Sometime in 1985 I had lunch with Sam Francis in the cafeteria of The Washington Times, where we both worked. You may never have heard of Sam Francis, but MAGA people (at least the more intellectual ones) know him as one of the seminal thinkers of their movement.
The lunch was awkward because I found him dark and creepy (and he probably found me naïve). Back then I didn’t understand that his way of thinking would triumph in conservative circles and my way of thinking would be vanquished. I don’t think he won because he was a flat-out racist, though he was. (He was later fired for writing a column arguing that “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.”) I think he won because he was a revolutionary, while I was a conservative. I wanted to reform things; he wanted to burn it all down.
Francis’ views coded reactionary on substance but revolutionary in method. He understood that his tactics were closer to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin than Edmund Burke. And it wasn’t just him. Over the last 50 years or so, left-wing revolutionary ideas have entered what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called the “spontaneous philosophy,” and what we would call the cultural atmosphere. MAGA has profited by exploiting these ideas in order to destroy the left.
The ideas, conceived when the bourgeois center constituted the cultural establishment, were developed to destroy that establishment. Now the elite university left is the cultural establishment, and left-wing revolutionary ideas work just as well against them. Let me give you a few examples of how MAGA embraces left ideas to get its way (even while not knowing, in most cases, where these ideas came from):
Postmodernism. Many postmodernists argued that there’s no such thing as capital-T Truth. Statements are constructed narratives for the imposition of power. What matters is whose narratives gain social dominance. As Jonathan Rauch noted in a brilliant essay in Persuasion, Donald Trump, who probably has never heard of the postmodernists, took that idea and ran with it. Truth is whatever he says it is. Kellyanne Conway talked about “alternative facts.” Rudy Giuliani, that notorious postmodernist, said that “truth isn’t truth.”
Anti-Globalization. In 1999, a group of mostly left-wing activists protested free trade and globalization at a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. I would love to go back in time and watch their faces as I told them who their eventual savior would turn out to be.
The Power Elite. The radical sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote a book with that title in 1956. His argument was that a shadowy elite made up of people who got into exclusive clubs at Harvard, Yale and Princeton actually ran America. The Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott began to explore a stratum of politics that he eventually called the “Deep State” in his 2007 book “The Road to 9/11.” As you know, MAGA embraces the “deep state” concept and this kind of conspiratorial thinking.
Marxist-Leninism. Marx saw history through the prism of class conflict. MAGA also sees history as the conflict between the masses and the elites. Lenin believed that every state institutionalizes the dictatorship of a single class. MAGA believes America has been ruled by a dictatorship of the educated elites. Lenin realized you can use a vanguard to seize power and utterly destroy the structures of the old regime. This is what MAGA seeks to do, using traditional Leninist tactics.
Back in 2013, Steve Bannon was honest about this. “I’m a Leninist,” he told an interviewer. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, destroy all of today’s establishment.” Christopher Rufo, the conservative culture warrior, embodies Lenin’s concept of “vanguardism,” that it takes a small revolutionary cadre to propel history and liberate the masses.
Critical Theory. This intellectual hodgepodge that emerged from something called the Frankfurt School built on Marxism and influenced the New Left over the past two generations. One of its tenets is that the supposedly neutral institutions of society are simply shams that the elite use to mask their grip on power. Trump agrees. A neutral Justice Department? Gone. A neutral media? Gone. A neutral Constitution? Going. A neutral judiciary? Going. Free speech? Going.
Identity Politics. This is based, first, on the idea that your group identity explains your worldview more than your individual consciousness. It is based, second, on the idea that history is a struggle between oppressor and oppressed groups. It is based, third, on the idea that victimized groups are innocent and oppressor groups are evil. You are defined by how much your group is oppressed. Over the last few decades identity-based departments flourished in American universities — women’s studies, African American studies, etc.
Trump took this idea and flipped it on its head. Now cultural studies professors are the evil oppressors, and evangelical Christians are the persecuted oppressed. As so many have noted, MAGA is identity politics for white people. It turns out that identity politics is more effective when your group is in the majority.
The Gramscian Turn. Gramsci argued that cultural power is interwoven with political power. Capitalist establishments wield their power through cultural hegemony. Political shifts are concretizations of shifts in values that have already occurred in people’s minds. Sam Francis (who died in 2005) explicitly cited Gramsci as his role model as he waged his culture war struggles. Christopher Rufo does the same today. This is why Trump is going after the universities, public broadcasting and the Kennedy Center. Francis once wrote, “The main focus should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime — within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it.”
Transgressivism. Since the 19th century, left-wing cultural figures have tried to “épater le bourgeois” — shock the bourgeoisie. They’ve done this in part through artworks like Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), which was a urinal laid flat on its back, and “Piss Christ,” Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass tank of urine. It’s fun to shock the pearl-clutching elites. You tell yourself you’re trying to jolt polite society into a new way of thinking. Recently Politico reported on a Republican group text chat that had a strong épater le bourgeois vibe, with participants sharing deliberately offensive and performatively transgressive statements like “I love Hitler” and Holocaust jokes like “We got to pretend that we like them. ‘Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax.’ Boom — they’re dead.”
Cancel Culture. There are more human beings in America eager to be offended than there are those who are eager to offend. A few years ago, people had their careers destroyed for uttering words that offended the snowflake left. Now people see their careers destroyed for uttering words that offend the snowflake right. These are words like diversity, equity, gender, nonbinary, antiracist, trauma and hate speech. Even just typing words like trauma traumatizes me. The horror! The horror!
Last year, a writer named James Lindsay cribbed language from “The Communist Manifesto,” changed its valences so that they were right wing and submitted it to a conservative publication called The American Reformer. The editors, unaware of the provenance, were happy to print it. When the hoax was revealed, they were still happy! The right is now eager to embrace the ideas that led to tyranny, the gulag and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, the right didn’t take the leftist ideas that were intended to build something; they took just the ideas intended to destroy.
But the left doesn’t get off the hook. Since 1848, leftist intellectuals have been working on a core body of thought, composed, in part, from the ideas listed above. Back in 2020, woke Democrats embraced these ideas with gusto — until Donald Trump utterly co-opted and discredited them. One of the reasons the Democratic Party is struggling so much is that the radical left ideologies that undergirded its cultural stances are kaput, and it hasn’t yet built a more moderate intellectual tradition to fall back on.
If you want a one-sentence description of where politics is right now here’s my nominee: We now have a group of revolutionary rightists who have no constructive ideology confronting a group of progressives who let their movement be captured by a revolutionary left-wing ideology that failed.
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David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks
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