Elon Musk MAGA-world feud with Steve Bannon It is perhaps best understood as 50 percent theatre. It distracts media attention, intentionally or otherwise, from the more substantive areas of Trump’s reloaded agenda, while fueling the undying liberal belief that the United States will, one way or another, sooner or later, MAGA movement Its own contradictions will collapse and a dimly imagined new era of normalcy will emerge.
This particular variety of nostalgia for the good old days of neoliberalism — for “those hopeful things,” in Sarah Palin’s immortal words — is a particularly offensive left-of-center failure, and one that has been extremely beneficial to the campaigns of Musk and Bannon. From the conquest. But I think the other 50% of the infighting in the MAGA world, the part that reflects real and serious disagreement over ideological visions and political outcomes, is also important, and has global consequences far beyond the Trump presidency.
You may have seen the headlines that emerged from a tech dispute over immigrant visas for highly skilled tech workers: Bannon called Musk A “truly evil man” and advocate of “technological feudalism on a global scale,” his class of “oligarchs” is alien to the true MAGA spirit. In an interview with A Italian newspaper Posted on January 8 Bannon made a promise he now no doubt regrets: “I will have Elon Musk out of here by Inauguration Day.” To put it mildly, that did not happen. By the time NPR Bannon was interviewed by Steve Inskeep On January 17, his tone changed dramatically. He avoided any direct or personal criticism of Musk and praised Malik X for his support of Trump, while insisting there was a “fundamental gulf” between them regarding how they view government.
Now, several days into Trump’s second term, and with the “shock and awe”-inspired onslaught of Project 2025 underway, the American political media has largely forgotten that both Musk and Bannon view the entire world as their stage, and the world of MAGA as their stage. . Just one battlefield (albeit a central one). Earlier in January, we were treated to a spectacle Suddenly, Musk injected himself In European right-wing politics, an area where Bannon has tried to play Svengali over the past seven or eight years, with mixed results.
Both men clearly recognize the possibility of a rising far-right tide – call it “national conservatism,” call it the cliché, call it what you will – that would sweep away the crumbling walls of the liberal democratic world order. But their visions of what could or should arise from the ruins, although partly and temporarily compatible, are in reality quite different.
If that makes you feel better about all this, we can move on to the spoiler alert: none of these guys will get what they want, because no one’s version of political utopia — the thousand-year Reich, the “end of history,” the decline of the state — remains Always in touch with the actual date. But yeah, in the meantime things can get ugly.
Musk has waded into European politics with all the false confidence of someone who became filthy rich by exploiting other people’s ideas without having any of his own. he British Prime Minister Keir Starmer scoffed – which has a lot of real problems, many of its own making – with a decade-long sexual assault scandal that Starmer may or may not have mishandled by retweeting far-right calls for King Charles to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. This kind of fantasy upsets some people: Maybe we can get rid of democracy just by saying that! But just to be clear: yes, it’s still called the United Kingdom, but that doesn’t mean the king can do things like this on his own.
Musk too He picked a fight with Nigel Farage From the Reform Party UK, the closest thing Britain has to a Trump counterpart, over a simple doctrinal dispute not worth exploring here. This was nothing more or less than a power play, or an announcement that a new mayor was in town: Farage isn’t going anywhere, having finally won his far-right post-Brexit movement a few seats in Parliament, but the version Racial nationalism or “ethnocentrism” is much closer to Bannon’s ideal than Musk’s hackneyed, currency-laden libertarianism.
Musk appears to be echoing many of the most damaging anti-immigrant talking points on the European far right at the same time as trying to improve or modernize the movement’s image. Farage may strike Musk as too old school for the 2020s, with his dapper pinstripe suits and faux-grandiose mannerisms; He looks less like an Anglo-Edwardian aristocrat than a caricature of someone played by Benny Hill.
Let’s note that Musk has also taken high-profile photos with a French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen The Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloniand on January 9, she made international headlines by hosting a 74-minute segment Interview on X with Alice Weidelco-leader of the Alternative für Deutschland or AfD, a far-right party that is often accused of being Nazi-flavored or interested in Nazism. Details matter, and the fact that all three of these figures of the European New Right are women (and conventionally attractive blonde women, at that) is no coincidence: I think Musk recognizes the propaganda value of such semiotics in the manner of Steve Bannon. Absolutely not.
