A year into Trump’s second term
MAGA’s internal contradictions can no longer be ignored.
The movement that had promised an end to foreign adventurism has found itself torn between an alliance of ideological noninterventionists and realists and a hawkish national security establishment.
Trumpism promised a revival of domestic manufacturing,
yet neither the president nor his advisers have decided whether this means tariffs, industrial policy, reviving organized labor, environmental deregulation -- or mere nostalgia.
MAGA also promised immigration reform
but has oscillated between showboating deportations and a deference to pro-visa allies in Big Tech and corporate agriculture.
At the same time, American support for Israel has become a contested issue on the right for the first time in decades.
Some opponents have been accused of antisemitism
-- others simply announce it.
The result of a decade of these upheavals has not been consolidation of the Trumpist position
but a series of existential questions to which no one seems capable of providing a definitive answer.
-- Yet sooner or later, someone must answer them.
Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro, who publicly clashed at the Turning Point USA gathering, cannot represent the same broad political tendency.
But it is hard to see how the necessary anathemas will be issued.
At present there is no incentive for any major figure or group to excommunicate anyone from the movement except in the most extreme cases.
Resolution would require sacrifice:
the narrowing of appeal,
the loss of audience and donor support,
abandonment of ideological and rhetorical flexibility.
MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement.
Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage.
Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself.
Loyalty tests proliferate.
Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation;
prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry.
Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.
