Begun, the MAGA Wars Have
It’s Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer vs. Elon Musk and David Sacks. Who you got?
1. #TeamBannon
Over the weekend Steve Bannon unleashed on Elon Musk:
“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera this week. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person.”
“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon added.
That was Bannon’s marker. His actual critique of Musk? Buckle up, Francis.
“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon said, noting that “76 percent of engineers working in Silicon Valley are non-Americans.”
“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Bannon said.
“Peter Thiel, David [Sacks], Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?” . . .
Bannon went on to accuse Musk of being self-serving, insisting that his “sole objective is to become a trillionaire.”
“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then—through wealth—power: that’s what he’s focused on,” Bannon said.
Bannon went on to describe Musk’s preferred objective as “techno-feudalism.”
Some observations:
Not every particular in Bannon’s brief is true.1 Peter Thiel is not from South Africa, although his family spent some time there in his childhood; he was born in Germany and his family moved repeatedly because of his father’s employment before settling in Foster City, California.2
But directionally, Bannon’s charges are right. Musk’s goals are highly correlated to his chip stack.3
There’s nothing in Bannon’s critique of Musk that any Democrat, or liberal, or neocon, or normie Republican would disagree with. I mean, I could have written that passage.
This isn’t a one-off. Bannon has hated Musk for a long time. And the fight between OG MAGA and Elon MAGA started with Laura Loomer, who launched her own jihad against Musk over the holidays. You can listen to Loomer here but if you don’t want to click, after calling Musk a “welfare queen,” she went on to indict the entire MAGA oligarch class:
“If you have a bunch of tech bros with billions of dollars and direct unfettered access to the vice president and the president of the United States, and then they are also very cordial with our adversaries as in China and Iran—we see that Elon Musk is having these meetings off the books with Iranian officials, with Chinese officials—what does that mean for us?”
You know the meme:
2. Iran-Iraq
There’s an old saying about how, when Iran and Iraq go to war, it’s impossible to choose a side. But that’s not right. We did choose a side in the Iran-Iraq war.
America, France, the Saudis, most of the other Gulf states—and even the Russians!—were on Iraq’s side.4 Because as bad as Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was, it was way less threatening to international stability than Iran’s expansionist, revolutionary theocracy.
This isn’t to say that the Iraqis were the good guys—Saddam was very much a Bad Guy. But everything is relative. In the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian regime was more dangerous and pretty much the entire world understood this. You know who the Iranians had on their side? North Korea.
If Bannon-Musk is Iran-Iraq, I’m with Bannon.
Say what you will about Steve Bannon, but at least he has ideas.5 Like a lot of autodidacts, Bannon is a bullshitter and he’s not above trying to get a taste of the action. But he sincerely believes in the populist revolution. He has policy goals that he thinks will benefit a majority of Americans. Are his policy goals nice? I don’t think so. He wants to restrict immigration and move toward isolationism while blowing up a bunch of institutions. And if he cripples the rule of law in the process, he’s not going to lose sleep.
But he’s in a different category than Musk, who started paying attention to politics five minutes ago and has decided that he should be god-emperor of the solar system. Bannon has ideological goals; Musk has personal, vaguely psychosexual desires.
If the federal government was going to be run by one of these guys for a year, it would be better for everyone if it was Bannon at the helm.
One other thing: You can trust Bannon to adhere to his code. In Dungeons & Dragons, Bannon would be lawful-evil. Musk, on the other hand, is chaotic-evil. He changes his mind every five minutes.
For Musk, climate change is the most important issue in the world. Or fertility decline. Or AI. Or the woke mind virus. Musk is one of those guys who insists that whatever his current obsession is, it’s the alpha and omega. Musk believed that Twitter is dominated by “censorship,” so he bought it and then rolled out the most heavy-handed regime of actual censorship this side of Beijing. He called Bari Weiss a freedom fighter and then unpersoned her a couple weeks later. He’s a 53-year-old serial impregnator who may or may not use ketamine and possibly spends a lot of time cheating on videogames so that he can represent himself as the ninth-best Diablo IV player in the world.
I could sit down at the Outback Steakhouse and split a Bloomin’ Onion with Steve Bannon. He’s a bad guy, sure. But he’s a bad guy who sees himself as the hero in the movie. You can understand his motivations and, if you squint, you can make out what a nontoxic version of them might look like.