It is not at all surprising that the new right-wing wave of the Old World is keen to cultivate ties with the richest man in the world. Dark money, in the American sense of the term, plays almost no role in European election campaigns, which tend to be tightly controlled, short-lived, and mostly state-financed. It’s not clear how much Musk can do to hack this problem using his endless piles of money, but he will certainly try. In the aforementioned NPR interview, Bannon himself said that Musk’s money could be a continent-wide game changer and destroy “centrist government”:
It brings two tactical nuclear weapons to modern politics. It brings unlimited cash, and it brings with it a social media platform that it can tie or dilute.
However, the more important unanswered questions may relate to exactly what Faustian bargain Europe’s far right is making in concert with Musk, and whether the differences between his tech libertarianism and Bannon’s supposedly reactionary, masculine working-class populism are purely superficial or more fundamental. .
As I suggested earlier, the analytical task here is to move carefully between the dual temptations of unwarranted optimism and desperate cynicism. No, a split between Musk and Bannon won’t expose the fatal flaws in the Trump alliance and bring the entire edifice down. On the other hand, Musk’s apparent rise, and Bannon’s apparent eclipse, pose problems that far-right politics cannot easily solve.
Pundits in the US media have almost completely avoided these substantive issues in favor of the usual war-room melodrama, veering from initial perceptions that Musk’s role in Trump’s inner circle was that of an unlucky wannabe to be photographed (as in a recent magazine cover illustration The New Yorker) as the de facto president or authority behind the throne. It took a European philosopher now working in Asia — Slavoj Žižek, In column L Hankyoreh Korean daily newspaper – to provide a truly nuanced analysis of the Musk-Bannon split and its consequences. (To my knowledge, his article has not appeared in the West.)
Žižek is an agitator par excellence, and may horrify some readers by calling Trump a “liberal,” though he makes that clear right away: only in the 19th-century sense of “allowing corporations to operate outside the control of the state,” and in the present context granting “more Freedom for the new digital feudal lords.” Although I’ve never found the discussion of “fascism” to be particularly productive, Žižek argues that the term does not fit into Trump’s strange alliance. In true fascism, everyone and everything is subject to the party: “What is happening now in the United States — the feudal masters of technology who directly hold high government positions — is inconceivable in fascism.”
But the more important point that Žižek makes is that the “MAGAfied” New Right cannot, in the long run, accommodate the “digital corporate” master class and the Pannonian “populists” who pretend to speak for ordinary workers. If the latter finally becomes disillusioned (which is undeniable), this creates a difficult but decisive opportunity for the left. He writes that there can be “no agreement between Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders,” yet
A key element of the left’s strategy must be to ruthlessly exploit divisions in the enemy camp and fight to attract Bannon’s followers to their side. In short, a victory for the left cannot be achieved without a broad alliance between all anti-establishment forces. No one should ever forget that our real enemy is the global capitalist establishment, not the new populist right that is merely a reaction to its predicaments.
Žižek is not suggesting, as in old Marxist doctrine, that this will inevitably happen or that some awakening of “class consciousness” will eventually turn right-wing populists onto a more virtuous path. He writes that the outcome “depends on political struggle, not on ‘objective’ social and economic processes.” But he notes, however, that without the formation of new alliances “the left will simply disappear from the map,” as has already happened in much of Europe.
Ultimately, Žižek argues that Trump’s “impossible” alliance between “feudal overlords” and “exploited workers” cannot hold, and that the “ideological tension” between libertarianism and authoritarianism on “both sides of Trumpism” cannot be resolved:
[T]The feudal corporate lords present themselves as radical liberals, advocating the use of media without state restrictions (the actual result of this freedom, as we have already seen, is the freedom of the digital lords to control their digital feudal sphere). ), while ordinary people who declared themselves partisans are highly authoritarian, calling for stronger state control over political and cultural life, banning phenomena they consider subversive – LGBT+ pressures, left-wing protest movements.
For political analysis, this seems to me to be unavoidably true – but it may be more relevant to how events in Europe will develop over the next decade or so than to the current crisis in the United States. It is not likely or even plausible that Musk and Bannon, separately or together, will be able to upend liberal democracy anywhere and everywhere, even though they can do much to damage it. But on this side of the ocean, in God’s favored nation, circumstances are different: as long as Donald Trump is with us, his followers will willingly swallow all the contradictions, all the hypocrisy, all the outrageous lies, all the pain.
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