The doomed politics of MAGA Romantics Why do they hero-worship a huckster?

For a few days recently, a young American writer named Mana Afsari attained the status many  writers secretly hope for — she wrote a serious article that went seriously viral among serious people. This was a little surprising, since many of those serious people were Left-of-centre writers, and the article was a largely sympathetic portrait of a bunch of Washington-based young men who love Trump. It’s also surprising because she calls these young men “Romantics”.

You’d think that throwing “Romantic” into this mix of signifiers would reinforce a lot of people’s darkest assumptions — that Trump’s nationalism really is fascist, if not Nazi, and that these young nerds are his ideologists. But they don’t appear this way because, despite their avowed pro-Trump sentiments, their so-called Romanticism does not come across as reactionary in the manner of “Romantic nationalism”, whose consummation was the Nazi bloodbath. Indeed their Romantic sentiments are not devoted to the American nation at all. They don’t express any overt patriotism or nationalism, at least as Afsari relates. They don’t chant “USA! USA!” What they do, most significantly, is yearn.

This is why Afsari calls them Romantics. They are, she writes, “young men looking for meaning, guidance, purpose and use, for a world where they could belong”. It’s clear from her conversations on these themes, with these yearning men, that their yearning is a pretty free-floating thing. It’s not primarily anchored in political or national objects; it’s more likely to be focused on things either more personal or more ethereal. But the yearning itself is primary. Its objects are secondary. It emerges both as a sidenote and as somehow paradigmatic when Afsari quotes one young man at a conservative debate party who stares into space and says: “I just want a girlfriend.” If there’s one thing those wanting young men want more than anything else, it is probably that. A girlfriend.

Aside from (and perhaps in sublimation of) their aching quest for heavenly girlfriends, what these men mainly yearn for, and actively seek out, is serious conversation. They stage debates. They have parties where they talk about philosophy and literature and history. They circulate articles. A striking feature of this intellectual engagement is how non-partisan it is. The articles they circulate are from Leftists as well as conservatives. The parties they hold, Afsari notes, are the most politically ecumenical parties she goes to in Washington. If their deepest impulses were truly political, truly nationalist, you’d expect more line-drawing, more conspiratorial hatred toward their partisan enemies, and fewer invitations for those enemies to join them for drinks and hors d’oeuvres and friendly conversation.

This does suggest a kind of Romanticism, but it’s not the scary, reactionary Romantic dreams of blood and soil that we associate with fascism, and it obviously isn’t the radical Romanticism that links Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution and Karl Marx. It is, instead, the aesthetic and pedagogical Romanticism of Humboldt, Schiller, and Fichte, in which the yearning of young people for purpose and meaning is taken very seriously, but is channelled toward culture instead of politics. With their high-minded parties and cross-partisan guest-lists, Afsari’s conservative subjects resemble those German Romantics, for whom aesthetic culture was more important than politics.

Afsari’s portrait of young conservative men, then, is in fact a damning commentary on the state of American universities. Her account is filled with half-expressed bitterness about university education — both her subjects’ educations and her own. In their free time, her subjects are striving to create an experience of liberal education they were deprived of at university, because their professors had abandoned earnest aesthetic engagement with the texts and subject matter of their disciplines for the power-trip of subverting those things.

Afsari had sought a similar experience, also with spotty success. She says that, as an American undergraduate, she “turned away from the tyranny of the present political moment to the timeless classics” — that is, she studied Classics. But this turning-away was hard to achieve, because even her Classics tutors were obsessed with contemporary politics, constantly treating passing political flareups as more important than those so-called classic subjects and texts. She had to go to conservatives such as theologian James Orr, whom she met as an exchange student at Cambridge, and the poet Dana Gioia, to find professors “who took their disciplines seriously on their own terms”. She says: “The few conservative, apolitical or moderate professors I worked with on campus never asked me where I stood, but how I thought.” And Afsari wasn’t even a conservative. Young men like those she writes about — “mocked and marginalised by most of campus culture” — had it even worse than she did.

In this light, their efforts to create a demimonde of cultural discussion in Washington seem not just understandable but admirable. I found it inspiring to read of their earnest reading and meeting and conversing, their attempt to give themselves and each other what their professors had failed to give them. I thought, well, since universities are trying to kill the humanities, maybe the earnest and reverent efforts of guys like these will protect and revive them, keep them breathing until they can be welcomed back into future universities, where their value is recognised.

But I couldn’t help worrying about the other thing, the politics. It’s not just Trump. It’s a more abstract tendency those bookish young men exhibit, in which their admirable willingness to seek and recognise what really is great in art and history is directed back onto the present scene, where it takes the form of a personalised fandom for living figures like, well, Trump. Afsari presents this as an expression of their thwarted Romanticism. Deprived of figures of greatness from culture and history, they have fastened onto Trump as a role model, a hero figure, quasi-historical, quasi-literary.

Even described this way this doesn’t sound like a very healthy adaptation, but I think it’s even more pathological than this suggests. The Romantic disaffection of these young men is real. The people and institutions that were supposed to nourish their souls with great culture really have failed. But the more basic sources of their worship of Donald Trump are pretty banal, not very great at all. One of these sources is the internet. The other is Donald Trump.

