Straight to the point

I wanted to love MAGA Communism. When the movement emerged on X in 2022, it ruffled all the right feathers. It sought to meet working-class people where they were, channelling their frustrations while simultaneously dismantling the Left-wing establishment.

Predictably, the Left derided MAGA Communists as “dangerous” and, of course, “fascist”. But when everything is fascist, it’s hard to take that epithet seriously. Indeed, if they’d bothered to look closer, the movement’s progressive critics may have learned something. For in reality, MAGA Communism is only a more forceful and meme-ified version of the modern Left. If it’s on the path to Fascism, it’s only because the rest of the Left lit the way.

MAGA Communism is led by a pair of the 20-something American political activists Haz Al-Din (often referred to as “Haz”) and Jackson Hinkle. Hinkle began his political career as a teenage environmentalist, praised by Teen Vogue and Reader’s Digest in 2017 as among the most inspirational young people working to “save the earth”. Within five years, however, he was describing himself as a “Maoist” and denouncing environmentalism as “anti-human” on his now banned YouTube channel. While Hinkle’s politics smack of controversy-courting and opportunism (he’s known for praising Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei), Haz is the more intellectual of the two although he shares similar political fandoms. His voluminous internet output includes several hundred tweet-treatises on why the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin provide the necessary foundations of Marxism and, thus for Haz, MAGA Communism. While MAGA Communism is allegedly rooted in Marxism, Haz asserts that the latter is absent in contemporary Leftism.

The movement consists mainly of niche agitations on social media, live streams and blogs which rail against imperialism and Zionism. Hinkle, in particular, has ridden the wave of anti-Israel sentiment after October 7. “Drop a like if you’re an American who SUPPORTS HAMAS,” he tweeted in May to his 2.7 million followers.

So far so Leftish. But unlike the Left, they are anti-identity politics, fervently pro-Russia and see the rise of Trump not as a sign of Fascism reborn, but as a unique opportunity to reawaken American communism. They are adamant, however, that this does not amount to support for the magnate-turned-politician. While Hinkle blamed the “deep state” for Trump’s recent assassination attempt and said he was “praying for President Trump’s full recovery”, it’s really Trump’s supporters who they’re excited about. For Haz, the rise of MAGA in 2015-2016 “marks an irreversible point in the rise of a new form of popular sovereignty in America — which American Communist politics will be rebuilt out of”. From a Left that long ago abandoned the working class for cultural issues and feigned kindness, their rejection of identity politics, gravitation towards MAGA and proclivity for edgy slogans like “FEMINISM IS CANCER” elicits horror. But dig a little deeper and things get murky.

Haz’s love affair with Dugin and Heidegger as intellectual torchbearers of Marxism hints at a much deeper affinity between both camps than either is perhaps willing to realise. At first glance, the ideas of these philosophers would seem far removed from the contemporary Left. According to Haz, Heidegger, who “finally initiated the revolution” to “emancipate the Western mind”, fuels “paranoia” amongst the Left due to the fact that he is “nearly equally infamous for [his] affiliation to German Nazism”. Instead, according to Haz’s account, the modern Left and wokeness are indebted to liberalism that stems from the Enlightenment. “Modern Western thinking doubts absolutely everything about society, even the definition of gender,” he writes. Such philosophical scepticism was upheld as an ideal during the Enlightenment.

But what this story misses is that the Left long ago abandoned the universalism of the Enlightenment, dismissing it as Eurocentric and racist: “Enlightenment-style Western democracy is… the source of black people’s subordination,” argued Richard Delgado, one of the founders of critical race theory. “Racism and enlightenment are the same thing.” With its now marked antipathy towards the French Revolution and its associated Age of Enlightenment, the Left has many of the same preoccupations as the “fascists” they accuse everyone else of being. What’s more — and here is where the Left’s embarrassment ought to kick in — it shares this hatred of the French Revolution with actual Fascism as a historically specific phenomenon, which sought to contain the forces of mass society that the French Revolution unleashed.

