sic] already made them far wealthier and more successful). The West opened its borders, a kind of reverse colonization, providing welfare and thus remittances, while extending to these newcomers and their families not only the full franchise but preferential legal and financial treatment over the native citizenry. The neoliberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.
So Britain and France should not have dissolved empires and colonies, but rather have fought to hold countries like, say, India and Vietnam? And the United States’ openness to immigrants from, say, India and Vietnam, has been an exercise in self-punishment?
Apparently so. On Monday, Miller extended his critique of the modern world, going on television to decry “This whole period that happened after World War II where the West began apologizing and groveling and begging.”
Was that what characterized the last eighty years of world history—eighty years of Western success and dominance?
As the political scientist Nicholas Grossman remarked , “Imagine looking at the period after WWII and especially after the Cold War as an era of American weakness.” But Grossman sees what lies behind Miller’s complaint: “Unless, I suppose, if becoming the strongest, wealthiest country in history sounds bad to you because some brown people were a part of it, and you’d rather be weaker if it means being whiter.”
The more liberal nation and the liberal world order that we were able to construct after World War II made us stronger. Miller and Thiel—and MAGA—reject that.
So MAGA does not want to make America great again. MAGA does not simply want to correct some of the excesses of modern America or the modern world. MAGA embraces what was most illiberal about the old order. The theorists of MAGA look back longingly to, they yearn for, the ideas and policies that produced the worst of the 1930s.
Or to put it simply: It is fascism that they yearn for.
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" If Peter Thiel is a MAGA theoretician, Stephen Miller is MAGA’s chief propagandist. On Sunday, in the wake of Trump’s Venezuelan intervention, Miller posted :
One of the things that bothers me most in this world is people who have little or nothing to complain about still complaining.
another step closer to my fantasy of trump triggering a civil war and maga paying the ultimate price ...
LOL