The Enemy Within

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, March 14, 2024

 

The kerfuffle in Congress over TikTok is a strange one. It feels as if the U.S. government is doing its job (for once!) and somehow not doing much of anything.

 

Do you worry that tens of millions of young Americans now get their “news” from a platform controlled by a totalitarian communist regime? You should, especially in an election year. If so, you’re presumably cheered by Wednesday’s House vote in favor of a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform or else see it barred from app stores in the United States.

 

Do you also worry that social media writ large is saturated with foreign propaganda and that enemy states are harvesting data from American users? The TikTok ban won’t do much about that, I’m afraid. As one House Democrat noted Wednesday, there’s nothing stopping the Chinese government from buying Americans’ personal data from willing brokers. And five minutes spent on The App Formerly Known as Twitter is enough to know that anti-Americanism will continue to thrive online even if TikTok doesn’t.

 

“Banning” TikTok would also do little to address the most alarming problem with social media. Jonathan Haidt, the foremost evangelist on the topic, has a long piece at The Atlantic exploring how the smartphone age has stunted the psychological development of young Americans in all sorts of horrific ways. One study he cites found college-aged users so eager to break free from TikTok that they were willing to pay to have their peers stop using the app so that they didn’t feel obliged to use it too.

 

Arguing over whether the Chinese government should have a right to control the platform or be compelled by law to sell it to an American outfit is like addressing the fentanyl epidemic by worrying about whether dealers are native-born citizens or not. Either way, the overdoses will continue.

 

And yet, the politics of Wednesday’s House vote are … interesting. Huge majorities in both parties voted in favor but 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans, many whose names you know, voted against. Any time Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are allied with the Chinese Communist Party against U.S. policy, you’ve got populist “horseshoe theory” magic in the making. What brought that unusual coalition together?

 

In fairness to them, I understand feeling some apprehension about the bill on the merits. My inner libertarian winces instinctively at granting the federal government the power to compel a business to divest its holdings for political reasons, although less so when, as here, the legislation is limited to businesses “controlled by a foreign adversary.” Jeff Blehar notes at National Review that the House bill also carefully limits those adversaries to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea instead of defining the term broadly. It’s not a tool for presidents to start squeezing foreign-owned companies willy-nilly.

 

But “control” is a gassy concept. If Elon Musk starts pushing Russian or Chinese propaganda on Twitter (more than he already does, I mean), what would Joe Biden need to show to prove that Elon and his platform are “subject to the direction and control” of one of those foreign adversaries within the meaning of the bill? Would extensive business interests in those countries suffice circumstantially to establish “control”? Because Musk has those. Would direct contact between him and the leaders of those countries matter? Because Elon is guilty of that too.

 

It’s possible to agree with those who find it suspicious that ByteDance is reluctant to cash in on TikTok’s success by selling the platform, suggesting more of a political than business motive to its operation, and to worry about how this precedent might be abused or extended in the future by an unscrupulous president with an ax to grind against disfavored social media companies.

 

But there’s a lot more that drove Wednesday’s “no” vote than just the merits of the bill.

 

***

 

The two sides of the populist coalition that opposed the TikTok ban aren’t perfectly aligned in their motives, of course.

 

For some Democrats, I suspect the tender age of TikTok’s user base influenced their calculus. Progressivism is self-consciously a youth movement, Bernie Sanders notwithstanding. Many of its most notable representatives in Congress skew conspicuously young as well: Ocasio-Cortez is just 34, as is Greg Casar of Texas. Maxwell Frost of Florida is, if you can believe it, 27.

 

All three were part of the bloc of 50 who voted against the TikTok bill. You can’t claim to be leading young Americans into a brave new socialist future if you’ve voted to “ban” the app to which they’re addicted, I suppose.

 

There may have been an ideological motive to the vote as well. Although TikTok disputes the claim, some critics insist that the platform’s algorithm put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Palestinians after Hamas instigated a war with Israel last October 7. If you’re a progressive in Congress who’s frustrated with the White House’s pro-Israel tilt, you need to bring as much public pressure to bear on Biden as you can muster to convince him to change course.

