Another interesting detail I forgot to note here: Nic makes the point about Italian and German resentment of “Anglo-American” hegemony. It’s interesting to note that the isolationist or sovereigntist mode in American politics was often suspicious of Atlanticists whom they thought constituted an Anglo-American international financial aristocracy and a conspiracy against productive middle America.
Populist resentment is also expressed in terms such as, "We give 'these people' all this money, and they hate us." The fact that we have foreign relations _at all_, trade agreements, NATO, etc. is somehow seen as a constraint on us. If we ditched all that and just resorted to bullying (which will only work for a while) and the more crass sort of transactionalism (obviously a complex trade agreement is a transaction, too), politics would be simplified to the point where a populist could understand it, and not have to suffer the imagined condescension of the fancy State Dept. types whose work is opaque to the angry drunk at the bar.
Your explanation makes sense, John. There’s nothing that puzzling about their turning against these American-led institutions when you see that they view them as hostile to “the real America.” Vance contorts himself every day to give a coherent version of this story (even though he knows it’s horseshit). What drives me crazy is that Republicans somehow win either way: they rob and murder under GWB and the make political hay from the robbing and murdering under Trump. A sane populace would condemn this party to hell but this one keeps putting them back in power.
I think one way to resolve this seeming contradiction of Americans trying to tear down an American system, a bit more clearly, is to get rid of the state-based framing. Don't analyze this in terms of nation states duking it out on the world stage, but evolving, competing interest groups and institutions. We've all been conditioned from the last ~200 years of world history to think of states as the primary actors in politics (what you might call "international politics" if basing your analysis on states. And for good reason - states have been a pretty powerful force over the last century or two. Many of these have been "nation-states", particularly in Europe, but many have not been (see: most post-colonial states, though some have tried to turn themselves into nation-states along the way).
To understand the seemingly contradictory strategy of MAGA tearing apart the pre-existing, "liberal international order", think of the state and state institutions as one player among many. Very dominant in some circumstances, but not all powerful and definitely not the only actor with agency. MAGA has made it easier to see this by defining their enemies and being so explicit about their intentions to remake, coopt, or destroy the institutions and organizations that stand opposed to them.
I think a system of "kleptocratic collaboration" is a great way to describe at least one thing MAGA is trying to create (another is Christian theocracy a goal held by a large and powerful segment of MAGA here, but I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole now). But I don't think "international" is the best modifier. I'm not sure "personalistic" is 100% right either, but that's as good as I can think of for now. You see that in Trump's "deals" with law firms and universities. They are not deals with the Unites States as an entity, but with Trump personally. Or his "tariff deals". I haven't paid much attention to the details of his proposals for Gaza, but I doubt he's going to try to get anything related to that pushed through Congress. You see this all over the place.
The reason why he needs to attack the existing "liberal order" are complicated and I think in part driven by his personal proclivities and not a strict analysis. Those institutions, rules, laws, and habits were developed over the past few hundred years to curtail, diminish, and destroy a system very similar to the one he wants to create, which is the system of collaboration among Noble families in Europe prior to WW1, going back and a long, long ways before then.
I have a request to you John: would it be possible to post a written transcript of your Chicago talk at some point? (All of this very thought-provoking).
Another aspect of this is that there's a view of domestic politics as being corrupted by these international entanglements. We saw this with DOGE, where there was clearly a view that USAID was how (((they))) paid for the existence of liberalism in the US.
You don't draw a direct line here but this makes pretty obvious why so many MAGA types are pro-Russia: they have a shared common interest in dismantling post-Cold War, unipolar, "status quo" type institutions.
Israel and Qatar.... you left out Russia. We know about a bit of bribery (more in Europe actually) but the Russians might just be more expert and less blatant than the Israelis etc.
I think the unsophisticated truth is that Americans think America should act how they act.
With the most engaged members of MAGA feeling left behind, taken advantage of by global elites, and (as we all do) more and more isolated I don’t think it should be surprising to see this isolationist trend. Even if it has no relation to the actual reality of foreign policy, which barely anyone knows anything about anyway.
