Does MAGA have ideas? | The New Yorker

Political life is inevitably disappointing, because all political movements contain contradictions. Democrats see themselves as defenders of the working class, but their party leans toward the highly educated; Old-school Republicans talk about freedom from big government while tolerating the predation of big business. When anyone argues about how society should be run, they risk hypocrisy, because reality is complex. So perhaps the New Right’s contradictions are normal.

The field shows how this is not the case. The contradictions of the New Right reflect a unique disconnect between thinking and reality. For example, the word “nationalist” may have crept into Trump’s vocabulary through the widespread influence of “The Virtue of Nationalism,” a book published the month before the Houston rally by philosopher and political theorist Yoram Hazony, which was well received by conservatives. Its basic argument is that the world is a better place when it is made up of distinct nation-states, each with its own individual culture and history; These societies are more stable, achieve more, and make unique contributions to all of humanity. This is not unreasonable. But Hazoni takes this idea too far. He argues, in abstract terms, that multiculturalism is actually a form of global imperialism, aimed at undermining the structure of those nation-states. In his novel, there is a black and white choice between this so-called imperialism and national sovereignty. Hazony suggests that the concept of national sovereignty, in turn, can be traced back to the struggles of “biblical Israel” to maintain its political independence and religious freedom. Thus a successful nation-state is in effect a theocratic ethno-state, enjoying, in Hazony’s words, “a majority… whose cultural hegemony is clear and indisputable, against which resistance seems futile.”

Hazony’s concept of nationalism has been shown to have been an influence on Trumpism. National Conservatism, the movement Hazony helped found, whose followers include Vance, Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley. There are all sorts of problems with basing one’s idea of ​​the nation, even loosely, on the case of Israel. But the biggest problem with Hazony’s theory, Field writes, is simply that it is “untethered to real-world history.” In fact, many nations have prospered without being homogeneous, and there are shades of nationalism, multiculturalism, and liberalism that allow nations to prosper without making black-and-white choices. Moreover, it is simply the fact that the United States includes people from many places, with different cultures and viewpoints. There’s really no sense in which Hazonian-style nationalism can be put into practice here. The New Right’s obvious intellectual mistake, Field says, is that it allows “abstractions to stifle the immediate realities of the real world.” You can’t deport half of America.

The New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas, not only about nationalism but also about human nature, God, virtue, sex, technology, the “common good,” and more. One way to understand this addiction to abstraction, Field says, is to look at a book like Ideas Have Consequences, an “original text” of American conservatism published by Richard Weaver, an intellectual historian at the University of Chicago, in 1948. Field claims that Weaver’s point was that “without a transcendent metaphysics… there is nothing to check political corruption, and no reason for people to be good and honest.” We may doubt this; We might point out that uncertainty about what is right and what is wrong certainly does not make you a nihilist. (In fact, the opposite may be true.) However, since then, many conservative intellectuals have been convinced that “moral relativism” poses a grave danger to civilization.

If, for any reason, you assume that moral uncertainty is nihilism, you must urgently acquire a transcendental metaphysics. This might mean turning to the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, or some other source of authority, and asserting that whatever you find there is absolutely true. Unfortunately, since we are stuck in modernity, it is always possible to disagree about what is transcendent; It’s also easy to welcome new transcendent abstractions into your pantheon. So someone like the far-right provocateur Costin Alamario – known by his pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert – could propose an alternative version of ancient history in which men once lived free, during the Bronze Age, but are now trapped inside a cage of “genocracy.” This view, set out in a widely read book entitled The Bronze Age Mindset, is hardly metaphysical. But they can easily be added to the storehouse of abstract ideas that seem to some people, in one way or another, a transcendent reality. (Vance follows the Bronze Age pervert in Movie X.)