Does MAGA Have Ideas?
Political life is inevitably disappointing, because all political movements contain contradictions. Democrats consider themselves advocates of the working class, yet their party skews toward the highly educated; old-school Republicans talk up freedom from big government while tolerating the predations of big corporations. Whenever anyone makes an argument about how society should run, they risk being hypocritical, because reality is knotty. So perhaps the contradictions of the New Right are just ordinary.
Field shows how this isn’t the case. The contradictions of the New Right reflect a unique disconnect between thinking and reality. The word “nationalist,” for example, may have snuck into Trump’s lexicon through the wide influence of “The Virtue of Nationalism,” a book published the month before the Houston rally, by the philosopher and political theorist Yoram Hazony, to conservative acclaim. Its central contention is that the world is a better place when it’s composed of distinct nation-states, each with its own individual culture and history; such societies are more stable, and achieve more, and make unique contributions to humanity as a whole. That’s not unreasonable. But Hazony takes this idea very far. He argues, in abstract terms, that multiculturalism is actually a form of globalist imperialism, aimed at undermining the structure of those nation-states. In his account, there is a black-and-white choice to be made between this so-called imperialism and national sovereignty. Hazony proposes that the concept of national sovereignty, in turn, can be traced back to the struggles of “biblical Israel” to preserve its political independence and religious freedom. So a successful nation-state is actually a theocratic ethnostate, with, as Hazony puts it, “a majority . . . whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile.”
Hazony’s conception of nationalism turns out to have been influential within Trumpism; National Conservatism, the movement Hazony helped found, counts Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley among its adherents. There are all sorts of problems with basing one’s idea of nationhood, even loosely, on the case of Israel. But the biggest issue with Hazony’s theory, Field writes, is simply that it is “untethered from the history of the real world.” In fact, many nations have prospered without being so monolithic, and there are shades of nationalism, multiculturalism, and liberalism, which allow countries to thrive without making black-and-white choices. Moreover, it’s simply a fact that the United States contains people from many places, with different cultures and views. There is really no sense in which Hazony-style nationalism can be put into practice here. The signal intellectual error of the New Right, Field says, is that it lets “abstractions smother straightforward real-world truths.” You can’t deport half of America.
The New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas—not just about nationhood but about human nature, God, virtue, gender, technology, “the Common Good,” and more. One way to understand this addiction to abstraction, Field writes, is to look at a book like “Ideas Have Consequences,” an “ur-text” of American conservatism published in 1948 by Richard Weaver, an intellectual historian at the University of Chicago. Weaver’s view, Field argues, was that “without a transcendental metaphysics . . . there is nothing to limit political turpitude, and no reason for people to be good and true.” We might doubt this; we might point out that being uncertain about what’s right and wrong definitely doesn’t make you a nihilist. (In fact, the opposite is probably true.) Still, ever since, many conservative intellectuals have been convinced that “moral relativism” is a grave danger to civilization.
If you presume, for whatever reason, that moral uncertainty is nihilism, then you must urgently acquire a transcendent metaphysics. This might mean turning to the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Bible, or to some other source of authority, and asserting that whatever you find there is capital-T Transcendently True. Unfortunately, since we’re stuck in modernity, it’s always possible to disagree about what’s transcendent; it’s also easy to welcome new transcendent abstractions into your pantheon. And so someone like the influential hard-right provocateur Costin Alamariu—known pseudonymously as Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP—can propose an alternative version of ancient history in which men once lived free, during the Bronze Age, but have now become trapped within the cage of “gynocracy.” This view, outlined in the widely read book “Bronze Age Mindset,” is hardly metaphysical. But it can easily be added to a storehouse of abstract ideas that seem, to some people, to be somehow capital-T Transcendently True. (Vance follows Bronze Age Pervert on X.)