 

Insofar as Chinese-run TikTok is steering young American liberals to side with the Palestinians, it’s an ally in that effort. A TikTok controlled by a U.S. entity (possibly one controlled by Donald Trump’s former Treasury secretary!) might be much less of one. No wonder dozens of older leftists, including the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also voted against the bill on Wednesday. And that certain younger leftists who aren’t members of Congress, thank God, pointed the finger squarely at Israel and its supporters when searching for scapegoats for the ban’s passage.

 

Populist Republicans who joined them in voting no had their own distinct motives for trying to block the bill.

 

Some plainly voted the way they did out of mindless loyalty to Donald Trump. Compare Greene’s attitude four months ago …

… to her attitude on Wednesday, less than a week after her idol came out against forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok:

Reaganites know zombified Trump-worship when they see it. “Conservatives have been railing against TikTok for years over the platform being used as a tool to indoctrinate kids into transgenderism,” Erick Erickson grumbled. “But now that Trump has changed his mind, all these people are suddenly fine with TikTok. These aren’t actually conservatives but cultists.”

 

Lobbyist influence might also have moved some Republicans, directly or indirectly via Trump, to oppose the bill. That’s a “both sides” problem, to be clear: Punchbowl News notes that the House bill will face a skeptical audience in Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, a Democrat with former staffers who now work or lobby for TikTok. It’s not just Republicans who are being bought off by friends and allies of the CCP.

 

But Trump is a unique case by dint of his enormous influence over lawmakers from his party. His recent meeting with ByteDance investor and right-wing mega-donor Jeff Yass coincided so remarkably with his turnabout on TikTok that even Steve Bannon felt moved to accuse him of being on the take. (Yass is reportedly on Trump’s short list to become Treasury secretary in a second term.) Lobbying the GOP is a wonderfully efficient business in the Trump era: If you can buy off the cult leader, you stand a fair chance of having scores of congressional Republicans tumble your way like dominoes.

 

Although … not this time, interestingly. The most hardcore Trump devotees in the House, like Greene and Matt Gaetz, dutifully voted as their leader had recommended. But so many Republicans broke the other way to help pass the “ban” that it led the estimable Ramesh Ponnuru to declare that “The vote to ban TikTok shows the Republican Party is not a Trump cult.”

 

Which is sort of true and sort of not. 

 

***

 

The Trump-era GOP is a cult in many ways but not, as I noted recently, on foreign policy. Not yet.

 

Maybe that’s because staunch hawkishness is the defining trait of Reaganism and therefore the last part of it to die. Maybe it’s because congressional Republicans know voters don’t pay close attention to foreign policy and therefore feel safer in defying Trump on international affairs. But mostly, I think, it’s because the question of China is confounding to MAGA populists in a way that no other global issue is.

 

On the one hand, opposition to Beijing all but defines the movement. They despise communists and recognize that the Chinese government threatens U.S. interests globally in a way no other power does. They also blame China for hollowing out American industries by undercutting the cost of Western labor and attribute the COVID pandemic, rightly, to a CCP cover-up. The Trumpist right’s obsession with “strength” all but requires them to be China hawks: If they won’t face down America’s most formidable enemy, they can’t credibly posture as strong.

 

All of which explains why MAGA heroes like Lauren Boebert and Anna Paulina Luna voted in favor of banning TikTok and why MAGA “influencers” like Laura Loomer supported doing so. Rarely do they cross Trump on major legislation but sticking it to China is a special case, a matter of populist obligation. Especially when the “swamp” of D.C. lobbyists is out in force on the other side.

 

On the other hand, Trumpy populists have no beef in principle with heavy-handed authoritarianism. Many of them, Trump himself most notably, admire it for demonstrating precisely the sort of illiberal “strength” they hope to emulate once in power. And an “America First” movement doesn’t concern itself with far-flung regional squabbles like the standoff between China and Taiwan, by definition. It doesn’t concern itself with foreign adversaries at all, really.

 

Populist-nationalism is about asserting tribal preeminence over other domestic tribes. And so it prioritizes fighting the enemy within.

 

The enemy within in this case is the U.S. national security establishment and its defenders in Congress, especially traditional Republicans. Those are the power blocs that are most gung ho for a TikTok ban and neither is part of the populists’ tribe, to put it mildly. Which leads to logic like this.

 

When forced to take sides between the “deep state” and China—or between the “deep state” and anyone—the most polarized MAGA types will reliably side against the enemy within. Their hero once famously did so onstage with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, remember. In fact, Trump has justified his reversal on TikTok as a counterstrike against an entirely different enemy within—namely, Facebook and its chairman, “Mark Zuckerschmuck,” who would stand to benefit financially if a platform that’s eating into his business suddenly went away.

