Troubles in the MAGA Utopia

Reactionary defenders of capitalism love to accuse leftists, Marxists, and socialists of being infantile, of needing to grow up and accept the ‘real world’ - accept the fact that capitalism is the only system that works. Yet if Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful breakup’ taught us anything, it is that the large-scale capitalist billionaires are the ones who need to grow up and act like adults. And yet Musk and Trump are not isolated cases - they are not the outlier capitalists who have gone awry whilst the rest of the new billionaires operate with a sane and rational sobriety. As Terry Eagleton wrote in Why Marx was Right, it is the capitalist, not the critic of capitalism, who is the true utopian, since he really believes that the world can continue down the same path it is going. He wilfully ignores the signs of global economic instability, precariously shifting geopolitical alliances, and the climate threat which lie as the ever-present possibility inscribed in the basic coordinates of capital circulation.

And yet with the cracks in the MAGA alliance being exposed, and the essential instability holding the New Republicans together, ‘utopianism’ is the wrong way to describe Trump and Musk. If psychoanalysis teaches us anything, it is that infants experience the world in anything but a harmonious way - they are endlessly persecuted by inarticulable and terrifying objects, and they are always balancing on the edge of a symbolic castration - or powerlessness - in the face of the impersonal alterity of the social. What Trump and Musk showed was precisely this capricious terror at a greater destabilisation in their economic hegemonies. Their breakup reflects the profound ruptures already installed in their vision of a return to a greater, pre-globalised and industrial capitalist America.

But the more ironic paradox is that the capitalism they defend is far from the capitalism they performatively worship. The free market, competition unimpeded by State intervention, and survival of the financially fittest - these are the authentic capitalist values that the New Republicans proudly champion. And yet these same values are the ones that they are so quickly willing to abandon if this free market does not go their way. Even before their breakup, Elon Musk asked Trump to slow down with tariff reforms due to the possible impact it would have on the valuation of SpaceX and Tesla and its support