On July 4, the world’s richest man made an ominous declaration.
To follow Elon Musk’s X feed is to peer into a dystopian reality where immigrants are murderous brutes, Black-on-white crime is endemic and the “makers” in America are under siege from the “takers,” the people who live merely as parasites off the productivity of others.
But on the 250th birthday of his adopted country, he did something that might seem surprising but is entirely consistent with his hateful, paranoid trajectory: He turned on the American founding. A science fiction author and X personality named Devon Eriksen wrote, “Elon, this is the moment where you’re supposed to wise up and abandon classical liberalism. If you let takers vote, they will not only take more and more, they will make it more and more rewarding to be a taker, and they will convert more and more makers into takers, forever.”
“Universal suffrage leads to universal suffering,” he concluded.
“Classical liberalism,” for those not up on political terms of art, refers to the philosophy of the American founding, the creation of a rights-based republic of democratic rule restrained by constitutionally protected liberties. And what was Musk’s response to this direct assault on democracy and American liberty?
“I have wised up,” he said.
I thought almost immediately of Peter Thiel, another wealthy right-wing mogul. His net worth is approximately $1 trillion less than Musk’s, but he’s still able to struggle along with his roughly $28 billion fortune. Ahead of the curve, all the way back in 2009, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Democracy can certainly threaten freedom. The mob can be just as brutal as any dictator. That’s why the founders created a government of limited powers restrained by, among other things, the Bill of Rights. But they also believed in the social contract theory of government, in the idea that governments gain their legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
Freedom and democracy aren’t incompatible; they’re inseparable.
Musk’s and Thiel’s views would be notable enough, especially given their extraordinary political influence on the right, but their views aren’t coming from nowhere. They’re rooted in a profound sense of pessimism and despair that is spreading throughout the right.
From the inception of the MAGA movement, it has attracted a cohort of explicitly postliberal academics and intellectuals. These are often people who believe that liberalism itself — the belief in a rights-based approach to democracy — is deeply and profoundly flawed.
But as so often happens, a movement that once felt confined to campuses and think tanks has broken its containment, and while populism and postliberalism are not yet synonymous, they do tend to have a common, deeply dangerous belief.
America, they believe, is dying — if it’s not dead already — and they hate the nation it’s becoming. How many times, for example, have we heard President Trump say that “you won’t have a country anymore” if he loses or if his plans are thwarted? In his mind (and in the minds of millions of his supporters), the fate of the country always hangs in the balance.
When the Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship decision last week, Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s most powerful adviser, said that the court read the Constitution to require “national self-obliteration” and added for good measure that the ruling was a “deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic.”
Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, a right-wing web magazine, responded to the ruling by suggesting a series of possible measures, including, incredibly enough, the “dissolution of the union” and the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”
Matt Walsh, a popular right-wing podcaster, said, “I at least got to live for 40 years in a country that looks and functions something like America. The fact that my children are having that opportunity stolen from them fills me with rage so deep, I can’t describe it. I truly hate the people who have done this to us.”
And, of course, no summary of the right-wing reaction to the ruling would be complete without overt racism. A MAGA X user writing as I Am Leah wrote that “18 years from now, my kid’s votes will be canceled out by a third-world cockroach whose cockroach mom arrived here three minutes ago.”
Don’t think for a moment that the birthright citizenship ruling was any kind of tipping point. In fact, it was more or less business as usual. Darkness covers the right. On June 28 a podcaster and columnist for The Blaze, another right-wing outlet, wrote that the assassination of Charlie Kirk “should have started a literal civil war between red and blue America.”
He later clarified that he wasn’t actually wanting civil war to break out. He said, rather, that his post was “descriptive not prescriptive.” Well, OK then.
Kirk’s assassination was an evil act, but the idea that it should have triggered civil war in this country is deranged.
The people above — who range from a sometime trillionaire to billionaires to government officials to journalists and pundits — aren’t exceptional on the populist right. They’re emblematic of a movement that, like Trump, is constantly arguing that this country is minutes away from midnight and that only the most extreme measures can yank America back from the brink of destruction.
And to them, Exhibit A of the destruction of America is the birthright citizenship case, the ultimate symbol of national suicide.
But how could that be? The Supreme Court’s decision did nothing more than confirm a legal status quo that’s existed since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 — a ruling that’s rooted in centuries-old British and American conceptions of citizenship.
Part of the rage seems to be rooted in a sense that MAGA came oh so close to winning. Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “The fact that it was 5-4 — so agonizingly close — just underscored that the legal community on the right and left has been so wrong for so many years, saying this was going to be a 9-0 ruling against President Trump.”
But that’s not quite right. Yes, there were only five unqualified votes for the constitutional status quo, but there were six total votes for birthright citizenship (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that birthright citizenship was required by statute, not the Constitution), and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent indicated that he was mainly concerned with citizenship for the children of temporary visitors.
As Gorsuch wrote about the children of unauthorized immigrants, “What matters isn’t whether a child’s parents are citizens. What matters is whether they (and, by law, their child at birth) have made this place their home and are thus ‘domiciled within the United States.’” The strong implication was that Trump’s order denying citizenship to undocumented immigrants was far too broad.