Musk is just a neurodivergent Bond villain.
Final thought: Over the weekend Bill Kristol mused that authoritarian movements are often riven and that it’s not uncommon for the populist-authoritarian faction to be pitted against the plutocratic-authoritarian faction.
I’m sure Anne Applebaum could write a book about this one subtopic.
But here’s the thing: I think that a small-l liberal worldview could domesticate most of Bannon’s ideas.
Not all of them; not completely. And for some of them, even the domesticated versions would be net-negative for society. But for others, you could get there. You could even see how the Democratic party could adopt some of them.
Especially if Musk wins the MAGA civil war and the Republicans become the party of the oligarchs.
3. Trump vs. The Military
A smart (and disturbing) piece in Foreign Affairs:
During his successful 2024 reelection campaign, incoming U.S. President Donald Trump promised to purge the military of “woke” generals. Soon after his November victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that his transition team had drafted an executive order to establish a so-called warrior board of retired senior military officers tasked with identifying serving generals and admirals who ought to be dismissed. In the meantime, according to other media reports, Trump’s team has been drawing up its own list of generals to remove from their posts and perhaps even court-martial.
That the Trump administration would put the military in its sights should not come as a surprise. When they first take office, populists often try to curry favor with the armed forces by encouraging the public to venerate officers and soldiers, especially fallen ones. But this love affair with the military is typically short-lived, because populists cannot abide strong, independent institutions that might prevent them from doing as they please. In countries such as Hungary, India, Israel, Poland, and Turkey, populist leaders eventually turned on the military. They variously attacked senior officers as incompetent or treasonous elites, purged those they deemed disloyal and appointed political allies in their stead, seized control of traditionally autonomous military functions, and redesigned military command structures. Their rhetorical attacks undermined public trust in the top brass, and their efforts to politicize the military rendered their countries’ armed forces less capable of contending with national security threats.
Nobody should be fooled by the Trump team’s claim that it aims, by culling top officers, to strengthen the U.S. military. The purpose would be precisely the opposite; weakening the professional military, in fact, is a move many populist leaders make as they consolidate power.
The “76 percent” of engineers in Silicon Valley being non-Americans stat is slippery. What do you count as Silicon Valley? How are you defining “engineers”? But it’s in the ballpark: The percentage of foreign-born STEM workers in the San Francisco area is very high.
Correction (January 13, 2025, 1:05 p.m. EST): As originally published, this bullet point said that Peter Thiel had been “born in Germany and grew up in Cleveland”; it has been modified to reflect the fact that his family didn’t stay in Cleveland but moved to several locations, including for a time South Africa, before settling in California.
For instance, Musk has moved the corporate registration of TSLA from Delaware to Texas for the sole purpose of paying himself a few extra billion dollars after a Delaware chancery court ruled that the pay package he had crafted for himself was invalid.
Why is a guy worth $400 billion going to so much trouble to scratch out a few more billion? It’s like the King of Kong—he’s obsessed with setting the high score.
I can hear someone yelling, What about Iran-Contra?! Yes, between 1981 and 1986, while the United Sates was providing Saddam with intelligence and training and billions of dollars worth of economic assistance and arms, the National Security Council was also secretly selling smaller amounts of arms to the Iranians. So while official American policy was Team Saddam, we kinda played both sides—but only because we wanted to bribe the Iranians to release some hostages and then use the proceeds of those bribes to support anti-Communist forces in Central America. As stupid (and probably illegal!) as the whole scheme was, it was also kind of clever in a value-neutral, Machiavellian sort of way.
“Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
"Musk is just a neurodivergent Bond villain."
I am kilt ded at the magnificence of this sentence.
I get the point of the narrative here, that if you have to choose between Bannon and Musk, it is better to choose Bannon. When in doubt, choose bad over worse if you must take sides (and if your voice actually matters). But for my part I remain firmly in the camp of Neither of the Above -- I am seeking to choose better over good.
Bannon will never be any sort of good guy to me. He helped to unleash the forces with which we all must live starting next week. And he is totally unrepentant. There is no upside to it that I can see. Put another way, if you're asking me to marry the person who is mean to me rather than someone who is meaner to me, I'll stay unmarried and make the best and the most of that, until someone not mean to me comes along, and preferably someone who is nice to me. For the sake of my long-term well-being that is not negotiable.