MAGA foreign policy has become almost a reflection of the loneliness crisis of its base: the world is so fucked up and my human connections are so distant or unfulfilling, I might as well turn inward, become wholly self reliant, and beat the shit out of people at the local muay-tai academy. And so I we have an autarkic, isolationist foreign policy punctuated by spasms of violence.
I may be missing something but... psychological seems exactly the right approach to MAGA to me. I think the 'left' has a strong tendency to knit (superfluous) intellectual scaffolding around matters of very basic human behavior. Trump is exhibit A for the dangers of inherited wealth. Without his daddy's 400m he'd be nothing--because he's a crude, mediocre bully who is mad that smarter, more talented people recognize him as such and don't want anything to do with him. MAGA resonates with his resentment and mean-spiritedness.
Agree, the coalition should be analyzed. And it's dynamic aspects should be noted. You've got alienated young men, religious conservatives, bigots & racists, tech billionaires intent on dissolving the institutions of representative gov't and your run of the mill right-leaning rich. But I see no evidence of any coherent thinking or planning or world-view behind Trump. Yes, decades of GOP thinking played a huge role in getting us to this point but there isn't much to it beyond unenlightened self interest, suspicion of collective action and racist hatred.
"I've been thinking a lot about Lincoln, and Lincoln had a... an immense talent of being, on the one hand, an extremely principled person, on the other hand, an extremely canny politician."
Can't help but think of Spielberg's Lincoln film, which is interesting, in spite of all of the annoying biopic-ey moments, because it at core is exactly about this political question. It's about Lincoln using all the noble political means as well as the dirtiest canny politician schemes to manage to pull off politically both an end to the Secession War and the abolition of slavery. It was released in 2012 and it's hard to take it as something else than an appeal to Obama to start using more crafty politician ways, so as to be able to pass deeper reforms in Congress (something that unfortunately didn't happen).
" international kleptocratic collaboration is the new regime’s replacement for the elite school chumminess of old diplomacy" - that's like Bill Kristol/David Frum replaced by Jared Kushner.
nic's (very good) question reminds me of something i've been intermittently mulling over, which is that the trump admin acts much more like an occupied/collaborator govt a la vichy than a traditional US presidential admin (possibly i read this somewhere tho)
This is rings of Matt Christmans thesis from early 20s that Rs are the party of rooted regional capital (car dealers, resource extraction) and Ds are the party of international capital (public corps, related professionals). If you accept this, Rs becoming fash is obvious in retrospect, especially after crises & secularization of society. It also suggests that the Silicon Valley and smaller Wall Street pivots to Trump in 2024 are big deals.
You can see something similar here in Canada, but it’s a lot clearer in intra-conservative politics.
Agree strongly with your characterization of "how we got here", especially vis a vis the sudden and violent onset of class consciousness amongst certain luminaries in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. At the risk of being a bit of a gadfly, though, I wonder if you could elaborate a bit regarding your diagnosis of the Democratic Party's issues over the past decade or so. I think your diagnosis of insufficient small-d democratic-mindedness among the party's elites is basically correct, but I'm not sure if "the primaries" really makes sense as the big example of this.
I say this as someone with no love for the Democratic Party broadly or the Clinton or Biden tendencies specifically, but 2016 and 2020 did result in the candidate who received the most votes winning the contest. It could, I think, be somewhat convincingly argued that the political priorities of the decisive plurality of Democratic party voters weren't conducive to winning a national campaign (at least in 2016, though 2020 was also way too close for comfort), but either way the nominee was a product of the voters' choice. Is the argument that The Party (including its aligned media, consultant class, etc.) put their finger on the scale in such a way as to destroy or hobble any democratic legitimacy that the primary otherwise could/should have produced? I don't really disagree with that argument, if it's the one being made. But I think it's important to specify what, exactly, made the 2016 or 2020 primaries flawed, aside from a personal or ideological distaste for the chosen nominee (or, indeed, hindsight bias produced by the nominee's subsequent loss/sundowning). Otherwise, what's stopping the 2028 Democratic Primary from producing equally unsatisfactory results as those in 2016 or 2020 (the latter, admittedly, on a more delayed time fuse of disaster)?
