MAGA civil war: on fascism and capital

The fight on the right gives us insight into the conflicting forces shaping their politics.

PHOTO CREDIT: Gage Skidmore. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

The honeymoon among Trump supporters is over. The MAGA rank-and-file have found themselves at odds with Trump’s base in Silicon Valley over H-1B “skilled worker” visas, according to the Washington Post. The fight is mostly visible on social media, particularly on Twitter where Elon Musk has spent the past few days sparring with Laura Loomer; but it expresses a much deeper schism on the right, and one that mainstream liberal discourse clearly didn’t anticipate.

There’s a reason for that. For nearly a decade now, liberal pundits have insisted on understanding the American right through the catch-all category of fascism. This has been useful for capturing some of the tendencies and sociological forces driving right-wing politics, but it has also actively resisted other analytical approaches — in particular, attempts to understand the economic forces at play. Already in 2016, liberal pundit Brian Beutler admitted that the ridicule of economic explanations had “gone too far”; but in the years that followed, liberals only grew more hostile to them.