Opinion
Donald Trump’s astonishing social media post last Tuesday threatening “a whole civilisation will die tonight” attracted appropriately furious reactions around the world. To threaten the extinguishment of an entire people (Iran has a population of 93 million) is to threaten genocide on a scale without parallel in human history. The excuse offered by Trump’s apologists – that it was a negotiating tactic, and therefore not to be taken seriously – misses the point. It would only have been made with the intention that it would be taken seriously, which means that Trump wanted it to be known that this was an act he was prepared to commit.
Some of the strongest reactions came from Republicans. Peggy Noonan – who, as Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, penned some of the most eloquent language of that great passage of American history that ended the Cold War – excoriated Trump in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
But Noonan speaks with the voice of the Republican Party establishment, which was almost entirely displaced by the MAGA movement. These people have always loathed Trump. More significant than denunciation by old-school Republicans is the fracturing in the MAGA base. There was already a growing number of disillusioned former acolytes, such as the once uber-Trumper Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. The war has both intensified existing anti-Trump attitudes among many of his former spear-carriers, while causing others – such as Joe Kent, who quit as director of the National Counterintelligence Centre – to bail out.
Several of Trump’s earliest social media cheerleaders have become his most lethal critics. Tucker Carlson, infamous for his very Trumpian coddling of Vladimir Putin, now describes Trump as “evil”. America’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, has been no less savage in his criticism, joining a growing social media storm demanding that cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment that permits the removal of a president unfit to serve. Taylor Greene has joined the 25th Amendment bandwagon.
The fracturing of Trump’s base should not surprise us. Like all very successful political movements – in particular, insurgencies – initial success creates the false impression of monolithic authority. That illusion is reinforced by the almost North Korean sycophancy of the beneficiaries of Trump’s patronage. Last week, his new attorney-general, Todd Blanche, used a press conference to tell Trump, “I love you, sir.” (I never said that to Tony Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull when they made me attorney-general.)
In reality, like all political movements, MAGA is a coalition with distinctly different values and priorities. In her recent book on the Trump phenomenon, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Laura Field anatomises the various strands of the movement.
While Trump himself is obviously no intellectual, it is wrong to assume that there is not a significant body of ideas behind him. It exists in the hinterland of right-wing think tanks, networks (most importantly the Conservative Political Action Conference), and conservative colleges (in particular the Claremont Institute), which have long incubated the ideas upon which Trumpism is built.
Some of those around Trump are deeply invested in that world. JD Vance, for example, is an admirer of Patrick Deneen, whose 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed is hugely influential. Several of the conservative intellectuals who developed the ideas on which MAGA was built trace their lineage to the political philosopher Leo Strauss and his two most important apostles, Harry Jaffa and Alan Bloom. An early landmark in the culture wars was Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind.
MAGA thinking extends from isolationists – a long American political tradition, whose adherents are among those most bitterly disappointed by the Iran “excursion” – to such self-described schools of thought as national conservatives (an ideology of aggressive American nationalism), paleoconservatives (who idealise a society before the rise of liberalism and the spread of Enlightenment values), anti-modern radicals (who also envision a pre-liberal Eden and seek, by radical means if necessary, to return to that prelapsarian world), and several other variants.
Some claim inspiration from classical philosophy (Aristotle, not Plato) and aspects of Catholic theology to support their argument for a politics devoted not to freedom or equality, but to the creation of “the good society”, based on common spiritual values. Their vision of the good society is a narrow one: Christian, patriarchal, heteronormative and white. Personal choice – whether reflected in markets or lifestyles – is subordinate to common values. The liberal ideals of inclusion, meritocracy and individualism are anathema to them. Their favourite politician is Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister.
One thing on which they all agree is that the liberal era is over – that we are currently witnessing the emergence of a post-liberal world. (Putin and Orban are of the same view.)
Another thing that unites them is ruthlessness. They are devoted to the destruction of the liberal order with the same zeal as the counter-Reformation in the 16th century and the counter-Enlightenment in the 18th. Patrick Deneen advocates using “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends”.
The Iran war has split the MAGA coalition, dividing isolationists and American exceptionalists from those for whom it has a deeper significance: the opportunity of a civilisational inflection-point, the victory of Christian civilisation. Revealingly, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has (to the obvious disgust of the Pope) taken to invoking “our lord Jesus Christ” in closing his remarks at press conferences. In defining the war as, in effect, a modern version of the Crusades, he is speaking to that more radical part of the MAGA base that sees the war – and the Trump presidency itself – in eschatological terms. Threatening to eliminate “an entire civilisation” does not offend them.
Meanwhile, those for whom Trump’s appeal lies simply in the promise to stay out of foreign wars are appalled.
One of the most important consequences of Trump’s war may not just be his plummeting popularity, but the release of ideological divisions within the MAGA world that are beginning to tear it apart.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.