In my (useless from a practical point of view) opinion, the US Democratic Party’s base has taken a long time to wake from the stupor of the consecutive Obama victories and their infatuation with ‘West Wing’ type federal politics. I think that has changed now, and the Party base will be a lot less forgiving and far more demanding of future putative leaders, and will pay more attention to State and Local politics. The latter attention is vital in any polity, but especially in the US with its wildly decentralised political arrangements.
I think the US isn’t leading the international component here. Its Russia leading and Americans (stupidly) adopting many of their grievances due to relentless propaganda and manipulation. The right wing leadership is perfectly content to do this as it distracts from the class conflict that would otherwise break apart their voting consortium.
The resentments from a couple generations of income stagnation have been redirected to the culture war and American supremacy issues. They are still screaming America first too.
For example, Michael Flynn did a road tour of political rallies he called “The Great ReAwakening” with rhetoric and imagery openly copying Alexander’s Dugins “The Great Awakening Vs The Great Reset.” They both wage war on America’s coastal elites and their liberal values.
I know John's area of interest is paleoconservatives, but modern MAGA worldview is truly the stuff of Russian discourse from a few decades ago, maybe sprinkled with Jesus and guns a bit. Even down to anti-semitism coexisting with affinity to Israel because of the racism against brown people.
Another interesting detail I forgot to note here: Nic makes the point about Italian and German resentment of “Anglo-American” hegemony. It’s interesting to note that the isolationist or sovereigntist mode in American politics was often suspicious of Atlanticists whom they thought constituted an Anglo-American international financial aristocracy and a conspiracy against productive middle America.
Populist resentment is also expressed in terms such as, "We give 'these people' all this money, and they hate us." The fact that we have foreign relations _at all_, trade agreements, NATO, etc. is somehow seen as a constraint on us. If we ditched all that and just resorted to bullying (which will only work for a while) and the more crass sort of transactionalism (obviously a complex trade agreement is a transaction, too), politics would be simplified to the point where a populist could understand it, and not have to suffer the imagined condescension of the fancy State Dept. types whose work is opaque to the angry drunk at the bar.
Astute observation.
Your explanation makes sense, John. There’s nothing that puzzling about their turning against these American-led institutions when you see that they view them as hostile to “the real America.” Vance contorts himself every day to give a coherent version of this story (even though he knows it’s horseshit). What drives me crazy is that Republicans somehow win either way: they rob and murder under GWB and the make political hay from the robbing and murdering under Trump. A sane populace would condemn this party to hell but this one keeps putting them back in power.
I think one way to resolve this seeming contradiction of Americans trying to tear down an American system, a bit more clearly, is to get rid of the state-based framing. Don't analyze this in terms of nation states duking it out on the world stage, but evolving, competing interest groups and institutions. We've all been conditioned from the last ~200 years of world history to think of states as the primary actors in politics (what you might call "international politics" if basing your analysis on states. And for good reason - states have been a pretty powerful force over the last century or two. Many of these have been "nation-states", particularly in Europe, but many have not been (see: most post-colonial states, though some have tried to turn themselves into nation-states along the way).
To understand the seemingly contradictory strategy of MAGA tearing apart the pre-existing, "liberal international order", think of the state and state institutions as one player among many. Very dominant in some circumstances, but not all powerful and definitely not the only actor with agency. MAGA has made it easier to see this by defining their enemies and being so explicit about their intentions to remake, coopt, or destroy the institutions and organizations that stand opposed to them.