In its shift from upholding liberal reason to exalting authenticity, the Left today actually owes more to Heidegger than Marx or the liberal tradition in which the latter was enveloped. Heidegger’s thought was a key inspiration to French philosophers of the Sixties and Seventies as they searched for an alternative to a Marxist tradition that appeared discredited by Stalinism. His criticisms of Western philosophy for stripping the world of meaning provided a theoretical foundation for subsequent generations of ecological, postmodern and postcolonial thinkers.

Heidegger’s preoccupation with authenticity and critique of modernity was attractive to a Left seeking deeper, more rooted forms of existence as an antidote to the superficiality of liberal capitalism. But it was also what led Heidegger to support Nazism, in which he saw the ability to restore a sense of being-in-the world to the German people. Heidegger believed that the existential resolve of individuals could be harnessed to fulfil the historical destiny of the Volk.

Similarly, the Left has increasingly rejected the inauthenticity, consumerism and rootlessness of the West, seeking instead an authentic subject in struggles abroad. So too has Hinkle said that what attracted him to Dugin is his glorification of Russian culture, which he sees “as an antidote to corrupted values in the West”. For Haz, the major conflict today is not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie “but between the ‘establishment’ and the ‘people’”. He frequently slips into the language of “soil”, gravitating toward movements “coming from the soil and the roots” of a country, and rejecting in particular the oppression of a people by “foreign” or “globalist” masters.

Like most of the Left then, the MAGA Communists are anti-Western and critical of liberalism and its attendant individualism. They instead want to undertake an exercise of communal ontology — that is, rethinking man as a “communal being”. According to Haz, “Dugin is necessary for Marxism” because he specifies the “communal being which is the premise of Scientific Socialism”. Indeed, one of his critiques of Heidegger is that his conception of mankind, Dasein, leaves too open the possibility of individualism: “While Dasein is thrown into a given community, as an established horizon of being, it acquires an authentic relationship to Being only through the exercise of individual will.”

More from this author

Hillary Clinton still doesn’t get it

By Ashley Frawley

Ironically, this puts Haz in the same camp as arch-genderist, Judith Butler, who said in a 2021 debate in true Heideggerian style: “We need a radical social ontology. We need to rethink selfhood — its boundaries, its openings — to have a completely different ethics and a politics of care.”

Yet this rejection of individualism is a rejection of precisely where Marxism is most powerful, and most powerfully overcomes the excesses of the modern Left. It’s a basic Marxist point that if the individual isn’t free then neither is society. Unlike wokeness, which often advocates subordinating individual freedoms to the good of some group identity or grievance, Marxism envisions a society where individuals flourish without the constraints of race, class or gender. In its critique of individualism, MAGA Communism fails to understand a key tenet of the philosophy it claims to expound.

What is so frustrating about MAGA Communism is that it actually gets quite a bit right. The founders slaughter liberal sacred cows like the European Union, proliferating LGBT+ identities, and the coup of the Left by sneery PMC-types “who are themselves chiefly to blame for the unpopularity of Communism”. So it is strange that, by following thinkers like Heidegger and Dugin, they should be so willing to throw themselves into the same abyss of romantic reaction from which Fascism itself emerged, and into which the Left has increasingly tossed itself. The Left might have enough sparks of self-consciousness not to draw on someone like Dugin, but their penchant for grounding their politics in the supposed authenticity of the “other” — indigenous people and the growing ranks of the “marginalised”— echoes Dugin’s critique of western liberal modernity. Dugin and the MAGA Communists just have the nerve to bring the “other” home.

Still, the search for the authentic subject elsewhere remains palpable. Lost in a world that seems fake and alienated but with no hope of changing it, today’s Left continually searches for connection to something “real”. Hence, MAGA Communists share with some of the Left an obsession with Hamas. “Al-Qassam fighters are true sons of the soil,” writes Haz. It’s too late for the US, but at least over there, they can enact their fantasies of booting out the cosmopolitan rootless oppressor.

These are, of course, ideas that were best left buried in the 20th century. Indeed, even if one acknowledges the fearless thoughtfulness behind the spiky MAGA Communist facade, it’s clear such fearlessness can lead to one of history’s most famous dead-end pathways. Offering connections to our innermost longings — like spiritual re-enchantment or that “arbeit macht frei” — can easily be turned against us. Even in the bowels of the internet, it’s a lesson that shouldn’t be forgotten.

view 1 comments

Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/