Elon Musk’s MAGA-world feud with Steve Bannon is probably best understood as 50 percent theater. Intentionally or otherwise, it distracts media attention from more substantive areas of the impressively dire Trump Reloaded agenda, while fueling the undying liberal faith that, somehow or other and sooner or later, the MAGA movement will collapse of its own contradictions and some dimly imagined new era of normalcy will emerge.
That particular variety of nostalgia for the good old days of neoliberalism — for “that hopey-changey stuff,” in the immortal phrase of Sarah Palin — is an especially humiliating center-left failure, one that has been immeasurably helpful to Musk and Bannon’s campaigns of conquest. But I think the other 50 percent of the MAGA realm’s internal conflict, the part that reflects genuine and serious disagreement over ideological visions and political outcomes, is important too, and has global consequences well beyond the scope of the Trump presidency.
