So Much for the MAGA Divorce
Steve Bannon seems resigned to sharing power with the “tech bros,” as he calls them. Last week, when I spoke with President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and continued ally, he was clear about his disagreements with Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites on the so-called tech right. “Nationalist populists,” Bannon’s self-identified political clan, “don’t trust these oligarchs,” he told me. But, he added, “we see the usefulness of working together on broad things.”
It was a noticeably different tone for Bannon. In recent months, he has taken every opportunity to bash Musk. In January, Bannon said that the billionaire is a “truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” and that he’d have Musk “run out” of Trump’s inner circle by Inauguration Day. Musk and other “techno-feudalists,” Bannon said later that month, “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being.” In February, he called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” (Musk seemingly isn’t a fan of Bannon, either: “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” he posted on X in February. “What did he get done this week? Nothing.”)
The nationalist right and the tech right came together to elect Trump in November, but the MAGA coalition has seemed on the verge of falling apart ever since. The nationalist right sees social conservatism—such as mass deportations, heavy immigration restrictions, and a more explicitly Christian government—as paramount, even if it comes at the expense of free markets. Prominent members of the tech right, including the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, prioritize private-sector technological progress above all else. In December, during a public spat with the nationalists over highly skilled immigrants, Musk posted on X that anyone who disagreed with him should “fuck” themselves “in the face.” Billionaire cosmopolitans who want to hire immigrants don’t mix easily with vehemently nativist populists who want to ratchet up taxes on said billionaires. Last month, in a speech at a tech summit in Washington, D.C., Vice President J. D. Vance said that he would “like to speak to these tensions as a proud member of both tribes.” This is not a thing you would feel the need to say about a relationship that is running smoothly.
[Read: The MAGA honeymoon is over]
But to assume that a fallout is inevitable is a mistake. The two sides don’t love each other, but for now, they are still together. Musk continues to be one of the most consequential people in government, and Bannon and other nationalists continue to hold sway over a White House that is cracking down on immigrants. Rather than split up, this new MAGA coalition might persist for years to come.
What the tech right and nationalist right are going through looks like an update to how conservatism has long worked. Especially before the Trump era, being “conservative” meant a commitment to free markets and traditional social views. This alliance wasn’t always a given. During the mid-20th century, traditionalists were suspicious of the potential harms of unchecked businesses, while libertarians saw excessive government encroachment as constraining the lives of Americans. But in spite of the difference, they still managed to stay together under one coalition. “Fusionism,” as the National Review editor Frank Meyer famously called it, worked because both sides had a clear, binding tie: opposition to communism.
The current moment looks a lot like fusionism 2.0: The uniting through line of opposing communism has been replaced by an opposition to “wokeness,” as the University of Virginia historian David Austin Walsh has observed. The similarities between the political moments provide a rough model for how the new MAGA coalition might persist. In the original fusionism, communism was almost always a bigger deal than whatever libertarians and social conservatives didn’t see eye to eye on. This worked because “communism” never just meant one thing. It could be invoked to oppose the Soviet Union and the literal ideology of communism, to thwart the supposedly communist-infilitrated civil-rights and anti-war movements, or to refer to anything related to left-wing politics.
Wokeness now serves that function on the right. It’s no coincidence that wokeness is a rebranded version of the right’s previous bogeyman: “cultural Marxism.” As Musk has ripped up federal agencies in a supposed effort to reduce government waste, a lot of what DOGE has actually focused on is rooting out perceived wokeness. Musk has enthusiastically helped carry out Trump’s anti-DEI executive order by targeting related programs for cuts, sometimes taking this to an almost-comic level of absurdity: DOGE reportedly placed one government worker whose job involved managing relationships with private-equity firms on administrative leave, seemingly mistakenly believing that the employee’s work was related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Andreessen, who played an early role in staffing DOGE, has also railed against wokeness. Charlie Kirk, the right-wing podcast host and member of the conservative power elite, loves to talk about how much he hates wokeness, and has applauded DOGE for “hunting down those insane DEI departments.”
[Read: Charlie Kirk is the right’s new kingmaker]
In many cases, the two factions detest wokeness in the same specific ways. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder and tech investor who is also a large donor to right-wing causes, recently posted that Columbia University “delenda est,” Latin for “must be destroyed.” Similarly, Bannon told me that he has urged Trump and other administration officials to target public universities such as the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Purge the faculties and purge the administrators,” he said. “The states have no money to back up universities, so hold federal funding until they purge.”
Wokeness is even vaguer and more malleable than communism, which makes it especially useful. DEI hiring practices and critical race theory in schools count as wokeness on the right, but depending on whom you talk to, so is something as simple as a TV show or a movie with gay people. It can be bent into a passionate opposition to anything that might have the faintest traces of being liberal, left-wing, or progressive. “As long as there are common enemies,” Walsh, the UVA historian told me, the new MAGA coalition “will remain stable.”
People within the coalition at least partially agree. To the right, wokeness “is the glue that holds the left together,” Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, told me. Carl, a self-proclaimed nationalist who worked in the first Trump administration, explained that both factions of the right sincerely don’t like the rough assemblage of things they deem to be woke, but they also lean on it because they see it as a unifying point. “My nationalist group chats are not filled with people spewing anger at Elon,” he said. “They like Elon. They think he’s doing a great job."
None of this means that the tech right and nationalist right are destined to stay together. The groups in the original fusionism were often on a similar footing in terms of power. That’s not the case now. The tech elites hold a disproportionate amount of leverage in their ability to influence elections through massive donations. Musk is still throwing his money around, funneling millions of dollars to try to sway a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. His influence does not seem to be waning, even as he has continued to pursue an agenda at DOGE that has reportedly irritated a number of Trump’s other senior administration officials. This power imbalance gives the tech right an advantage. Even if the relationship still benefits the nationalists, they become the political equivalent of a group of suckerfish riding a whale.
When we spoke, Bannon rejected the entire idea of fusionism 2.0. “Let me say it bluntly: Fuck fusionism,” he said. At another point in the conversation, he referred to Silicon Valley as an “apartheid state” in which white-collar tech jobs are filled by immigrants instead of native-born Americans. In Bannon’s view, MAGA is not fusing together so much as begrudgingly forced to stick together—the way that the Democratic Party was once a coalition between northern liberals and southern Dixiecrats.
But even if Bannon’s view is right, it still suggests a MAGA coalition that is far more robust than it seemed just a few months ago. The Silicon Valley elite, Musk especially, has already moved closer to the nationalist right over the past several years. The nationalists, however wary of the tech right, have welcomed them. They understand that Musk and the rest of the tech right are deep-pocketed, powerful allies against wokeness in all its forms. Each faction still has every reason to keep putting its differences aside.