 

It speaks volumes about MAGA’s priorities that Trump felt safe politically allying himself with China on a pressing issue in an election year so long as he framed his position in terms of greater antipathy to one of the right’s domestic enemies, Big Tech. Sure, the CCP is bad, but it wasn’t the CCP that took away his and other insurrectionists’ posting privileges after January 6, was it?

 

The adversarial posture taken by many left- and right-wing populists toward their own government is the common ground among those who voted no on the TikTok bill. Progressives like Ocasio-Cortez fear and loathe the national security establishment because it led the U.S. to war in Iraq and now supports Israel’s, ahem, “genocide” in Gaza. MAGA types like Greene fear and loathe it because it supports Ukraine’s fight on behalf of the Western liberal order against Russia and because it “persecuted” their champion, Donald Trump.

 

If your worldview is based on the belief that the U.S. political establishment is the planet’s greatest evil then of course you’re not going to roll over when it calls for banning TikTok. A revolutionary faction that seeks to replace that establishment will naturally seize this moment as an opportunity to suggest that, in a test of credibility between America and one of the most evil regimes on Earth, it’s the latter that deserves the benefit of the doubt.

 

***

 

Precisely because MAGA is of two minds about what to do when the “deep state” confronts China, traditional Republicans in the House had all the political cover they needed to support the bill.

 

What was Trump going to do to them for voting yes? Lambaste them for being too hard on the CCP?

 

Reaganites have never trusted him on foreign policy. Long before Kevin McCarthy became “My Kevin,” he was caught on tape sharing his suspicions with colleagues that Trump was being paid by Putin. Eight years later, despite the GOP’s populist metamorphosis in many other areas of policy, there remain enough hawks in the Trumpified Republican House conference for a major new Ukraine aid bill to pass easily if Speaker Mike Johnson ever dares to call a vote on it.

 

I suspect old-school Republicans were also emboldened by the fact that Trump’s motives for flipping on the TikTok ban were less idealistic than those of the libertarians who resent using state power to force business divestitures for political reasons. For instance, among those leaning on Trump to reverse himself was his former campaign manager, the no doubt very-well-compensated Kellyanne Conway calling in a favor on behalf of the Yass-funded Club for Growth. “Inside Trump’s campaign, senior staff are particularly annoyed with Conway, who didn’t give them a heads up she was lobbying Trump on TikTok,” our former colleague Andrew Egger reported today at The Bulwark. “So his flip-flop ‘exploded like a bomb’ inside the campaign, one source told us.”

 

Electoral considerations were also a factor, Time alleges: “Part of his calculus, multiple sources familiar with Trump’s thinking tell TIME, is the opportunity to make gains with younger voters by protecting their beloved platform.” There’s nothing unusual about a politician seeking advantage at the polls by changing his position on a pressing issue, but his willingness to subordinate a priority as paramount as U.S. national security to his reelection chances may have rubbed old-school Republican hawks in the House the wrong way.

 

Particularly since it isn’t the first time that he’s done it.

 

Ponnuru believes this episode could even be a harbinger of how Trump’s second term will go, with the “mercurial” president hedging on tricky foreign policy questions and/or being ignored by resolute congressional Republicans who insist on doing the right thing. That’s a happy thought; I do think there would be significant GOP pushback in Congress if Trump tried to withdraw from NATO, for instance. It takes a lot nowadays to get Marco Rubio to resist him, but NATO is one subject on which the senator has already done it.

 

Europe is one thing, though. Taiwan is quite another.

 

MAGA’s inherent ambivalence about containing China makes it anyone’s guess how a President Trump would respond to a Chinese blockade of the island. His deathly fear of being seen as “weak” would encourage him to move boldly; his “America First” ethos, and his equally deadly fear of losing a war with China, would discourage him from intervening. That’s the problem (well, one of many problems) with “mercurial” leadership. No one knows what we’ll get, Trump very much included.

 

Perhaps it’ll all come down to who’s in his ear and greasing his palm when the fateful moment arrives. Taiwan lobbyists in Washington might want to start holding meetings with Jeff Yass. He appears to be the man to see in setting Trump’s foreign policy nowadays.