The internet creates an illusion that impersonal things are not just personal but somehow intimate. Instead of generalised lore and occasional news stories of nosy people making needless trouble, for example, we now have “Karens” captured on video, their livid faces zoomable, available for exquisitely personal hating. Instead of reading “snippets” and “scraps” of half-reliable “gossip” about celebrities on the personality pages, we now follow those celebrities on Instagram and personally commend their own vacation photos, as if they know us and want to hear what we think. We join thousands of others in networked judgment of them. We find the YouTubers and TikTokers most agreeable to us, and we follow them so that they become more agreeable, their authority a deeper and more intimate part of our own makeup.

This is the psychological model by which otherwise intelligent and discerning young men purportedly seeking higher enlightenment would find themselves hero-worshipping a huckster businessman, a TV personality, a politician, a cranky old man who’s clearly beneath the soul-ideals they’ve been training themselves to seek and appreciate. Their Trump-worship is the opposite of Romantic, a machine output of personal media technology that has insinuated itself into their brains. It’s important to dwell on the historical strangeness and novelty of this form of political engagement. It much more closely resembles the identification that young men have with their famous and infamous online role models — Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate — than it does the more abstract political fandom that Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy inspired in earlier regimes of media technology.

On top of this, Trump’s own way of doing politics, notoriously “transactional” in its use of presidential power, is also transactional in a more personal way. He performs love toward those who show love for him. Trump’s classes of fans — working-class people, rural people, young men — say they feel seen and recognised by him. This is a potent political talent to have, the ability to make people feel as if, from your Olympian remove, you literally see them, recognise them in their specific predicaments and identities. This effect is both enabled and magnified on the internet — just consider Trump’s insulting and preening and perpetually complaining presence on social media, the fact that he can be personally followed and RP’d and @’d, the fact that you can look up the hateful people who attack him, and hate them like he hates them.

It’s surely unhealthy for politicians to be granted the status of Romantic heroes or charismatic best friends or emotional support animals by their supporters, but it’s hard to predict exactly how it will go bad. Since these emotional connections exist only in people’s minds and not in the external world, they’ll most reliably end as other unreal romances end, in disappointment, bitterness, and cynicism.

But the correction to this spiritual overinvestment will likely be more than mere personal disappointment, especially given the roaring and wrecking ambition with which the second Trump Administration has begun. In a provocative 2023 article in National Review, journalist Tanner Greer gives a revisionist take on the lessons of America’s response to 9/11 that casts a worrying light on the present relationship between Trump and the sort of manly yearning expressed by Afsari’s young men. Greer points to a certain complacent and self-serving consensus, among today’s “young Rightists”, about the lessons of America’s foreign-policy overreach after 9/11. This consensus says it was crusading neoconservativism, smuggling the utopian liberalism of Woodrow Wilson into the Pentagon, that led America to embrace the foolish goal of democratising not just Afghanistan and Iraq but the entire Middle East.

Greer argues that this view leaves out an important element of American politics after 9/11 — the sudden appeal of a sort of spiritualised manliness, and the belief that this dispensation should have more of a say in how an imperial power such as the US carries itself in the world. As Francis Fukuyama predicted, the End of History had become a time of boredom and suppressed frustration. America’s unchallenged hegemony had rendered manly projects and warlike virtues superfluous and suspicious, which was depriving our natural “spiritedness” its traditional outlet. And then the 9/11 attacks happened, and talk of manly things was suddenly everywhere. I was living in Washington then, working and socialising on the margins of the conservative think tank scene. I watched (sympathetically, I ruefully admit) that scene embrace this new, vitalist understanding of foreign policy — the idea that war wouldn’t just be good for Afghanistan and Iraq; it would be good for us. Greer’s sober lesson is that, since conservatives are once again wanting to see vitalist drives and manly virtues directly guiding the work of the nation, “it is not clear [that] we have learned any lessons from our experience in Iraq after all”.

The second Trump administration is already revealing the wisdom in Greer’s pessimism. As I write, Trump has just announced that America is going to “take a long-term ownership position” on Gaza, as if “Gaza” is a tradeable stock, or a golf course and subdivision complex in Florida. This is obviously unworkable. But triumphalism from Trump’s narrow victory, and the well-founded loathing of the progressive regime he replaced, have instilled in his supporters a sense of historical destiny: what he’s doing will work out, whatever it is, however shallowly and passingly he’s considered the practical questions himself.

This all makes recent days seem eerily like the ecstatic months between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, when the pleasure of those upwelling spirits merged with convictions about the manifest villainy of our adversaries to generate theories of American destiny that were disastrously innocent of practical insight. This is the problem with programmes of political action that are grand in scope but based on Romantic feelings. Those feelings are no substitute for knowledge and judgement. At some point, practical payment will come due for those manly feelings and the disruptive ambitions they inspire. That payment is typically steep.

This, ironically, is the historical lesson of Romanticism itself. The idea that the mass spiritual yearning unleashed in modernity could find its object in the imperfect world of real politics has been a repeated recipe for disappointment and disaster. The more real, more enduring and essential achievements of Romanticism have been cultural, which the young Trump supporters whom Mana Asfari got to know seemed halfway to comprehending when she spoke to them last year. They’ve probably forgotten that lesson for now, in this heady moment of brash Trumpian action, but they’ll have occasion to remember it later.