Thanks to a Twitter Fight, MAGA Learns Marxism the Hard Way
Who knew Elon Musk had different class interests than Republican voters?
The second Donald Trump administration has done the impossible: lost its new President honeymoon before it even began.
Despite not yet taking office, Donald has already managed to upset the American populace, including core parts of his base. Unsurprisingly, most of the dissatisfaction was the fault of Elon Musk, America’s most divorced person. Not long after the election, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy announced their plans to set up the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE. Ostensibly, DOGE would aim to cut inefficient government programs and curtail the dreaded government waste. In reality, it’s a mechanism for two unelected oligarchs to slash and hack social programs they don’t like: Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and other forms of welfare that keep grandma from living on the street. The clear oligarchical nature of DOGE — two unelected profiteers with long histories of ripping off the public — irked many Americans. But it wasn’t until last week that the gruesome two-some enraged some of MAGA’s most ardent supporters.
It all started when Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan as his senior advisor on artificial intelligence. A few longtime Trump believers, including Laura Loomer, took issue with the appointment for two reasons:
Krishnan had previously supported green cards for high-skill immigrant workers, including the H-1B visas favored by tech companies, and
Krishnan is Indian-American and has brown skin.
All hell broke loose on Thursday when Vivek, who is also Indian-American, posted the below tweet. While defending the H-1B visa program, Ramaswamy criticized American culture as the reason tech companies needed to hire foreign talent. In doing so, Vivek broke the unwritten rule of conservatism: You can criticize minorities all you want, but don’t you dare say anything bad about White people.
Essentially, Vivek talked about White Americans the way the GOP talks about Black Americans, calling their culture misguided and lazy, incorrectly worshiping celebrity and leisure instead of academic success. In his words, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” Unsurprisingly, many Trump supporters took issue with Vivek’s words.
When Musk chimed in to defend Vivek and the H-1B visa program, the MAGA world cracked faster than a Proud Boy being questioned by the FBI.
With a division between the nationalist right and the capitalist right, the infighting devolved into typical rightist nonsense: explicit racism, accusations of wokeness, and calling each other the slurs they usually reserve for me.
My favorite part of the dispute was when Elon got mad and deleted accounts criticizing him.
But the fighting wasn’t limited to pointless posting. Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s top advisors, came out hard against Elon Musk. In his words: “You [Elon] are not an American nationalist.”
While it might seem like the MAGA Christmas Civil War was a Twitter spat that will be patched up by inauguration day, the truth is this is a very real division in the MAGA coalition. Like most rightist political projects, the Republican party is comprised of two core groups: On one side are the racist and nationalist forces, which seek to promote White American supremacy at home and abroad. The flip side of the coin is the oligarchical, capitalist wing that adopts the language of America First to gather support for its true motivation: deregulation and other political gifts that will increase capitalist profit. While the sides commonly share each other’s rhetoric, such as when a minimum wage Republican voter supports Musk’s desire to end labor protections, when their actual goals conflict, the glue bonding them strains.
What the MAGA base is currently learning is something leftists have been pointing out for centuries: nationalism and patriotism are time-tested weapons in the right-wing arsenal that capitalists and their political allies use to divide the working class and gather support from the more reactionary elements.
Like every Republican before him, Donald Trump’s campaign and politics center on two components:
Unconfined oligarchical capitalism that cuts taxes and regulations so businesses can maximize profit, and
American nationalism.
Point #1 courts the rich and powerful to the Republican coalition, while Point #2 attracts enough working-class support to get the campaign across the finish line. Much like Democrats’ use of say-a-lot-do-little identity politics that pays tribute to social and political progress without delivering change for marginalized Americans, nationalism does nothing for Republican voters. It is, from top to bottom, the politics of vibes. Attached to the vibes are loose policy proposals, such as Trump’s claim that deporting undocumented immigrants will lower healthcare costs. After listening to the reactionary rhetoric of someone like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or Donald Trump, they’re ready to Make America Great Again, which they believe is a synonym for “make my life easier.” As their thought process goes, “Once we deport the illegals, the Woke Mob, and the women who won’t sleep with me, America will prosper, and I’ll magically get a raise.”