Now, by this reckoning, we can count seven justices who would retain the status quo for the children of unauthorized immigrants, at least when those families wish to stay in the United States. Birthright citizenship — at least for those people whose families live in the United States — is far more secure than MAGA seems to believe. Or wants to believe.
When you grow up conservative and Republican, you are made keenly aware of the anti-American left, those people who seem to believe that America has been rotten from the beginning, a settler-colonial enterprise, to use a modern phrase, that possesses no inherent virtue and whose many sins are a stain upon humanity.
I had not, however, been taught about an anti-American right. Part of my then-primitive understanding of my party was that it was impossible to be anti-American and be a conservative in good standing. Patriotism was an indispensable entry ticket to the movement — and patriotism entailed an appreciation of the American Constitution and American democracy.
The conservatism of my youth positioned itself in direct opposition to Communism in both its Soviet and its Chinese forms. Fascism (and everything like it) was dead, and no one wanted to revive it.
How wrong I was. Parts of the right still posture as patriots, but they have imagined a different kind of patriotism, one that loves the country but scorns its creed. They — like Musk on July 4 — reject the classical liberal founding or at least de-emphasize its importance compared with the ancestral lineage of its citizens.
JD Vance, for example, has said that he does not believe in the “logic of America as a purely creedal nation.”
Instead, he argues, “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
Vance is making a version of the argument that a certain subset of Americans — sometimes called heritage Americans — enjoys a superior claim to American citizenship. At its most extreme ends, proponents of the idea have even assigned letter grades to your citizenship based on the length of your American family roots.
As my friend and former Dispatch colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote, this is a form of identity politics: “It literally grades individuals on a metric they have zero control over. It’s no different than assigning grades based on skin color, sex or height.”
And if America isn’t rooted in its creed — and if certain classes of citizens have a superior claim to their American identity than other citizens — then it is a short trip to believing that the American government exists to serve only the favored class, the “real Americans” who make up, say, the MAGA base.
In this formulation, true patriotism isn’t the preservation of the creed; it’s the preservation of the people. And once you see this distinction, MAGA’s entire governing philosophy makes infinitely more sense.
Why crack down so aggressively on immigration? Immigrants — especially those from the global south — are not and can never be part of the people. They’re the “invaders” whom progressives want to use to replace the “real” American electorate.
Why does Trump govern so often as if red America were the only part of America that mattered? Because that’s where the “real” Americans live.
Why does Trump aggressively reject American alliances and act indifferently to Russian and Chinese aggression? In part because he scoffs at the idea of universal human rights and sees national leaders, like him, as embodying the national will.
Against this backdrop, birthright citizenship is especially noxious to the populist right. They scorn it as relying on magic dirt — the idea that there is something inherent in American soil that makes a person an American citizen.
Yet the same populists seem to believe in something like magic blood — that one’s lineage can make one superior. You can see it in the constant anger against immigrants. You can see it in the racism of constantly highlighting crimes committed by Black and brown people, citizens and immigrants alike.
I don’t want to denigrate the idea of respecting one’s ancestors. No family is without its flaws, but I’m proud — very proud — of my family’s history. My grandmother was a member of the Mayflower Society, which means we can track our presence in America back to the first Pilgrims; other ancestors were at Valley Forge. Later generations fought in the Civil War (umm, on the wrong side), and they took their turns defending democracy in World War I and World War II.
I can be proud of where I came from without believing there’s anything magic about my blood. While I want to live up to the best parts of my ancestors’ example, they don’t make me any better as an American than my friend Leo, a Mexican immigrant, who served side by side with me in Iraq. The worth of my citizenship is judged by the value of my choices, not by the identity of my parents, much less that of my great-grandparents.
America doesn’t have magic dirt, and it certainly doesn’t have magic blood. But it does have a magic idea — the creed that declares “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
It’s easy to understand why the drafters of the 14th Amendment made it so easy to become a citizen. They were standing in the shoes of a founding generation that wanted to draw people from across the world. They believed that the creed had immense power.
Take, for example, the words of James Madison in 1785, when he objected to a religious assessment that would have been used to fund teachers of the Christian faith. “The proposed establishment,” he wrote, “is a departure from that generous policy, which, offering an asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every nation and religion, promised a luster to our country, and an accession to the number of its citizens.”
That’s why we believe that any person born in the United States is a citizen. The creed has helped create and sustain a culture, and then both creed and culture tell us that each person in this country is of equal worth and equal status. If the creed isn’t central to our identity, then why does the oath of office bind the president to “preserve, protect and defend” a constitution, not a country?
The Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address — these are the proclamations that define who we are. They are the core of the American creed, and without that creed, America might retain its name, but it will not retain its nature.
Some other things I did
I took some time off last week — a rarity! I did, however, find the time to talk about the Supreme Court. In addition to my conversation with my colleague Emily Bazelon, which we sent to you on Monday, I also discussed the Supreme Court’s term on two podcasts.
First, I joined Sarah Isgur on “Advisory Opinions,” where we spent most of the podcast talking about birthright citizenship and separation of powers, with a discussion at the end about the term as a whole.
Next, I joined Tim Miller on “The Bulwark Podcast,” where we talked about birthright citizenship, executive power and the court’s approach to the presidency.
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The post Is America’s MAGA Wing Giving Up on America? appeared first on New York Times.
