MAGA must be reborn Time to shed the crankery and contrarianism

When Donald Trump first descended the escalator nine years ago, he opened his political career with a trail-blazing critique of globalisation with a focus on fixing America’s trade and immigration imbalances: MAGA 1.0. A radical strategy, at times its critiques of bipartisan corporate orthodoxy converged with Bernie Sanders and the populist-Left. The opening days of the first Trump Administration saw out-of-the-box proposals for a tax hike on the rich (put forward by Steve Bannon, of all people) and an expansion of public healthcare options for working-class Americans, as opposed to an Obamacare repeal.

But it was an unstable formulation. And it was soon folded into the same party leadership Trump initially opposed. The president essentially adopted Congressional Republicans’ tax cutting agenda as his own and abdicated any serious effort at comprehensive immigration reform, even coming to oppose Mandatory E-Verify under pressure from business lobbies.

Only with trade under the leadership of Robert Lighthizer did the administration seriously and consistently diverge from GOP strictures. Its final achievement was Operation Warp Speed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the greatest feats of executive action in modern times, which set the template for the Biden Administration’s industrial policy. But MAGA 1.0 was a largely stillborn revolution that never had much of a chance against a still entrenched old guard.

Enter MAGA 2.0: As Trump left office in 2021, the lingering conflicts between his populist instincts and the establishment’s policy dictates were effectively suppressed. A common front of loyalty to Trump took precedence over any ideological commitments. The party’s emotional centre of gravity remained with the personality rather than with any policy. Much of the Right regrouped around the same small government ethos that had defined conservatism since Reagan. Only tariffs and the defence of entitlements remained from Trump’s original economic heresies.

While out of power, MAGA also expanded not just as a political brand but as a cultural current. It came to include many diffuse elements, including: anti-deep state former Democrats like Robert Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard; Silicon Valley tech bros such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen; and substantive heterodox populist conservatives J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. It attracted more than a fair few disgruntled cranks but one of these factions, the intellectual wing of the so-called “New Right” has actually come far in developing the anti-globalisation ideas of MAGA 1.0: reining in Wall Street; reforming finance and defending workers and upgrading the defence-industrial base against a resurgent China.

The irony is that MAGA 2.0 had by then lost any genuine interest in governing, instead focusing on indulging the “vibe and tribe” identity affirmation aspects of the movement. But the upshot is that Trump campaign did not have to talk about policy much at all: Americans’ disaffection with continuing economic decline and progressive-led cultural change, particularly among the working-class, non-metropolitan and non-college-educated, was strong enough.

And so, in the immediate post-election environment, Trump partisans must hope that the next MAGA movement will take the best features of MAGA 1.0, while cutting the fat from MAGA 2.0: Vance’s post-globalised vision without the crankery and contrarianism. It must recapture the creative and ambitious policy visions of early-stage Trumpism while developing the discipline and foresight that the first term lacked. It must also complete the break with the GOP’s free-market fundamentalism by adopting a pragmatic approach that can mix strategic deregulation with state-directed guidance of key industrial sectors. But who is going to actually carry it out?

The realisation is clear enough for both Trump himself and his die-hard followers that this is his last rodeo. The torch will eventually be passed on to a worthy successor. The day before the election, Politico interviewed Trump supporters and hinted at the difficulty of finding such a figure: Vance, Tucker Carlson, Kari Lake, Donald Trump Jr, Ron DeSantis, all elicited at best lukewarm reactions from rally-goers, who recognised Trump as a singular (and non-replicable) phenomenon. But the lack of a clear successor may be a good thing. It would allow the movement to move on from personalities and back toward the big-picture promises with which Trump launched the MAGA era.

All great American political movements united broad coalitions under a compelling alternative vision of the country; they succeeded only if they were able to displace the existing elite with a new counter-elite: from the Revolution to the New Deal and beyond, this has been the pattern of US history. MAGA 3.0 should build itself not around one politician but around one particular class. The role should go to an unheralded group at the heart of the MAGA coalition: not quite the working-class, who lack the social, political, institutional and economic capital to fulfil the function of elites, but rather the “American gentry” who fuelled Trump’s rise from the very start: the car dealers, general contractors, agribusiness owners, extractive industry magnates, franchise and factory owners, and assorted small-town millionaires, who often possess great wealth but little cultural prestige or recognition — a classic description for a revolutionary counter-elite.

Rather than a single princely political figure to take the mantle of Trump, it is they — this class of local entrepreneurial leaders — who should be crowned as the collective successors to Trump, for what are they if not a collection of mini-Trumps? The promise at the heart of MAGA, the physical reconstruction of the United States, should be entrusted to them. They could be awarded generous provision of capital in the form of subsidies, loans, and technology transfers to supercharge national productivity. This petty-bourgeois industrial policy would create jobs, helping the working-class along and the nation as a whole. Just as important, by upgrading the technological capabilities of the small-business sector and enlisting its help in stamping out the employment of undocumented workers (in fields like agriculture and construction) through a national Mandatory E-Verify scheme, the demand for illegal immigration could be reduced.

MAGA 3.0 may end up being less entertaining than the early tide of the Trump era, with more conventional politicians, your Vances and Rubios and Hawleys, courting the gentry and the other members of the coalition. But the Trump legacy could be more serious. By bulldozing the old establishment and galvanising a counter-elite, the MAGA job he started might just find success.

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.

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