I think a system of "kleptocratic collaboration" is a great way to describe at least one thing MAGA is trying to create (another is Christian theocracy a goal held by a large and powerful segment of MAGA here, but I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole now). But I don't think "international" is the best modifier. I'm not sure "personalistic" is 100% right either, but that's as good as I can think of for now. You see that in Trump's "deals" with law firms and universities. They are not deals with the Unites States as an entity, but with Trump personally. Or his "tariff deals". I haven't paid much attention to the details of his proposals for Gaza, but I doubt he's going to try to get anything related to that pushed through Congress. You see this all over the place.
The reason why he needs to attack the existing "liberal order" are complicated and I think in part driven by his personal proclivities and not a strict analysis. Those institutions, rules, laws, and habits were developed over the past few hundred years to curtail, diminish, and destroy a system very similar to the one he wants to create, which is the system of collaboration among Noble families in Europe prior to WW1, going back and a long, long ways before then.
I have a request to you John: would it be possible to post a written transcript of your Chicago talk at some point? (All of this very thought-provoking).
Yes!
Another aspect of this is that there's a view of domestic politics as being corrupted by these international entanglements. We saw this with DOGE, where there was clearly a view that USAID was how (((they))) paid for the existence of liberalism in the US.
You don't draw a direct line here but this makes pretty obvious why so many MAGA types are pro-Russia: they have a shared common interest in dismantling post-Cold War, unipolar, "status quo" type institutions.
It’s like a bunch of reverse XYZ Affairs with the suitors lining up with bags of cash.
But at least Talleyrand had Old Regime finesse. These wheeling-and-dealing vultures have sticky claws they never tire of licking.
Bonaparte would say these vultures are all shit and no silk stocking.
Israel and Qatar.... you left out Russia. We know about a bit of bribery (more in Europe actually) but the Russians might just be more expert and less blatant than the Israelis etc.
I think the unsophisticated truth is that Americans think America should act how they act.
With the most engaged members of MAGA feeling left behind, taken advantage of by global elites, and (as we all do) more and more isolated I don’t think it should be surprising to see this isolationist trend. Even if it has no relation to the actual reality of foreign policy, which barely anyone knows anything about anyway.
MAGA foreign policy has become almost a reflection of the loneliness crisis of its base: the world is so fucked up and my human connections are so distant or unfulfilling, I might as well turn inward, become wholly self reliant, and beat the shit out of people at the local muay-tai academy. And so I we have an autarkic, isolationist foreign policy punctuated by spasms of violence.
a little too psychological and presentist considering the tradition goes back farther
I may be missing something but... psychological seems exactly the right approach to MAGA to me. I think the 'left' has a strong tendency to knit (superfluous) intellectual scaffolding around matters of very basic human behavior. Trump is exhibit A for the dangers of inherited wealth. Without his daddy's 400m he'd be nothing--because he's a crude, mediocre bully who is mad that smarter, more talented people recognize him as such and don't want anything to do with him. MAGA resonates with his resentment and mean-spiritedness.
Sure, but the left also does itself a disservice by understanding this totally as a pathology and not analyzing the social nature of the coalition
Agree, the coalition should be analyzed. And it's dynamic aspects should be noted. You've got alienated young men, religious conservatives, bigots & racists, tech billionaires intent on dissolving the institutions of representative gov't and your run of the mill right-leaning rich. But I see no evidence of any coherent thinking or planning or world-view behind Trump. Yes, decades of GOP thinking played a huge role in getting us to this point but there isn't much to it beyond unenlightened self interest, suspicion of collective action and racist hatred.
I don't think my account really needs coherence per se to work
The Chicago lecture is fantastic !
"I've been thinking a lot about Lincoln, and Lincoln had a... an immense talent of being, on the one hand, an extremely principled person, on the other hand, an extremely canny politician."
Can't help but think of Spielberg's Lincoln film, which is interesting, in spite of all of the annoying biopic-ey moments, because it at core is exactly about this political question. It's about Lincoln using all the noble political means as well as the dirtiest canny politician schemes to manage to pull off politically both an end to the Secession War and the abolition of slavery. It was released in 2012 and it's hard to take it as something else than an appeal to Obama to start using more crafty politician ways, so as to be able to pass deeper reforms in Congress (something that unfortunately didn't happen).