Well, half of MAGA just got a reality check.
While Trump and his ilk literally hug the American flag, the truth is they don’t really give a shit about America or any of its inhabitants. Despite being the most xenophobic person in politics, Donald Trump has a long history of hiring low-cost, undocumented workers. That’s because Donald Trump is a capitalist. He cares about nothing besides profit and his self-image. He even buried the mother of his children on a golf course to get a tax break. While Trump is more brazen about his addiction to profit, it’s a sentiment shared by every member of the capitalist ruling class. Vivek, Elon, and every other Trump-supporting business person like H-1B visas because they supply an easily exploitable workforce. Because visa workers must stay at their supporting company to keep their visas and remain in the country, they are much less likely to rock the company boat by unionizing or taking any collective action that threatens the profit line.
Of course, the Trump Team’s admiration for these visas shows their true allegiance. Despite what his campaign claimed, it is not to their voters or their country but to their class.
Marxism 101
There’s a cheeky saying in leftist circles that capitalists are the most ardent Marxists. Not in that they want to overturn the system that has made them richer than God, but because they practice unwavering class solidarity. Consciously or unconsciously, they recognize Marx’s theory that class, particularly the schism between the working class and the capitalist class, is the defining force of history. They correctly identify that a threat to one of their profits is a threat to all profits. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may insult each other on social media but happily support each other’s anti-worker politics.
That’s why capitalists do everything in their power to obscure class divisions with nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and whatever other “-ism” the GOP’s Bigotry of the Month wheel landed on. By building an imagined bridge to working-class voters through anti-immigrant and pro-imperialist propaganda, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, create the illusion that they are on the same side as their everyday supporters. But as this Twitter spat shows, the vague notion of “America First” is not their goal. As capitalists, their only concerns is, and will remain, the increase of their personal wealth and that of the shareholders they are obliged to. There’s no better example of this than Vivek Ramaswamy himself.
In 2014, Vivek was the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Axovant. Under his direction, Axovant purchased Intepirdine, an Alzheimer’s drug that had failed trials and was no longer in development. Unconcerned with anything except his wealth, Vivek ran a pump-and-dump scheme with a little help from his family. With his mother rerunning the trial, the drug surprisingly passed! What an amazing coincidence! Wasting no time, Vivek went on a media tour to praise Inderpirdine’s potential to cure Alzheimer’s s-caused dementia. Axovant rocketed to a $350 million IPO in 2015, which Vivek and his mother cashed in on before announcing subsequent trials had failed. The drug returned to worthlessness, but the Ramaswamy’s got rich along the way.
If Vivek actually cared about Americans the way he claims to, lying to hopeful Alzheimer’s patients and ripping off small-dollar investors is a strange way to show it.
And that is what politics boils down to: class interests. The capitalist class will always act in its best interest by acting against the interests of the working class. That’s why they love cutting taxes, attacking workers, and deregulating industries. But in order to do so, they need enough working class political support to win elections. So, they throw the meaningless idea of nationalism to the masses, hoping the lie of patriotism will carry them across the finish line.
“We don’t curse our fatherland, or anybody else’s country. We curse patriotism, that which you call patriotism, which is national arrogance, that is the preaching of hatred towards other countries, a pretext for pilling people against people in deadly wars, in order to serve sinister capitalist interests and the immoderate ambitions of sovereigns and petty politicians.” — Errico Malatesta, At The Cafe
Intra-MAGA fights like the one we witnessed are a product of the opposing interests in the Republican coalition. That’s why class politics, the kind the points out the false promise of America First and the capitalists’ true goal for profit share, are the only avenue to defeat fascism. The sooner we elevate the class struggle to America’s masses, the sooner the fascist threat will whither and die.
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In Solidarity — Joe
Thank you for this analysis of this visible split among the MAGA sect. May it grow ever wider in the coming New Year!
Thanks for summarizing all of this up, it was a fun read :) I mean, in the typical depressive dystopian sense :)