
We all recently saw the Hitleresque hand gesture which Elon Musk performed before the world’s eyes. We also saw the ensuing debate, asking if he really did do what we all thought he did, and, finally, we saw his reaction, embracing the notoriety and rejoicing in the enormous ‘owning’ which the ‘libs’ had just received. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what really happened; inspecting the 3-second clip and hoping to find a definitive answer is a fools' errand, and one which strays far too close to interpretive dance criticism for me to want to occupy my time with it. What matters more is that, accident or not, Musk has embraced the notoriety and all but insisted in retrospect that it was what everyone thinks it was.
Even a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a politician in American could embrace the imagery of Nazism and get away with it, but the insane and bizarre whirlwind which surrounds Trump, and the slowly increasing perceived insanity in American politics (soon to be exported across the channel no doubt) are a much broader matter. For now, I’m concerned with why Musk chose the Nazis in particular. To begin with, I do not think that Trump or any other of his goons are Nazis. Likewise, I do not think that any part of Elon Musk’s worldview is derived from Nazi political, racial, or economic theory. Nazism is, let us not forget, a failed ideology. It took hold in one country, and was so volatile that, like an unstable isotope, it promptly destroyed itself, and took much along with it. Nazism, it turns out, has a half-life of barely more than a decade.
Following the Second World War, modern society and culture, in Germany as well as the wider West, moved away from the macho militarism it had learned to hate and kill. The values of the West began to align with the diametric opposites of those touted by Hitler’s Germany. Such evils did the Nazis commit that they have adopted a deserved position in our culture as a byword for evil itself. In recent times, however, ‘Nazi’ has become a benign and lazy insult thrown around online to denounce those who transgress the sacraments of political correctness. And thus Nazism finds its new feet in the modern world. The word’s liberal use has become a red flag screaming ‘here lies the frantic, the unserious, and those who unscrupulously will cast the first stone’.
That which we most repress we most fetishise, and amidst the excesses of politically correct ‘snowflake’ culture, the masculine Übermensch of Nazi propaganda has slowly bewitched the far right as an antidote to the chaos. ‘Nazi’, once a historical and political term, well defined by decades of scholarship, and defined equally by all of American society, has become something almost tantamount to leftist slang. At the same time, some of the substance behind it has migrated rightward. Musk’s adoption of Nazi imagery sits at the extreme knife-edge of this trend.
This small event interestingly elucidates a wider phenomenon. MAGA, for all that it fetishises the decisive man of action trope, is nothing but reaction. Reactionary is, in fact, the only term which can be (almost) consistently applied to MAGA. Musk has not set the agenda on Nazism; that was set by the mob he sought to own. The mob itself, hysterically seeing in everything the spectre of Nazism, are merely the outer echoes of the West’s reaction to the Nazis’ crimes. MAGA is a reflection of a reflection; the only thing new lies in the distortion created by time’s imperfect mirrors.
Combined in Trump’s coalition are both crypto bros, and the Amish; both industrial workers, and the industry moguls they spent so long striking against. The coalition is so dissipated, both intellectually and in its actual material interests, that it cannot set its own course. Trump cannot shout Forward! because his supporters are all facing different ways. They’d storm off with admirable zeal in different directions and leave him completely on his own. Thus, MAGA does not lead - it follows. The left shouts ‘Nazi!’ as an insult; MAGA adopts it. Biden gives support to Ukraine; Tucker Carlson interviews Putin, and Trump threatens to cut off aid. Even in reaction though, Trumpists can be inconsistent; they’ll argue with Thunberg online and scream against net zero, all while dutifully buying Musk’s electric cars. Nothing underlying MAGA is truly consistent.
This fact essentially sentences MAGA to die. At the head of such a convoluted coalition, Trump puts one in mind of Tito’s Yugoslavia; it’ll only need the (already 78 and growing quite doddery) head to die for it to shatter. When it does, there'll be nothing worth salvaging from the rubble. Like the Nazis Musk is emulating, MAGA will violently shudder in place and then die, probably over a similar time span. Maybe,in a few decades, some politician will appear on stage in a red cap, and the world will throw itself into fits asking if they’re deliberately emulating Trumpism. MAGA’s reactionary populism is following an agenda set by the very ‘woke left’ it vilifies. It is a blind beast which cannot decide its own path; if it tried, it’d fall to pieces. Rather than occupying the headlines with reaction against reaction, any opposition against Trump should remember this fact. Harris was a reflection of Trump and she lost. The American public sensed that there was something truer and more authentic in him, one less layer of reflection down.
American politics is trapped in a carnivalesque hall of mirrors, the ephemera of MAGA flashing in their reflections, followed by the left, and back again. If the Democrats want to win back the American people they need to give up this game and build something real. Something not mere reflection, but solid and principled. For now they show no sign of achieving this, and America remains where it is, trapped and dazzled by its many reflections.
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