That hit on Hamas in Doha shifted the dial - showed what matters most to the Trumps, quasi-legal corruption.
" international kleptocratic collaboration is the new regime’s replacement for the elite school chumminess of old diplomacy" - that's like Bill Kristol/David Frum replaced by Jared Kushner.
nic's (very good) question reminds me of something i've been intermittently mulling over, which is that the trump admin acts much more like an occupied/collaborator govt a la vichy than a traditional US presidential admin (possibly i read this somewhere tho)
This is rings of Matt Christmans thesis from early 20s that Rs are the party of rooted regional capital (car dealers, resource extraction) and Ds are the party of international capital (public corps, related professionals). If you accept this, Rs becoming fash is obvious in retrospect, especially after crises & secularization of society. It also suggests that the Silicon Valley and smaller Wall Street pivots to Trump in 2024 are big deals.
You can see something similar here in Canada, but it’s a lot clearer in intra-conservative politics.
Agree strongly with your characterization of "how we got here", especially vis a vis the sudden and violent onset of class consciousness amongst certain luminaries in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. At the risk of being a bit of a gadfly, though, I wonder if you could elaborate a bit regarding your diagnosis of the Democratic Party's issues over the past decade or so. I think your diagnosis of insufficient small-d democratic-mindedness among the party's elites is basically correct, but I'm not sure if "the primaries" really makes sense as the big example of this.
I say this as someone with no love for the Democratic Party broadly or the Clinton or Biden tendencies specifically, but 2016 and 2020 did result in the candidate who received the most votes winning the contest. It could, I think, be somewhat convincingly argued that the political priorities of the decisive plurality of Democratic party voters weren't conducive to winning a national campaign (at least in 2016, though 2020 was also way too close for comfort), but either way the nominee was a product of the voters' choice. Is the argument that The Party (including its aligned media, consultant class, etc.) put their finger on the scale in such a way as to destroy or hobble any democratic legitimacy that the primary otherwise could/should have produced? I don't really disagree with that argument, if it's the one being made. But I think it's important to specify what, exactly, made the 2016 or 2020 primaries flawed, aside from a personal or ideological distaste for the chosen nominee (or, indeed, hindsight bias produced by the nominee's subsequent loss/sundowning). Otherwise, what's stopping the 2028 Democratic Primary from producing equally unsatisfactory results as those in 2016 or 2020 (the latter, admittedly, on a more delayed time fuse of disaster)?
In my (useless from a practical point of view) opinion, the US Democratic Party’s base has taken a long time to wake from the stupor of the consecutive Obama victories and their infatuation with ‘West Wing’ type federal politics. I think that has changed now, and the Party base will be a lot less forgiving and far more demanding of future putative leaders, and will pay more attention to State and Local politics. The latter attention is vital in any polity, but especially in the US with its wildly decentralised political arrangements.
Fascinating!
I think the US isn’t leading the international component here. Its Russia leading and Americans (stupidly) adopting many of their grievances due to relentless propaganda and manipulation. The right wing leadership is perfectly content to do this as it distracts from the class conflict that would otherwise break apart their voting consortium.
The resentments from a couple generations of income stagnation have been redirected to the culture war and American supremacy issues. They are still screaming America first too.
For example, Michael Flynn did a road tour of political rallies he called “The Great ReAwakening” with rhetoric and imagery openly copying Alexander’s Dugins “The Great Awakening Vs The Great Reset.” They both wage war on America’s coastal elites and their liberal values.
I know John's area of interest is paleoconservatives, but modern MAGA worldview is truly the stuff of Russian discourse from a few decades ago, maybe sprinkled with Jesus and guns a bit. Even down to anti-semitism coexisting with affinity to Israel because of the racism against brown people.